Thus, their inability to relate to her does not come from hatred but form their upbringing or skepticism. Janie’s story (profoundly economic in emphasis, as Houston Baker has argued) focuses on three representative husbands (Newman, Oct., 2003). Although the focal point of Their Eyes Were Watching God correlates with Janie’s relationship with her three husbands and other people. It is the main and primary idea of Janie’s search for divine clarification and a strong sense of her own identity. Janie is alone as seen in the beginning and the ending of the story.
The novel is not a story of Janie’s quest for love but rather than her quest for sense of security and independence. Janie’s improvement has been charted along the way as she studies the use of language and discovering her relationship to her own voice. At the end of her journey, Janie is stronger and more confident then she was when returns to Eatonville. As a young girl, Janie has some romantic bones in her body (Shmoop Editorial Team). Her magical experience underneath a blossoming pear tree has a profound effect on her; she associates the pollination of pear tree blossoms with the epitome of a romantic experience (Shmoop Editorial Team). When we first see Janie, she is unsure of herself or how she wants to live. Janie’s revelation under the blossoming pear tree initiates her quest when shares her story with Pheoby. After seeing the pear tree, Janie is immediately inspired to seek love, which leads to her first kiss and lifetime searching for true love (Shmoop Editorial Team).
Janie’s burning desire to achieve for this type of love is a mutuality that produces togetherness with the world, but she’s unsure how to ensure that her goal is met. From the pear-tree incident o...
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...nticized readings of it as a feminist triumph tale (Newman, Oct., 2003). Thus, Janie’s analysis of the novel’s attitude toward language when she tells Pheoby that talking “don’t amount tuh uh hill uh beans” if it isn’t connected to actual experience. Triumphalism has itself been located within a dubious rhetoric of status (Newman, Oct., 2003).
Work Cited
"Dis ain't Gimme, Florida": Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"
Author(s): Judie Newman Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 817-826
Published by: Modern Humanities Research
AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3737926 .Accessed: 21/04/2014 10:27Your
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God" Shmoop University, Inc. 11 November 2008. http://www.shmoop.com/eyes-were-watching-god/janie-crawford.html (accessed April 21, 2014).
The pear tree, the ocean, the horizon, the hurricane are how Janie views nature. Hurston uses spring as a sign of fertility, blossoming sexuality, and a new start. The pear tree represents Janie blossoming into womanhood. In Janie’s eyes the pear tree represents beauty and freedom because she is able to reflect on her life, and her future. No one is telling her what to do when she sits under t...
In the beginning, the pear tree symbolizes Janie’s yearning to find within herself the sort of harmony and simplicity that nature embodies. However, that idealized view changes when Janie is forced to marry Logan Killicks, a wealthy and well-respected man whom Janie’s Nanny set her up with. Because Janie does not know anything about love, she believes that even if she does not love Logan yet, she will find it when they marry. Upon marrying Logan, she had to learn to love him for what he did, not for that infallible love every woman deserves.
In the beginning of the novel, Janie attempts to find her voice and identity; the task, of harnessing
Janie Speaks Her Ideas in Their Eyes Were Watching God In life to discover our self-identity a person must show others what one thinks or feels and speak his or her mind. Sometimes their opinions may be silenced or even ignored. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character Janie would sometimes speak her ideas and they would often make a difference. The author, Zora Neale Hurston, gives Janie many chances to speak and she shows the reader outcomes.
While Janie’s Nanny forces her into marrying Logan Killicks for security; Logan also lacks love and compassion for Janie and silences her. Janie cannot use her voice when she marries Logan Killicks because of her Nanny. Although Janie knows “exactly whut” she wants to say; expressing her voice is “hard to do” (Hurston 8). From the beginning, Logan does not resemble her perfect pear tree love, which to Janie means a man who instills confidence into his wife and listens to her voice. Logan falls short of fulfilling that dream as he isolates her from the community, leaving her with no voice whatsoever. Realizing her marriage lacks love and compassion which she longs for, Janie comes to understand that her relationship with Logan will not last long .Not only does Janie’s marriage to Logan stifle any hopes of exp...
The flashback commences by recounting the years leading to Janie’s childhood through alluding to Nanny and Janie’s mother Leafy’s, life difficulties. Nanny is raised in slavery and was raped by her slave master, which led to Leafy’s birth. She had to flee in the night and hide in swamps during the war to protect her daughter. They go to live with a white family; the Washburn’s who are very accommodating. Once Leafy is older, she is raped by her white schoolteacher, leading to Janie’s birth. Leafy is absent through Janie’s life, so Nanny becomes her caregiver. Due to the abandonment of her parents, Janie is uncertain about her character and is lacking parental influence. Nanny raises Janie vicariously, so she will not encounter the same obstacles. Under a pear tree one day, Janie observes a bee pollinating a flower. She determines that this is how love is supposed to look. Love is passionate and never selfish or demanding. One day she kisses a boy named Johnny Taylor, whom Nanny does not approve. Nanny’s beliefs and authority on Janie’s life cause Janie’s abrupt marriage, before she can discover her true identity and spirit.
