Chapters 1 to 10 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston Essay hii need help for writing 1 paragraph summery ( NOT from the intrnet ) for each c
Chapters 1 to 10 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston Essay hii need help for writing 1 paragraph summery ( NOT from the intrnet ) for each chapter from the novel. ( from chapter 1- 10 ) only.the Novel is ( Their Eyes Were Watching God by ZORA NEALE HURSTON ) ( see the Attachment ) THANK YOU ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their
Eyes Were
Watching God
With a Foreword by Edwidge Danticat
3/260
To Henry Allen Moe
4/260
Contents
E-Book Extra
Janies Great Journey: A Reading
Group Guide
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Edwidge Danticat
Foreword by Mary Helen Washington
1 Ships at a distance have every
mans wish on board.
2 Janie saw her life like a great tree
in leaf
5/260
3 There are years that ask questions
and years that answer.
4 Long before the year was up, Janie
noticed that her
5 On the train the next day, Joe
didnt make many
6 Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the
7 The years took all the fight out of
Janies face.
8 After that night Jody moved his
things and slept in
9 Joes funeral was the finest thing
Orange County had ever
10 One day Hezekiah asked off from
work to go off
6/260
11 Janie wanted to ask Hezekiah
about Tea Cake, but she
12 It was after the picnic that the
town began to
13 Jacksonville. Tea Cakes letter
had said Jacksonville. He had
worked
14
To
Janies
strange
eyes,
everything in the Everglades was
big
15 Janie learned what it felt like to
be jealous. A
16 The season closed and people
went away like they had
17 A great deal of the old crowd were
back. But
7/260
18 Since Tea Cake and Janie had
friended with the Bahaman
19 And then again Him-with-thesquare-toes had gone
20 Because they really loved Janie
just a little less than
Afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
About the Author
Books by Zora Neale Hurston
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
E-Book Extra
Janies Great Journey:
A Reading Group Guide
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Introduction
In her award-winning autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road(1942),
Zora Neale Hurston claimed to have been born in Eatonville, Florida,
in 1901. She was, in fact, born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7,
1891, the fifth child of John Hurston (farmer, carpenter, and Baptist
preacher) and Lucy Ann Potts (school teacher). The author of numerous books, including Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jonahs Gourd
Vine, Mules and Men, and Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston had
achieved fame and sparked controversy as a novelist, anthropologist,
outspoken essayist, lecturer, and theatrical producer during her sixtynine years. Hurstons finest work of fiction appeared at a time when
artistic and political statementswhether single sentences or booklength fictionswere peculiarly conflated. Many works of fiction were
informed by purely political motives; political pronouncements
9/260
frequently appeared in polished literary prose. And Hurstons own
political statements, relating to racial issues or addressing national
politics, did not ingratiate her with her black male contemporaries.
The end result was that Their Eyes Were Watching God went out of
print not long after its first appearance and remained out of print for
nearly thirty years. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been one among many
to ask: How could the recipient of two Guggenheims and the author
of four novels, a dozen short stories, two musicals, two books on black
mythology, dozens of essays, and a prizewinning autobiography virtually disappear from her readership for three full decades?
That question remains unanswered. The fact remains that every
one of Hurstons books went quickly out of print; and it was only
through the determined efforts, in the 1970s, of Alice Walker, Robert
Hemenway (Hurstons biographer), Toni Cade Bambara, and other
writers and scholars that all of her books are now back in print and
that she has taken her rightful place in the pantheon of American
authors.
In 1973, Walker, distressed that Hurstons writings had been all
but forgotten, found Hurstons grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest
and installed a gravemarker. After loving and teaching her work for a
number of years, Walker later reported, I could not bear that she did
not have a known grave. The gravemarker now bears the words that
Walker had inscribed there:
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
GENIUS OF THE SOUTH
NOVELIST FOLKLORIST ANTHROPOLOGIST
(1891-1960)
10/260
Questions for Discussion
1. What kind of God are the eyes of Hurstons characters watching?
What is the nature of that God and of their watching? Do any of
them question God?
