The Legacy of Romanticism: the Pear Tree and Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (2016)
Hajjari, Leila (Author)
Harehdasht, Hossein Aliakbari (Author)
Ghasemi, Parvin (Author)
Journal of African American Studies
Volume: 20
Issue: 1
Pages: 35-52
Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and its protagonist, Janie Crawford, have mostly been studied under the rubrics of African American culture. That is why the readings are typically concerned with the analysis of the protagonist’s personality in her African American society, e.g., the study of such issues as language, racial discrimination, and male authority, to name but few. Emphasizing the protagonist’s connection with the pear tree as a synecdoche for nature, the authors endeavor to examine the novel and its heroine in a romantic context. It will be argued that Janie’s personality is subject to a tri-partite development. A connection will be drawn between her infatuation with the pear tree as her source of inspiration and the three stages of her life to demonstrate her growth from innocence to experience to organized innocence. Analyzing Hurston’s masterpiece from this perspective provides a better understanding of the mechanism that leads to the protagonist’s development. "Janie Crawford, the protagonist in the novel, establishes a prolonged relationship with nature in general and with the pear tree specifically in order to escape the mechanism of her communal life. "
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Carolyn Finney;
(2014)
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
(/isis/citation/CBB468417469/)
Book
Harrison, Ira E.;
Harrison, Faye V.;
(1999)
African-American Pioneers in Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000110244/)
Article
Olivia Marcucci;
(2017)
Zora Neale Hurston and the Brown Debate: Race, Class, and the Progressive Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB076521156/)
Book
Christopher Abram;
(2019)
Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB236553261/)
Book
Oscar de la Torre;
(2018)
The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835–1945
(/isis/citation/CBB716355605/)
Book
John Lennon;
(2014)
Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869-1956
(/isis/citation/CBB807072736/)
Article
Rüdiger Graf;
(2020)
Truth in the Jungle of Literature, Science, and Politics: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Food Control Reforms during the Progressive Era
(/isis/citation/CBB563474141/)
Book
Josh Doty;
(2020)
The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB390733948/)
Book
Andrea Stone;
(2016)
Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB310374882/)
Thesis
Newman, Megan Haley;
(2001)
The Vermin-Killers: Pest Control in the Early Chesapeake
(/isis/citation/CBB001562392/)
Book
Lerone A. Martin;
(2014)
Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion
(/isis/citation/CBB497586158/)
Book
Jonathan M. Metzl;
(2020)
Étouffer la révolte: La psychiatrie contre les Civils Rights, une histoire du contrôle social
(/isis/citation/CBB840020850/)
Book
Mickens, Ronald E.;
(2002)
Edward Bouchet: The First African-American Doctorate
(/isis/citation/CBB000201894/)
Book
Kornweibel, Theodore;
(2010)
Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey
(/isis/citation/CBB001230717/)
Thesis
Claudia Jeanne Ford;
(2015)
Weed Women, All Night Vigils, and the Secret Life of Plants: Negotiated Epistemologies of Ethnogynecological Plant Knowledge in American History
(/isis/citation/CBB407270471/)
Book
Ellen C. Scott;
(2014)
Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era
(/isis/citation/CBB195877199/)
Article
Gregory Bond;
(2018)
“Love Him and Let Him Go”: The American Colonization Society's James Brown—Pioneering African-American Apothecary in the United States and Liberia, 1802–1853, Part I—The United States
(/isis/citation/CBB749822662/)
Book
James Michael Brodie;
(1993)
Created Equal: The Lives and Ideas of Black American Innovators
(/isis/citation/CBB935934498/)
Thesis
Jones, Rita Michelle;
(2001)
Pills, Pleasure, and Reproduction: Reconsidering Mothers' Little Helpers of the Postwar Era (1945--1965)
(/isis/citation/CBB001562379/)
Article
Savitt, T. L.;
(2000)
Four African-American proprietary medical colleges: 1888-1923
(/isis/citation/CBB000111187/)
Be the first to comment!