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

Complicated relationships, even family members can bring a person down but in the end, the hard times are what makes a person who they are. Janie Mae Crawford is a prime example of this, she goes through many relationships and even has complications with her own family that lead to her being unhappy. She finally learns that when she finds who she is and finds her own voice is when she becomes happy. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston examines the idea that Janie's past, where she has many complicated relationships, including her Nanny, aids her on her journey to find who she is and to establish her own voice. Janie’s difficult journey of finding her voice begins when her Nanny forces her to marry her first

After Janie leaves Logan and runs off with Joe, they head to Eatonville and Joe quickly becomes the mayor. The people of Eatonville ask for a word from the mayor's wife where Joe says, “Mah wife don’t know nothin’ bout no speech makin” (Hurston 78). At the very early start of Janie and Joe’s relationship, he continues to strip Janie more and more of her voice. Janie has been stripped so much of her voice that she does not even know who she is as a person anymore. ”The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul” (Knodson 222), Janie continuously let Joe take away her voice, Janie did not even fight back, she lost all of her fight, that's how her whole life had been. When Joe is on his death bed, Janie finally finds just a little bit of fight in her soul, she says to Joe, ”You changes everything but nothin’ don’t change you…”(Hurston 127). This was the first time that Janie stood up for herself, she had a voice in something, she stood up to Joe and this was the start of her gaining her voice back. Even if Janie standing up to Joe did not really get her anywhere, the fact that she stood up to Joe was a major leap in not only gaining her voice but also finding out who she was. Janie makesis making progress. “”She

After Joe’s death Janie feels a sudden wave of relief, and freedom comes over her, ”She sent her face to Joe'sJoes funeral, and herself went rolllicking with the springtime across the world” (Hurston 129). At Joe’s funeral Janie had to pretend to be sad and put on a mask that she was grieving and mourning the death of Joe Starks but in reality, Janie was happy, she felt free, she could now do what she wanted whenever she wanted. Janie no longer had someone to sit there and control or or tell her what to do as stated here:,”For the first time in her life she is free to make her own decisions and live the way she wants to, rather than being told how to live it” (Davidson), all she has is herself and she is happy with that, especially after all that she has been through. Joe restricts Janie on who she is able to talk to and what she can do, she no longer has that holding her back so she can really dive into her journey of finding herself now. When Janie figured out who she was a little, it allowed her to know what she wanted for herself , she ran off with this guy named Tea Cake and when she comes back to Eatonville Pheoby, her friend, and the people of Eatonville tell her that Tea Cake was not good enough for her, but using the voice that has come to grow on her she states ” Still and all