Instead, Janie becomes the center of attention and her hopes become the main focus. By doing this, the focus of the story changes making Janie the only focus and the inclusion of the other characters never reaches closure, making their expectati... ... middle of paper ... ... an Diego, 1 Apr. 2005. Web.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston portrays the journey of Janie Crawford as an African American woman who grows and matures through the hardships and struggles of three different marriages. Although Janie is an African American, the main themes of the novel discusses the oppression of women by men, disregarding race. Janie gets married to three different men, aging from a young and naive girl to a mature and hardened women near the age of 40. Throughout the novel, Janie suffers through these relationships and learns to cope with life by blaming others and escaping her past by running away from it. These relationships are a result of Janie chasing her dreams of finding and experiencing true love, which she ultimately does in the end. Even through the suffering and happiness, Janie’s journey is a mixture of ups and downs, and at the end, she is ultimately content. Zora Neale Hurston utilizes Janie’s metaphorical thoughts and responses of blame and escape, as well as her actions towards success and fulfillment with her relationship with Tea Cake, to suggest that her journey
In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford the main character goes through some big changes. Throughout this book Janie struggles to find her inner voice and purpose of love. She looks high and low for a sign of what love really is and she finds it as being the pear tree. The pear tree is very symbolic and ultimately shows Janie what love is and how it should be in a healthy relationship. This tree, with the bees pollinating the blossoms, helps Janie realize that love should be very mutual and each person needs to provide for the other equally. Janie tries to find this special kind of love through her three husbands, but she comes to realize it is going to be much harder then she expected. Each one of Janie’s husbands are a stepping stone for her finding her voice.
"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches" (8). When Janie was a teenager, she used to sit under the pear tree and dream about being a tree in bloom. She longs for something more. When she is 16, she kisses Johnny Taylor to see if this is what she looks for. Nanny sees her kiss him, and says that Janie is now a woman. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the main character, is involved in three very different relationships. Zora Neale Hurston, the author, explains how Janie learns some valuable lessons about marriage, integrity, and love and happiness from her relationships with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.
In the book, Janie fails at finding her voice when she is suppressed with unequal and unnatural love by her first two husbands. Ever since Janie’s incident with the pear tree, Janie has desired to venture out to find mutual and natural love; however, due to her Grandmothers consistent persistence for her to marry a man who would offer her “protection” (15), and protect her from “harm and danger” (13), she marries Logan, a man she describes as “some ole skullhead in the graveyard” (13). Thus, Janie can already feel the mere image of Logan Killicks “desecrating the pear tree” (14). As her marriage progresses, Logan begins to
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford, the protagonist, constantly faces the inner conflicts she has against herself. Throughout a lot of her life, Janie is controlled, whether it be by her Nanny or by her husbands, Logan Killicks and Joe Starks. Her outspoken attitude is quickly silenced and soon she becomes nothing more than a trophy, only meant to help her second husband, Joe Starks, achieve power. With time, she no longer attempts to stand up to Joe and make her own decisions. Janie changes a lot from the young girl laying underneath a cotton tree at the beginning of her story. Not only is she not herself, she finds herself aging and unhappy with her life. Joe’s death become the turning point it takes to lead to the resolution of her story which illustrates that others cannot determine who you are, it takes finding your own voice and gaining independence to become yourself and find those who accept you.
As the novel begins, Janie walks into her former hometown quietly and bravely. She is not the same woman who left; she is not afraid of judgment or envy. Full of “self-revelation”, she begins telling her tale to her best friend, Phoeby, by looking back at her former self with the kind of wistfulness everyone expresses when they remember a time of childlike naïveté. She tries to express her wonderment and innocence by describing a blossoming peach tree that she loved, and in doing so also reveals her blossoming sexuality. To deter Janie from any trouble she might find herself in, she was made to marry an older man named Logan Killicks at the age of 16. In her naïveté, she expected to feel love eventually for this man. Instead, however, his love for her fades and she beco...
Throughout this novel, Janie’s life is affected by racism and her being a woman. Janie was having a hard time being a black women and looking for love in her marriages. As Hurston has noted, she knew know that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman (30). Janie decided to become a woman after her first
Janie’s first attempt at love does not turn out quite like she hopes. Her grandmother forces her into marrying Logan Killicks. As the year passes, Janie grows unhappy and miserable. By pure fate, Janie meets Joe Starks and immediately lusts after him. With the knowledge of being wrong and expecting to be ridiculed, she leaves Logan and runs off with Joe to start a new marriage. This is the first time that Janie does what she wants in her search of happiness: “Even if Joe was not waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good…From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (32). Janie’s new outlook on life, although somewhat shadowed by blind love, will keep her satisfied momentarily, but soon she will return to the loneliness she is running from.