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Analysis Of Janie In Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

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In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is a young woman who struggles to find her identity. Janie Separates her exterior life from her interior life by keeping certain thoughts and emotions inside her head, and she reconciles this by while presenting the proper woman society expects her to be. Janie also silently protests to those expectations by acting against what people require of her, both emotionally and physically. When Janie’s rude and abusive husband, Joe, dies, Janie is glad because she is finally free from him. But she doesn’t want people to know how happy she is that he is dead. So she “[starches and irons] her face, forming it into just what people [want] to see” (Hurston 87). Contrast to Janie’s grief stricken

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