Реферат: Their Eyes Were Watching God An Epic

Florida. He feels that he will have a better chance at being a big voice in an

all black town than in a white man’s town. The problem is that he has adopted

white man’s values and forces them upon the townspeople and, most notably, upon

his wife Janie. Hurston points out the irony of Joe’s dilemma: “Starks is able

to ’set himself up as lord, master, and proprietor’ everywhere in Eatonville,

and not just in his general store. His power in Eatonville approximates the

white man’s almost total institutional control of America” (27-28). This

relationship was just another setback in Janie’s epic search. Nevertheless, when

her marriage to Joe collapses, she again decides, “So new thoughts had to be

thought and new words said” (77).

After a long stretch of pointless and endless days in her search, Joe

dies. This is one of the greatest days in her search. By now Janie’s

relationship with Tea Cake was growing into her greatest love yet. When she

falls in love with Tea Cake, she tells her friend Pheoby, “He done taught me de

maiden language all over” (109). Her search seemed very close to a peaceful end.

However, it was far from over, Tea Cake became ill after being bitten by a rabid

dog, he feared that he had been conjured. He was suspicious that Janie wanted to

be free of him so that she could marry a lighter skinned man. In an attempt to

quell his fear, Janie said, “Maybe it wuz uh witch ridin’ yuh, honey. Ah’ll see

can’t Ah find some mustard seed whilst Ah’s out” (166).

Janie’s search for an identity for herself, free of the ideas she had

grown up with, ties into bigger issues, important for her race as a whole.

Nanny’s vision of Janie’s care free life on a porch somewhere is associated with

being white; somehow the other lives of women are made to be less honorable

along with their racial ties. Janie’s straight hair becomes tied up with

whiteness, and because 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