Their Eyes Were Watching God Essays (2125 words) -

Their Eyes Were Watching God This paper will tell the reader about all aspects of the numerous problems that are presented in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. It will deal with all of the numerous problems that were experienced in the rough time that the book was written in. Also, it will deal with how these problems are still involved in today's society. While many of the problems will never go away, some have already, and some will go away in hopefully the near future. There were many problems and issues that Zora Neale Hurston brought up in this novel, and she did this mostly through the recollection of the main character, Janie Crawford. While this story deals mainly with Janie's life from age sixteen to approximately the age of forty, the novel also deals with the problems that society faced even before Janie's birth. The major problem issue that is involved before Janie's birth is the fact that the town schoolteacher raped her mother, Leafy Crawford. When this novel was set, approximately twenty years after the Civil War, rape was still an important issue in their society. While rape was probably more common back in those days, less was done about it, and it was basically just ?accepted.? (Baker 134) This is especially true if it is a white man with a black woman. If it would be a black man with a white woman, a lot more problems would arise. This is a type of double standard, because it is not just to allow a horrible action for a certain set of people and disallow it for another group of people based solely on the color of their skin. The schoolteacher, a white man, who raped Janie's mother, a black woman, created another type of problem that went far beyond the obvious. As a result of the rape by a white man, Janie had a coffee and cream complexion, and this was considered a skin tone of great beauty (www.novelguides.com). This became a problem with the other girls all through Janie's life, because of the issue of jealousy. Even though Janie thought herself as nothing better than any other black girls, all of the girls feel Janie was just that much better than everyone else. Everyone else, except Janie, created a superior image of the character Janie. Janie didn't even realize she wasn't white like her childhood friends until she was six years old and saw a picture of herself. The major problem created by Janie's light facade was the fact that all of her friends seemed out to get her. They seemed overly jealous of her, and no matter what she did, or how hard she worked for it, they feel she achieved what she did solely because of her beautiful looks. (Jones 36) Hurston does a good job at portraying this feeling in the following quote by the people of Eatonville on Janie:"It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful" (111). Another chief problem faced by the people of the time was the idea of trying to survive the low quality of work available at the time. People worked as migrant workers, very similar to those in Jon Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. People would work tedious jobs for very little pay. People had to survive. Blacks especially had to do whatever they could to survive. Since this wasn't long after the ending of slavery, the overall population of blacks in the United States still wasn't very educated. They had to do whatever they could do for money, whenever they could get it. This wasn't so obvious in Janie's family ways, and after reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, it is apparent that the times seemed to be getting a little better as the story progressed. Janie experiences life through many different views throughout the novel, and all seem to have slightly different problems. First, she experiences life as a rich, light skinned girl who was always the envy of every other girl in town. Later, she experiences life as the wife of a potato farmer, then as the wife of the mayor, and finally as the wife of a migrant worker. While many people feel envious of Janie's money and power that she possessed through her marriage with Logan Killicks the potato farmer, and Joe Starks the Mayor of Eatonville, people seemed to be more envious than ever when she found what she was always looking for, in true love, though it was with