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Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

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Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston
A SOAPSTone for Their Eyes Were Watching God
Author
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida in an all black community
She moved away at age 13 and later joins a travelling theatre company.
Later in life during the Harlem Renaissance, she worked with Langston Hughes on a play that was published posthumously, but never finished because of creative differences
She wrote the novel in seven weeks while studying voodoo in Haiti
She suffered a stroke and forcibly was put under hospice care. She dies about one year later.
Subject
“women” (1)
‘equal’(23)
‘Negroes’(58)
“grief” (189)
love” (90)
“workin’” (176)
“death”(135)
Larger Occasion
Nineteenth Amendment passes giving all white women the right to vote. Many women of colour are barred from voting like their
…show more content…
She doesn’t wear black/ stops wearing it because Tea Cake help her realise she does not exist for everyone else.
Simile
“...[she was] cruel ...more negroid... in... ratio... their negroness. Like... pecking-order in... chicken yard.”
This quote also represents another larger occasion going back to slavery because if one was a lighter coloured slave, they worked in the house. This set up a hierarchy of lighter is better. It also degrades Tea Cake, who apparently has dark skin, to an animalistic status.
Symbolism
“Mules and other brutes had occupied their [the womens’] skins”(1)
The mule symbol repeats later in the book to illustrate Janie’s inequality, and other women’s, to her husbands and other men. The mule motif also represents the larger occasion of how hard black women work in juxtaposition to the white housewife of the time
Personification
“The years took all of the fight out of Janie’s

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