Their Eyes Were Watching God - Adjust, Adapt, Overcome a...

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than ones self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud... br-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself br brZora Neale Hurston, in dealing with the female search for self-awareness in Their Eyes Were Watching God, has created a heroine in Janie Crawford. In fact, the female perspective is introduced immediately: Now, women forget all those things they dont want to remember, and remember everything they dont want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly (1). On the very first page of Their Eyes Were†¦show more content†¦He pick it up because he have to, but he dont tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see, opines Janies grandmother in an attempt to justify the marriage that she has arranged for her granddaughter (14). This excerpt establishes the existence of the inferior status of women in this society, a status that Janie must somehow overcome in order to become a heroine. This societal constraint does not deter Janie from attaining her dream. br brThe man her grandmother had arranged for Janie to marry is Logan Killicks, a respectable black man with financial security and a plot of land, who fit Janies grandmothers view of the perfect marriage. However, after the first few months of her marriage to Killicks: Â… she [realized] now that marriage did not make love. Janies first dream was dead, so she became a woman (24). Logan had br brIt is now apparent that Janie is not afraid to defy the expectations that her grandmother has for her life, because she realizes that her grandmothers antiquated views of women as weaklings in need of male protection even at the expense of a loving relationship, constitute limitations to her personal potential: She hated her grandmother . . . Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon (85-86). Despite her pre-arranged marriage, Janie is not afraid to follow her instincts, even when this means leaving her