2. What is the importance of the concept of horizon? How do Janie
and each of her men widen her horizons? What is the significance
of the novels final sentences in this regard?
3. How does Janies journeyfrom West Florida, to Eatonville, to the
Evergladesrepresent her, and the novels increasing immersion
in black culture and traditions? What elements of individual action
and communal life characterize that immersion?
4. To what extent does Janie acquire her own voice and the ability to
shape her own life? How are the two related? Does Janies telling
her story to Pheoby in flashback undermine her ability to tell her
story directly in her own voice?
5. What are the differences between the language of the men and that
of Janie and the other women? How do the differences in language
reflect the two groups approaches to life, power, relationships, and
self-realization? How do the novels first two paragraphs point to
these differences?
6. In what ways does Janie conform to or diverge from the assumptions that underlie the mens attitudes toward women? How would
you explain Hurstons depiction of violence toward women? Does
the novel substantiate Janies statement that Sometimes God gits
familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business?
7. What is the importance in the novel of the signifyin and playin
de dozens on the front porch of Joes store and elsewhere? What
11/260
purpose do these stories, traded insults, exaggerations, and boasts
have in the lives of these people? How does Janie counter them
with her conjuring?
8. Why is adherence to received tradition so important to nearly all
the people in Janies world? How does the community deal with
those who are different?
9. After Joe Starkss funeral, Janie realizes that She had been getting
ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it
was important to all the world that she should find them and they
find her. Why is this important to all the world? In what ways
does Janies self-awareness depend on her increased awareness of
others?
10. How important is Hurstons use of vernacular dialect to our understanding of Janie and the other characters and their way of life?
What do speech patterns reveal about the quality of these lives and
the nature of these communities? In what ways are their tongues
cocked and loaded, the only real weapon of these people?
Acknowledgments
The Estate of Zora Neale Hurston would like to thank those people
who have worked so hard over the years in introducing new generations of readers to the work of Zora Neale Hurston. We are indebted to
Robert Hemenway, Alice Walker, and all the Modern Language Association folks who helped usher in Zoras rediscovery. We are also
deeply appreciative of the hard work and support of our publisher,
Cathy Hemming; our editor, Julia Serebrinsky; and our agent, Victoria
Sanders, without whom this reissue would not have been possible.
Foreword
BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT
I
Ships at a distance have every mans wish on board. So begins
Zora Neale Hurstons brilliant novel about a womans search for her
authentic self and for real love. At first it might seem contradictory
that a work whose central character is the remarkably resolute and resilient Janie Crawford should start with a dictum about the life of
men. However, that is one of the many shrewd manifestations of Zora
Neale Hurstons enormous talents: her ability to render a world complete with its codes and disciplines within a few sentences, and then
placing in that world her vision of how her peoplethe women and
men of her own creation, her charactersfunction, triumph, and survive. So off that metaphorically distant ship comes our heroine Janie
Crawford, and suddenly we realize that she had been on her own singular journey all along, her dreams mocked to death by Time, but
never totally defeated. And since women remember everything they
dont want to forget, Janie Crawford recalls all the crucial moments of
her life, from the time she first discovers that she is a colored little
girl by searching for her face in a group photograph, to the moment
she returns to Eatonville, Florida, from the Everglades, not swindled
and deceived, as had been expected, but heartbroken, yet boldly defiant, after having toiled in the bean fields, survived a hurricane, and
lost the man she loved.
14/260
Janie Crawford is able to retrace her steps, disembark from her
own ship, come home, and remember, because she has been close to
death but has lived a very full life. So in spite of the judgmental voices
that greet her upon her return, in spite of the mass cruelty invoked
by her prodigal status, Janie has earned the right to be the griot of her
own tale, the heroine of her own quest, the member of her own
remembering.
