Their Eyes Were Watching God Feminist Analysis

The great majority of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston revolves around Black characters in essentially all Black communities. Despite the oppression of Blacks in America continuing long into the 20th century, Janie’s oppression is hardly on the grounds of her race. Though race is a central basis of the novel, Janie is often mistreated and oppressed due to her gender, not her race. The majority of Black Americans in the early 1900’s yearned for civil rights above all else, placing women’s rights and the role of women in the backdrop, especially in the rural south. Janie, as a female protagonist in a male-dominated society, has to fight against mistreatment and abuse to ultimately find her happiness, employing feminist ideologies …show more content…
“Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss” (147). He is happy with Janie, but grows insecure about himself, as other men seem to have more dominance over their wives than he does. Janie is older and possesses wealth, and Tea Cake feels he needs to compensate via physical dominance. Janie’s passiveness towards the beating calls back to Tea Cake’s incident with Nunkie, when Janie attempted to beat Tea Cake. Though Tea Cake prevented the beating, the event preserves equality between them in that Janie, too, has used violence against Tea Cake, and holds him to the same standard of violence as acceptable. Despite their tumultuous end, even their armed battle was conducted with a sense of equality, as Hurston states, “The pistol and the rifle rang out almost together” (184). With Tea Cake, Janie finds herself a partner she can share her life with instead of another man who wants a woman to serve him. Even Janie’s beating, a potential hiccup to their equality and Janie’s feminist values, can be chalked up to mutuality, as Janie, too, had attempted to beat Tea