Summary Of Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

The casual ignorance of history: The writing of Zora Neale Hurston
A growing divide in society makes social commentary easily very impactful, with Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston failed this easy task. When Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1936, there were major tensions growing in the United States, especially those between the African-American and White communities. In this book Hurston tries to make social commentary on this growing divide, she fails at this because she ignores racial relationships at the time and severely oversimplifies African-Americans.
Hurston oversimplifies African- Americans making them sound unintelligent. Throughout the entire book African Americans are only speaking

Her final husband is Tea Cake, who in the book is portrayed as a perfect husband for Janie by being adventurous and saving Janie from her boring life working in a store. The flaws in Tea Cake quickly begin to show, he practices gambling regularly, for example before the big Saturday “Tea Cake was busy practicing up on his dice” (119). This gets him into many situations where he could get seriously hurt and one day he is, but when he says “Dey cut me, dats all”(120), his tone makes it feel like it has happened before. This reveals that Tea Cake’s sense of adventure Janie loves is only there because it’s an adventure just for Tea Cake to get money. Later in the book Tea Cake mirrors Logan’s opinion of women “‘git uh job uh work’”(127). Janie leaves Logan over having to work earlier, but now she does what he says and does backbreaking work even though Tea Cake is supposed to be a much greater man than Logan. In the end the husbands that are supposed to be the bad ones are much better all-around people, while Tea Cake, the one that is supposed to be the best man and husband, is the worst at

Every African-American in the book, except for Jody, works low and/or menial jobs. The main two jobs shown for African Americans in the book are farmers and spending “All day. . .pickin’ beans”(Hurston 123). The fact that Hurston has African-Americans working all day in fields picking beans all day is very counterproductive to her social commentary she is trying to make about African-Americans being treated as lower class humans than they are. The jobs in the book are very menial and have a similar resemblance to picking cotton as slaves, except this time the African-Americans do this job at their own free will, and this makes it seem like the African-American society barely progressed in the 70 years since slavery, and that they are as low class as then. Also, Tea Cake can’t work to well so he resorts to gambling for money. In the book, and everything known about Tea Cake point to him never having a real job in today’s standards, only working odd jobs and hopping trains to get around, but Tea Cake calls himself “one uh de best gamblers God ever made” (Hurston 119) while trying to prove how his gambling