Content s introduction Chapter I zora Neale Hurston’s life and career

CONCLUSION

Hurston wrote the novel during a critical moment for African-American writers. The “ New Negro Movement” and the Harlem Renaissance presented African-American artists with the opportunity to use their art as a way to authentically represent the African-American experience.

Hurston’s life in Eatonville and her extensive anthropological research on rural black folklore greatly influenced her writing. Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937, long after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the protagonist Janie learns and grows from each of her relationships. Her life lessons are woven into the themes of love and ‘mislove’, power and domination, and inequality and discrimination throughout the novel.

Hurston continually interrogates the conventional wisdom about what it means to be a strong, successful woman. By giving her protagonist three husbands, and by ending her novel with Janie alone and content, she suggests that happiness does not always involve one husband, children, and a settled existence. And by portraying the bursts of independence that follow Janie’s episodes of subservience, she argue that great strength is sometimes the direct result of real weakness.

Hurston has explored the themes of Gender roles relations, desire, independence and love, race, and the value of females in a relationship in her novel. The use of dialect, figurative language and self-cognitive construction by Zora Neale Hurston in his writing is evident. The story of Janie represents a typical life of an African-American woman.