Personal experiences often shape how people see the world. This can be said for people’s views of love and what love means to the individual. In Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character Janie searches for love and what true love is to her ever since she first got married. As Janie lives her life, she experiences marriage with three men: Logan Killicks, Jody starks, and Tea Cake, each of whom she initially believes she loves. However, as the story continues, she realizes that she does not truly love any of them except for Tea Cake. Exploring Janie’s journey of love, the novel utilises the motif of the horizon as she goes from one marriage to another, figuring out true love is something that comes with both choice, and …show more content…
While horizons are usually depictions of sunsets or the sun in the sky overhead, the novel represents the horizon as the ideal future, an unknown future with hope for change to happen. Setting the audience up for this connotation for the preceding chapters, the first paragraph of the novel commences using the idea of the horizon and the sun, “Ship’s at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some, they come in… For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight”(1). For people whose dreams do not come true immediately, they still remain in their minds, in an ideal future where it can still come true eventually. They do not let the dream die if it seems that it will not come true. As Janie’s life progresses, she tries to reach her horizon, her ideal future of finding someone that she truly loves, and she gets closer as she goes through her …show more content…
When Janie is sixteen years old, her nanny coerces her to marry a man named Logan Killicks to not disappoint her. Despite not loving Logan in the slightest, Jane marries him to make nanny proud, she goes along with it because she is under the conception that “marriage compel[s] love like the sun the day”(21). She believes that love will come eventually after marriage commences just as automatically as the sun rises each morning. Janie holds this idea with her because she wants to find love, and she thinks that marriage is the correct way of going about it. However, over the course of Janie’s marriage with Logan, she realizes this is not the case. She never feels in love with Logan like she thinks will happen after marriage, “Looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead”(25). As one dream ends, a new one begins for Janie as she looks to the horizon. Janie initially holds the thought of love because of marriage, with this not being the reality, she knows it is time to find a new dream. Janie would see that she did not love Logan before their marriage if she has a choice in whom she's marrying. This is a lesson that Janie learns from her first marriage, and this might lead to the impetuous decision of marrying her next husband, Jody. It is
Sanchez Pg.1 Perfection does not exist within the finding of a husband. Woman may unintentionally encounter several marriages and in the end it may seem like everything happens for a reason. Experiencing a horizon would be a blessing to protagonist Janie Mae Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She is an African American woman who deals with hardships while being married to her three husbands Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake, each having their own effect on Janie.
In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston traces Janie’s quest for independence and the search of her self-confidence through events that happened before and after her epiphany immediately following Joe’s death. Throughout the novel Janie’s view of life, her independence, and her view of love changed exceedingly depending on who she was married to. This story centers around an important epiphany that Janie has when Joe dies; that personal discoveries and life experiences help people find themselves. Before her revelation, when Janie is 16 years old, she experiences a moment of realization in she discovers new-found feelings about love, marriage, . Under the pear-tree, she has a perfect moment in nature, full of passion
One of the biggest themes in, "Their eyes were watching God" is Janie’s quest for love and independence. Janie has a goal throughout the novel to find enlightenment within herself and reach the "horizon". She went through several relationships and absurd thoughts to do this, through her grandmother nanny and her three husbands. However, her third husband, Tea Cake plays a less substantial role in the progression of the novel but a significant role in Janie’s quest to reach her dream of love and security within herself.
This makes Janie learn that you should marry someone that you actually like to be with and that marriage doesn’t always mean love. Throughout the book Hurston uses many forms of figurative language and symbols to describe Janie’s feelings about love. One of these is “She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface
Janie Mae Crawford’s story is one of turmoil, and struggles. Janie wishes to live a fairytale life to make up for her troubled upbringing. While Nanny did raise Janie well, and tried to do what was best for her, it is still hard to go through life without your parents. Especially because Janie never really knew her father or her mother, she is trying to create this fairytale life for herself in order to do the opposite of what her parents have done. But because Janie is striving for this fairytale life, she will never be satisfied, because fairytales are not real.
