The Liberation of Souls Through the Quest of Dreams: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
             After the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, the ex-slaves could not find enough good work to earn a living. Jim Crow laws were installed to push blacks further away from reaching their dreams. These laws were enforced after the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that blacks and whites could have everything "separate but equal." This included schools, transportation, drinking fountains, bathrooms and more. By 1914 all towns were split down the middle with the blacks on one side and whites on the other (Hoobler 51). The Homestead Act was established in 1862 to help encourage the growth of the family farm and migration to the west by giving land away in exchange for the land being developed. Many bought their own farms or went North and learned to linotype or held other professions such as shoemaking (Hoobler 51). With the movement of blacks to the North came the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, a black movement in New York in which blacks began to more freely express themselves and their ideas (Rood 38). In illustrating gender roles and the class structure of a black society, author Zora Neale Hurston portrays the changing black society in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God through characters that follow their dreams, which helps them take possession of their own lives.
             The role of women in black society is a major theme of this novel. Many women help demonstrate Hurston's ideas. Hurston uses Janie's grandmother, Nanny, to show one extreme of women in black society, the women who follow in the footsteps of their ancestors. Nanny is stuck in the past. She still believes in all the things that used to be, and wants to keep things the way they were, but also desires a better life for her granddaughter than she had. Nanny grew up on a plantation and was enslaved for most of her life. She was raped by her master as a young ...