Their Eyes Were Watching God Analysis

In the first marriage Janie was a 16-year-old girl who was forced into marriage with a man in his 50’s. She lives with Logan on his potato farm, where Logan is very set in his ways and does not care what Janie has to say or think. Being that Janie is only 16years old she allows her outer personality to submit to whatever Logan wants even though her inner self, her true self is miserable. She believed that because they were married that just being married would bring love. So she continues to submit to Logan’s

Janie’s grandmother, whom Janie referred to as Nanny, played a large role in shaping Janie’s way of thinking during Janie’s

Nanny did not give a clear answer except for giving it time to evolve between them. Janie tried to argue that Logan was not meant to be loved but Nanny disagreed, I think because she wanted Janie to have a name and a good life when she was gone which Logan could provided her with. Janie did not seem to like this answer so she wondered, “Did marriage compel love like the sun the day?” (Hurston 21). This simile seemed to make Janie wonder if marriage meant two people were forced to love one another just because of the title of Mr. and Mrs. This question from Janie made me see a theme of confusion in this chapter; Janie keeps coming back to asking what marriage is and what love feels like. This made me think she has never been in love before causing her to find it unclear. I think Janie was nervous that she would not love Logan, which makes sense since she was told to marry him, and did not want to never get that chance to feel true love for someone she picked. The first chapter of the novel tells us of a man named Tea Cake whom Janie ran away with. When I reflected on this I knew Janie must have either been cheating on or divorced Logan Killicks. Could this have been because she wanted to truly love someone? I think Janie did this to please herself with true love and not feel forced to love someone just because they are

Tea Cake loved Janie so much that he would rather himself get hurt than her, which is something Janie had never experienced: true love. Without Tea Cake’s role in Janie’s life she would have never experienced true love and actual happiness. Tea Cake is a mysterious man from the

Janie learns to value and accept herself throughout the many relationships in which she is involved. Through each relationship where she is controlled, Janie’s reaction shows the freedom and independence that she gains. Janie’s grandmother arranges Janie’s first marriage to Logan Killicks and assures Janie that “yes, she would love Logan after they were married” (21). In her marriage to Logan Killicks, Janie discovers that marriage, in fact, does “not make love” (25). Janie finds independence and freedom by realizing that she does not love Logan even though she is married to him; she finds independence and freedom by realizing that her grandmother is wrong, and that she does not have to stay in a marriage where she is unhappy only because her grandmother has forced her to marry. Janie finds independence and freedom by deciding to leave her husband because marriage is not about “protection” like her grandmother believes, but about being valued and loved for who she is (15). In her marriage to Jody Starks, Janie realizes that she should be treated as an equal, not as inferior. Janie is angry that he is “mad with her for making him look small when he did it to her all the time” (81). She wanted Jody to “act like somebody towards her” (81). Rather than accepting Jody’s treatment towards her, she demands that she be treated respectfully. She finds the confidence to stand up against Jody’s disrespectful treatment that is directed at her because she is a woman. Janie finds freedom in her marriage to Jody because she allows herself to be seen as valuable and important. She does not allow her husband’s treatment to degrade her self worth or rob her of her freedom to be an independent woman. Janie’s first two marriages help determine the attributes she discovered were essential for her happiness in a partnership. Because she

Throughout the majority of the book, Janie was explaining to her best friend, Pheoby, what had happened from her youth until that day, when she returned to Eastonville without her third husband, Tea Cake. Janie is attracted to each of her three husbands in different ways. Her first husband, Logan Killicks, was whom her grandmother arranged her to marry because she wanted Janie to be financially supported and respected rather than truly loved. Janie then leaves Logan because after a year of being pampered, he starts asking her to help on the farm and she feels she is being disrespected and used. She learns from this, that you should love the person you marry, not marry them because they have the money to support you.

In Janie’s marriage to Logan, she is unhappy. Nanny’s vision of Janie’s life was to be secure and safe, which was something Logan could give to Janie. However, Janie wants a relationship with love, passion, and happiness, which was something Logan did not give to her. After Janie’s second and abusive marriage, she finds a new marriage with a man named Tea Cake. In Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake, they are truly in love.

