The Remarkable Janie Crawford (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

Joe Starks first came into Janie’s life when she was just an innocent young woman with all sorts of hopes and dreams. To Janie, he represented these dreams and was her opportunity to fulfill them. However, what Janie did not foresee is that Joe took her away from that life she hated with Logan Killicks and led her into that same life with him. For years and years Janie is suppressed and is unable

Later in the novel, Janie faces death once again this time in the form of a vicious storm. She and Tea Cake and Motor Boat are stuck in a small house while the hurricane rages outside. Hurston uses an entire page to describe the ferocity of the storm. The storm’s winds become “louder and higher and lower and wider,” and it totally engulfs the house. The storm itself is personified, described as “the monster” which “trampled over the roof of the house” and “roll[ed] in his bed.” Hurston uses this personification to further emphasize the great magnitude of the storm and the extreme danger it poses, making it apparent that it is like death, threatening the lives of Janie and her beloved husband, Tea Cake. So great is the hurricane that Janie calls it “His work.” Only God can create such a storm with the fierceness to take their lives at anytime. And it is during this time, when a storm sent from God threatens her life that Janie comes to a realization that will forever change her life.

Janie, now free with Joe’s death, begins to ask herself questions and thinks back to her past which she despised so greatly. Hurston uses this long paragraph of Janie’s memories of her grandmother to show the extent of her suffering in the past and what may lie ahead in the future. As a child, Janie was very hopeful and dreamy. She had been “getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people.” She was not the type of girl satisfied being a housewife and striving to live a secure life. No, Janie felt “it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her.” However, in a single action, Nanny, her grandmother, shattered these hopes. By marrying Janie to Logan Killicks, Nanny was committing Janie to a life she wanted nothing o

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