An Ecological Reading Of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston（1891-1960）is an outstanding and productive woman writer inAmerica in the20th century. Her second book Their Eyes Were Watching God was publishedin1937, and this novel was considered Hurston’s most important work. It tells a story abouta black woman-Janie’s three marriages in25years whose whole life is struggling for selfidentity. In this thesis, the author tries to analysis the novel from an ecological perspective. Italso shows Hurston’s profound reflection about the relationship between man and nature,male and female, the white and the black, which will help the reader to understand Their EyesWere Watching God from a new angle.In the introduction, the author tells something about Zora Neale Hurston and Their EyesWere Watching God’s status in American literature, the main idea of the novel, the literaturereview of current studies about this novel, besides, it also introduces the theory of ecology.Chapter one is preoccupied with the relationship between mankind and the nature. Itemphasizes that everything in this world can not exist independently, just as human beingscan not survive without nature. At the same time human beings do harm to the nature, theyshould realize that one day they would make to pay a price for what they had done, soprotecting nature is protecting ourselves. Chapter two refers men’s oppression towardswomen, the same as the relationship between human beings and nature, in patriarchal society,women were not taken as equal as men, and from the perspective of men, women were onlyattachments that belong with men. In chapter three, racial discrimination is referred, the blackhad suffered a lot under the white’s oppression, after long times of dominatied by the white,many blacks were whitened, and they even forgot their identities as blacks.Through these three chapters we come to the conclusion that as long as the relationshipsbetween nature and man, men and women, the white and the black are better harmonized,could our world be a ecological and harmonious one.