The purpose of this research is to examine the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas and events in the book and to discuss the means by which they unfold, particularly in regard to Janie's marriage to Tea Cake.
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 struc tured 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 dis covery 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 black men to black women. Nanny also reveals that Janie was the product of a rape, implying that Janie's romantic dreams of love are just so much nonsense. Shocked and hurt by these revelations, Janie is manipulated into marriage with the farmer Logan Killicks. But as Williams explains, Logan "can't see any further than his plow, and Janie is stifled by his plodding nature" (Williams xii). Logan's betrayal of Janie comes in the form of mental cruelty, as he thr...