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Character Analysis Of Janie In Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale

781 Words4 Pages

When Janie walks back into the town, she has nothing but overalls on. Everyone sees this and starts to stare in disbelief. By then, people started to talk about her. Asking, “Where’s dat blue satin dress she left in… Where he left her…”(Hurston 18). Everyone is jumping to conclusions. But not wanting to fight back, Janie says nothing and continues to walk to her house. She may not want to tell them, because all they do is gossip. Or she is too upset to even talk about it. The readers do not know. However, before Janie gets back to the town, it states, “So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead”(Hurston 17). Maybe he lover had died and she was back because she had no one else to share her love with. When …show more content…

SHe enters and seems depressed and lonely. Everyone is mocking her and talking about her. However Janie does not talk back. She just sulks back to her house. The people on the porch just, “...sat with judgement,”(Hurston 17). Before she left, Janie might of been all high and mighty. This could be why they are judging her. She might have been greatness, and seeing her like this, makes them feel good. Just because they are doing better than her. They also ask where her blue dress went, which could also mean that she also had money to spare. In the second chapter, just after she kissed someone, she gets a talking to with her Nanny. Her Nanny does not want her to be thrown around between men like her mom did, so she tells Janie that she has to marry Logan Killicks. However, Janie replies, “Please dont’ make me marry Mr.Killicks,”(Hurston 32). If Janie marries Logan Killicks, she could be sad, which causes her to run away. Janie could end up with teacup to, only end up lonely, back in the town. Her Nanny could be the cause of why she loses all of the Happiness of her life. Also why she can’t stay with one man. In the beginning of the novel when she walks back into the town, it could be the result of her Nanny because she does not truly love. Since she was forced to marry a man she did not love in the first

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The main character Janie of the book Their eyes were watching God, is facing the conflict of a loveless and abusive marriage. Through the chapters, five and the first part of chapter seven Janie is submissive to her husband’s words and does what he says. However, at the end of chapter seven Janie talks back to Joe while working in the store and humiliates him in front of the townspeople. In result of Janie’s actions Joe makes it clear to Janie and the customers in the store Joe is still the dominant figure in the relationship, to show his dominance Joe smacked Janie in the face. Although Joe hit Janie it was not the first time, and Janie knew the first time Joe had hit her that the love she has longed for is not in this marriage.

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For example, just like Jody, Tea Cake also physically abuses Janie to display his authority over her. What makes Janie 's relationship with Tea Cake different from her other relationships is that it is based on a love that runs much deeper than her motivation in staying in her other relationships. Janie married Logan in search of love. She married Jody in search of wealth and his ambition. When both of these relationships failed, she entered into her relationship with Tea Cake with low expectations.

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s flaws about love continuously brought her to the same ending with all of her husbands, no matter how long the marriage lasted. In The Odyssey, Calypso was trapped on an island to fall in love with men who washed ashore. The fatality of her faults was her over affection and her need for love while being so alone on her island, Ogygia. Their weaknesses are exact opposites, specifically in their relationships with men. The flaws are role in relationship, attachment to men, and lastly, their submissiveness to men.

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Even when Joe’s jealously forces her to wear a head rag, Janie refuses to rebel against his rule. Her conformity is representative of her distaste for dissension, which seems to outweigh her unhappiness with their relationship. Even after Joe’s death, she conforms to the townspeople’s ideas of wearing mourning black, despite the lack of love and desire she had for

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In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the protagonist Janie, is influenced by others to change her ideals. Hurston vividly portrays Janie’s outward struggle while emphasising her inward struggle by expressing Janie’s thoughts and emotions. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening the protagonist is concisely characterized as having “that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions,” as Janie does. Janie conforms outwardly to her life but questions inwardly to her marriages with Logan Killicks, her first husband, and Joe Starks, her second husband; Janie also questions her grandmother's influence on what love and marriage is.

