Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God Analysis

Picture this: It’s 1937, the Harlem Renaissance is in full swing, while walking down the street in Harlem, one could hear the jazzy music of Louis Armstrong rolling across the streets. It was a time of new ideas, music, art, and literature. All of these radical changes to society, led to tremors that rocked the world in the coming decades. One such of these was the Civil Rights Movement, an effort to raise up the African-American man and all races to be equals. Along with men, women would be elevated. While the idea of equality of all is commonplace today, leading up to the Harlem Renaissance, no time had been given to the issue. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the pioneers of this idea, in all of her writings. Through her use of natural objects with a feminine connotation, Zora Neale Hurston, called to attention wrongness of the confinement women were

This object would be the old yellow mule and its funeral in Eatonville. Through Nanny’s observations, the mule later in the story becomes a symbol for Janie. The story of the mule is that several of the men, from Eatonville, were harassing it. This harassment caused a remark by Janie, saying that what they were doing was cruel. Upon hearing it, Jody bought the mule so that it would be able to rest, and spend its last days free of any burden. Then, about a week later, it died and the whole town had a funeral for it. This mirrors Janie in that Jody freed her from being forced to work, but still she was his mule. Another similarity is that the proximity of Jody dying to the mule dying in the story. In this way, the mule’s death signifies that Janie as a mule, or her slavery to men will end soon. After Jody died, Janie no longer was forced to work by anyone, not even Tea Cake. Rather, she was able to be