Janie's Hair In Their Eyes Were Watching God

Janie the protagonist of the book Their Eyes Were Watching God is introduced as a forty-year-old harlot by the woman on the porch. “They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs” (pg 2). From this porch Janie’s best friend Pheoby comes in to save her rep, Pheoby refutes, saying “You mad ‘cause she didn’t stop and tell us all her business” (pg 3). From this friendship we see that Janie is not a harlot she is just the talk of the neighborhood; she describes it as “Mouth-Almighty … got me up in they mouth now” (pg 5) . She then replies to the gossipers saying “They don’t know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt” (pg 6).

The character’s personalities and the settings reflect Hurston’s life. The book was written in 1937, in which Hurston lived through the time period of the book (2015). Hurston was born 1891 in Alabama, then raised in Eatonville, Florida where Janie lived with Jody (Boyd, 2015). Hurston lived through women’s suffrage (which was achieved before the book was written) and serration. Janie is held to certain expectations of this time period, specifically for women to marry and obey their husbands.

Her Story, Her Voice The unique story that is Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story of voices collected together to create one big voice. Hurston uses many characters’ voices to help Janie find her own, actual voice and tell her story by the end of the novel. The story by Zora Neale Hurston is a frame story which is a story within a story. Hurston, like many other authors, uses the frame narrative to help the story come full circle and create a sense that the reader is part of the story.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s happiness and self-fulfillment greatly depended on the man whom she was in a relationship with. From, the beginning of the novel, Janie never followed the path that had the utmost value to herself; She always settled for what other people thought was best for her. This made Janie never quite content with her situation and caused her happiness and self-fulfillment to be hindered by her circumstances. The horizon, a motif representing dreams, wishes, the possibility of change, and improvement of ones’ self, is the point in which Janie’s journey of self-discovery is illustrated by.

Media: From T.V. to Books is a Changin' Thing " There's two things everybody got to find out for theyselves: they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living. Now, love is like the sea. It's a moving thing.

Their Eyes Were Watching God Journal 3 Essay In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston uses the idea of hope to represent the final destination for the main character, Janie. Janie uses her hopes and aspirations as motivation for achieving what she wants in life. Hurston uses the motifs of the Horizon and the road to symbolize hope or the lack of hope within the novel.

Wallace Thurman poses the question “What did the color of one’s skin have to do with mentality or native ability” (Thurman 50). For a woman in America, quite a lot! While some have the luxury of living in “one nation, with liberty and justice for all”. For African American women, justice is hard to come by, and liberty is nothing more than a term without any true purpose or meaning. It is true, “to be black is no disgrace, just often very inconvenient”, but to be both African American and female, is nearly unbearable (Johnson,.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: Prompt 10 In Zora Neale Hurston’s famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, main character Janie Crawford struggles through many of life’s trials, including poverty, discrimination, and three consecutive marriages that each come with their own challenges for Janie. While many tribulations of the era are discussed during the novel, the featured conflict revolves around Janie, and what it means for her and her dreams of being independent to be alive during a time when she is discriminated against for both her race and gender. Hurston’s novel explores how deeply generations of oppression and poverty can affect a person, and how Janie slowly but surely overcomes the obstacles of ignorance and prejudice barring her

In life we all have goals and aspirations. So what we do is we spend our whole life searching for this satisfaction. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God the main character Janie was on an exhibition to find happiness. This exhibition was called “the pear tree goal”. Janie’s ambitions in her life were sexuality, marriage, freedom, maturity, and Family.

Binish Iqbal Dr. Faiza Zaheer ENG-7201 1 July 2016 Identity is the most poignant and distressing theme in 20th century Afro American Novel. Justify. This does not come as a surprise to those, fairly acquainted with the mores of and motives behind the emergence of Afro American Novel, that it is well-informed and well-stocked with the historical struggles for identification on the part of Afro American community.

Later when Janie marries Jody Starks, we see another example of a member of the “in-group” enforcing the negative stereotypes the dominant culture has imposed upon them. Jody remembers the “other men figuratively wallowing in” Janie’s hair (55). He has her cover it up because “she was there in the store for him to look at, not those others” (55). Janie’s hair is a symbol of her sexuality and womanhood. Janie remarks that when Jody forced her to start wearing the scarf, their sexual relationship suffered.