The Female Rebellion Against Role Expectation

Zora Neale Hurston is one of the representatives of African American women writers in the 20^th century.Her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God deeply reveals the hardships and difficulties of women's life by discussing the different characters'expectations for the protagonist Janie and her different role perceptions.Many scholars and critics at home and abroad have analyzed this novel from many perspectives,but few of them adopt role theory to analyze this novel.This thesis tries to explore Janie's rebellion from the perspective of role theory,which also provides a new angle to study Hurston's other works.This thesis consists of three parts:introduction,body part and conclusion.The body is divided into three chapters.The introduction is composed of four parts.Firstly,there is a brief introduction to Neale Hurston and her main works and the current academic research status of Their Eyes Were Watching God.And then the second part covers more details of the role theory including the origin,development history,theoretical schools and important concepts applied in this thesis.Role expectation connects social structure with role behaviors,which provides motivation for role players.Role players perform a series of role behaviors based on the characters'expectations and their own perceptions of the expectations in society.And the last part of introduction is about the significance and the structure of this thesis.The first chapter mainly analyzes the characters'role expectation for Janie,which is divided into three parts.The first part is about people expecting Janie to have a rich material life.As long as the material conditions can be met,spiritual life can be ignored.The second part is that people want Janie to be mentally attached to them without having her own mind.They just hope Janie is a doll controlled by them and that everything would be in line with them.The last part of this chapter is that people expect Janie to behave in step with them.Janie should behave according to their expectations.If Janie does not behave as they expect,they will take some violent measures to force Janie to meet their expectations.The second chapter discusses Janie's rebellion against these characters'expectations.First of all,Janie is not content with a rich material life.Janie is more inclined to have a rich spiritual life rather than a rich material life.She craves for love and respect.Such desires are no doubt inseparable from her inner self expectations.Poor spiritual life is intolerable to her,so she has made great efforts for a colorful and spiritual life.Secondly,Janie is not content to be a“marionette”who is always controlled by others.She wants to be mentally independent.With the time passing by,Janie's spiritual world begins to be awakened.She has a different understanding of the world and the relationships among people.The last part of this chapter is Janie's breakthrough for behavioral freedom.She bravely breaks through the behavioral constraints imposed on her with her actual actions.The third chapter interprets the inadequacy of Janie's rebellion against role expectations and reasons for it.Although Janie breaks through the social expectations to a certain extent,her change is not complete.With the death of her last husband,her happiness will eventually disappear.This part mainly analyzes the reasons behind this inadequacy from both personal and social aspects.Personal reasons mainly include defects of the growth background and personal personality,as well as self-obedience to social role expectations.Growing up in the family without any love from parents,Janie desires love but does not know what love is,which promotes her to understand it in her own way.However,her own way is not to rely on her self-growth but to place her hope on getting married again and again to satisfy her desires.The family background also helps her form a submissive understanding of social role expectations,thinking she can become happy as long as she obeys expectations.Women's lives become more and more difficult in the society of racial and gender discrimination.Janie tries to change her fate,but her efforts do not rely on her own strength to pursue happiness,but to change the status by getting married repeatedly.This kind of happiness relying on others would only lead to tragedy in that era.The conclusion part summarizes the whole thesis.Their Eyes Were Watching God not only discusses reasons for the failure of the marriage of the black woman Janie,but also profoundly portrays the survival situation of all the women.Racial and gender discrimination have brought misery not only to the black women,but also to everyone.As for black women,it is only through their own efforts,not others',that they can break their tragic fate.