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How Does Hurston Use Figurative Language In Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Anthropologist, and Harlem Renaissance writer and activist Zora Neale Hurston sought to share the “untouched, raw” characters of the South with her readers. Zora masterfully incorporates metaphors, imagery, idioms, and personification into her narratives as she shares her biography, folk tales, voodoo customs, and the social context of black life. Similar to Dust Tracks on a Road Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, she uses metaphors and imagery to rise from her childhood poverty in the rural South to a leader taking over a captivating movement of her time, the Harlem Renaissance. In Mules and Men, a black America’s folklore who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed an oral history of the South since the time of slavery.Figurative language in Hurston’s work is used in order to convey its themes and messages and make the language richer and deeper. Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of Zora’s eminent bodies of work shows examples of Hurston using figurative language to bring Janie's (the main character) experience of tragedy to life.Janie wants something out of life and love that seems …show more content…

Mules and Men, unlike any of her other stories, is a straightforward depiction of the humor and "exoticism" of African American folk culture, Zora Neale Hurston carefully arranged her folktales and meticulously delineated the contexts in which they were narrated to reveal complex relationships between race and gender in Black life. Underscoring the traditional subversive role of African American folklore, she highlights the continuing role folktales play in Black people's struggles with economic and racial oppression. Hurston also details the function of folklore in conflicts between Black men and Black women, showing both how men use folktales to reinforce and legitimate oppression of women and how women use them to fight against a subservient role and to assert their

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Zora Hurston a superior author who wrote short stories and often used folklore, and religious references in her writing. Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God uses symbolism throughout the book followed with a vast amount of metaphors and similes. She used this unique style in order to draw in the reader's attention and to get them to feel as if they were there. Hurston starts every chapter out with either a metaphor or a simile. For instance the very first sentence of Their Eyes Were Watching God is a metaphor, “ Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

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A kiss of a memory and a great tree is all Hurston needed to illustrate a picture of Janie’s feelings. The novel is about a woman named Janie, who 's had many different types of emotions, through her ups and downs. In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston uses symbolism to interpret Janie’s emotions.

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As Maria Tai Wolff says “for telling to be successful, it must become a presentation of sights with words. The best talkers are “big picture talkers”. For Hurston, the construction of African American identity requires a voice that can make you see, a voice that celebrates the visible presence of black bodies.

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Zora Neale Hurston reveals inner self versus outward self through different vocal and lyrical diction. Zora Neale Hurston uses dialect to cause familiarity in her novel and described the struggles as an everyday African American faced in their community. The theme of my novel was gender roles and relationships not as a black woman, but as a human being. Even having the desire for love from different men. The connecting themes were that “Black folks” were proud of their culture instead of being oppressed.

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In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, we follow our protagonist, Janie, through a journey of self-discovery. We watch Janie from when she was a child to her adulthood, slowly watching her ideals change while other dreams of hers unfortunately die. This is shown when Jane first formulates her idea of love, marriage, and intimacy by comparing it to a pear tree; erotic, beautiful, and full of life. After Janie gets married to her first spouse, Logan Killicks, she doesn’t see her love fantasy happening, but she waits because her Nanny tells her that love comes after marriage. Janie, thinking that Nanny is wise beyond her years, decides to wait.

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Maria Leonard AP English Literature & Composition Their Eyes Were Watching God Essay March 13, 2023 A Journey Through Janie’s Eyes The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, is a self-realization psychological-fiction book about a young woman named Janie Crawford and her lessons through life and love. Throughout the novel, Zora Neale Hurston employs various literary devices to guide the reader through Janie's journey of self-discovery. Hurston uses literary devices such as dramatic irony, symbolism, imagery, and syntax to depict the downfall of Janie's inner damage, marriage to Joe Starks, and discovery of different types of romantic relationships.

