Theme Of Two Places In Their Eyes Were Watching God

All throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel by Zora Neale Hurston, the themes of uniformity, love, and more can be seen encircling the world of Janie Mae Crawford, the protagonist of the story. These symbols and motifs stretch farther into the contrasting locations of Eatonville and the Everglades. There are many prominent differences between the two places, as well as prominent meaning and themes surrounding the two different locations. Eatonville and The Everglades house thematic symbols that contrast one another. Eatonville, the central urban setting, represents conformity, suppression and stagnant standard. This can be seen in the behavior of Janie’s Grandmother, setting a goal for Janie to be married to a wealthy man. This unmoving, premeditated path set for our protagonist is a constriction, thus causing her to fall in line to what was societally correct in Eatonville. Moving away from the static customs of Eatonville, the rural setting of The Everglades provides Janie with a sense of freedom, utopia, and relative happiness. This theme is deliberated by the self-sovereignty Janie was allowed to inherit in her marriage to Tea Cake. She

Eatonville is a place of repression, what with how Janie worked in the shop, and how gossip ran rampant through the town if deliberation occurred. Eatonville is not a negative and antagonistic place, but simply a place of high standards, which did not suit the independent nature of Janie Crawford. Opposing this place, the rural location known as “The Muck” has almost entirely different motifs. The Everglades was home to farmers and common workmen, not the high-class citizens of Eatonville. People were also free to come as they were, and be treated equally. This place is also where Janie was allowed her independence, even in her marriage to Tea Cake. The Muck was also filthy, as opposed to the home she had in