Their Eyes Were Watching God: Personal Relationships

Their Eyes Were Watching God: Personal Relationships Zora Neale Hurston, in keeping with themes dealing with personal relationships and 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 don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and …

…of Their Eyes Were Watching God, "for most Black women readers discovering Their Eyes for the first time, what was most compelling was the figure of Janie Crawford - powerful, articulate, self-reliant, and radically different from any woman character they had ever before encountered in literature." Janie Crawford is defiant; she defies men, but most importantly, she defies our own preconceived notions of what the role of an African-American woman should be in modern literature.