Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God follows the life and loves of Janie, who in the opening chapter of the book is in her early forties and has come back to her Eatonville, Florida, hometown for reasons obscure to the townsfolk. The narrative is structured mainly as a flashback, shaped around four segments of Janie's life, each of which is marked by her relationship with a significant Other: her childhood and adolescence under the care of her grandmother Nanny, her first marriage to an elderly farmer, Logan Killicks, her second elopement-marriage to Joe Starks, and her third and last marriage to Tea Cake Woods. Each stage of life and each relationship is marked by Janie's discovery of an unresolvable tension between social expectations and norms on one side and Janie's either unfelt or unexpressed emotional needs that results in some form of betrayal.

The first betrayal of Janie comes from Nanny, who after witnessing the adolescent, hitherto pampered and sheltered girl kiss a young man insists on her marrying "decent like" (Hurston 28). Nanny proceeds to explain the facts of life for "de nigger woman" (29), who perforce takes up burdens flung first from white to black men and then from bl

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o false pretense wid me," he earnestly answers, "Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom" (Hurston 165). Marriage to Tea Cake represents a dramatic change in life style for Janie. Far from improving on the life of material comfort she has had with Starks, Janie finds herself keeping house for a migrant farm worker whose luck is not always good. Having heard of another woman who had been seduced, swindled, and abandoned, she pins two hundred dollars to the inside of her clothing--escape money in case Tea Cake turns out to be a fraud. Indeed, when he swipes the money and disappears for several days--returning only after having spent the money on a spree--her fears seem confirmed. But he returns contrite, explaining that he "never had had his hand on so much money before in his life, so he made up his mind to see how it felt to be a millionaire" (Hurston 183). He successfully wins back that two hundred, plus a hundred more, although it is his hard luck to be attacked by losing gamblers, and Janie must nurse him back to health. Throughout this activity, however, the one constant is Tea Cake's fidelity: "Ah told yo' before dat you got de keys tuh de kingdom. You can depend on dat" (Hurst
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1472
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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