Their Eyes Were Watching God, Research Paper Example

Thesis Statement

The interpersonal relationships of Janie Crawford, with whom she shared her life, were dominant and suppressive. They resented her dreams and existence. But she was a woman of substance.  In the era of racial discrimination and gender stereotypes, she had the infallible courage and enigma to discard her cliché roles and face the social dogmas of the time. Life could not give her much sorted happiness but her vitality made her a winner of her time.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel, a vision that portrays unending optimism and search for love. The protagonist, Janie Crawford is a dreamer-she loves to think and dream, she loves to epitomize passion and was busy all her in divulging her entire spirits in the pursuit of finding true love.  Well, love for her was like the tree in the backyard, which blossomed and looked full and content. To her love was beyond the boundaries of thought, an explicit imaginative foreplay that would one day sweep her off her feet. “ [Janie] was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her.”(p. 56) ( Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston)

Why was Janie crazy for love? Was it recourse to her silent captivity in the monotonous grudges of her grandmother?  Or was love a desire, a strange feeling that she had never felt before? It was like a taste that would brethren her senses. “Love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (p.191) ( Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston)

Characterization of Janie reveals that life had always been harsh on her.  She was never loved or cared in her childhood; her grandmother and mother were both raped by white men. They never really gave her feelings of warmth and love…she never had a father and never realized the bondage of a family. “ Ah ain’t never seen mah papa. And Ah didn’t know ‘im if Ah did. Mah mama neither. Ah wuz big enough tuh know. Mah grandma raised me”.(p.12) ( Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston)

She wore old clothes given by her white master, she was treated with contempt and neglect, and she was forcibly married to an old man…most of all her young dreams were shattered by her insecure grandmother.  She did not realize that Janie had different aspirations. She was different in nature and content from her counterparts, and life to her was not essentially family, husband, children and work. She craved for passion, care, and an inalienable relationship; above all she wanted to love and be loved.

Janie was married three times. Each of them was a shade of experience in her quench of finding the ultimate happiness. She was beautiful and sensuous quite unlike her old, obese husband, Logan Killicks.   Janie was forced to marry him by her nanny; it was a marriage in denial. “ Ah Brother Logan Killicks. He’s a good man too. Naw, Nanny, naw ma’am! He look like some ol skullhead in de graveyard”.( p.18) ( Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston)

She made compliance to the relationship but was eventually treated with distraught.   Torment, cynicism and sudden encounter with a handsome young man named Joe Starks, gave her the hope of love. They fled to Eatonville.  Janie desperately wanted to be happy, and this marriage was the first glimpse of love for her.

Was Joe the man of her dreams? Would Jody give her all the unfulfilled love? All were not as well as preempted. Jody was chauvinistic and dominated Janie. He stopped her from expressing her thoughts and emotions. He attempted all forms of mental brutality to stop Janie from being what she was. He envisaged Janie as a homemaker, who would be constrained in the four walls of the house. Jamie lost her freedom and her wing of dreams became mere oblivion. Janie was a fighter and her spirits were undaunted. Jody died of a disease when Janie was at the age of 40. “To my thinkin’ mourning oughtn’t tuh last no longer’n grief” (p.113) (Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston)

It was another chance for retrieval, another opportunity to get back her life and dreams. Nevertheless, Janie was still sensuous and could easily capture the mind of many a men. Multiple offers for marriage came her way, but she wanted to enjoy her freedom. She continued her work but at the end of the day she felt lonely. Her desire for love was still on fire and she felt her incompleteness. During this period she met Tea Cake, a much younger man than Janie. Tea Cake was young, virile, energetic and happy. He rekindled Janie’s deep rooted desires to live a life of happiness; where pleasure of togetherness, simplicity and bondage were considered to be the ultimate joys of life. “Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place”.(p. 155) ( Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston)

They laughed, played, worked in merry as if the most wished dreams of Janie were finally coming true.  But her happiness was short lived, an accident made Tea Cake sick. He became a threat to Janie’s life and under circumstances Janie killed him.

