Essay Database

In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston shows how the lives of American women changed in the early 20th century. Zora Neale Hurston creates a character in her own likeness in her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. By presenting Janie's search for identity, from her childbirth with Nanny to the death of Tea Cake, Hurston shows what a free southern black women might have experienced in the early decades of …

…of the society's racial pecking order, her hair is a form of power against which her first two husbands strive. It is only toward the end, when Janie both lets her hair down and condemns Nanny's vision, that Janie sheds the same restrictions that continue to doom others to personal stagnation. In one compelling novel, Hurston ties together the important issues facing her generation without distracting from the tale of one woman's struggle with them.