...The novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is extremely rich in dialect. Dialect is regional, and it consist of distinctive features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Hurston uses dialect to bring the story as well as the characters to life. The use of dialect makes the characters seem real; they are believable. As a reader to become familiar with the language, readers feel as if they were actually a part of the action. Early in the novel, Hurston tells her readers what to expect in the language of her characters. She states that Janie will tell her story to Pheoby in "soft, easy phrases." Being that the novel is closer to a Southern dialect, rather than an African-American dialect; this shows that racism is still around but is slowly...
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...“... Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” (Frost, Robert). This excerpt taken from “The Road Not Taken”, shows the choices, and the consequences of those choices. These themes are present in both the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a story of a Southern white teenager, Huckleberry Finn is being “civilized” by the society's standards, taking place throughout the Mississippi River between 1835 and 1845, years before the American Civil War. While the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, takes place in the early 1900s, following a Southern African-American...
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...Black Culture and Women’s Role in Society as Seen in Their Eyes Were Watching God In Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, we see many different references to the way both blacks and women were seen in her time as well as when the book was set. The book takes place a few generations after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished. Tensions between blacks and whites were high, and they were still decades away before women’s rights were even considered as legitimate concern. Hurston uses a variety of devices to help portray the world of her characters, the most obvious being her use of dialect. The way each particular character speaks gives us an inside view of their life and experiences. For example, if a character is educated, and lived in big cities for most of their life they are going to sound different than a character who worked in the fields their whole life. Giving each character their own dialect also helps the reader differentiate between characters based on who’s talking, and allows Hurston to give each character their own mannerisms. A good example of this is on page 92 of Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God . “Another time she overheard him using Joe’s favorite expression for pointing out the differences between himself and the carelessliving, mouthy town. “Ah’m an educated man, Ah keep mah arrangements in mah hands.” ” Throughout the novel, there are many references to women’s places in society during that time period. Women were seen as stupid, and belonged to men...
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...In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God written by Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston depicts the life and struggles of a black woman named Janie Crawford. Hurston uses the literary technique of symbols to represent the plot and emotions of Janie throughout the work. The two prominent symbols pertaining to the growth of Janie is the symbolization of her hair and the hurricane, which act as a symbols for restraint and oppression. Although the hair symbolizes confinement, while the hurricane representing Janie’s continual struggle, they also reveal her strengths and advancement as a character when she breaks free of those bonds. Through the symbolization of Janie’s hair and the hurricane, two themes are highlighted: the struggle to discover the individual stems from language and power, and liberation comes from self discovery found in personal loss. Hurston utilizes the connection between themes and the symbolization of Janie’s hair and the hurricane to give meaning of Hurston’s interpretation of Janie. Their Eyes Were Watching God is unique as a novel because of Hurston choice of conversational dialect for the characters. Throughout the novel Hurston uses the Southern black dialect in order to bring a realistic feel to the setting and plot line for the reader. The irony in the novel’s unique choice of conversational dialect is that the protagonist, Janie, is often hidden behind the other characters in the novel. This brings about the first theme which is, the struggle to discover...
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...In the African- American community today, there is a lack of representation, along with voices that go unheard and unspoken. Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, delves into the significance of silence, and the ways that the protagonist, Janie Crawford, has had her voice silenced. This resonates with many people of the Black community, who feel as though even with the progression we’ve made as a society, that their lives and struggles matter less than a white person’s. With movements such as Black Lives Matter, and many other African-American protesters, there has been a cultural outcry from the Black community who want to be heard, who want to be represented, who want to matter as people. Many women in particular among...
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...Danielle mordon Zora Neale Hurston's love of African-American folklore and her work as an anthropologist are reflected in her novels and short stories--where she employed the rich indigenous dialects of her native rural Florida and the Caribbean. In her foreword to Hurston's autiobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Maya Angelou wrote, "Her books and folktales vibrate with tragedy, humor and the real music of Black American speech." A published short story writer by the time she came to New York in 1925, Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard, where she was the college's first African-American student. After graduation, Hurston pursued graduate work at Columbia with renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. She left New York to conduct research in Florida and in Haiti and Jamaica, and her field work resulted in the folklore collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). Her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937. Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.) So when she died on Jan. 28, 1960--at age 69, after suffering a stroke. Her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her February 7 funeral. The collection didn't yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973. In 1975, Ms. Magazine published Alice Walker's essay, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" reviving...
