The Theme of Sexuality in Their Eyes Were Watching God Research Paper

The Theme of Sexuality in Their Eyes Were Watching God - Research Paper Example novel, and Hurston describes it in the context of slavery to show that it was a regular and repeated aspect of the black woman’s experience in slavery, and occurred in the early formative age of adulthood in the place of a woman’s education. The relation of racist authority to rape in the narrative is that Janie’s father and grandfather are both portrayed as white, and the educational system is equated in lineage with the system of slave ownership. This is a fundamental social and political critique that is introduced through the common dialect of the Southern woman and related through her personal sexual experience. The historical base is expressed by Zora Neale Hurston through sexual relationships, and this interracial sexuality is paradoxical, integral, and structural in her writing throughout the novel. In this context of repression, Hurston presents only a brief glimpse of the hope for genuine love in youth, which is quickly replaced with a black folk tradition that is portrayed as repressive to womanhood in a manner equally to be resisted and run away from as slavery. The repression of family tradition is portrayed through forced marriage, which implied another type of rape and forced servitude of the woman. Janie’s compromise is to arrange a marriage on her own terms that supports her own self materially on her own terms, even if she has to leave everything she knows to do so. Thus she provides for her needs while giving herself a limited economic role in the society at large through her husband’s business. When this ends early through the death of Joe Starks, Janie has the ability to choose any man in her society from a position of independent stature. Rather than the professor or tycoon, Hurston presents Tea Cake as a model of the black male with whom Janie most identifies. Their love also accelerates into death, but in this instance it is from the increased slow burn of passions, rather than their extinguishment. In the end, the gossip of black