Their Eyes Were Watching God: Comprehension and Analysis Blog

I think the role of women in Their Eyes Were Watching God is an interesting interpretation of women’s rights during that time period.  It would seem that the women are caught half way between two worlds.  On one hand, they are African-Americans who have just earned their right to freedom.  Then they are also women, who are in fact not entitled to all the same rights as men.  Janie, as a black woman, manages to escape actual slavery, but finds in the real world that black men have assumed the position of slave holders.  Logan Killicks tells Janie that: “You ain’t got no particular place.  It’s wherever Ah need yuh.  Git uh move on yuh, and dat quick” (Hurston 30).  He sees her as a slave.  I think it is interesting that in this particular scene, Logan is discussing going to purchase a new mule, yet he is talking to Janie like she is a mule that he can load up with his chores and she will go out and make his work easier. 

            Contrary to the wishes of her Nanny, husband, and even the society she lives in, Janie lives her life the way she wishes.  She embraces both her womanhood and blackness.  Her Nanny marries her off to Logan which is: “frustrating and futile for Janie, as her desire is to explore the world, to take risks, and to savor life’s possibilities- all qualities of and reserved for men in western cultures” (Lester 81).  It is an interesting action coming from Nanny who is indeed the patriarch and matriarch of her family.  She is land owner and the sole provider for the household, so she herself has taken on the more masculine role of the family.  Yet she slaps Janie for her insistence on wanting to travel and find love, Nanny will not allow Janie to have the same patriarchal lifestyle that she now leads.

            As Nicole mentioned in her post, the story is about Janie’s search for her identity.  Can we conclude from Janie’s current taste for freedom that her identity quest will take her towards a more manly identity?  Is it Janie’s embracing the rights of men even though she is a woman that makes her the heroine that women across the country love her for?  Or is it her integration of male characteristics into her womanhood that make her the heroine?

                                                                                                   Kara Buchan

The Forward to Their Eyes Were Watching God gives background information on the author, Zora Neale Hurston and the rebirth of this novel.  I think it is difficult to understand exactly what Mary Helen Washington, the author of the forward, is saying.  Since I have not yet read the entire novel, I cannot apply the analysis of Janie and Tea Cake with the story.  Although, I have made connections to previous works we have read.  Washington states this novel is about “a woman on a quest for her own identity and… her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into blackness” (Washington ix).  Like Joyce Carol Oates’s style of writing, this novel focuses on a search for identity.  In “Mark of Satan,” Flash is lost and unsure of his identity.  Washington tells the readers that Janie, too, is unsure of her identity.  Question: From the Foreward, are there any other aspects Washington leads the reader towards, that we have expierenced in previous literary works this semester?

In the Foreward, Washington awares the reader of some of Hurston’s main choices and implications.  Washington says that she loved this novel because of “its investment in black folk traditions” (Washington viii).  Clearly Hurston wanted to depict aspects of African-American life and use allegories of folklore.  Washington also implies that Hurston wanted to do this in a way that the women readers can relate directly to the characters: “women all across the country who found themselves so pwerfully represented in a literary text was often direct and personal” (Washington ix).  The readers like Janie because she’s a woman “who wasn’t pathetic, wasn’t a tragic mulatto, who defied everything that was expected of her, who went off with a man without bothering to divorce the one she left and wasn’t broken, crushed, and run down” (Rushing ix).  I think the readers look up to Janie for her strength and at the same time feel connected.