Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some, they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. 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 do things accordingly (Hurston 15).
This quote is at the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God and serves to usher the reader to the novel’s theme of gender difference. The quotation in itself rebels from the feminist notion that men and women are equal establishing that men and women are primarily different not only in their sexes but also in their perceptions. From the quote, we can see the author’s attempts to symbolically demonstrate how men and women have different needs from each other and from the environment around them. In the plot, for example, Janie is in search of the man that can demonstrate the values while Logan and Jody are also in their relationships pursuing their distinct needs. Generally, the significance of the quote above to the first four chapters of their eyes was watching God can be defined in its foreshadowing of the major thematic aspects of the novel that revolve around gender difference. According to this quote, men rarely reach their ambitions due to their inability to control their thoughts while women control their wills hence chasing their dreams.
Works Cited
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937.” Urbana: U of Illinois P (1978).