Their Eyes Were Watching God Feminist Analysis

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie, the heroine, represents some aspects of feminism when she takes it upon herself to become liberated from each of her three domineering romantic relationships. Janie’s first husband, Logan Killicks, treats Janie as more of a prized possession to be obtained than as a wife or companion. For example, Logan goes to Lake City to buy a second mule that Janie can plow behind in the potato field because potatoes are “bringin’ big prices” (Hurston 36). To Logan, Janie is a means of increasing his profits, and her value in lies in the work she can do, not the love she can provide him. Later, Logan makes sure Janie understands her role in their relationship. He demands her
Janie’s relationship with Joe, at the start, is dramatically different from the one she had with Logan. Before she ran off with him, Joe stated, “Janie, if you think Ah aims to tole you off and make a dog outta you, youse wrong. Ah wants to make a wife outa you” (38). Though being a housewife is not the ideal form of liberation, for Janie it is a huge step up from the possibility of becoming another man’s mule. She has high hopes for her marriage to Joe, even though she knows that he is not exactly the man she always dreamed of. Joe does not “represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance” (39). But along the way in the marriage, Janie comes to see that even though he provides her with a kind of liberation from Logan’s domination, he confines her to a new sort of domination. He does this by not permitting her to speak in public, forcing her to wear her long hair up, and forbidding her to socialize with other townspeople on the store’s front porch. Joe also dominates Janie through physical as well as verbal abuse. In one instance, Janie’s meal she had prepared for Joe did not come out as planned, and she was punished accordingly; “so when the brad didn’t rise, and the fish wasn’t quite done at the bone, and the rice was scorched, he slapped
Like Joe, Tea Cake appears, at first, to be a completely liberating force for Janie, and he does this by treating her as an equal, if not a superior. Despite their age difference, Janie “found herself glowing inside” when Tea Cake invited her to play a game of checkers. “Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play” (128). For the first time, Janie receives equal treatment from a man and fittingly, ends up marrying him later in the novel. Another example of Tea Cake liberating Janie occurs when he shows her how to handle a gun and to hunt. Ironically, she eventually becomes a better shot than Tea Cake himself, a talent that later comes back to haunt him. Additionally, Janie is able to fend for herself and becomes the main provider in the home she shares with Tea Cake in the Everglades, rather than the other way around. But in this liberation, however, just as in Joe’s liberation, there still exists a side of domination. This domination presents itself in Tea Cake’s jealousy and later his abuse of Janie. Tea Cake first shows his display of jealousy when he starts to leave work in the middle of the day to check on Janie. She asks him why he does this one day, and he tells her he is worried that “de boogerman liable tuh tote yuh off whilst Ah’m gone” (177). Janie does not believe him, and confronts him about it. She says, “Tain’t no boogerman got me tuh study ‘bout. Maybe you