In the loose call-and-response structure that frames the novelJanies friend Pheoby asks her to tell her where she has been, and
Janie responds with the story that constitutes the bookJanies is an
intimate audience of one. She entrusts her adventures to Pheoby to retell to others only if Pheoby chooses. (You can tell em what Ah say if
you wants to. Dats just de same as me cause mah tongue is in mah
friends mouf.) Janie is recounting her story as much to Pheoby as to
herself. Her response to Pheobys call is at the same time an echo,
much like the nymph Echo who retains only her voice after having literally been torn apart. Hurston herself also becomes Janies echo by
picking up the narrative thread in intervals, places where in real life,
or in real time, Janie might have simply grown tired of talking. Much
like the porch sitters at the beginning of the book who are the first to
see Janie arrive, Janie, Pheoby, and Zora Neale Hurston form their
own storytelling chain, and it is through their linking of voices that we
are taken on this intimate yet communal journey that is Their Eyes
Were Watching God.
II
I have always been extremely proud to remind all who would listen
that Zora Neale Hurstons masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching
God, was written, by her own account, in seven weeks, in my homeland, Haiti. I once made a complete fool of myself in front of a group
of young women writers who had just created a book club and had
15/260
gracefully invited me to their first meeting. Soon after the book clubs
newly elected president announced that the first book theyd be reading would be Their Eyes Were Watching God, I intervened to declare,
Did you know that Zora wrote it in seven weeks in Haiti?
I was hastily rebuffed by a curt So? from one of the members.
So? I replied, embarrassed. Could you write a book like that in
seven weeks?
Of course Hurstons own account of how long it took to compose
the novel has been debated and contested. However, I am awed by her
ability to have found the time during her anthropological travels and
constant research in Haiti to produce a novelat all. As a writer, I am
amazed by the way she often managed to use the places and circumstances she found herself in to create a room, a world, of her own.
Even with the menace of pennilessness always looming, she somehow
unearthed the solace, or perhaps the desperation, to write.
Many of my contemporaries, including myself, often complainsometimes with book contracts in towabout not having
enough time, money, and space to write. Yet Zora battled to write and
she did, knowing, as Janie Crawford must have also known, that
there is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. Thus, no
matter how many times I have read this book, when Janie begins
telling that untold story inside her, I am always doubly elated, both
with the story itself and with the way in which it came to be. And so
when I blurt out my favorite piece of Hurston trivia, I do it partially
out of pride for her association with Haiti, but I also do it heeding
Alice Walkers extremely wise advice in her foreword to Robert E. Hemenways literary biography of Hurston: We are a People. (And I include all the international peoples of the African diaspora in this category.) A People do not throw their geniuses away.
16/260
Fortunately, over the years, I have met very few active readers of
my generation (born after 1960), writers and nonwriters alike, who
would even consider throwing Zora away. Many of us can remember
vividly our first encounter with her work, particularly Their Eyes Were
Watching God. Because of the efforts of Ms. Walker and others, who
valiantly reclaimed Zora for themselves and for all of us, we read Zora
either in high school or in college classes, where her work is enthusiastically taught by men and womenmost of whom were much older
than we were when they first read herand still had the exuberance of
a recent discovery, much as in the early days of a love affair, or a reunion with a friend long thought dead.
I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God in an elective black history class at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York. The
class was taught by a young teacher who conducted it during his lunch
hour. There was not much reading for young adults about Zora and
her work, so we struggled with the plot and the language with a lot of
coaching from our teacher. Most of us were new immigrants to the
United States and read Janie, Pheoby, and Tea Cakes dialogue out
loud with our heavy Creole accents, and managed to come away with
only a glimmer of the brilliance of what we had read.
At times, feeling as if my lack of English had robbed me of precious
narrative information, I would raise questions that went beyond the
scope of the novel, and my teacher would become very excited, applauding the fact that I was stretching my imagination way beyond the
words in front of me, which is what all good readers are supposed to
do. Where was Tea Cakes family? I would ask. And what did Janies
friend Pheoby do while Janie was gone?
I would later explore more purposefully deliberate questions about
the book in a freshman English class at Barnard College, where Zora
had also been a student in the 1920s. Hers were among the books in a
17/260
glass case in the Barnard library that also highlighted other famous
alumnae authors, including the poet, playwright, and novelist Ntozake
Shange. Each time I walked by that glass case, I felt my dream of becoming an author growing more and more attainable, partly because
Zora and Ntozake were black women, like me.