At the beginning of their marriage they have a few ups and downs but they then promise to share everything with each other. In chapter fourteen, because of Tea Cake, Janie decides to start working in the fields on her own free will. This was something neither Logan nor Jody were able to get her to do, but now because of how in love with Tea Cake she is, she works in the fields so she can spend more time with him. She actually enjoys this work and tells him that “Ah laks it. It’s mo’ nicer than settin’ round dese quarters all day” (pg. 133). Her character has changed significantly at this point since the beginning of the novel since, while hanging out with the towns people, she “could tell big stories herself” which she would never have imagined doing while with

Their marriage quickly goes downhill and Janie ends up leaving him for another man named Joe Starks, who she is married to for 20 years before Joe dies. Soon after this she encounters another man know as Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods and marries him only to have their marriage end by Janie being

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is about a young woman that is lost in her own world. She longs to be a part of something and to have “a great journey to the horizons in search of people” (85). Janie Crawford’s journey to the horizon is told as a story to her best friend Phoebe. She experiences three marriages and three communities that “represent increasingly wide circles of experience and opportunities for expression of personal choice” (Crabtree). Their Eyes Were Watching God is an important fiction piece that explores relations throughout black communities and families. It also examines different issues such as, gender and class and these issues bring forth the theme of voice. In Janie’s attempt to find herself, she

Janie's grandmother was one of the most important influences in her life, raising her since from an infant and passing on her dreams to Janie. Janie's mother ran away from home soon after Janie was born. With her father also gone, the task of raising Janie fell to her grandmother, Nanny. Nanny tells Janie "Fact uh de matter, Ah loves yuh a whole heap more'n Ah do yo' mama, de one Ah did birth" (Hurston 31). Nanny's dream is for Janie to attain a position of security in society, "high ground" as she puts it (32). As the person who raised her, Nanny feels that it is both her right and obligation to impose her dreams and her ideas of what is important in life on Janie. The strong relationship between mother and child is important in the African-American community, and the conflict between Janie's idyllic view of marriage and Nanny's wish for her to marry for stability and position is a good illustration of just how deep the respect and trust runs. Janie has a very romantic notion of what marriage should be. "She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace . . . so this was a marriage," is how the narrator describes it (24). Nanny's idea of a good marriage is someone who has some standing in the community, someone who will get Janie to that higher ground. Nanny wants Janie to marry Logan Killicks, but according to her "he look like some ole

Janie’s marriage to Logan was not anything special. In the beginning Logan was acted like a good husband and would do all the work on his land, and Janie would stay in the home, cooking and cleaning. Eventually, after a couple of months of being married, this so-called honeymoon stage was over. Logan now acted as if he owned Janie and she was his slave, commanding her to do whatever he wanted, not listening to what she wanted. Janie felt constraint; she felt like she was losing her freedom to Logan, she felt like she was not Janie anymore, she was now Mrs. Logan Killicks and she was now obligated to do whatever he commanded of her. Janie was tired of being in an unhappy marriage; she did not love Logan like Nanny said she eventually would: “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman”, and she did not like the way she was being treated. One day while she was outside she saw a man walk by, she thought he was very attractive so she drew attention to herself and the man came over. After having a conversation

At first, Janie thought that loving someone meant you were married to them. Janie believed that she would love Logan because they were married as that was what Nanny had told her. In the few days before she would be with Killicks, Janie thought “Yes, she would love Logan after they were married… Husbands and wives always loved each other” (Hurston 21). Since Nanny had always told her that a marriage would make her happy, that’s what Janie thought. She had no feelings towards Logan, yet she held on to the hope that they appear once they were husband and wife.

Nanny tried to live the life she initially craved through Janie, conversely, this caused Janie to hate her. Nanny and her daughter were both raped by their masters, so she is determined to ensure that does not happen to her granddaughter as well. When Nanny talks to Janie about her birth, she says “Ah said thank God, Ah got another chance” (Hurston 16). She thanks God as though Janie is simply her gift to have an another chance for raising a daughter. The view of Janie as a second chance causes her to be controlling. She wishes for everything to be right for Janie and does not want to mess up again, comparable to when she unable to prevent her daughter from being raped by her master. When Nanny finds Janie kissing a boy in the yard, she demands that Janie is now a woman and must get married. Nanny forces her to marry Logan Killicks, although she does not love him. Nanny insists “’Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it’s protection” (15). This demonstrates Nanny’s protective instincts towards Janie as well as her controlling nature. Although Janie clearly does not love Logan, Nanny forces her to marry him, simply because it is what she [Nanny] wants. Marriage should be something desirable for both people, however in Janie’s case, it is simply due to Nanny’s dominance over Janie. In addition, Nanny also states that she wished to preach her

The film Their Eyes Were Watching God, based off of the novel by author Zora Neale Hurston, is a story of a young woman named Janie who spends the film narrating her life story to a friend. Janie’s story is one of self-exploration, empowerment, and the ability to express her freedoms both as a maturing woman and African American, throughout her life experiences. As she navigates through sexism and racism to find herself it becomes more evident that it will be more difficult than she initially thought to reach a point of happiness.