Love is a topic that has been written and sang about through ages because love is a key subject in life. Love is an emotion felt and displayed by people, with each individual expressing love in their own unique way. Zora Hurston was an African American woman writer whose work was criticized for her views on love. In her book “Their eyes were watching God, she demonstrates the lack of love in African American marriages, and the great lengths to which women have to go in search for love. Stevie Wonder was an African American singer who demonstrated his opinions on love through his album “Songs in the key of life.” This essay will discuss the connection between Zora Hurston’s point of view about love in here novel “their eyes were watching god”, and Stevie Wonder’s point view of love in his Album “Songs in the key of life”. Both Hurston and Wonder are skeptical about the relationship between love and marriage, and the two go to great lengths to protect these believes as shown in the novel and album respectively, and their way of life.
Hurston take on matters of love received various criticism from across the world. According to Hurston, marriage was not a sign of love and this was reflected in her personal, in which she chose to remain single. Wonder got married and divorced early after two years of marriage at the tender age of 21 (Gates and Higginbotham 908). He later found love and married the object of his love. Although he believed in the purity of love, Wonder considered marriage to a woman as one of the means through which men should demonstrate their unconditional love for women. She considers the institution of marriage as an arena which allowed women to be oppressed by the opposite gender, both in mind and physically. Marriage was an object of victimization for women, and it prevented women from reaching their full potential. Hurston uses the context of African American marriages, which she considers as a system of values, rather than an object to demonstrate love. Happiness was never considered a part of the American African marriage (Hurston 31-32).
Even in satisfactory relationships, Hurston considers happiness absent and she considers these women to be suffocated by these relationships. Janie’s grandmother is sexually abused by her husband, a trend that was common among most African American marriages. Janie’s grandmother admits to Janie that she does not like the kind of world they live in, which denied them the pleasure of dreaming (Gates and Higginbotham 31-32). Instead, women were considered tools of work, which were used by men. A man who loved a woman should allow her to dream. Janie is forced to marry Kellicks, a man she does not love, and just sharing a bed with him makes her uncomfortable, that she admits she thinks death a better choice.
Love should allow women to choose their lover’s instead of being forced on them. When Janie first choose Starks as her lover, she is happy for the first time. Love allowed people to share, together and make love. Janie felt different about the man she truly loved, and she always felt intoxicated in his presence (Hurston 161). Love was considered as a thought for most women as only very few of them had experienced true love. Men on the other hand, associated jealousy with love, which they used to defend the act of beating their wives constantly. Women are to seek love through any means possible which went to the limits of cheating on their husbands, passionate and submissive women, sensual beings, and women who used their sexuality to go after the men they desired. Women who experienced love were sexually satisfied contrary to most women who lay in bed unattended by their husbands (Hurston 111). Men who loved their husbands did not use their sexual organ to punish or reward women, but instead, they used it to show their women that they loved them. Love is associated with gentle masculinity.
Janie’s love for her third husband Tea Cake, she willingly obliges to his commands and his friends are even jealous of Tea Cake for finding himself such a good wife (Hurston 111). Wonder believed in a selfless kind of love in which he saw befitting to simply call a woman to declare that he loved her (Gates and Higginbotham 908). This same selfless love is seen with Janie’s third husband who sacrifices himself and gets bitten while protecting her beloved. Love treated the other partner as an equal, and not as an object to control. Wonders songs were based on the various social issues which faced the issue of love in the society. According to Wonder, love itself was demanding and had to be nurtured. It also needed love (Myers). Later when Tea Cake becomes too obsessive with Janie, he beats her up in jealousy, and Janie kills him in self-defense. She decides to remain single as she has finally realized marriage does not guarantee happiness .
In conclusion, both Hurston and Wonder had very strong opinions on love and marriage. These opinions are clearly evident in the kind of lives they lead, in which Hurston remains single all her life while Wonder gets a divorce early in life. Wonder believes love should be an effortless emotion and one that cannot be forced. He has no problem getting a divorce and finding love again which ends in a happy marriage. in Hurston’s book, the character Janie marries thrice to find love until after her third marriage when she decides that she can afford to be alone and happy. She goes to great lengths to find love which according to her should be equal and selfless, and that both parties should derive equal pleasure from the marriage.
Works Cited
Gates, Henry Louis and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. African American lives. New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their eyes were watching God. New York: Harperluxe, 2008. Print.
Myers, Marc. "How Stevie Wonder Created ‘Love’s in Need of Love Today’." The Wall Street Journal 17 March 2015. Web. <http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-stevie-wonder-created-loves-in-need-of-love-today-1426603130>.
