Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie Crawford
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston draws a sharp portrait of a proud, independent black woman looking for her own identity and resolving not to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or romantic dreams. Like most lives of black women of the early 20th century (or any time for that matter), Janie Crawford's life, told here in her own sure voice, is not without its frustrations, terrors, and tragedies &mdash in fact, it is full of them. But the power of her story comes from her life-affirming attitude: Through all the changes she goes through &mdash once divorced, twice widowed (once by her own gun-wielding hand)-she kept a death-grip commitment to live on her own terms, ...
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she and her daughter endured. She pushes Janie into marriage with an older man named Logan Killicks, a farmer with some property. Her life with Killicks is full of boredom and hard labor, so she runs off with Joe Starks, a handsome and well-off storekeeper who moves her to the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida. Even with the prestige and security this new marriage brings, she is bored and unfulfilled by her stunted life with Starks. When Starks dies, Janie begins to live with Tea Cake Woods, a man who cannot provide her with the stability that her Nanny taught her to value, but who finally gives her the passion and satisfaction she'd been looking for all along. Even when further tragedy greets her, she maintains a staunchly positive view of the future.
Hurston, an anthropologist and folklorist, fills this novel with shotgun rhythms and the poetic language of her native south. Language in this novel is crucial; it is through the beautiful self- made idiosyncrasies of southern ...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie Crawford. (2008, December 16). Retrieved June 22, 2025, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Their-Eyes-Were-Watching-God-Janie/94725
"Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie Crawford." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 16 Dec. 2008. Web. 22 Jun. 2025. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Their-Eyes-Were-Watching-God-Janie/94725>
"Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie Crawford." Essayworld.com. December 16, 2008. Accessed June 22, 2025. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Their-Eyes-Were-Watching-God-Janie/94725.
"Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie Crawford." Essayworld.com. December 16, 2008. Accessed June 22, 2025. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Their-Eyes-Were-Watching-God-Janie/94725.
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