Well, there was a sudden darkness in her bright colored dreams. Life, love, romance and hope suddenly had a setback. Was Janie a loser, not by choice but by luck? Was Janie a victim of gender bias? Did the men in her lives overlook her strong feminist sentiments? Was her subjugation as an individual influence her character?  Janie was a portrayal of a character that never found love. Her strong feminist feelings were ruthlessly crushed by the men in her life, which made her a pessimist She had no family; her mother and grandmother were victims of servitude and torment. She envisaged three generations of distraught, neglect and insecurity. She had unfulfilled marriages and an incomplete family life. She also did not get the bliss of motherhood. Janie personified as a teenager and as a woman, who has no voice. Huston described an era where the black women were ridiculed and lead the life of a slave. They were mere objects of slavery, domestic workers and caretakers of children.  She was throttled in the chauvinistic environment but yet she thought that the love from a man could bring her the happiness. Maybe her lack of experience as being a daughter, a joy in the family leads her to believe that her dream tree would blossom from love by a man. She never could imagine that love does not know gender. However she was eventually freed from her male domination,  “pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see” (p. 231) (Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston)

Dreams and Reality: In her childhood, she eagerly looks at a pear tree which had blossomed. It was the synonym of happiness and fulfillment in the life of the sixteen-year-old Janie. The tree symbolized her dreams and she transcended into a utopian world. What was the reason for the hypothetical enigma which surrounded her existence? Why was she camouflaged in the non-existent desires and why was marriage the basis of all her happiness? Was her the reason of her submergence in latent dreams and quest for that unknown happiness? Janie had limited knowledge of love and relationships. Her lack of family and parental influence led her in a state of oblivion. She wanted to feel all the pleasures of life, far away from the scorn and denial of her grandmother. The narrow vibes and secluded sentiments of her grandmother, made her dreams of happiness more prominent. She was unaware of the prevailing racial discrimination and the patriarchal influence of the era.  She felt that the love with a man would give words to her dreams of happiness and the ‘man’ would give her all the pleasures that she had dreamt for so long.  To her, her dream was a ‘happy marriage’ , that  would eventually be in the state of the blooming pear tree –when she meets the man of her dreams and get married and be happy thereafter. “She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!”(p. 15) (Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston)

However, Janie’s dreams were shattered after the failure of her three consecutive marriages. Maybe her over enthusiasm and high expectations from her relationships made her cravings incomplete. She lived in a total euphoria about her version of a man. He symbolized fervor and sensuality…an equalitarian and above all a happy man. However, her marriage entailed her with the grim realities of life, husband and marriage. Unaware of the antidotes and composites of marriage, she every time leaped into it with her heart full of imagination for eternal happiness. The harsh reality was hard for her to bear. To her the first marriage was compliance, the second was attraction and the last one was also ‘love’ which she could not retain. Every relationship failed to bloom like the pear tree and ended before its time.

Gender Roles: The novel proposes several definitions of gender roles- an old man with a translucent objective in life, intimidated with the daily chores of life. To him wife was a superior form of labor, a worker who could help him with his work in return for food and a shelter; a young man with aspirations in his life..he wants to achieve wealth and prosperity… Love to him was domination by the superior on the inferior, and women were articulate objects that need to be kept in home. He wanted Janie to be like other housewives of the period who were inanimate objects shut behind the doors of the household. There was Tea Cake, who could understand Janie and respect her feelings as an individual. He treated her with awe and respect. The novel also speaks about the local men who loitered around Janie, yet were chauvinistic and criticized Janie on all aspects. These characters influenced Janie..she became cautious, virile and pessimistic. She came to understand that all men are not heroes, and different from her imagination. They were complex and complicated individuals and love to them was a secondary or last option. Janie learnt to be free, a master of her own wishes and a careful observer in choosing her next relations, She became particular, insecure and sometimes over protective about her relationships.

