Their Eyes Were Watching God Literary Analysis

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Women too often experience suppression of identity within society—expected to keep house and to wait on the whims of men, they lose their sense of self in the duty of gender. If one were to factor in how women are perceived to act, and include race, position in history, & economic status in the description of a woman’s gender role it would be revealed that there is a hierarchy to a woman’s world, and African-American women skim the bottom of it. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she uses the character of Janie in an explicitly emotional way through depictions of male dominance, violence, and the explorations of love to break through this suppression of identity in intersectionality of Black womanhood. Hurston’s character,…show more content…
Nanny’s decision to do such a thing to protect Janie from the harm men bring, “as Nanny further explains her protective strategies for Janie, she reveals that she does not believe that racial and gender trauma are unavoidably passed on from mother to daughter, and that Janie can escape her mother's and grandmother's fate through acquiring money and avoiding love” (Bealer 315). Janie’s first marriage to Logan, though very brief and loveless, is important because the marriage sets into motion the rest of the events to follow her through the end of the novel when she does make decisions based on love, and “Nanny does accurately predict that marriage, rather than being a Utopian space immune from political hierarchies, is in fact susceptible to reinforcing the oppression of African American women” (Bealer 316). Janie experiences such oppression in great multitudes by trying to escape the hierarchies of marriage with another man,…show more content…
Although, Janie at the time, sees a man in Joe who will not force her to work in the fields like a mule as Logan does, and desires to be viewed as more than an asset to farm work and the threat of compulsive labor, along with Logan's overweight and aged body, make Joe's handsome appearance and a future of "reaping the benefits" of his ambition appealing” (Lee 316). Whatever sex appeal Janie has for Joe cannot overpower the sexist role he casts Janie into. He expects her to become the complying trophy-wife at all times and in every situation. Joe’s expectation of Janie’s womanly role casts the hierarchy between bodies and races through their time together. As their relationship progresses with their move to Eatonville and Joe’s new position of power, Janie begins to learn more about herself as a woman and her self-worth—but she also learns the role men try to
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