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Figurative language is a technique used commonly among authors in literature, yet still something readers have a difficult time figuring out due to the deeper meaning that is hidden in the piece of work. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a minor yet significant character named Mrs. Turner is compared to a pious worshipper, portraying her as someone who is obsessed of one race over another, showing her want of power in society. This ultimately suggests the invisible power in a race and how the color of one’s skin can make differences. Mrs. Turner is an interesting character in this novel. Mrs. Turner is compared to “believers [who] had built an altar to the unattainable -- Caucasian characteristics for all” (Hurston

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3. Explore how Hurston uses elements of nature as a metaphor for Janie's life. 
 Hurston shames us immodestly with grotesque glimpses of our protagonist, Janie, whose life delicates through painful metaphors within the terrestrial veils of her world. They flutter and furiate like a beating heart, gasping in the polluted industry of sentience. In Their Eyes Were Watching God this chivalry of language erotosizes the ideas that human existence can translate into forms of seemingly ethereal aesthetics.

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In reading Joyce Carol Oates, “Hi Howya Doin”, 2007 and Zora Neale Hurston’s, “Spunk”, 1925, we have noticed similarities and differences between the two stories, which we have analyzed for further discussion. Both stories consist of life that is filled with uncertainty; good and evil are ill defined. In the story, “Hi Howya Doin”, by Joyce Carol Oates, she describes a husky male running along a path filled with a variety of different individuals from all walks of life who want only to be left alone, want no social interaction or discourse and prefer to contemplate in solitude with their miserable existence. In “Spunk”, the author paints a verbal picture of life during the early part of the 20th century, in a rural southern community, where social discourse, social contact and social interaction are extremely important for

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Hurston narrates belief to motivate African American women to conquer and be strong. (49) The story finally tells that Janie found liberty and tranquility in her life. Her experience reflects on promoting women’s

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Many authors utilize the events that have occurred throughout their lifetime as an inspiration for not only their novels’ plots, but also their novels’ themes. The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, is one of the many authors who have utilized their life’s experiences as inspiration for her novels’ themes. Throughout her major novels, she has utilized events in her life, such as her early life, her relationships, and the fact that she grew up in an all-black town, in order to inspire several themes in her novels, and several of her beliefs that she conveys in her novels. Themes, and beliefs, such as African-Americans are not all good nor are they all bad, experiences contribute to finding one’s true self, there is no

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Hurston uses a mule, more specifically Matt Bonner’s mule, to symbolize Janie and all African American women because like African American women, mules are not held in high regard and work from the bottom, bearing the weight of many other that rely on them and their work. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Matt Bonner’s mule is used to

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This paper focuses on Zora Neale Hurston’s novelThere Eyes Were Watching God, itexplores the Triple oppression, race, class, gender discrimination, black woman, identity, liberated woman, oppression, suppression, conditions and situations of women in society, position of women and self-realization or self-awakening through the process of colonization, male-dominated African culture brought to America by the slaves. In fact the black women are oppressed and suppressed in different aspects. This paper is an analysis of the ways in which the protagonist of African-American literature signifies Racism, Classism and Sexism with traumatic conditions under which African- Americans live. This is an attempt to explore, from different feminist perspectives, the quest for feminine identity of a black woman, Janie Crawford, the protagonist of the novel. The protagonist's experience of gaining her natural womanhood has a number of controversial complexities.

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The ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurstson's Of Mules and Men and that of the Clifford Geertz's Balinese Cockfight contrast significantly in their writings. They contrast in that they differ in their ethnographic approach, what or who they are observing and their judgements placed on those they are observing. The narrative voice remains the same between the two Anthropologist's writing but seems to be the only thing. Hurstons's Of Mules and Men made great contributions to African American culture as we know if today. She focusses her ethnography on African American folklore of the time in the 1930s.

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston wrote in a way that conveyed a message through her characters, using a storytelling "frame" to express her ideas. Hurston did not stop by means to get her point across. Hurston uses Janie’s thoughts and actions to represents how during Reconstruction, African Americans were trying to find their identities and achieve their dreams of independence. At the start of the novel Hurston begins to illustrate how African Americans in Eatonville feel about their lives.

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