Their Eyes Were Watching God

The pear tree symbolizes Janie’s change and burgeoning sexuality. A symbol is something that stands for a bigger idea than what it literally means. In the beginning of the book, Janie is...

Three major changes that Janie goes through in Their Eyes Were Watching God are that (1) she fits in with a community, (2) learns to do previously gender-restricted activities, and (3) acts with...

Zora Neal Hurston opens here novel Their Eyes Were Watching God with an incredibly lyrical metaphor: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For...

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie, decides to abandon her first husband, Logan Killicks, and run off with Joe (Jody) Starks. Her elopement with...

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is such a rich novel that there is no one main theme or message. Rather, the book is ripe with multiple life lessons. However, one of the central...

Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937 and is considered one of the most important works of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement in post-World War I African...

One of the best ways to come up with a convincing thesis statement for an essay based on a book is to consider the number of themes that there are in the book and to pick one of those and to...

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie marries three times, and her relationship with each husband contributes to her character development toward becoming an independent, confident woman. Logan...

In Chapter 2 of Their Eyes Were Watching God, thirteen-year-old Janie is seen by her grandmother as she kisses the tall and lean Johnny Taylor over the gate. Alarmed that Janie is becoming like the...

Joe Starks symbolizes for Janie the horizon that Zora Neale Hurston references throughout the novel. The horizon, the farthest point one can see, is a place that holds Janie's hopes and dreams. In...

The townspeople were very critical of her choice to see Teacake. From an external point of view, the marriage of Janie and Joe Starks has everything required for success: wealth, respect, a...

The end of chapter thirteen features a bit of a test of Janie and Tea Cake's relationship. He has taken her money that she had saved carefully and gone and gambled with it. Janie has been...

Tea Cake's real name is Vergible Woods. He meets the heroine Janie after she has had two less than fulfilling marriages. Tea Cake is twenty-five years old and is not wealthy, but he has an inner...

Zora Neale Hurston portrays Janie as a philosophical, imaginative person through the use of vivid imagery, drawing on multiple senses. Janie feels deep connections to the natural world and, through...

The "something falling off the shelf" is Janie's illusion/perception of Joe Starks. Up until this point, Janie has held on to her hopeful beliefs that Jody wanted to be a "big...

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God begins and ends with the horizon. The horizon is the line between the sky and the earth, or sea, and is the maximum distance that an observer can...

The title of the novel becomes important in Chapters 18 and 19 just before the full fury of the hurricane and again after it is over. However, the set-up for these passages occurs in Chapter 16:...

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses the image of the horizon to symbolically represent Janie’s aspirations for equality within marriage. Early in the novel, Hurston employs the...

At the start of chapter 2, Janie is a young woman living with her grandmother, Nanny. As she tells her life story in retrospect, Janie tells Pheoby that she sees "her life like a great tree in leaf...

Janie's hair is a complex symbol in Their Eyes Were Watching God. It takes on its greatest significance when she is living in Eatonville as Joe Stark's wife. Joe is the mayor of Eatonville, and...

As my colleague mentioned above, the allusion is a biblical one. In 2 Samuel, Chapter 6, King David is so happy about bringing the ark of God to the city of David that he can't help dancing for...

In the final line of Chapter 11, Tea Cake tells Janie how much he wants to be with her and expresses his depth of emotion with the words, "You got de keys to de kingdom." This last sentence is a...

The town of Eatonville could be seen as a kind of heaven in multiple ways. As you suggest, the all black town is a kind of haven for African Americans where they can live and thrive is a place...

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches. Thus begins Chapter 2 of Zora Neale Hurston's...

By refering to the beginning of the novel, I am assuming that you mean the start of the story rather than the beginning of Janie's life, which of course is part of the middle section of the story...

Each of Janie's three husbands has a different personality and social class/profession, and each man helps Janie to develop a sense of her own identity and what she truly wants from her life and...

The most important passage in this entire novel that is relevant to language and the way in which men and women communicate, actually occurs in the first two paragraphs of the novel. This expresses...

Nanny is Janie's grandmother, raising her after her mother, Leafy, leaves. Nanny's influence is significant early in the novel, as Nanny is seeking to protect Janie from the types of oppression...

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...

Chapter 16: 1) Mrs. Turner is very clearly prejudiced. How does Janie react to her? Janie humors Mrs. Turner and indulges the older woman's behavior. Janie doesn't try to change Mrs. Turner's views...

The two opening paragraphs of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God are as follows: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For...

The opening scene of Their Eyes Were Watching God provides the lens through which the narrative of the novel is viewed. The opening scene introduces us to Janie, an independent woman who has defied...

The sitters are quite simply the people of Eatonville sitting on the porch in the evening. Since most of them are laborers during the day, they have essentially been rendered "tongueless, earless,...

In Chapter 11, we see the true beginnings of a relationship between Tea Cake and Janie developing. However, after all of her years in Eatonville with Joe, Janie is suspicious of her own feelings...

An excellent simile is used in chapter 5 to describe the behavior of Joe Starks. Joe makes a lot of the townspeople uncomfortable because he is always putting on airs and acting like he is better...

Throughout the narrative of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is telling the story of her life to her old friend, Pheoby Watson. Janie's story is sad, then happy, then sad again, but as she tells...

The beginning and end of Their Eyes Were Watching God provide a frame for the novel. At the start, Janie returns to Eatonville, and her former neighbors gossip about her from their porches. She...

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is a protagonist who struggles with dependence on men as she grows into a more decisive and independent person. She is involved in three marriages,...

The tension between outward conformity and inward questioning is the very heart of Their Eyes Were Watching God, as Janie's character's iconic status comes from her journey of self-actualization....

Zora Neale Hurston uses dialect to help her characters appear to be real people with actual cultural backgrounds. A character's dialect is a large part of who they are as a person. It can show...

Another literary device that Hurston uses in the novel is free indirect discourse. This form of discourse involves both the narrator's speech and the characters' speech or thoughts. Free indirect...

A folklorist and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston' Their Eyes Were Watching God is both an account of black heritage and her main character's journey to female individuality. In Chapter 14, for...

Janie Crawford drives women crazy with envy and men crazy with lust. Chapter one shows Janie walking through Eatonville to get to her house, and the way the townspeople respond to her proves the...

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God depicts the journey towards maturity and independence of a young black woman in the South in the early twentieth century. Hurston does more,...

At the very end of Chapter 2 of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny speaks to her granddaughter Janie as follows: "Ah can't die easy thinkin' maybe de menfolks white or...

Nanny’s objectification of her granddaughter is evident through her decision about Janie’s marriage. As the older Janie reminisces about her childhood and adolescence, she acknowledges the strength...

The narrator tells us why Janie choose to run off with Jody. He represents "change and chance", a distinct contrast to her boring and predictable life with Logan. As a young girl, Janie dreamed of...

Janie's most noticeable characteristic is her hair; it's long, straight, and representative of her blended racial heritage. She's a beautiful woman who is admired and desired by men throughout the...

Hurston means that Teacake taught Janie to appreciate and respect the fact that she was a woman and the things that come along with that. Janie was oppressed when she was forced to be with Logan at...

The name of the town to which Jody and Janie moved is Eatonville, Florida. Joe Starks is an ambitious black man who has "been workin' for white folks all his life". He had always wanted to be "a...