In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the author Zora Neale Hurston is interested in women’s role in society and male-female relationships.   Hurston’s depiction of the differences that exist between the male and female gender is extraordinary.  She is able to incorporate the folk language and descriptive metaphoric language in order to paint the most vivid and intricate picture of her characters and their surroundings.

This novel focuses on the character and heroine Janie, who learns several life lessons through male and female relationships.  Janie’s story has often been described as a woman's coming of age story, where she moves from a young girl to a mature woman or a bildungsroman.  This novel has also been viewed as a “feminist” novel, where a beautiful woman releases herself from a world of male values and enters into a life of a “woman’s freedom.”  The lessons that she learns in life help her to grow as a person.  Hurston shows this growth process through Janie’s process of gradually achieving a voice.  And only when she finds and hears her voice, is Janie able to begin to have autonomy and self-direction.

The character, Janie, learns her life lessons, while moving through life under the ruling hands of men, having no self-direction and directed mainly by whim.  Janie, having no real stability, runs away from her first marriage and marries Joe Starks, who promises her the world.  But Janie realizes that this world that he promises her is not what she truly wants.  This is a world where women are not allowed to have a voice, a world where a woman's place is in the home.  She is unhappy in a world where she is not a wife, but a showpiece to be paraded around.  Janie realizes that this world that Joe promises her is a world where she is not treated as a person, but an object to be seen or felt and used for the owner's use, not to think or to be heard.

The text taken from the end of chapter eight is one the most powerful sections in the novel.  In this scene, Joe is dying and losing his mind.  It is also in this scene that Janie feels the urgency to be heard by Joe, who has constantly suppressed her voice throughout their marriage.  Janie is finally able articulate to Joe her feelings about their marriage and the world that he has promised her.  Janie finally discovers her voice and Joe hears it before he dies.

On the one hand, it could be argued that Janie can only speak her true feelings to Joe when she knows that there can be no consequences: he is on his deathbed, so there is no risk involved.  On the other hand, Janie finally is able to hear her voice and knows that it exists and can be used.  Janie now has a newfound freedom and self-direction that neither she nor Joe knew existed.  This is her first step to freeing herself from the constraints of this patriarchal society.  She is now prepared to rely on herself instead of man, although they have taught her many lessons.  These lessons, however, have made her stronger and helped her to mature from “young girl…to a handsome woman (83).  By the end of this chapter, Janie is no longer going to play by the rules of “this world” in which she has lived for almost 40 years.  She is now going to live life in a way that is comfortable for her, where she is free to think, live, move, breath, and finally speak!