I wrote this paper in a few hours after not only speed reading the book, but also having been awake for far longer than I should have. It was finals week and I had over twelve papers to write in one week. Honestly, I was probably near delirium, but it resulted in one of my favorite papers.
I say sped read, but really I ended up spending more time than I thought I would just savoring the words. I think part of why it was so easy to read and write this paper was because of how beautiful it was. It was full of such beautiful, extremely vivid imagery that made me want to respond in kind. It was a bit shocking how the words just poured out of me.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel by Zora Neale Hurston. It follows Janie Crawford as she recounts her life and her romances that she followed searching for her horizon. The novel uses African-American Vernacular English as well as figurative language to paint a picture of the post slavery South. However, this story is not about slavery, or even about racial issues, though they do play a role as those issues color the experiences of the individuals as well as the collective within the novel. Instead, this story is about love and independence, or at least the journey to find the former which led to the latter. This will be examined using the quote from chapter two, “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.” This metaphor is the metaphor of Janie’s life and every phrase deals with her journey and growth. This paper will dissect her suffering, enjoyment, things done and things undone (whether of her doing or others), her dawns, and finally her deaths.
To begin, it is necessary to understand what the tree means to Janie exactly. The tree metaphor is first introduced in the form of a pear tree. The pear tree Janie enjoys sitting under in her Nanny’s yard was where she first imagined what marriage and love were. To sixteen year old Janie, love and marriage were akin to a bee sinking into the blooms of a flowering pear tree, fertilizing it and shaking the entire tree down to its roots. (10). This of course was in the wake of her first kiss with the young Johnny Taylor, so while it was driven by young hormones - her sexual awakening - Janie knew that her future love and marriage must shake her to her core and fertilize her. Therefore, the tree represents Janie.
Tree metaphors have been sprinkled all over Their Eyes Were Watching God, and they all relate to people. Very few people are trees in full bloom. This makes Janie stand out, but it also others her. She is an outcast in most of her communities due to her vibrance and beauty. I do not believe her beauty is what makes her different. It is her capacity to dream and strive towards something outside the mainstream that makes her vibrant. Because of this she suffers reproach, jealousy and negative speech.
Janie starts her life in the care of her grandmother, Nanny. This is where the first of sufferings occurs. Janie’s mother, who had her after being raped by her school teacher, turns to drinking and abandons her and Nanny. She is raised lovingly but restricted. Her grandmother, traumatized and broken in her own way, wanted Janie to have better; to have roots. Nanny states, “us colored folks is branches without roots.” (15). On the same page she says that she hopes Janie can sit on a porch - a high ground. This is another use of the tree analogy. If colored folks are rootless wood, then at least let them be on a high ground and not a low one that can get swept up in a hurricane. Nanny does not realize, though, that while she and others have restricted themselves, Janie has always imagined herself to be a tall tree full of life. To have her be a porch or stool or live in a lifeless stump is to try to deface her tree and her life.
However, Janie trusts Nanny and the other women when they tell her that marriage will bring love, so she goes to the high ground Nanny has arranged for her - Logan Killicks. She protested against the marriage at first because she feels “the vision of [him] was desecrating the pear tree.” (14). By this she could feel that her life would be ruined if she stayed with him. It's almost like a foreshadowing because in her brief marriage to him, he started to desecrate her by attempting to make her do things she had no interest in doing like chopping wood and tending to the earth. She discovered early on that the love she wanted, she would not get from him. Which meant that marriage does not equal love, and that was the first of her deaths; the death of her first dream. This dream was a necessary part of life, for it made her a woman. So perhaps for the sake of the metaphor, it should be called her first winter.
Eventually, Janie learns to search for the horizon and she finds speckles of it with Joe “Jody” Starks. She knows there is no bees or sunshine, but she hopes by going with him she will find something closer to that which will be preferable than desecrating away at an isolated tree stump. So, she runs away with him to another town and another life. She was able to have flowering fields with him and budding blossoms, but they slowly closed up, becoming cold with autumn, and then eventually cold with winter once it turns out that Jody’s sweet rhymes were just like Logan’s. The only difference is that his came with more people to watch her and envy her and to be paraded about in front of. Janie became Jody’s trophy, helper, and prisoner slowly but surely. The day she knew her marriage had no salvaging was the day he slapped her. (71). It was then Janie realized that she had closed up toward him and that there was nothing left to do in the marriage than to stay strong. This was year seven out of twenty. Her second winter was a long one. She lasted another thirteen years before Jody died and she was finally free from another person’s control for the first time in her life.
