Their eyes were watching god
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 Ne
The next class consists of rich blacks. The role of women in black society is a major theme of this novel. She begins to let herself live, with no boundaries holding her back. Even with these laws in place, blacks are able to be happy with what they have. Through Janie, Hurston gives an example of a woman in society who follows her dreams and takes control of her soul. Many women help demonstrate Hurston's ideas. When Janie comes to tell her grandmother that she still doesn't love Logan after three months of marriage, Nanny says, "you come heah wid yo' mouf full uh foolishness on uh busy day. One morning while he holds her she watches him as he "drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. In another instance, Tea Cake makes sure that Janie knows that she is the only woman for him, saying, "Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah'm lyin'. After realizing that she doesn't want to spend her life as a slave, she runs away from Logan to be with a man she had met only days before this realization. In the story Hurston is showing how men should cease to be. Blacks wanted to earn a respectable reputation, but were sometimes so restrictive that they kept themselves from achieving this goal. The women in this novel show the need for the black society to move away from oppression and begin to follow its dreams.
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Acceptance Essays
