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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie never wanted to marry Logan but gave in to her grandmother’s wishes to secure Janie’s future. From the beginning, Janie worried that she would not love Logan and she even brought her concerns...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston was strongly influenced by African American oral narrative traditions and contemporary vernacular speech. She incorporates elements from both of them into the structure and the...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The collective label of “porchsitters” is applied to people who sit and talk; it is largely a synonym for “gossips.” Many of the people frequently hang out on the porch of Joe Starks’ store, while...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Tea Cake, Janie's third husband, could arguably be labeled as the "staunchest feminist in the novel" because he makes space for Janie to be her whole, true self. Tea Cake's positioning as a...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
One of the devices that Zora Neale Hurston uses in this passage is personification, which means endowing a nonhuman being or a thing with human attributes. In this case, the attribute is speech or...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Throughout the novel, Zora Neale Hurston often presents Janie in a situation where speaking out would not help her gain what she desires or could be dangerous. At other times, she is outspoken....
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
To consider Nanny and Tea Cake as feminists is to consider how they believe in or work toward the empowerment of women. For Nanny, this comes through her work in empowering herself and Janie. Nanny...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Each of Janie's three relationships helps her to grow into the self-actualized woman whom we meet as she walks back into the town of Eatonville in Chapter 1 and endures the questions and gossip...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s interiority is portrayed as a strength and is reflective of the way she processes traumatic life crises. The story is written from Janie’s subjective point...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The simplest definition of a feminist is “a person who supports the belief that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men.” In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Much of the narration in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God borders on poetry. As such, it doesn't always lend itself to a simple summary. The passage that you quote seems to...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel written by Zora Neale Hurston. It was first published in 1937 and follows the life of Janie Crawford, who is African American. In the second part of the...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie's journey is one of both self-actualization and personal and spiritual fulfillment. I'm not so sure her journey is one of increasing immersion in black culture as it is one of broadening...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Each of Janie's three relationships helps her to grow into the self-actualized woman whom we meet as she walks back into the town of Eatonville in Chapter 1 and endures the questions and gossip...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huston's use of dialect is important in helping us to understand and these characters and the novel as a whole. Because so much of the novel is concerned with Janie "finding her voice," it is...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel that is rich in figurative language. Hurston employed symbolism, metaphor, free-indirect discourse, anthropomorphism, and other devices to depict Janie's...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
It would be hard not to associate Janie's dream with the pear tree episode: She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The opening lines of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston are written as a metaphor for the novel, or at least for the protagonist, Janie. Ships at a distance have every man's wish...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
One interpretation of Janie Crawford is that her growth as a character is closely related to her ability as a master storyteller. With Killicks, she has no voice; with Joe Starks, her voice is very...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
This tragic point in the story of Their Eyes were Watching God represents a turning point in Janie that encapsulates the loss of her innocence. The "two different selves" that her internal dialogue...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The concept of horizons threads throughout this novel. People look off in the distance to where the sky meets the earth to see a literal horizon. When people think of their own lives, they also see...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford's personal growth is tracked through each of her three relationships. While Logan might wish to see her as a mule, or basically...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is full of examples of figurative language. I will quote a few from Chapters 2 and 3 and explain how they impact the meaning of Hurston's novel....
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
There are numerous literary devices used throughout Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. In chapter 5, Janie marries her second husband, Joe Starks, but learns that this relationship...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
I would want to argue that there are various moments of this novel when Janie in particular sees her life for what it is and also sees her various husbands for who they are. Blindness or lack of...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The first two paragraphs of Zora Neale Hurson's Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrate distinct tones and imagery when compared to the last paragraph in the novel. In between, an entire story...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
One of the main changes that Janie, the protagonist, undergoes late in the novel is that she becomes a widow. She causes this change herself by shooting her husband, Tea Cake. The events leading up...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie, the protagonist in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, struggles to come to terms with the reality of her own need for independence. She is initially guided by her family’s decisions about her...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In chapter 5, page 47, just after the Starks runaway to the black township, the author states that "there was something about Joe Starks that cowed the town" He is neither more physically...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The pear tree in the garden is an important symbol throughout this novel. Janie Crawford has her first significant sexual, or adult, experience underneath it—she allows Johnny Taylor to kiss her,...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In chapter 2 of Their Eyes were Watching God Janie tells Pheoby about her past, conveniently filling in the reader. Janie tells about her first romantic experience. Her romantic experiences become...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston creates the character of Janie who develops goes through intimate personal relationships with three very different husbands until staying with...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie is a resilient person who continues to seek a loving relationship even after enduring misery with both Logan and Joe. She understands love as a force, like the ocean’s waves, that will...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
"Tea Cake" is the nickname of Vergible Woods, a vagabond who becomes the third husband of Janie Starks in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. His nickname is an inversion of his real...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Matt Bonner is constantly teased about the fact that he doesn't feed his mule and often neglects it and overworks it. The people from the store would tell him that the mule is "bad off," and many...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Toward the end of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is on trial for shooting and killing Tea Cake. Tea Cake suffered from an unnamed medical condition, which worsened shortly before...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
This is an interesting question, given the way in which Zora Neale Hurston organizes Their Eyes Were Watching God. The book itself begins where it ends; the story of Janie's growth and discovery is...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
When Janie first meets Tea Cake, she "[finds] herself glowing inside" because he asks her to play checkers with him. Tea Cake is a stark contrast to Joe Starks, who never let her play...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Absalom, Absalom! focuses on the contradictions of family through the lens of race and class. The Sutpen family has European and African members, but Thomas Sutpen vehemently rejects the idea of...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God recounts the story of Janie and her life's journey with three different men. The first, Logan, is the man she married because her grandmother was afraid. She was...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Chapter 5, there is a passage in which Janie is told by Jody to "mind the store." Here we can see several aspects of African American culture in the 1920s: the mercantile, the...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In the first few decades of her life, Janie is controlled by forces beyond herself, most notably her grandmother and Logan Killicks. Yet when Joe Starks comes along, she makes the choice to leave...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The conflict centers on the varying opinions of what--if anything--should be done about Matt Bonner's mule. The mule is the subject that allows the town to do a great deal of teasing of Matt Bonner...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston describes a social hierarchy where the white male reigns and the black female exists metaphorically as the lowly mule. Victimized at the bottom...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
With Tea Cake Janie recaptures the vitality of her youth and a mature freedom; with Joe she had lost her own identity and grown hollow. When Janie first meets Joe Starks, he is taken with her,...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie grows up under the care of her grandmother because her mother ran off and left baby Janie behind. After returning to Eatonville, Janie begins to open up about her history to her friend,...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The novel makes references to important historical institutions and events. In Chapter 2, for example, it makes reference to slavery as Nanny tells Janie that as she was born into slavery she had...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
The rich symbolism that is given to the figure of the mule in this excellent novel clearly concerns both the position of black women in this world but also provides a comment on the character of...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Chapter XVIII of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Theie Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, her husband Teacake, and various other poor black people are huddled in a cabin, listening to the fury of a...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
In her piece "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston writes, BUT I AM NOT tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind...