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...Through the use of colloquial dialect, syntax, and descriptive figurative language, Zora Neal Hurston beings to create the townspeople as a judgmental, jealous mass in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The old, stereotypical, Southern Black accent is prevalent throughout the novel, allowing the reader to see the speakers as uneducated laborers. Their judgmental rhetorical questions relate their feelings of jealousy towards Janie, asking what a “forty year ole ‘oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her back lak some young gal”(1) and other probing questions, silently comparing themselves to and judging her. Yet these “uneducated laborers”, as they are so flawlessly portrayed, take the low road themselves, silently seething with jealousy. The townspeople, blinded by the main character’s beauty, are confused, fragmented sentences blundering foolishly from their tongues. They all seem to think “[Janie] was going to marry” and her husband “[runs] off wid some young gal so young she ain’t even got no hairs”(2), wondering about Janie’s life, so much more interesting than their labor-monkey lives. The townspeople, who make the transition to the “porch” are lumped together. At first described as monkeys on the “bander log”(2), the porch’s organs of judgment are taken away, Janie’s consideration of them as “tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences”(1) are synecdochal humiliations and degradations, lumping them together once more. The porch’s “killing tools” of laughs are only...
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... She struggled with poverty throughout most of her life despite her hard work. From 1925 on, Ms. Hurston lived in New York and eventually joined the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the shapers of the black literary and cultural movement of the twenties. Ms. Hurston was the first black scholar to research folklore on the level that she did. From 1930s to the 1960s, Zora Neale Hurston was the most prolific and accomplished black woman writer in America. During that thirty year period, she published many short stories, magazine articles, plays, and seven books. She gained a reputation as an outstanding folklorist and novelist. She drew attention to herself because she insisted on being herself at a time when African Americans were being urged to assimilate in an effort to...
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...Theo Siggelakis Prof. T Dansdill February 20, 2012 Of Books Books either encompass my thinking or they stretch the limits of my imagination. Some of the most inspiring books are those which capture life, as I know it down to every specific detail. These books are similar to watching an HD TV; every detail is just so pronounced and accurate. Books that resemble this beautiful real life portrayal could be like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye. Every emotion that Salinger delineates through his characterization of Holden Caulfield is so potent that those details resonate even more for someone dealing with a similar internal struggle. When I read the book at 15, every sensory detail that Salinger described helped better illuminate part of my own internal struggle. The over exaggeration of the resentment of society as being in genuine really captured my own internal resentment for molds that people contrive themselves to fit. The one scene with Caulfield sitting in the bathtub depressed after refusing sex from a hooker will always be infused into my constant sub consciousness. When I just feel worn out and pushed to my emotional limit, I see that image burned bright into my memory because that scene is the ultimate depiction of frustration and stress. Although, this style of writing may be beautiful, sometimes it is nice to escape the hyperrealism captured in a book like Catcher in The Rye, and instead read something that expands the mind’s imagination. The contrary to the...
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...to accept jazz into their culture II. Poetry Langston Hughes One of the most well known names of the Harlem Renaissance His writing reflected that black culture should be celebrated because is it just as valuable as white culture "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street...(these songs) had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." said Langston One of Langston most famous work was his essay entitled "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" This essay talks about no great poet ever being afraid of being himself even if he is african american. Zora Neale Hurston The most well known female writing activist during Harlem Renaissance Showed african american culture by writing in a distinct dialect which today would be known as slang a quote from her novel “jonah’s gourd vine” shows this "Ah dare yuh tuh hit me too. You know...
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...Journal Prompts for Their Eyes Were Watching God Directions: Choose ONE of the following prompts to complete for the selected chapter. Please type your response in MLA format. Use as much detail as possible. Chapter 1 Questions: Select quotations from the text that support your answers. 1. Hurston begins the book with an extended metaphor. What are the dreams of men? How are they different from the dreams of women? Who doesn’t get disappointed? 2. Janie has come back to town after doing what and to whom? (Pay attention to and remember their description.) 3. What are the porch-sitters compared to? How are they characterized? What can you infer from that description? 4. The first two pages are loaded with figurative language, as though Hurston was writing poetry in book form. What is the effect of this? Is it hard to understand? What is the effect of having to work a little harder to understand all the layers of her opening pages? 5. Pay attention to porches. What is the function of the porch in this chapter? 6. The author makes a big deal about Janie’s black rope of hair. This metaphor is a central image in the book. What might Janie’s hair symbolize? Follow it through the book. 7. Hurston is careful to give us many of the particulars of Janie’s life since she left this town. What do we know about her? 8. In the last line of the first chapter, Hurston uses a metaphor. What is it and what is its effect on the mood of the story? 9. Briefly discuss the voice...
