Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God Feminist Analysis

In the novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston brings to light many themes such as gender roles and women’s rights. When the novel was published in September of 1937, it was not welcomed by society which was mainly due to the fact that most citizens of the United States were still very conservative and racist with their social views. With a country such as this, a literary work that rebels against society's ideals of segregation and minimal woman's rights was disrespected after its release. Like the quote above, many excerpts in the novel portray this theme of women’s rights through the use of various literary devices, such as analogies and symbolism. Zora Neale Hurston’s use of analogies in the way she describes both the male and female views on life is beautiful. This

How she describes the ship as a dream and the coming to tide as the achieving of the dream is beautiful. Also, the way she describes the horizon to define the vast, almost endless pursuit of men’s dreams is powerful, because the amount of twists and turns in life are just as limitless and unpredictable as what lies on the horizon. In addition, no one ever knows what could lie on the other side of the horizon. Men are chasing the horizon, which always appears so close, only to the die on the open sea. Even though she does not explicitly mean the open sea, she implies that men waste countless hours and die only focused on the dream they were chasing, never realizing the good they had already achieved. Therefore, men die with a void in their life because they were consumed with the dreams ahead of them, so they never took the time look at what they had actually accomplished. Even God, the Watcher, is aware of this fruitless waste of the days of men. Her use of symbolism depicts a vivid picture of what a men’s pursuit of the American Dream is