Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Baby Janie”

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel about a woman named Janie who grows up and finds out what life and God have in store for her. The story is very similar to Black Women by Georgia Johnson. This novel and poem share similar themes, characters, and symbols. This similarity is seen through out these two works within their writing.

These two stories both tell a basic theme of being born into a harsh world and the choices which must be made by the characters. The themes main focus is on the development of the baby and Janie and the paths they chose to follow. In “Black Woman” the child is ready to be born, but the mother isn’t willing to have the baby just yet. Her reasoning for not wanting to have the baby is the fact that the world is full of “cruelty and sin” and the “monster men” (Johnson, 4) who inhabit the earth are bad. The mother in this poem can see the world is harsh and that raising a baby in such a world would be difficult and a struggle. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s grandma wants her to get married to an older man right away. Her reasoning is because she too also has seen how harsh the world is and doesn’t want her baby Janie to be stuck alone and have to live in hardship. Janie, like the unborn child, is determined to go her own path and set her own life. They both seem to feel that they are ready for what life has in store for them. Janie wants to live her own life by her own decisions, and the baby wants to go on the same path and be born into the world to start its’ “path”. These similarities in theme are very apparent through the novel and relates to Black Woman’s story.

Both Their Eyes Were Watching God and “Black Woman” have very similar characters due to their decisive and protective qualities. Janie is very happy with life as she sees it and wants to make her own decisions. Her grandma wants to protect her from a wrong choice, so she decides Janie must marry Logan. ”I wants to see you married right away” (Hurston 12). Like Janie, the unborn child is ready to come into the world and live a beautiful life of happiness. Her mother on the other hand, doesn’t want to give birth just yet because the world isn’t ready. The mother in “Black Woman” is very similar to Grandma due to the fact that they both want the best for their young and are willing to make the correct, mature decisions for them. Both of these characters are actually making the decisions which they believe to be right, not the decisions which Janie or the baby wants. The mother is willing to hold off her delivery until she presumes the world is ready for her child. An example of this protection is when Janie marries Logan for protection but later she leaves Logan for Joe; a man who treats her