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...Connecting Hurston life to the novel While Their Eyes Were Watching God is a work of fiction, it has been considered autobiographical as well. Hurston reveals her personality through the interaction of the author’s, protagonist’s, narrator’s voices and through the narrative events. Hurston’s father has been lodged in many characteristics of Jody Stark. Like Jody, her father moved to a solely black town called Eatonville as in the novel. Her father John Hurston was also noted for “being very ambitious, hard-headed and having a prominent position of carpenter as well being a Baptist preacher and attaining a position of power within the South Florida Baptist Association”. (Robert 5) Like Jody, he sought out to be a leader within the fledgling community of Eatonville Janie similarly shares many characteristics with Hurston. One of...
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...traditions that have been passed on from generation to generation for thousands of years. Japanese people can be very modern but till hold onto traditions that have been passed on for centuries. They wear amazingly beautiful clothes, have interesting art techniques and have one the largest markets for music. Japan is also known for their Geisha girls, martial arts, and bizarre foods. Origins “The Japanese Archipelago includes more than 3,000 islands, covering a total area of 377,835 square kilometers. The four main islands, from north to south, are Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu” (Szczepanski, n.d.). There is evidence that people inhabited Japan 30,000 years ago. According to Szczepanski (n.d.), these people were called Jomon and were hunter and gatherers who lived off the land. Japan first appears in the historical records of China in about 300 BC. There are many theories regarding the evolution of Japan. The most popular is that “Japanese gradually evolved from ancient Ice Age people who occupied Japan long before 20,000 B.C., and widespread in Japan is a theory that the Japanese descended from horse-riding Asian nomads who passed through Korea to conquer Japan in the fourth century” (Diamond, 1998). Japan gained its independence and culture while emerging from isolation to create an industrialized society in the nineteenth...
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...Spunk Kenny Leon’s True Color Theatre Company’s production of Spunk: Three Tales by Zora Neale Hurston at the 14th Street Playhouse on September 25, 2013, presented the audience with a very culturally embellished version of Hurston’s original three tales: “Sweat,” “Story in Harlem Slang,” and “The Gilded Six Bits.” Zora Neale Hurston strived to portray the reality of life as an African American in the early 1900s through native dialect in her short stories and novels. Her most notable production, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a prime example of her effort to illustrate the life of the everyday Negro in search of a better life. Each of the short stories portrays a different, yet comparable view on African American culture in separate areas of the United States. Director Hilda Willis depicts this play, adapted by George C. Wolfe, in the most literal variation of Hurston’s original stories; the actors from True Colors Theatre Company perform the short stories verbatim. This production is energized with selections of blues music to help the audience feel the attitude of the era in which the play occurs. Wolfe’s adaptation of Hurston’s Spunk infused the original three short stories with delineative and characteristic blues music, highlighting the mood during the era of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Migration. “Sweat” tells the story of a woman named Delia who suffers in an abusive relationship with her husband, Sykes. Her husband tries multiple methods of coercing Delia to...
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...every woman. None of these women possess a name, only a color, to show that they represent all women of color. Shange includes themes of love, abandonment, sexuality, abortion, and domestic violence to emphasize what women in her community were and still are subjugated to. Through dance, poetry, and music these women slowly but surely find their true identity. Ntozake uses her work as a tool to empower all “colored girls” by creating these seven strong women that form a bond when they are able to find their identity as black women, and essentially in their journey make it to the end of their rainbows without committing suicide. When looking into Shange’s life there’s no question that situations, which she had observed day-to-day or experienced herself, were imposed on her writings. Born as Paulette Williams she was raised in a middle class family, which was not a childhood common for blacks. Her family moved to St. Louis and she attended a non-segregated school where she had to endure blatant racism at the mere age of eight years old. She rebelled against her family’s satisfaction with being a part of the middle class when she still had to deal with the hardships of being black and a woman. Realizing that in the real world there were limitations being set on blacks and women in society, produced her anger: the catalyst to her decision to write to not only empower women, but to empower and teach young girls about social issues as...
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