Their Eyes Were observing God

Outline

When Their Eyes Were Watching God first appeared in 1937, it was well-received by white critics as an intimate portrait of southern blacks, but African-American reviewers rejected the novel as pandering to white audiences and perpetuating stereotypes of blacks as happy-go-lucky and ignorant. Unfortunately, the novel and its author, Zora Neale Hurston, were quickly forgotten. But within the last twenty years it has received renewed attention from scholars who praise its unique contribution to African-American literature, and it has become one of the newest and most original works to consistently appear in college courses across the country and to be included in updated versions of the American literary canon. The book has been admired by African-Americanists for its celebration of black culture and dialect and by feminists for its depiction of a woman's progress towards self-awareness and fulfillment. But the novel continues to receive criticism for what some see as its lack of engagement with racial prejudice and its ambivalent treatment of relations between the sexes.

Introduction

People and animals share numerous characteristics. We sometimes contrast persons to animals by saying that “he is hard working like a mule” or that “she is clever like a fox”. If we address the idea of evolution people came from and are even now just another species of animals that reside on Earth. In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God we can find all through the innovative significant animals and the evaluation of feature to animals. The question is how significant is the concept of animals in the novel? The animals help us realize completely Janie's various relationships and positions she deals with.

Thesis Statement

We know that Janie is still very naive when she is forced to marry Logan, a man she does not love. When she moves on to live with her husband on their farm we can see that she is unhappy and that Logan does not treat her as he should. The concept of their relationship is best represented when Logan decides to get a second mule.

Body

What Logan says summarizes his feel towards Janie as he wants her to do more that she thinks she should. In his eyes she is another “mule” and that is not what she wants in life.

In Janie's relationship with Joe there is also an animal that symbolizes what is going on between them. The animal is Matt's old mule that everyone makes fun of. We know that the mule is not kept for work on the fields and is old and skinny. So the mule is meant more like a possession to both Matt and now to Joe Starks. That is the way Janie feels in her relationship with Joe. He forces her to keep her long beautiful hair wrapped up because he doesn't like the way other men look at her. She is not allowed to take part in conversation with other men and is almost always inside their house. Like the mule, she is trapped. After Jody buys the ...