Growing up an Afro-American Woman:

Abstract

Growing up an Afro-American woman in the twentieth century has been one of the hardest challenges that black women have had to handle. Hence, this study is an attempt to analyze from both the psychoanalytic and the feminist perspectives the stages of Janie Crawford’s growing up as well as her quest for feminine power and assertion in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching (1937). The study attempts to investigate the relationship between Hurston’s life and her novel’s events. Therefore, the study aims on one hand at scrutinizing the protagonist's journey of giving up her role as a submissive and indecisive woman to adopt after long painful experiences the role of a strong woman who fights for her feminine voice against patriarchy and domination, and on the other hand it aims at portraying how Hurston embalms her painful memories and experiences in the novel as a tool for healing her scars. The results of the analysis prove that the novel is highly feminist, in view of that, Janie Crawford can be seen as an example like all Afro-American women who have suffered from sexism and have emerged in spite of that independent and self-liberated.