Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

As Janie ages, she has been going through different stages of loves and misloves, which gradually introduced her to reveal her feminnity. In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston depictures Janie’s feminism through her growth of life from an innocent and vulnerable 17 years old girl who had not yet experienced love to a true women who forgets “all those things (she doesn’t) want to remember, and remember(s) everything (she doesn’t) want to forget” (1) in various of perspectives: Janie’s education and her grandmother’s instigation about marriage; Janie’s misloves with Logan and Jody; and Janie’s love for Tea Cake.

Before Janie even learned the concept of “love”, Hurston showed how Janie was raped when she still had her “womanly”

Logan owns “sixty acres uh land right on de big road” (23), and Jody believes that “It takes money tuh feed pretty women” (37); whereas Tea Cake, who is not wealthy at all, but takes really good care of Janie and respects Janie’s femininity. While Jody was constantly “unconscious of (Janie’s) thoughts” (43), Tea Cake often “wanted her to get her rest” (107) in the mornings instead of getting up early to make breakfast for him. Janie’s young vulnerable heart was let down many times but her heart of finding the one and experiencing real love always stayed with her, and “she was saving up feelings for some man he had never seen” (72). When Janie decided to be with Tea Cake, Janie experienced a “a new sensation” (108) of “passive happiness” (107): “Tea Cake and Janie gone hunting” (110), fishing, dancing… everything that she had not experienced before with Logan and Jody, who are more hidebound rather than fun. Tea Cake respected and admired Janie as a woman instead of a tool that is enslaved by man, and Tea Cake helped Janie to “crawl out from (her soul’s) hiding place” (128) and experience the part of a life that she had never been exposed to before; Every time Janie looks at Tea Cake and what he had done for her, she would feel a “self-crushing love”