More about Their Eyes Were Watching God, Written by Zora Neale Hurston
Although at the beginning of the book Janie was naïve about love, she learned through her three marriages many lessons about love, including the major lesson, that love actually existed. Janies view of love was of the pear tree. The perfect harmony between the pear tree and its surroundings was what she thought love was.Tea Cake treated her as an equal. He allowed her to do things Jody never would have like shooting and playing checkers. Janie loved Tea Cake, their marriage was like a pear tree and its surroundings, a perfect harmony. Zora Neale Hurston compares their marriage with the pear tree, Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees.Forget all your stereotypes, and throw your timelines out the window. Their Eyes Were Watching God teaches that love can strike at any time of life. And when it does, watch outnot only is it as ever-changing as the sea, it's also just as powerful.
To Janie, marriage was perfect harmony between two people like a pear tree and its surroundings. Janie felt like being like a pear tree and its surroundings would be in true love, Oh to be a pear tree any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. Forced to marry for money at 16, Janie at first believes that love automatically comes with marriage. Unable to endure her mule-like servitude and the desecration of her dreams, she spontaneously leaves Logan for Joe Starks, a handsome, ambitious man determined to put her on a pedestal once he becomes mayor of Eatonville. After enduring a mostly joyless 20-year marriage to him, Janie finally meets a young, uneducated wastrel named Tea Cake. With him she thinks she can find genuine love for the first time, but fate intervenes, and Janie fears she may have to choose between his safety and her own. Considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century African American literature, Zora Neale Hurston successfully paved the way for future prominent writers.
Even though African Americans across the nation were no longer considered slaves, they were still chained down But critics who felt that Hurston's fiction undermined their attempts to combat racism misunderstood her aesthetic. As she once wrote in a letter, "I tried . . . not to pander to the folks who expect a clown and a villain in every Negro. Neither did I want to pander to those 'race' people among us who see nothing but perfection in all of us. " Holding to this vision would cost her, financially and otherwise, right up until her death in 1960. Janie's story starts with her youth, as a girl in search of great things. Raised by her grandmother, a black woman raped by a white man, Janie never really has the chance to go out in search of her dreams. Her grandmother, having grown up during slavery, never had much of anything, including a voice. She was always repressed by white people, and never could have the kind of nice things that she wanted. When Janie's mother is raped, she runs away and leaves Janie to be taken care of by her grandmother. Her grandmother only wants Janie to have the kinds of things she never had the chance to have. So, despite Janie's refusal, she arranges for Janie to marry a man named Logan Killicks.
When was their eyes are watching god written - Janie realized that Jody never respected her, Ah knowed you wasnt goingtuh listen tuh me. You changes everything but nothin dont change you not even death. But Ah aint goin outa here and Ah aint gointuh hush. (Pg. 86) Janie knew that Jody never treated her as an equal and she did not love him because of it.
A Hectic Journey in Their Eyes Were Watching God was written by Zora Neale Hurston - When Janie married Logan Killicks, she realized that she could not learn to love someone. Janie was forced be Nanny to marry Logan Killicks for her financial stability. She thought that she could love him after their marriage, Yes, she would love Logan after they were married. (Pg. 21)
Through dedication and hardships in her life, she is famously recognized as an important person during the 1920s for her writing and role in the Harlem Renaissance. () Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama and later moved to Eatonville, Florida. She lived a happy childhood in her 8-room house Hurston fell out of favor for the middle of the 20th century, but her work was recovered from literary oblivion by the hard work and tenacity of feminist scholars like Alice Walker in the 1970s. While earlier Harlem Renaissance writers didn't understand Hurston, a new generation of professors, writers, and researchersmany of them black women themselvesadmired the novel's portrayal of the black female experience. And attitudes Zora put into her writings. One character in Their Eyes Were Watching God who was harshly changed because of what she endured as a slave was Nanny. It was commonplace for slaves to experience hardships even after the Civil War when they were freed, After the Civil War, discrimination and a lack of education prevented most former slaves from obtaining a good job (Slavery).
Hurston uses dialect to bring the story as well as the characters
to life. The use of dialect makes the characters seem real; they
are believable. After making some initial adjustments as a reader
to become familiar with the language, readers feel as if they
were actually a part of the action.Most of socio-cultural and
religious traditions in their original form regarded a
comparatively low position to woman. Controlled by patriarchy,
woman has suffered discrimination, subjugation, otherness either
as a lesser being or as a super being. A number of social and
literary movements have helped women attain equality and
independence. 20th century has witnessed an increasing awareness
amongst women about their sexuality, desires, discovery of
self-identity and existence. The contemporary writers are
striving to provide the desired liberation to women from the
socio-cultural confines and the dictatorial myths.Mules and
Men
Before Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, she
created a collection of folklore gathered from her research of
black cultural life in Eatonville. That collection later became
the book Mules and Men. Several of the folktales in the
book can open new ways of understanding the folklore in Their
Eyes, especially Witness of the Johnstown Flood in Heaven.