Examples Of Identity In Their Eyes Were Watching God

HL Paper 1 - Identity in Literature

On October 5, 1937, author Richard Wright condemned Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as an exploitation of African Americans. To Wright, the black community’s old-fashioned lifestyle, dialects, and struggles portrayed in the novel satisfied the derogatory assumptions of White America: affirmed with the introduction of the Jim Crow laws in the South. restricted education for black people, creating the stereotype of their lack of intelligence; and the mistreatment of black people before slavery’s abolishment made the stereotype that they’re fit for labor, which is why the military didn’t put them in military combat (Clark). Although Wright’s claim that conflict and dialogue used in Hurston’s book

Their Eyes Were Watching God, The protagonist, Janie like Hurston, struggled with broken relationships and cultural hardships. This raises the line of inquiry: “How does Zora Hustron use Janie and her relations to reinforce negative stereotypes of the African American community and marriages?” Hurston’s use of dialogue and imagery not only reinforces negative stereotypes of Black culture, but exposes the ceaseless discriminatory mistreatment by White America.

The first way Hurston affirmed black stereotypes and exposed African American is through dialogue. Since the beginning of American slavery, negative stereotypes of black people have hindered them from living peacefully which Hurston uses to affirm black stereotypes and expose the mistreatment of and within the black community. One example is the African American Ms. Turner--a respected business woman. However, because of her Caucasian features, Ms. Turner saw herself as superior to dark-skins. In her discussion with Janie, a light-skin, Ms. Turner expressed her distaste for Janie’s dark-skinned husband, Tea Cake. When

Her description of a situation makes interpretation loose, because of her rhetorical diction. Nonetheless, it is easy to capture one of the underlying messages of the novel. For example, Janie’s second husband, Jody, was strict about her independence once he was voted mayor. He wouldn’t let Janie speak to other people when he was around, he made Janie work in his grocery shop and ridiculed her for being slow. But there was “one night he had caught Walter standing behind Janie and brushing the back of his hand back and forth across the loose end of her braid ever so lightly so as to enjoy the feel of it without Jannie knowing what he was doing…That night [Jody] ordered Janie to tie up her hair around the store…She was there in the store for him to look at…” (55). It can be argued that Janie’s hair represents beauty and originality, because of the imagery presenting Walter’s admiration of it. The description of Walter stroking Janie’s hair indirectly states that many women in Janie’s town do not have the same hair as her, and her husband was so admired by it, that he was willing to hide it from others. Jody’s action proves that the headscarf he ordered Janie to fix on her hair represents suppression because he concealed a feature that makes women proud. Jody gives Janie the identity of a slave because just like what Jody did, most white slave owners forbade gatherings for black people, overworked them