Intro: There are many biblical allusions in Their Eyes Were Watching God, but the analysis that I am going to present delves the higher meaning of a simple three word phrase that is traditionally overlooked by readers. “Old as Methusalem” Now before I go into the aspects of this quote as they pertain to Their Eyes Were Watching God, it is important to have a quick overview of who this biblical allusion refers to. CLICK According to Infoplease.com, Methusalem is a figure from the Hebrew Bible who lived to be older than any other biblical figure at the age of 969.
Is it worth risking everything in order to be happy? In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman named Janie makes many challenging decisions in order to be happy. This novel takes place in the 1920’s which creates many obstacles that Janie must overcome in order to achieve happiness. There are many stereotypes and inequalities during this time that make life extremely difficult for Janie. Although Janie allows others to mistreat her at points throughout the novel, she is overall an excellent role model for young readers because she overcomes several stereotypes of African American females during this time period, and she makes many difficult decisions based solely on her own happiness.
emotions of the main character. Their Eyes Were Watching God shares the lie of Janie Crawford, a girl who is obsessed with the idea of finding true love. Throughout the whole novel she shares her emotional growth as a woman and maturity through all three of her marriages. Zora Neale Hurston planted a mental image in readers to follow along in the story. The bee and the flower are one example of imagery in this novel.
Misguided Assumptions Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Hurston, is the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman with beautiful Caucasian-like hair and her pursuit for love. Janie meets Joe Starks while she is married to her first husband Logan Killicks. Janie chooses to leave her first husband to marry Joe with the hope of finding the love she had envisioned as a young girl. Unfortunately, Jody’s love of wealth and power is much stronger than his love for Janie.
How Men are Portrayed in Their Eyes Were Watching God The Oxford Language Dictionary defines Portray as “To depict (someone or something) in a work of art or literature”. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, men are portrayed in many different ways, and most of the time they are not portrayed positively. Janie, the book's main character, goes through a few different relationships with men that don’t end well. The first relationship is an arranged marriage with a wealthy farmer named Logan Killicks.
Their Eyes Were Watching God experiments with several topics in one unique novel, one of which is love. This topic is portrayed through Jaine, the main character of the book as she marries three men all with different ways of showing their affection toward Janie and how well they connect with each other. It is through these marriages Jaine learns that love doesn’t happen after marriage, inner strength, and nothing last forever. Logan Killicks, Janie’s first husband where she learns that love is not something that happens when you get married.
Love plays an important part in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. First of all Janie spent her days looking for love. She thought love was like an element of springtime. In the story she tells Phoebe about the day she spent under the pear tree and how she watched a bee pollinate a pear tree blossom. After she witnessed that, she found herself kissing a boy named Johnny Taylor.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses speech as a tool to show the progression of the story. Janie Crawford, the main character of the novel, finds her true identity and ability to control her voice through many hardships. When Janie’s grandmother dies she is married off, to be taken care of. In each marriage that follows, she learns what it is to be a woman with a will and a voice. Throughout the book, Janie finds herself struggling against intimidating men who attempt to victimize her into a powerless role.
An Epic on Jaine’s Silence And her Expolaration of INNER-SELF Introduction In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston a young lady named Janie starts her life obscure to herself. She searches for the horizon as it illustrates the distance one must travel in order to distinguish between illusion and reality, dream and truth, role and self (Hemenway 75). She is unconscious of life’s two most valuable endowments: adore and reality. Janie is raised by her suppressive grandma who reduces her perspective of life.
Love and judgment can cause people to do things that they would never think that they would do. In the novel love and judgment causes Janie to think and make absurd decisions that she wouldn’t normally do. In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses figurative language to develop the theme that love and judgment can cause people to make fanatical decisions. Hurtston uses a metaphor to show love can cloud your judgment sometimes. When Joe died, Janie said this about Tea Cake “He could be the bee to a blossom.
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston, many symbols and metaphors appear to fully depict how Janie lived her life and what kinds of things she believed in. Hurston uses metaphors to describe the lessons Janie learned as well as the expectations that she set for herself growing up in such an unstable environment. Janie, the main character, references many symbols, as they all have a great influence on her life as well as the decisions she made, the metaphors in the novel bolster our understanding of why Janie was the way she was, and why it was important for her to find a stable relationship that would give all that she wanted. Janie always viewed the horizon as ever changing, because she could always go further and
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a widely known novel written by Zora Neale Hurston, one of America’s most fascinating authors. Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937 and was quickly forgotten but has recently received a renewal of interest by many scholars. The novel has been praised as a unique contribution to African-American literature and admired by various people such as African Americanists for its commemoration of the black culture and dialect and by feminists for its portrayal of a woman’s path toward becoming self-aware and fulfilling her life. Although there are those that criticize the book in one way or another, there is, without a doubt, that the novel has many impressive uses metaphor, dialect, and folklore of southern
Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of how one man, Tea Cake, changes how a grown woman named Janie views life, opportunity, and happiness. Zora Neale Hurston employs parallelism in order to reveal the dynamic of this relationship between Janie and Tea Cake and writes, “He drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place” (Hurston 128). At the very end of the book, Hurston writes again, “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net.
Estelle Ngobua Debra Lydon American Literature 13 April 2023 Their Eyes Were Watching God. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston male dominance and power is seen in the book as the author uses symbolism to explain and show how the male figure poses a threat to the female’s freedom in the relationship. This masterpiece shows how no human can stand against God or what he has in turn for you. As the protagonist's life is put together life lessons are shown in themes of power, male domination, love, inequality, discrimination sexism, teaching her things she wouldn’t have known.
Zora Neale Hurston’s writing in Their Eyes Were Watching God, reflects the Harlem Renaissance through Janie 's individuality, and departs from the Harlem Renaissance with the common recurrence of black woman empowerment. In the novel, Hurston reflects the ideas of the Harlem renaissance with the ways in which Janie rebels and goes against norms for women.
