Relatable (Metaphor)
When Zadie was only fourteen, her mother gave her Their Eyes Were Watching God. Of course, she wasn’t fond of the idea of reading something that was recommended by her mother. However, as soon as she had read the first page, the girl knew that that it was a special book! Every idea was so relatable that Zadie recognized herself in almost every female character. The second part of Their Eyes Were Watching God, “about women,” “struck home.” It was and remains “an accurate description of her mother” and her. “There hours later” the girl was “finished and crying a lot,” for reasons that “both were, and were not, to do with its tragic finale.”
The new beginning (Metaphor)
Janie’s story and her progress “through three marriages” confronted Zadie “with the significant idea” that the choice one would make “between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another)” stretched “beyond romance.” It would b the choice between “values, possibilities, future, hopes, arguments,” “languages,” and “lives.” Janie disagreed with her grandmother’s famous line “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world.” She believed that “God tore down the old world every evening” and “built a new one by sun-up.” There always was a chance.
The same (Metaphor)
According to Zadie, that part of Janie that is “looking for someone” or “something” that “spoke for far horizon” had its “proud ancestors” in “Elizabeth Bennet, in Dorothea Brook, in Jane Eyre,” and even in “Emma Bovary.” Though “the romantic quest” aspect of those fictions had been “often casually ridiculed,” Zadie didn’t see it as banality. Yes, Janie took her time to find the man she would love, but it didn’t make the fiction trivial or shallow. That was the story about “the discovery of self” in and “through another.”
