Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles both center on a female protagonist going through trials and tribulation to find their true selves. To find their true selves, Janie Crawford and Tess D’Urberville attempt various relationship with good and bad man and courageously fight their battles alone. By revealing bits of pieces of their protagonist's interesting past in their beginning passages, Thomas Hardy and Zora Neale Hurston allure their reader to find out what happens and show the effects the past has on the present events of the novel Tess and Janie’s history influences the events that happen in the novel. Tess is revealed to come from a noble family called the …show more content…
Not only does the past of the protagonist affect their present, it also says something about their protagonists in the novel. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, it reads, “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly (TEWWG 1).” Hurston inputs that message in the beginning of her book to tell the reader how women forget what they don’t want to remember about their past so that they see themselves as living out their dreams that are “mocked to death by time (TEWWG 1)”, and how that reflects Janie’s life choices. Janie’s dream is to be in love and happy for the rest of her life, but during the course of the novel she is put through two struggling marriages which is not part of her plan. So she forgets all her marriages and chooses to be happy with Tea Cake, her one true love which speaks to how people need to forgive and forget their past misfortunes in order to move on with their lives. For Tess, her “pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the D'Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life's battle as yet, Hardy, even though gave his protagonist nobility, did not give her noble