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The voiceless, beautiful, store keeper pales in comparison to the smart, talented identity Janie’s thoughts demonstrate her to be. After twenty years of a growing tension, Janie’s thick rope snaps and she tells Jody how she feels Which ultimately kills him. Once again, Janie conforms to the mold of a mourning widow, dressed in black. Contrary to most people 's knowledge, she is overjoyed in the new found freedom she now possesses, but still cannot express. The idea of having to conform outwardly hurt Janie.

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In The Eyes are Watching God, the author Zora Neale Hurston expresses the struggles of women and black societies of the time period. When Hurston published the book, communities were segregated and black communities were full of stereotypes from the outside world. Janie, who represents the main protagonist and hero, explores these communities on her journey in the novel. Janie shows the ideals of feminism, love, and heroism in her rough life in The Eyes. Janie, as the hero of the novel, shows the heroic qualities of determination, empathy, and bravery.

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Janie Crawford Killiks Starks Woods is the main character in the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, where she learns what's it's like to go from marriage to marriage looking for love. In the novel, Hurston utilizes the pivotal moment when Janie realizes that marriage doesn’t always mean love to show Janie's coming of age and psychological development which is used to show that love doesn't always come first. Logan Killicks was Janie's first marriage, which was brought about after Nanny (her grandmother) decided that she need to be married after she caught Janie and a young boy kissing when she was 16. After that Janie finds herself being thrown into some random marriage with some man she barely knew, and for a reason

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However, Janie is an African-American woman that has an overprotective grandmother, who insists that her granddaughter gets married pronto. Nonetheless, in the long run, she realizes that love she can turn and change when it is compared to the start of each of her relationships. Noticeably, when she is with Jody, a mayor of Eatonville, instead of providing her with protection after being married for nearly twenty years, he violently assaults her. Additionally, after she gets remarried to Tea Cakes, she is faced with the fact that he got rabies and has become paranoiac as he thinks that Janie is unfaithful, causing him to threaten her existence with a gun, eventually making her to kill her to save her own life.

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She never expressed her feelings, instead she hid them pretending nothing was wrong. She didn’t admit that she wanted a change, and she refused to talk about the issues in her relationships, as she stayed silent. Throughout Micheal G. Cooke's article, he uncovers multiple aspects of Janie reaching the fulfillment of self actualization. Furthermore, the more that Janie had been deprived by others, the more self-sufficient she became.

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Janie has become fully aware and blossomed into a full tree in her quest to find herself. In the beginning, Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship was too good to be true. Janie quickly realized that what you want may be what you should live without. Hurston writes “But to kill her through Tea Cake was too much to bear.

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In the first instance, Tea Cake is alive and physically sleeping beside Janie. However, at the end of the story, after Tea Cake has died, Janie’s adoring and loving memories of Tea Cake continue to live on and that in itself is enough to make her feel at ease. By paralleling Janie’s soul in these two moments, Hurston highlights the

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This “low” dialogue of her lashing out shows, when Janie expresses bottled up feelings, instead of basing her accusation on the reasoning she establishes, she expresses frustration while talking to Tea Cake. Had she not let her emotions get the better of her, they could have been peacefully discussing her concerns. She allows her jealousy to become anger, which leads her and Tea Cake into a small fight. This demonstrates a significant difference in Janie’s thinking between her inner thoughts, and what she says in a

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Janie reacts in different ways to people in her life trying to control her, and this can be seen with Grannie, Jody, and Tea Cake. Grannie forces her to marry Logan, but Janie stands up for herself when she decides to leave him after Grannie dies. Throughout the novel Janie is looking for love, and she

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When tea cake shows up janie 's feels something she has never felt before, she is set free but the townspeople don 't think so. “‘Ain’t you skeered he’s jes after yo’ money him bein’ younger than you?’” (Hurston pg.133)Janie is in love with Tea Cake because he loves her for her youthful young side that was forced into hiding for so long because of her previous husbands. However the rest of the community is discouraging her and trying to keep her in the image as a mayor 's wife. They told Janie that Tea Cake was after her money

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