Their Eyes Were Watching God Character Analysis

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston explains the journey of Janie, the main character,who struggles to find her independence and a place where she feels comfortable. She undertakes a bold journey to find her own self. She goes through several relationships, thinking they would somehow fulfill her life, but all fail because Janie does not feel content or the relationship leads to the death of a spouse. In the end, Janie uses her desire for power and independence for freedom to reveal that she does not need an unpleasant relationship to fulfill and appreciate her search for her true self. First, Janie struggles with her relationship with her first husband, Logan.

*change slide* The purpose of the poem is to challenge the views of motherhood. Gwen Harwood presents the idea that motherhood is anything but glamorous. She shows her audience that being a mother is more than complex and tiring, it is shown in the way she paints the woman as a person constantly making sacrifices for her children, which mentally exhausts her. Throughout the entire poem, she demonstrates the woman’s desire to have a better life and her want for freedom, to be free of responsibilities given to her.

Jane Eyre obtains her goals at the end of the novel by using her faith in God, nature, and herself to overcome her obstacles; this faith and strength also keeps her family and the judging, oppressing nature of man from stopping her from obtaining what she wants in life. As previously stated, Jane Eyre, the main character in the novel, is forced to face many different challenges in her life. She is orphaned at a young age and is made to live with her aunt, Mrs. Reed, who despises Jane and is only keeping the young girl around because Mr. Reed made Mrs. Reed promise to raise Jane. Thus, Jane’s childhood is unloving and she is constantly bullied by her cousins, particularly John Reed. This abuse and neglect causes Jane to be someone who holds intense grudges for a long time and who does not love, nor is loved, by anyone.

Memories of her dead daughter are thus both an implement of healing and a tool of masochism. Sethe’s forces her into a kind of stasis; an interloper that prevents her from moving on from her haunted past. But, unlike her mother, eventually “Denver prevents the past from trespassing on her life” (Ayadi, 2011: 266) and becomes a transformed female figure. With the introduction of a long-lost friend of Sethe’s from her days at the slave yard, Sweet Home, Paul D at first appears to be the liberator of Sethe from the shackles of her actions and the heavy weight of not only her child’s death. However, despite being the figure of

She states that “I don’t write to god no more, I write to you.” to Nettie in letter seventy-three shortly after. This is a significant turn in Celie’s spiritual journey as she abandons God – which she deemed unhelping and unresponsive, in favor of her sister who has always been there for her as a source of comfort to her from the beginning. Celie began to turn away from religion and begins to search the spaces of spirituality in her life, which are namely Shug and Nettie. When Shug describes her journey from religious to spiritual and how she discovered her spiritual state became the ultimate turning point in Celie’s development away from stiffly structured religion.

MAIN THEMES IN THE NOVEL FAMILY The primary journey in Jane Eyre is Jane 's scan for family, for a feeling of having a place and love. Be that as it may, this hunt is continually tempered by Jane 's requirement for independance. She starts the novel as a disliked vagrant who is relatively fixated on discovering love as an approach to set up her own personality and accomplish bliss. In spite of the fact that she doesn 't get any parental love from Mrs. Reed, Jane discovers surrogate maternal figures all through whatever remains of the novel.

Before Nettie loses up on reaching her sister who left, she understands “whether God will read letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me…When I don’t write to you I feel as bad as I do when I don’t pray, locked up in myself and choking on my own heart” (Walker 130). In a sisterhood as solid as the one like Nettie and Celie, writing letters to each other without reaction and pleading God are enough to keep the two sisters together strongly, however physically isolated by a

Preeminence in all and each is yours; Yet grant some small acknowledgment of ours (Norton 209) Her position as a woman in a puritan colony, and her doubts of the male hierarchy, a judgmental god and her love of her husband and community created much conflict within herself and her poetry. Her inner conflicts are expressed in a letter written to her children before she passed. In the letter she explains the first conflicts she had about her beliefs. “But as I grew up to be about 14 or 15 I found my heart more carnall, and sitting loose from God, vanity and the follyes of youth take hold of me” (Norton 235).

She simultaneously loves and resents her children because, while she is their mother, she feels that they have taken away her freedom and self-purpose. As Edna journeys in her awakening, she strives to find meaning for herself as Edna, not her children's mother. To prove she is more than just a mother, she distances herself from normal motherly responsibilities. “He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it?”(Chopin, 15) Edna's neglect of her children stems from others expectations for her to submit to and look after her

Stokely Carmichael urged the people to understand that everyone had importance  in America not just white men.   This convinced many people to have a change of thought. Some people realized that it wasn't fair but not all. Many fights broke out when whites didn’t change their minds.

Hurston divulges in the deception of hopes and dreams through the recurrent symbol of the horizon. What one hopes for on the horizon is ultimately what deceives one. In Janie’s adolescence, she presumes that she loves Nanny, her grandmother and legal guardian, and that Nanny knew better for Janie’s welfare. However, during Janie’s newfound independence and self-discovery after a controlling marriage, she discovers her true feelings of Nanny: hate. She abominates Nanny because, “Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon… and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it around her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her” (Hurston 89).

The idea of black feminism is that sexism, gender roles, racial oppression, and racism are meant to fit together. This definition is idealistic and describes what Jennifer Jordan, an author and reviewer, wishes to have seen in the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jordan argues that although this novel “provides a most effective examination of the stultification of feminine talent and energy”, Janie, the protagonist, is lacks “black feminist” characteristics. However, there are several instances in this book where one can see a feminist mentality build in Janie’s personality. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston advocates for feminist issues through Janie’s growth throughout the novel from a naive, docile wife, to an independent, confident

in their Eyes were watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, it's far difficult to see Janie or her interactions along with her community as feminist. whether or not Janie is living in Eatonville or the Everglades, her status as a black running class lady locates her on the very bottom of the social hierarchy. The guys objectify her, her lover beats her, her community misunderstands her, and she fails to withstand. however, if we examine the fragmented narration and Janie’s position as the major narrator, a special view emerges about woman employer. The narration switches between the first- and third-person angle, and those perspectives, each one by one and collectively, assist to assert Janie as a narrator with authority and organization.

“I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want”-Muhammad Ali (brainyquotes). In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie's growth from a young girl without an identity, not knowing her own race, to a woman strong enough to return to her hometown of Eatonville allows her to discover who she is and how she has the power to change her own life. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God shows that the only way to achieve fulfillment is to ignore society's control and concentrate on one's own desires, while avoiding selfishness. This is revealed as Janie moves through abusive relationships to one which finally allows her room for her own thoughts and

“Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston”. In this story the main character Janie gets married three times. Her first husband Logan Killicks didn’t work out because she was forced to marry him by her Nanny. The second husband Joe Starks, she kinda had feelings for him, but it wasn’t anything big. Then her third husband was Tea Cake, she love him and actually had feelings for him.