Movie and Novel Depictions of Zora Neale Hurston´s Their Eyes Were Watching God

The novel which we are reading in class is “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. The main idea of the novel is to portray the story of Janie Mae Crawford’s development to finding her identity, through love. Both the book and the movie depict different pictures for the audience. Although the movie is very similar to the book, it has multiple different scenes that help the audience connect more to the charaters which the book may not, but it’s also missing deeper layers that were covered in the book. In this essay I will compare the two mediums and which I identified more with.
The movie like the book expressed Janie’s life as she grew up and started to search for her identity through relationships. Some parts that were different in the movie and not in the book was when she ran from Nana and went into the pond after kissing Johnny Taylor, when Joe Starks abused her infront of the community, when Joe embarassed her and she almost walked out on him, and the corset dress that Joe purchased for Janie. When Janie bathed in the pond, this was not in the book, rather in the book she was under a peach tree dreaming of her love life. The difference in scenes from the movie to the book provided peole with more connection to the characteristics of Janie, Joe, or even Tea Cakes. The pond scene was symbolic because it showed rebirth and cleansing, just as when the church baptises someone to remove all sins, and this was important since she had kissed Johnny and so the water was a sign of her starting over and not being put down by what Nana had told her. While the peach tree in the book expressed how she was starting to develop and mature, since she was masterbating and describing her desires. A scene different in the book than the movie was when J...

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...ce of being happy. This novel taught me how developing your identity is a life long process that come with experience and errors however, the results are worth it.
The novel and movie “Their Eyes Were Watching God” both told the story of Janie developing through out life although they each showed it in similar and different ways. The movie was a depiction of Janie’s experience with her relationships and how they helped her grow while, the book focused on her relationships but also her knowledge of her what she wanted and thought of many of the things that were happining around her. I related more to the book since it was more decriptive and I actually got to picture how analyzed the story was played through my past experiences. The main point of the novel was for Janie to identify who she we find out she did when she killed Tea Cakes and picked her life over his.