There is a large distinction between an arranged marriage and the traditional marriage, where love was the choice made by both individuals. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, her main character Janie Crawford struggles to satisfy her newfound romantic appetite. “She had glossy leaves and bursting buds” (Hurston 11), ready to find a man to love her and for her to love him. The trouble comes when she is presented obstacles in finding a balance between peace and love in the patriarchal society as well as the hegemony of white America, both of which she lives in. Her Nanny has what seems to be a panicked approach to achieving “love” which is marrying Janie off to a to an older black man. Growing up in nineteenth-century America
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Before Janie got married to Logan Killicks, Nanny always expressed how she wanted Janie to be a woman. She would always tell her granddaughter, “youse got yo’ womanhood on yuh...Ah wants to see you married right away” (Hurston 12). The ideal woman in twentieth-century America was one who internalized the norms of the patriarchy. At the time, Janie just did not want to be anyone’s wife, because she wanted love as well. According to Nanny “she just wants to hug and kiss around with first one man and then another” (Hurston 13). To Janie’s own surprise, when she ran away from Logan, it was with a man named Joe Starks. Although Nanny did not live to meet Joe Starks, she would have accepted him and his assertion of patriarchal ideals. First meeting Joe, Janie was excited for the romance. He lured her in with the promise of a big life in a new town that he would bring up himself. When there were no more romantic surprises left in the relationship, we see Janie …show more content…
Janie is a romantic in search for a man who can cure the suffering that is her loneliness. So why does Nanny even want an arranged marriage when Janie would get married sooner or later? Urgency. Nanny watches Janie grow up right before her eyes. One day she watched Janie kiss a boy and “that was the end of her childhood” (Hurston 12). Right then Nanny started talking about an arranged marriage for Janie. Her urgency suggests there is a threat. The unspoken threat is the fact that a young black woman is growing up in white America alone. This thought alone scares Nanny so she sees it as her job to find a man willing to take care of her
Before Janie got married to Logan Killicks, Nanny always expressed how she wanted Janie to be a woman. She would always tell her granddaughter, “youse got yo’ womanhood on yuh...Ah wants to see you married right away” (Hurston 12). The ideal woman in twentieth-century America was one who internalized the norms of the patriarchy. At the time, Janie just did not want to be anyone’s wife, because she wanted love as well. According to Nanny “she just wants to hug and kiss around with first one man and then another” (Hurston 13). To Janie’s own surprise, when she ran away from Logan, it was with a man named Joe Starks. Although Nanny did not live to meet Joe Starks, she would have accepted him and his assertion of patriarchal ideals. First meeting Joe, Janie was excited for the romance. He lured her in with the promise of a big life in a new town that he would bring up himself. When there were no more romantic surprises left in the relationship, we see Janie …show more content…
Janie is a romantic in search for a man who can cure the suffering that is her loneliness. So why does Nanny even want an arranged marriage when Janie would get married sooner or later? Urgency. Nanny watches Janie grow up right before her eyes. One day she watched Janie kiss a boy and “that was the end of her childhood” (Hurston 12). Right then Nanny started talking about an arranged marriage for Janie. Her urgency suggests there is a threat. The unspoken threat is the fact that a young black woman is growing up in white America alone. This thought alone scares Nanny so she sees it as her job to find a man willing to take care of her