The Eyes Were Watching God Literary Analysis

Janie's sense of herself changes as she gets older by her maturing and her experiences in her life. She became a strong woman through her experiences and relationships. Janie has been in many relationships and they all symbolize her journey towards self-discovery. Janie's grandmother taught Janie to not prioritize her dreams or desires and she is constantly controlling Janie. Janie's grandmother arranges for Janie to get married to Logan Killicks which shows Janie's initial acceptance of societal expectations instead of her pursuing her happiness.

The horizon is also used to show the things in Janie’s life that are hard to reach, untouchable and unattainable ‘… but he spoke for a far horizon’ (29). For instance, in the book Janie’s idea of a perfect relationship and her yearning for a perfect marriage is unattainable, and that is why she gets married three times to get this fulfilment. The horizon represents her wishes as Hurston quotes in Page 1 thus: ‘Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board…For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight … until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation…”

As a young girl, the circumstances Janie is in has restricted her from reaching her dreams. Janie is trying to discover who she is as well as making her own decisions by finding who she wanted to be with, but Nanny disagrees, and takes “the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon” away from her. This left no other option than to have an arranged marriage with Logan. When Janie is in this relationship, she starts to lose sight of the horizon, or her dream, because she feels trapped and alone, and blames this on how she

Everyone that an individual encounters throughout his or her life time. In the novel, Janie has many relationships with men, but also with Nanny. Janies relationship with Nanny shaped who she was at the start of the novel. Nanny wanted nothing but the best for Janie and for her to be very successful. The relationship between Janie and Nanny was a healthy one that benefitted, and help form Janie grow into the person that she was.

Janie realized that it was time for a change and to take a chance in attempt to attain love by her own means. Nanny would've disapproved of the big talk behind a black man like Jody Starks; however, he would create an even more financially stable setting for Janie to live in than in the marriage she set up Janie with the farmer, Logan Killicks.

While the heart-shaped world in the drawing represents Janie’s world with both goodness and conflict in the form of light and darkness, it is surrounded by other important features such as religion and personal values that act as major influences to how her world works. Therefore, our drawing is a complete representation of not only Janie Mae Crawford’s views on the world from her perspective, but also her life itself as seen throughout the

In Zora Neale Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching, she uses many symbols to express to the reader that a woman, specifically Janie, does not need a man to feel fulfilled. The more effective of the symbols used is death which symbolizes new beginnings. Even though she is expected to be gloomy and depressed , the death of her husband evokes the opposite reaction in Janie. Awhile after Tea Cakes death, Janie “grabs the horizon and wraps it around her like a cloak.” In this book the horizon symbolizes fulfillment.

As a child, raised by Nanny, Janie was guided by the unreal allusion of what life is made up of.

We see a lot of symbolism through the book, such as the gun used at the end of the book, and the pear tree. Towards the end of the chapter we see janie having to kill her only true love with a gun, it was a tough decision because in her eyes tea cake has shown her what true love really feels like. The gun symbolized how sometimes the tough decisions are the necessary ones. In the last chapter page 185 it states “It was the meanest moment of eternity. A minute before she was a scared human being fighting for its life. Now she was sacrificing self with Tea Cake’s head in her lap. She had wanted him to live so much and he was dead. No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep. Janie held his head tightly to her breast and wept and thanked him wordlessly for giving her the chance for loving service”. This is talking about how she had to kill her own true love because her own

Janie is not afraid to defy the expectations that her grandmother has for her life, because she realizes that her grandmother's antiquated views of women as weaklings in need of male protection even at the expense of a loving relationship, constitute limitations to her personal potential. "She hated her grandmother . . . .Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon " (Their Eyes 85-86).

In Laura Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the horizon represents change and the possibility of accomplishing an individual’s hopes and dreams. According to Hurston “Women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (Hurston 17). For most of her life Jaine searches for her own horizon, and her relationships with Jody, Nanny, and Tea Cake help her find what she was looking for.

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston reinforces the idea of understanding oneself by the use of repeating patterns such as the blossom and the bee, and the horizon throughout the novel. The use of these two motifs represents the ideal relationship, an effortless union of individuals and the possibility of change or dreams and wishes. Janie Crawford in the beginning of the novel is a young lady who is naïve to love and will do anything that is asked of her. She is essentially forced into a marriage that her Nanny set up for her, for her own protection. Janie denies at first but then gives in, believing she will fall

Hurston’s main way of inspiring a sense of feminism in her novel, is through the relationships of Janie including her Nanny, Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake. She addresses Janie’s role differently in each of these relationships using motifs and stereotypes. Janie begins her journey of self-discovery following the dreams of her Nanny to becoming a strong, independent woman who makes her own decisions. All of the roles that Janie obtains stem from the distinct

Firstly, Janie views the horizon as an opportunity for something great to happen in her life. For example, in the beginning paragraph in the novel, it illustrates how harboring ships give people hope for the ships to be carrying cargo that they need the most: “[s]hips at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never

Janie is a black woman who asserts herself beyond expectation.  She has a persistence that characterizes her search for the love that she dreamed of since she was a girl.  Janie understands the societal status that her life has handed her, yet she is determined to overcome this, and she is resentful toward anyone or anything that interferes with her quest for happiness. "So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don't tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see, "(Page 14)  laments Janie's grandmother as she tried to justify the marriage that she has arranged for her granddaughter with Logan Killicks. This paragraph establishes the existence of the inferior status of women in Janie's society, a status which Janie must somehow overcome in order to emerge a heroine in the end of the novel.