Manipulation In Their Eyes Were Watching God

In general, humans are superficial creatures that have judged others based on gender rather than ability over the many generations that passed. Likewise, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, the main protagonist, Janie Crawford, had suffered greatly under such proposition. During the 1930’s, the time period of the novel, many women lived constricted lives as women were expected to obey their husbands and the men around them due to society's expectations. During the events of the novel, both manipulation and abuse took place as well as love and marriage in the relationships that Janie Crawford had been pushed towards. Moreover, Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, features Janie Crawford and her struggles to overcome

As a result, through the deaths of her previous two husbands, she learns to let go in the moment she had killed Tea Cake, “The gun came up unsteadily but quickly and leveled at Janie’s breast…Maybe he would point to scare her… The pistol snapped once. Instinctively Janie’s hand flew behind her on the rifle and brought it round… She broke the rifle deftly and shoved in the shell as the second click…” (Hurston 182-3). Although Tea Cake had brought Janie so much joy as she was able to live a life of her choosing, it was his death that allowed her to finally realize that her life is her own to control and no one else's. Furthermore as Simmons, in his article states, “Janie's ability to free herself from the confinement represented by her first two husbands and, after the death of her third husband, Tea Cake Woods, to attain a new form of cultural power, the ability to shape her own story (Simmons para. 4)”, it depicts the hidden feelings that Janie had in the relationships she had been in. Specifically, in her last two relationships, she had started out deeply in love, but towards the end, she came to understand how much suffering and abuse she had received but was only able to come to peace with herself after their deaths. By the end of the novel, Janie returns to Eatonville, living a quiet life as she becomes content with having lived her dream of “a marriage filled with love”, content and happy at the life she had experienced, finally being able to let go with everything. By killing Tea Cake, in a self defense action, Janie overcomes the barrier of “men being superior” and not needing a man to live successfully. Through her experiences, she was able to ignore the gossip of her neighbors as she was criticized for overtaking her husband. By ignoring the gossip and unwavering towards the isolation, Janie overcomes the