Zora Neale Hurston

In “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston makes it very obvious about what people thought of women at the time. They were trophy prizes. They were meant to sit on porches and observe the world instead of live in it. From the very beginning when Janie’s grandmother finds her kissing a boy, she warns her not to mess around with boys like that. She informs Janie that she should marry, not based on love, but based on financial stability (more or less).

“Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger women is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you. Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!”

This whole paragraph ties up Janie’s first two men. Brother Logan Killicks is so old that he has trouble doing his own work. He gives Janie his work and leaves her to finish it. He even leaves several times to do business, and tells her to stay at the house. The next treatment she gets from a man is Joe Starks. He is no better. Even though he starts off treating her well, by the end of their relationship, he is abusing her, emotionally, mentally, and physically. He is making the townspeople think that she is the bad one. He is always expecting her to do all the work and to stay in the house, since all the men think she is attractive. He keeps Janie locked up like a slave. He treats her as though he owns her.

Finally, she finds a man that she loved and that loved her back. The only problem with this relationship was that every once in a while, Tea Cake would abuse her by slapping her. This was not because he was mad at her, but because he had to show her who was boss (I don’t know which is worse).

In all, women in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel are treated as though they are slaves to their husbands. They are expected to have dinner on the table, and are expected to not leave the house unless they are told to do so. They are put on a horrible pedestal.

Cheever and O'Connor

Cheever's story about the swimmer was pretty good. I thought that it was great that it was told in first person. This made the story more effective. I also loved the way that a little bit of information was "leaked" out at a time. For example, when he went to the old people's pool and they told him they were sorry to hear about his house. It was great that he was totally oblivious to what they were talking about. This story reminds me of "Desperate Housewives" or "The Stepford Wives," where everyone sits around, drinks, talks about the same things, and everyone knows who does what in the town and so on. It was a little hard to figure out what was going on in the beginning, and I assume that he was a little crazy man, swimming from pool to pool, but thinking he was swimming across the country. What I think was that his neighbors all knew he was crazy and an alcoholic but were just keeping it quiet. I also thought it was genius of Cheever to keep everything in the alcoholic's perspective, so that the reader did not know too much of what was going on.

Good Country People by O'Connor was a little hard to get into. I didn't figure out what the point of view was in until the end of the story. I was totally smitten with this story. I really did not see the "little chrustian boy" as the evil one in this story. I guess that was one of O'Connor's use of trickery, using stereotypes and assumptions that the reader might have about characters. I also never really thought about Hulga, in the sense that she COULD be weak, even though she did have a fake leg. So many times, I assume that every smart person is always strong. I liked the omnitient narrative. I think that it worked very well for this story. It got a little boring at times though, listening to little stories about the mother and Mrs. Freeman.

I liked the way that both stories, even though they were about completely different things, had a little twist at the end. So many times, I assume that the person telling the story is in a right frame of mind, but The Swimmer showed me that I should enter a story with an open mind from now on. I really loved the way Good Country People makes us re-think what we think about people and how much we trust certain people. Mostly, we think that Christians are good people and they can be trusted. Even though the majority of the time this is true, it could also be false. We have to view people as individuals, and not by the label they carry.