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Analysis of janie and her relationships with her husbands
Janie and her three marriages essay
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Analysis of janie and her relationships with her husbands
Janie and her three marriages essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The townspeople’s envy of Janie is rooted in internalized racism--one that favors light skin and other Eurocentric facial features. The porch-sitters of Eatonville also find it strange that Janie, who was at a higher social class before she met Tea Cake, come back to Eatonville and present herself in a way typical of a laborer. Although Janie yearns for a sense of community within Eatonville, the porch creates a division rooted in envy and internalized racism amongst the black community. Furthermore, as Tea Cake rapidly gets more sick, Janie acts upon self-defense and is forced to kill Tea Cake. That same day, Janie was to be put on trial in the courtroom.
(Hurston 142). I get the impression that her doubts about her marriage spring from the constant criticism from Jodie Sparks about her growing old and saggy, as well as the nasty comments about their relationship by the people of
Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.” This realization made by Janie supports one of the biggest themes in this novel, which is that the concept of innocence and womanhood can’t exist at the same time. Because Janie finally lets go of her “childish fantasy”, her innocence is lost and she is now a woman. The theme of lost innocence in exchange for womanhood is also prevalent in Hurston’s story Sweat. This idea is one of the reasons that Sykes and Delia’s relationship begins to fall apart when we meet them.
Evan Wheeler Ms. Gommermann Honors English 10 3 March 2023 Role of Women in Different Works In both her short story, “Sweat,” and book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston brings forth the convention that black women are abused by their husbands; however, she highlights the different ways that the women in each story stand up for themselves. In the short story, “Sweat,” Delia defends herself from the beginning. Conversely, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie hesitates to assert herself until midway through the book. The outcomes of these women standing up for themselves are very similar, but the timing in which they do so are very different.
Hurston describes Janie’s quest to finding love and to recovering herself, though
She is to stay in the house and do what women were expected to do, clean and cook. Janie is eager to help outside and Tea Cake is the first guy to let her do so. “So the very next morning Janie got ready to pick beans along with Tea Cake” (Hurston 133). In this day in age, it is rare for a women to work along side a man, they were expected to stay in the house. Janie is infatuated by the idea of a man finally giving her a sense of freedom because her whole life she has been trapped in a world where the guy is the only person in charge and
Next, Janie marries Joe Starks and they go to Eatonville, Florida, a town created entirely by and for blacks. When they first arrive into town they quickly realize the town is in desperate need for leadership. Janie volunteers Joe to become major because of his wealth and his strong personality. Joe also buys a grocery store and has Janie work there. At this point in the novel Janie is content, but soon after the true colors of Joe start to emerge.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, she uses her characters to challenge the gender roles of that time. In her book, women are the submissive and weaker gender. They cannot gain power without a influential or wealthy man backing her up which is usually connected by marriage. Considering since women have no powers in society, in marriages they also don’t have much power, therefore the husband suppresses their wives and doesn’t give them any freedom. Because the females are scared of the males, they don't fight back and just keep it in.
Throughout the novel, Janie struggles to find herself and who she really is in a society where opportunities are limited. Janie challenges traditional gender roles throughout the novel by doing a mens job and changing the way women were looked at. Hurston states that “She was stretched on her
During her marriage to Jody Starks, Janie is described as feeling like “... a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but kept beaten down by the wheels” (72). Janie does not feel happy or lively during her marriage. Society, however, feels as though Janie should get married hastily because during the time it was commonly thought that every woman needed a man to look after her. Hurston demonstrates this idea when Nanny tells Janie, “Neither can you stand alone by yo’self” (15).
Their Eyes Were Watching God, penned by Zora Neale Hurston, bears a major life question: how is happiness reached? Hurston uses Jannie, Nanny, Jody, and Tea Cake’s experiences to show how a person reaches happiness. Hurston’s creation of Janie’s and Nanny’s relationship shows the contradiction of feeling secure and feeling happy. Nanny’s struggles in life edged Janie to her first marriage with Logan Killicks. Nanny was born a slave who had meager rights, which contributed to her being raped and the subsequent birth of her daughter.
The era in which the novel takes place is fraught with old-fashioned ideals. The ideology that women are meant to be subservient to their husbands was prevalent during this time and caused many women to live out their married lives miserably, often being abused both emotionally and physically. Janie is forced to marry at a
Women are confined to single roles and are expected to be submissive and respectful. When Joe married Janie, he forced her into a role of subservience. Hurston indicates that Joe attempted to mold Janie into what white women do on a daily basis which is to “sit on their high stools on the porches of their house and relax.” Doing this, Joe believes he is granting his wife all the wishes she ever wanted while neglecting the fact that Janie takes pleasure in the simple things in life like chatting, laughing, fishing and dancing. “Janie [especially] loved the conversation[s]” that took place on the porch and sometimes “she thought up good stories on the mule, but Joe had forbidden her to indulge” because he didn’t want her to talk after those “trashy people” (Page 104).
While married Janie had to conform to what her husband wanted her to be like, look like, and act like. Janie’s hair is another powerful symbol in the novel. It symbolizes her power and freedom within society. It is what most of the men characters noticed about her right away. Her hair was so beautiful that while being married to Joe Starks, he made her wear it in a hair rag.
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger attempts to answer the question of what it means “to be” or “to exist”. He argues that, historically, philosophy has failed to answer this question because it erroneously assumes that there is one form of “existing” that is shared universally among all things. From this philosophical framework, to say that chairs exist would be the same as saying that we exist. Heidegger rejects this framework. He argues that if we seek to answer the question of what it means to exist, we have to study the unique entity that has an understanding of what it means to be (i.e. Dasein) and how that entity’s existence differs from that of all other entities.