Their Eyes Were Watching God Chapter 9 Analysis

Chapter 9 Response
In the passage from chapter 9 from the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the author uses diction, figurative language, and selection of detail to express Janie’s change to a self-promoting attitude compared to Nanny’s materialistic and dependant way of living life. Jody’s funeral was a great event that everyone from doctors to farm people attended. Janie’s sadness did not show, if she had any at all, but she could not show the world that she was not affected by her husband’s death. Janie “starched and ironed” her face to show her mourning, while on the inside she feels relieved, free, and happy. Hurston uses rhetorical fragment in paragraph two to emphasize how quick Janie got over the death of
With all of her free time, Janie contemplates about what she wants to do. Thoughts of tending her grandmother’s grave finds its way into her head. Then the mood abruptly changes, and Janie is irritated. Janie hates her grandmother and tried to hide it from herself “under a cloak of pity.” Janie felt bad for her grandmother and did what her grandmother pleased. Instead of searching for “people” on her “journey to the horizons”, she was forced to run after “things.” Janie felt that Nanny took the horizon, pinched it so small and “chocked” her with it, and that humans had no love towards one another, and this “mislove” was so strong that even blood was not any thicker than water. Although Janie was mad at her grandmother for raising her to value things, she realizes that was the way Nanny was raised and she pushed these beliefs on her because Nanny loved her. In the last paragraph, Hurston uses an allusion-like figure of speech, explaining that when God made the man, he made him out of things that “sung all the time and glittered all over.” After time, angels became jealous and destroyed and beat him down, and covered him with mud so the remaining sparks could not sing. Janie, although covered in mud, tried to