Their Eyes Were Watching God Literary Devices

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston composed a passionate story of a beautiful African American woman in the early 1900s. It embodies how life was for the women of color, and the struggles they faced. Hurston used literary devices to show the struggles Jaine had to go through to find her voice and the power within herself. In the relationship between her and her first two husbands, she struggled to figure out if marriage was really the equivalent of happiness. Not knowing what she needed in life she struggled to find the feeling she had always craved. Then after finding Tea Cake she uncovers the power within herself to fight for what she wants.
As a young girl in the early 1900s Janie, even from a young age, had expectations for what her life was supposed to look like. She was beautiful, with long hair that most didn’t have, and because she was raised by a grandmother who grew up in slavery, was expected to use

Because her and Tea Cake really loved each other Jaine was no longer afraid to speak out. She was no longer a trophy but worked alongside her husband. When she felt like she was being wronged by Tea Cake she didn’t think she just followed her feeling and called him out. (137) In that relationship, she would who she really was and found she no longer cared what people thought of her. Tea Cake loved her and that's all that mattered.
Their Eyes Were Watching God doesn’t have the traditional happy ending. In the end, Tea Cake ended up going crazy with rabies and Janie kills him. But this had a purpose, Hurston did this to show the new found spirit Jaine had even after losing Tea Cake. In the end, she said “Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking,”(193) She was content with her life because it was her life, she lived it the way she wanted with Tea Cake and she didn’t need anyone for happiness anymore. She found