Sexism In Their Eyes Were Watching God

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In her book Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston portrays the story of an African American woman’s experience with sexism. Throughout the novel, Janie strives for high self-worth and gender equality while living in a society that values misogyny. As a result, she often neglects the expected behaviors of women in her society, something extremely uncommon for women to do at that time. In one such incident, after Jody calls her an old woman, Janie retaliates harshly by calling him an old man and pointing out his large stomach. Furious with the fact that his own wife would embarrass him and stand up to him like that, Jody wages a silent war against Janie. Specifically, Jody begins to sleep downstairs instead of sleeping with Janie, and he tries to …show more content…
When Janie and Jody are around each other in the store, Hurston explains that “anybody that didn’t know would have thought that things have blown over, it looked so quiet and peaceful around. But the stillness was the sleep of swords” (81). Because Jody decides to ignore Janie as much as possible following her retaliation, the store appears to be “quiet and peaceful” due to the absence of interaction between Jody and Janie. However, in reality, Hurston indicates that the “stillness” of the store was “the sleep of swords”, suggesting that the store was quiet only because Janie and Jody were not fighting. Similar to the previous imagery of Jody licking his wounds, this passage also suggests that Jody is somewhat animalistic, as he immediately resorts to “swords” and fighting once his “territory”, his pride, is taken away from him. Hurston’s depiction of the contrast between reality and what appears to be reality in this passage displays the pretenses and false appearances in Janie’s and Jody’s lives, ultimately leading to an extremely unhealthy
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