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Janie Crawford In Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

733 Words3 Pages

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford experiences many hardships that lead to her eventual satisfaction and fulfillment. As a young girl, Janie always felt she was missing a part of herself which could not be found through self advocated discovery alone, but by the presence of a companion that provided her with affection. As she sheds the majority of her innocence through various abusive marriages at an extremely young age, Janie’s dream may have been altered, but never ceased to exist. There was always hope in Janie’s mind that she would find a man that helped her complete herself, and allow her to become liberated from the tiring desire of discovering love for herself. As stated by Farah Mahmood Abbas, …show more content…

In the beginning of this journey, Janie was excited to discover and experience her dream of finding a man who she truly loved and vice versa: "Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches" (8). Although Janie’s dream began innocently, as time passed, she discovered what she wanted for herself more specifically. Her first thoughts of love in general began when she was sixteen years old, sitting under a tree in her yard: "Oh to be a pear tree--any tree--in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen...Where were the singing bees for her? Nothing on the place nor in her grandma's house answered her. She searched... looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made”(11). Even as young as she was, Janie knew love was going to be the primary focus of her life. From this point on in the novel, Janie’s dream begins to take shape, and dictates her future actions, as explained by Emily Kendall: "From the moment of revelation under the pear tree, to the book’s lyrical conclusion, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of the progression of Janie’s dreams of love and freedom” (Emily Kendall). This dream of love

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