Female Independence and Self-Actualization in Their Eyes Were Watching God

📌Category: Books, Their Eyes Were Watching God
📌Words: 1153
📌Pages: 5
📌Published: 31 March 2022

The unconscious driving force that propels human beings to seek more is the desire for self-actualization— being the best version that a person can be. Abraham Maslow, famed American psychologist, separates the road to self-actualization into a hierarchy of four different needs: physiological, safety, belongingness and love, and esteem. Once one need is met, a person moves on to meet another. It is thought that once these four needs are met, a person achieves self-actualization and reaches their full potential. In literature, the evolution of a character can be distinguished by the steps in their journey to self-actualization. In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses the setting to reflect the different stages of the main character Janie’s road to self-actualization to convey the idea that women find true self-actualization when they find their independence. Each transition of setting within the novel corresponds to additional needs met until Janie is finally independent and self-actualized. 

Janie achieves the first step in the hierarchy of needs in West Florida where she is brought up by her grandmother, Nanny. As Janie begins to tell her story to her friend Phoeby, she says, “Mah grandma raised me. Mah grandma and de white folks she worked wid. She had a house out in de back-yard and dat’s where Ah wuz born. They was quality white folks up dere in West Florida” (Hurston 8). It is here with Nanny that Janie’s physical needs are met. She is provided with food and shelter by her grandmother and the family that Nanny works for. However, Janie yearns for more and continues on her path to self-actualization where she reaches the next step, safety. Janie’s safety needs are met when Janie marries Logan Killicks in an arranged marriage facilitated by her grandmother. DeLisa Hawkes, a contributor to peer-reviewed The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs, contends that, as a former slave, Nanny fights for Janie to have a better life than she did by putting Janie in a situation that allows her to achieve her physical needs. Hawkes argues that, “According to Nanny’s beliefs, Killicks’s suitability for marriage is based on his land, luxuries, and mule, all of which possess the potential to provide Janie with the protection she needs for her womanhood and financial security after Nanny dies. Nanny wants Janie to focus on protection and not foolish fantasies of romance” (Hawkes 5). Janie’s safety needs are met through the attainment of financial safety as well as personal. Logan’s money and land provide Janie with what she needs to have her safety needs met. 

With her physiological and safety needs met, Janie searches for more. Unhappy in her marriage with Logan, Janie craves more. More, at first, comes in the form of Joe Starks. Joe is an extremely well-spoken man who Janie leaves Logan for and moves to Eatonville where she partially fulfillsfufills her third need, love and belonging. The partial fulfillmentfufillment is due to the fact that while Janie finds status and some aspects of community and friendship, it is not until Joe dies and she finds true love with Tea Cake in the Everglades that her love and belonging need is truly met. In describing her experience in the Everglades, Janie thinks to herself: 

What if Eatonville could see her now in her blue denim overalls and heavy shoes? The crowd of people around her and a dice game on her floor! She was sorry for her friends back there and scornful of the others. The men held big arguments here like they used to do on the store porch. Only here, she could listen and laugh and even talk some herself in she wanted to. (Hurston 134) 

In the Everglades, Janie is able to fully achieve love and belonging. She is deeply in love with Tea Cake, and he is deeply in love with her. She has a valuable place in her community, as well as acceptance, status, respect, friendship. Unlike in Eatonville, Janie is able to be a part of the conversation. With the first three needs met, Janie is content. While Janie is in love and satisfied in the Everglades with Tea Cake, Tea Cake’s abuse prevents her from reaching the next level in the hierarchy of needs, esteem. However, when Tea Cake is bitten by a rabidrapid dog while he is trying to save Janie from drowning during a hurricane and contracts rabies, Janie is forced to make a decision that pushes her to reach the level of esteem. To prevent herself from being killed due to Tea Cakes rabies-induced hysteria, Janie mustJanie is must shoot Tea Cake. In her article in the UCCS Undergraduate Research Journal, Katie Pritchard writes, “He does not die protecting Janie; she must kill him to protect herself. Janie chooses herself and her own life instead of a literary death beside him. In the end, Janie regains her freedom from Tea Cake’s burdens of violence and domination by saving her own life” (Pritchard 23). In choosing to save herself, Janie finds self-respect and self-worth. She chooses to value her life more than Tea Cakes which is the true mark of finding her esteem.  

Having lost Tea Cake, Janie decides to move back to Eatonville. As she had reached esteem by shooting Tea Cake, Janie’s move back to Eatonville marks the achievement of all four steps to Janie’s true fulfillmentfufilment of self-actualization. When Janie is sitting in her house upon her return to Eatonville, Hurston writes: 

Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulders. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see. (Hurston 193)

Janie is the best version of who she can be when she returns to Eatonville and the story ends. She is at peace. More importantly, she is independent. Janie is free from the men in her life and the expectations that they had and the burdens that they carried. Laura Fox, a contributor to New Views on Gender, writes,“By the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God, however, Janie — somewhat surprisingly but not yet unexpectedly — emerges like a butterfly from the cocoon of silence and oppression she has been enveloped in under the yolk of the men in her life. Indeed, ready to spring her wings and fly, Janie finds her own sense of purpose and self-realization and becomes a sort of “Mother,” a repository of community knowledge, strength and feminine unity” (Fox 16). Janie’s self-realization is connected to her independence. When Janie reached the four steps necessary to attain self-actualization, Janie achieved her independence and her self-actualization. This highlights a larger idea that emphasizes that for women to reach self-actualization, they must reach their own version of independence. 

The novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a powerful story that chronicles the story of Janie Crawford on her journey to self-actualization. Zora Neale Hurston uses the setting to reflect the different stages of self-actualization all to lead to the culminating idea that women find true self-actualization when they reach their independence. The connection of self-actualization and female independence is part of a larger idea that women are allowed to reach their full potential outside of familial expectations and the men in their lives. Women must be, by their own definition, free in order to be the best version of themselves and lifted up instead of being pushed down.

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