In the early 1900s, Janie struggles to find her self worth. In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, expands on the story of a girl who goes through many different relationships before finding herself. Janie faces emotional abuse, insecurities, and a variety of men. Her grandmother taught her many life lessons and engraved in her head that she needed to find a man to take care of her for the rest of her life. Janie grows through each relationship and soon comes to the conclusion that she is able to care for herself.
He teaches her to shoot, hunt, play checkers, and work outside. Instead of telling Janie what to do he gives her options, creating a two way relationship instead of a dominant partner. As well as being a good man, the circumstances change, in the past Janie had no way to support herself and was younger. In comparison to her old relationships, Janie is older and has quite a bit of money to keep herself standing while with Tea Cake. Janie also loves how sweet and caring Tea Cake is.
And God, please suh, don’t let him love nobody else but me”(120). This shows she’s emotionally attached and jealous, which shows attachment. Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Janie Crawford. Janie’s life was a quest to find true love. Janie narrates the story of her three marriages and her search for love to her friend Phoeby.
Throughout the novel, Janie aspires for different goals that she feels that she can achieve through her relationships. For example, when she seeks love, she marries Logan. When she realizes that she cannot attain love through marriage, she desires wealth and power. In order to obtain this, Janie leaves Logan to marry Jody Starks. She is constantly moving from desire to desire every time she is unhappy with her present condition.
As Janie is laying down at sixteen years old beneath a pear tree in the spring, it becomes a symbol to her of the optimal relationship. Janie marries to Logan Killicks to please her Nanny before she dies. As Janie cries to her Nanny she says to her "Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage, lak when you sit under a pear tree and think." (p 24) she admits to not being happy with a relationship she is in with Logan. As the Pear Tree continues to grow, so does Janie’s understanding of her optimal relationship.
Zora Neale Hurston's book, Their Eyes are watching God, follows the journey of main character Janie Mae Crawford through three main steps; the departure, the initiation, and the return. These three steps summarize the true elements of Janie Crawford finding her true self. It also offers an understanding of the hardships faced, and how Janie is referred to as a Hero for her ability to not give up. This Chart conducted by Joseph Campbell's teaches us the adventure of life and how our journey is being lived every day. Where does your Journey
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston uses lots of characterization and figurative language to give the reader an inside on Janie’s feelings and surroundings. In chapter the way the men focus of Janie’s physical features, and women criticize Janie’s hygiene and looks allows the reader to make an image of how Janie looks. The men were “saving with the mind what they lost with the eye,” and the women “took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance,” this also shows how the women were going to keep that image of Janie in their head to hold over her (Hurston 2). Janie has a love for nature, the figurative language and metaphors allows the reader to understand Janie and her connections with nature. Hurston uses the pear tree in the backyard to show how Janie felt free and
Zora Neale Hurston 's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie, a young mulatto, through her life journey of placement in regard to the men whom she married. Toni Morrison reflects on this placement in her essay Having It All? : "She had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may well have invented herself." Each man whom Janie marries dictates her "place" in society, however negatively or positively, leaving her ultimately responsible for overcoming the male-domineering personality and for re-inventing herself: Janie 's first husband, Logan Killicks, identifies her as not having a place, and Janie 's second husband, Jody Starks, views her
This word has a denotative meaning of providing light, but Hurston uses it to describe Janie as having deep satisfaction. Words like tingle, beam, thrill could all be used in a similar context as “glowing”. Janie has never been treated as an equal, so here the foreign sense is exciting her. Through all this evidence, it can be seen that Robert Hemingway correctly analyzes one of the main messages of Their Eyes Were Watching God as the importance of organic relationships between men and women. By Tea Cake proving himself that he sees Janie as his equal in the evidence from Hurston’s book, it shows that Hemingway is correct about one of the main messages about the book.
Janie, at first, doubts Tea Cake loves her because of her age and then, on account of her fortune, fears he may have married her only to run off with her money. However, Tea Cake proves through and through that he loves Janie for Janie and treats her with love accordingly. Though Janie and Tea Cake’s marriage is not perfect, (such as when he beats her to show Mrs. Turner and her brother that he is in possession of Janie) she has found the “bee for her bloom” in Tea Cake. Willingly, unlike with Killicks who would have forced her, Janie works with her husband in the fields when she and Tea Cake make a home in the Everglades (184–185). When jealousies arise through the flirtation of Nunkie, a girl who takes a liking to Tea Cake, Janie and Tea Cake fight but talk through and express their feelings over the flirtation to one another until each gives in and they become united once more (188–191).