Their Eyes Were Watching God proclaims the discrimination of women in the era and has the ability to express the contemporary gender and sexual politics. Hurston was a spokeswoman for African-American women and a political activist, who spoke vehemently against gender discrimination, exploitation of the feminine gender and advocated women should be in par with men. According to Aaron Devour, in his book- “Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender” she states,  “Sex is seen as wholly determining gender and largely determining gender role. … It is presumed that there are normally two, and only two, sexes. . . . Sex is believed to so strongly determine gender that these two classifications are commonly conflated to the extent the terms are used interchangeable…gender is a social product produced . . . in dynamic interactions and given meaning through the cognitive framework of the dominant gender schema.”(p.46) Thus gender categorization is essentially a product and manifestation of the society ruled by male domination. However Alexis de Tocqueville discusses the equality of the sexes in his book, Democracy In America, “In America all books, novels not excepted, suppose women to be chaste, and no one thinks of relating affairs of gallantry. No doubt this great regularity of American morals originates partly in the country, in the race of the people, and in their religion: but all these causes, which operate elsewhere, do not suffice to account for it; recourse must be had to some special reason. This reason appears to me to be the principle of equality and the institutions derived from it. Equality of conditions does not of itself engender regularity of morals, but it unquestionably facilitates and increases it.”  Gender equality though advocated was in not in vogue at the era of the author Hurston where women were treated with contempt and neglect. (Book 3, p.12)

Identity/ Culture: Zora Neale Hurston, an active proponent of Harlem Resistance, in her book- Their Eyes Were Watching God, speaks about development of an African American woman living in the 1920s and 1930s as she struggles hard to search the roots of her identity and existence. Hurston is however criticized for not clearly speaking about racial discrimination. She narrates white and black relations, their differences and on the inflicted African-American community. The protagonist, Janie spent his childhood among the whites. Her grandmother worked in the house of a white and made Janie wear the clothes of the children of white masters. Then there are instances when Jody Starks, tired of white domination, proceeds towards Eatonville and meets Janie on the way. They settle their lives in the ‘all black’ town so that they do not have to bear discrimination from the white. Here they would create a world of their own and save themselves from white skepticism. Jody believed and imitated white culture and customs. To him superiority meant the adaptation of the lifestyle of the white people. He looks down on the townsfolk as “common” and even as his inferiors. One of the men comments, “You kin feel a switch in his hand when he’s talking to yuh.” The disparity is also reflected in the comments of Mrs Turner on Jane and Tea Cake; when they are called “black folks”. Wachtel reveals his ideas about the role that ‘racism’ plays in American society. His observations highlighted the inexplicable and endless list of special burdens placed on African-Americans which proved as a major hindrance for their social and economic progress. He says, “those who benefit from differential power, wealth, and opportunity have a stake in finding a way to justify that differential.” Critically examining the life of the author, Zora Neale Hurston, she was a feminist born in a family of eight children. She was the fifth child and had high ambitions. She was a private person and epitomized love. A propagator in black movement, she was critical of the racism and had radicalized views. Her family life was full of speculation shadowed by many marriages.

Reference

Collie, (2009). Review: “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston (II of III). Last Retrieved on October  21, 2009 from http://www.stormtiger.com/collie/bestiary/2009/01/review-their-eyes-were-watching-god-by-zora-neale-hurston-ii-of-iii/

Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, (1937), Unsigned publisher’s foreword, first edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Last Retrieved on October 21, 2009 from http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam854/summer/hurston.html

Grade Saver, (1999), Biography of Zora Neale Hurston. Last Retrieved on October 21, 2009 from http://www.gradesaver.com/author/zora-neale-hurston/

Alice Walker,(1975), “There is no book more important to me than this one.” Last Retrieved on October 21, 2009 from http://www.zoranealehurston.com/books/their_eyes_were_watching_god.html