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, we follow our protagonist, Janie, through a journey of self-discovery. We watch Janie from when she was a child to her adulthood, slowly watching her ideals change while other dreams of hers unfortunately die. This is shown when Jane first formulates her idea of love, marriage, and intimacy by comparing it to a pear tree; erotic, beautiful, and full of life. After Janie gets married to her first spouse, Logan Killicks, she doesn’t see her love fantasy happening, but she waits because her Nanny tells her that love comes after marriage. Janie, thinking that Nanny is wise beyond her years, decides to wait.
People of all differences can dream for the enrichment of their lives. Hopes and dreams are prevalent in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God whether they are eradicated or achieved. The protagonist of the novel, Janie Crawford, longs for a passionate, loving marriage despite all other oppositions for her to marry for security. However, Janie is constantly mocked by her dreams which appear just out of reach.
Logan Killicks was just the beginning for Janie, leaving her with the realization she first developed herself as a woman with him. Joe Starks gave her only what she had thought was love. Janie was left in a dark place until she developed the courage in regards to standing up for herself, and voicing her opinion to Joe. Joe’s death later in the novel, was a door opening for Janie. She could be free of the pain and continue her development as a woman through courage.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie suffers from hardship in two relationships before she can find her true love. Janie explains to her best friend, Pheoby, how she searches for love. Therefore Pheoby wants to hear the true story, rather than listening to the porch sitters. Throughout the book Janie experiences different types of love with three different men; Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Vergible "Tea Cake" Woods. At 16 Janie marries Logan Killicks.
Janie has many encounters with men where she felt love but she couldn’t maintain them. Her first husband held no love but rather only respect for Janie. The first husband was a gateway to her second lover, Jody. Jody loved Janie and she to him but as time progressed his ambitions destroyed what they had previously cherished.
She comes to understand that love is not what she made it out to be when she was a young girl in the back of her nanny’s yard looking up at the pear tree. It is “ uh love game” (Hurston 114). It is not until the end of the novel, where Janie understands that she has lived her ideal “love” with Tea Cake for it was unconditional, raw, and
In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the protagonist Janie, is influenced by others to change her ideals. Hurston vividly portrays Janie’s outward struggle while emphasising her inward struggle by expressing Janie’s thoughts and emotions. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening the protagonist is concisely characterized as having “that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions,” as Janie does. Janie conforms outwardly to her life but questions inwardly to her marriages with Logan Killicks, her first husband, and Joe Starks, her second husband; Janie also questions her grandmother's influence on what love and marriage is.
Zora Neale Hurston, an author during the Harlem Renaissance, wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, an amazing novel written about the losses and loves of a lady named Janie Crawford. The author describes the way Janie found out who she really was and what love was throughout her three marriages. Janie’s first two marriages were unfulfilling and not healthy for herself. Janie realized what true love was when she met Tea Cake. Janie’s first marriage was to a man named Logan Killicks, which was forced upon her by her grandmother.
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” is a novel written by Zora Neale Hurston. The novel portrays Janie, a middle aged black woman who tells her friend Pheoby Watson what has happened to her husband Tea Cake and her adventure. The resulting telling of her story portrays most of the novel. Throughout the novel, Zora Neale Hurston presents the theme of love, or being in a relationship versus freedom and independence, that being in a relationship may hinder one’s freedom and independence. Janie loves to be outgoing and to be able to do what she wants, but throughout the book the relationships that she is in with Logan,Jody and Tea Cake, does not allow her to do that.
After leaving Logan and marrying Joe, she was very happy and seemed to be in love but soon after becomes a “trophy wife” and was just going through the motions of marriage. “No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some… She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value”(Huston, 76). At this point Janie had fully accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to have love in her marriage, and didn’t really care. At this point Janie’s character starts to develope into a more independent woman who cared less about what he husband wanted and more about what she wanted.