Zora has lived in my country, I happily told one of my classmates, and now I am living in hers. I liked to think that Zora was
drawn to Haiti partly because of the many similarities between Haitian
and Southern African-American culture. Zora was from an all-black
town, run and governed by black people, and I was from a black republic, where Frederick Douglass had resided and where Katherine
Dunham had studied and danced. In Tell My Horse, Zora finds an
equivalent for the cunning Brer Rabbit of the Uncle Remus stories in
Haitis sly Ti Malis of popular lore. And in the rural belief that our
dead will one day return to Ginen, Africa, she uncovered echoes of the
strong convictions of many of those who were forced on board slave
ships for points of no return.
There were so many things that I found familiar in Their Eyes
Were Watching God: the dead-on orality in both the narration and
dialogue; the communal gatherings on open porches at dusk; the intimate storytelling (krik? krak!); the communal tall-tale sessions, both
about real people who have erred (zen) and fictional folks who have
hilariously blundered (blag). Her description of the elaborate burial of
Janies pet mule reminded me of an incident that she detailed in Tell
My Horse, in which Haitian president Antoine Simon ordered an elaborate Catholic funeral at the national cathedral for his pet goat Simalo,
something many Haitians would laugh about for years.
In class at Barnard, we gladly raised structural questions about
Their Eyes Were Watching God. Was it a love story or an adventure
story? We decided it could be both, as many other complex novels are.
18/260
Besides, dont adventures often include romance? And arent all exciting romances adventures?
We brought up issues that concerned us as young feminists and
womanists. Was Janie Crawford a good female role model or was she
solely defined by the men in her life? Many of us argued that Janie did
not have to be a role model at all. She simply had to be a fully realized
and complex character, which she was. She certainly manifested a will
of her own in spite of the efforts of her grandmother and her two first
husbands to dominate her, leaving her first husband when life with
him grew unbearable, and taking off with Tea Cake against public
opinion after the second husband died.
Why did Janie allow Tea Cake to beat her? Some of us thought that
Hurston tried to envision characters who are neither too holy nor too
evil. Her men and women are extremely nuanced, reflecting human
strengths as well as frailties. If Tea Cake were too cruel, then Janie
would not love him at all. If he were too uniformly pious, then rather
than being her equal, as he was at work in the fields, he would be worshipped by her, and all gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods
dispense suffering without reasons
half gods are worshipped in wine
and flowers. Real gods require blood. In the end, Janie receives from
Tea Cake the equivalent of all threewine, flowers, and bloodand
she becomes like a treasured relative whose love affair we could never
wholeheartedly condone, but the source of which we could certainly
understand. Tea Cake gives his life for Janie, and this, if nothing else,
serves as some atonement for many of his sins.
In spite of Janies choices concerning Tea Cake, or perhaps because
of them, she experiences more freedom than most women (certainly
most poor women) of her time. And as much as she loves Tea Cake,
she ultimately chooses to live and not to die with him, and her final act
is not to follow him to the grave, but to bury him and return alone to a
19/260
community that will not embrace and welcome her without first being
given an explanation as to where she has been and what she has been
through.
III
For many decades and, hopefully, centuries to come, Their Eyes Were
Watching God will probably be at the center of Zora Neale Hurstons
legacy as a novelist. Perhaps because it was written in such a short
and, reportedly, emotionally charged period, this is a novel with an
overpowering sense of exigency and urgency in its layered plot, swift
pace, intricate narration, and in the raw anguish evoked by the conflicting paths laid out for Janie Crawford as she attempts to survive
her grandmothers restricted vision of a black womans life and realize
her own self-conceived liberation. Like all individual thinkers, Janie
Crawford pays the price of exclusion for nonconformity, much like
Hurston herself, who was accused of stereotyping the people she loved
when she perhaps simply listened to them much more closely than
others, and sought to reclaim and reclassify their voices.
The novel not only offers a penetrating view of Janies evolving
thinking process, but we are also given plenty of insight into the mindsets of those who would wish to condemn her. Janie, however, is never
overly critical of her neighbors faultfinding reactions to her. She
either ign…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
