“Their Eyes Were Watching God” is a 1937 novel by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston. Essays on this work may involve character analysis (with a focus on particular traits like willpower), may explore gender differences during the described period, may focus on women empowerment but also on more common subjects like jealousy, love, divinity, maturation, etc. – all these make it both interesting and relevant for students even nowadays. Before writing your own essay on this novel, explore the samples of papers found here – besides original ideas and interesting perspectives, you could always learn something from a well-structured outline or a properly formulated introduction/ conclusion. Apart from this, the writing style also counts a lot (including towards your final grade).
In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is encouraged to develop her own personality throughout the book, and she is forced into constant movement down roads after being abandoned by her grandmother and her three husbands. This movement allows her the...
The entertainment of a Harlem cabaret hypnotizes Helga Crane, the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. She loses herself in the “sudden streaming rhythm” and delights in the sexually suggestive moves of the dancers. Helga is “blown out, ripped out, beaten out by the joyous, wild,...
Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while she was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, researching the country’s major voodoo gods and studying as an initiate under the tutelage of Haiti’s most well-known Voodoo hougans (priests) and mambos (priestesses). However, while many...
Throughout the history of black American culture, the pursuit of dreams has played a pivotal role in self-fulfillment and internal development. In many ways an individual’s reactions to the perceived and real obstacles barring the path to a dream define the very character of that...
As the old adage goes, it is not what one says, but how they say it that matters most. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the novel’s protagonist, Janie Crawford, is immersed in a journey to establish her voice and, consequently, shape...
Despite disparities in the poetic styles of Sterling Brown and Arna Bontemps, each author was equally effective in conveying the “new voice” of the black American during the Harlem Renaissance. The idea of a more suitable expression for African Americans repudiates the Renaissance’s fundamental ideology....
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neal Hurston uses language as a tool to show the progression of the story. Throughout the novel, Hurston uses a narrative style that is split between poetic literary prose and the vernacular of Southern blacks. This style emphasizes...
In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston leaves part of the title ambiguous and therefore open to interpretation. Throughout the novel, the characters mention or allude to God, or a “god.” The multiple meanings of the word “God” allow the word...
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses metonymy several times in order to express motifs which appear throughout the novel. For instance, one of the clearest examples of metonymy, the porch, appears as a whole or general entity, which Hurston uses to...
When Nanny tells her young, naïve granddaughter Janie Crawford, “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see,” (14) she is merely setting the stage for a number of connections between humans and animals that communicate Hurston’s ideas about...
Their Eyes Were Watching God The Undying Power of Will The traditional human existence encounters immense and miniscule transformations in predominant viewpoints directly affecting subsequent proceedings as individuals embark upon an expedition of lucid self-expression to explore personal identity. Literary pieces produced during times of...
Jealousy in Their Eyes Were Watching God In her article “Listening to Jealousy,” Sara Eckel explains how jealousy can be a useful emotion that can bring a couple closer together if it is properly managed; however, if left unchecked it can lead to the demise...
Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, utilizes a struggle W.E.B. Du Bois describes as “double consciousness” to chart the journey of Janie Crawford into selfhood. In “The Souls of Black Folk,” Du Bois describes African Americans as both gifted and cursed with...
Though written almost fifty years apart, and by two authors from completely different backgrounds, Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand and Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (also known by the title A Doll House) address similar issues concerning the oppression of women by society, and particularly...
Through Janie’s growth from a girl so far removed from any identity that she doesn’t know her own race, to a woman strong enough to return to her hometown that wants nothing more than to revel in her miseries, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were...
“It [the tiny bloom] had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously” (13). Zora Neale Hurston, an African-American author, is known for her expressive...
In the novels Their Eyes Were Watching God and Love Medicine, Hurston and Erdrich (respectively) use the characterization of the women to promote women’s empowerment and self-fulfillment. Lulu can be seen within Erdrich’s work as the stereotypical, “evil woman” who can’t find her proper place;...
Zora Neale Hurston enriches our sense of her childhood world by using sensory language and manipulating the reader’s view by articulating the contrast between her mother’s idealism and her father’s realism. Hurston’s diction and syntax come together to create a vivid image of the beautiful...
Nella Larsen began writing during a time when women, especially black women, did not have a place in society. Her novels consisted of stories re-iterating the lives of the oppressed during the Harlem Renaissance. In her story Passing, Larsen depicts the lives of two women...