Hurston writes, “things done and undone.” (8). In my opinion, her marriages are among those things done and undone. She married and left her marriage. She married and became widowed, twice over. Of course, this does not mean that her marriages did not have an effect on her life; they affected her greatly. What I take it to mean is that no condition is permanent and Janie has had a condition change four times in her life by the end of the novel.
During her mourning phase, Janie meets the love of her life who she has yet to discover is the love of her life. Tea Cake enters her life one day and starts changing it for the better from the start. From his first introduction, we can see the onset of what Janie states she wanted all the way back in chapter three. “But Nanny, Ah wants to want him sometimes. Ah don’t want him to do all de wantin’.” (23). With Tea Cake, his actions seem to unlock this wanting. When he asks about checkers and she says she did not know how to play, the simplest conclusion to him was to teach her. This was a direct contrast from Jody, who claimed that she could never learn due to her deficiencies. (96). This in combination with the chills she feels, is akin to her first dream of love - the bee embracing the blossoms and causing the tree to tremble to its roots. A new spring - a new love - is dawning in her life.
The difference between Tea Cake and her previous two husbands is made even more clear in their treatment of her hair and their regard for her opinions. Logan is said to have stopped caressing her hair and telling her sweet rhymes almost as soon as they consummate their marriage. He claimed that he only told her all those sweet things because he thought she would appreciate the good treatment and behave as he directed her after. (30). Likewise, Jody and his glib and sweet words turned to demands, and forced her to wrap her hair because of jealousy and possessiveness. These men desired her, but wanted to mold her into the box of what they felt their wife should be. Tea Cake courted her extensively, because by this time she was seasoned and knew better than to jump in with any man so fast even as taken with him as she was. He brought her things, helped her experience new activities, and he brushed her hair. (103). He did not just admire her and tell her sweet things, he did acts of services and gave her sweet things. Things that she enjoyed and had fun doing. Things that did not make her feel trapped or judged. He was showing her the horizon, perhaps even leading her there.
She had to deal with negative talk as always, but it had ceased to matter long ago. She and Tea Cake get married and leave for Jacksonville, then eventually the Everglades. Tea Cake decides to show her all of him by being reckless, gambling and even knife fighting. She also comes clean about her savings after he wins back her hidden money. He tells her to keep all her money in the bank so they can experience life together, what is his, is hers and if he has nothing, she has nothing. (127). Janie happily agrees. She wants to experience life with him and new things. She wants to meet his friends, people like him who do not judge but are always enjoying life. These may be the kind of people she spoke about wanting to meet in chapter nine when she revealed her hatred of her grandmother. She hated how her grandmother had prevented her from starting, “her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her.” (89). It is possible that Tea Cake was one of these people, and that the friends she made with him more of the same people. People who were not trapped by the hurricane that is societal rules and expectations. People who were free to dance in the wind like leaves, and blossoms, and bees. She had another bout of springtime weather.
By the end of her marriage with Tea Cake, and the end of his life, Janie has learned a lot about herself and life. She learns to utilize her voice better, she learns about comfortable silence, and about what was on the horizon. It was her and her growth, continuous growth independent of any bee. So while she experienced another death; the death of her partner, marriage and even her friendships and life in the Glades. But it was not the death of her love. She continued to love, she did not freeze over and die with him.
I believe that Janie’s metaphor was rather insightful. The start of it was naive, but that is how young, hormonal teenagers think. Her life was full of experiences that lifted her up and even more that tried to tear her apart. Janie believed her life could be special and full of love and experiences and she never let the sufferings and deaths keep her down. She was truly like a maturing flowering tree. She flowered and bloomed, and experienced harsh winters that stole her buds from her, but she was resilient in a way that others could not be. This allowed her to continuously be done and undone, until finally she could do herself and never be undone by another person. Her blooms became her own to tend and fertilize with the lessons she has learned throughout her life.
Like I said, I like this paper a lot. The only thing I would change is probably the lack of mention of colorism. I didn't include it, not because it wasn't important in the novel, but because it wasn't all that important to Janie herself. Her complexion and features played a role in her perceived beauty and her appeal to many, but they didn't play a part in others' appeal to her, nor was it what made her different. What truly sets her apart from others is her vitality and inability to be truly limited by anything or anyone.
Janie is a tree with deep roots and flowering branches, not fragments of one left out to drift or to be molded into something for someone for long. She's a tree searching for a forest where her branches and blooms can reach out to their limits and possibly brush against others.