In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston a young girl named Janie begins her life unknown to herself. She searches for the horizon as it illustrates the distance one must travel in order to distinguish between illusion and reality, dream and truth, role and self” (Hemenway 75). She is unaware of life’s two most precious gifts: love and the truth. Janie is raised by her suppressive grandmother who diminishes her view of life. Janie’s quest for true identity emerges from her paths in life and ultimatly ends when her mind is freed from mistaken reality.
Failing to recognize herself as the one black child in a photograph, Janie begins her story without a name or color (Meese 62). “Dey all uster call me Alaphabet’ cause so many people had done named me different names” (Hurston 9). The revelation doesn’t devastate Janie, rather it stands as both a symbol of Nanny’s unrealistic attempts to shield the girl from life and a metaphor for Janie’s lack of self-knowledge (Williams 100). Nanny raised Janie through her own dreams “of what a woman oughta be and do” (Hurston 100).
Nanny projects a stereotypical identity and a secure future for Janie based on what she knows, which is limited by the historical constraints of what she has seen of the white man’s power over blacks (Meese 62). She tries to control Janie under her own rules and unfair authority. Nanny tells Janie, Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as far as Ah been able to find out. Maybe it’s someplace off in the ocean where the black man is in power, but we don’t know nothi’n about what we see.
So de white man throw down the load and tell de nigger man tu pick it up…The nigger woman is de mule uh de world so far as Ah can see. (Hurston 14) She wants Janie to have the life that her and her daughter did not have; though Nanny is unaware of the emotions that must follow. As a child, raised by Nanny, Janie was guided by the unreal allusion of what life is made up of. When Janie was about sixteen, she spent a spring afternoon under a blossoming tree in Nanny’s yard. Here she comes to the realization that something is missing in her life… sexual ecstasy.
The blooms, the new leaves and the virgin- like spring came to life all around her. She wondered when and where she might find such an ecstasy herself. According to Hurston, Nanny finds Janie kissing a boy named Johnny Taylor and her “head and face looked like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm” (12) . Nanny can think of no better way to protect Janie than by marrying her to a middle-aged black farmer whose prosperity makes it unnecessary for him to use her as a ‘mule’ (Bush 1036).
Nanny makes Janie believe that marriage makes love and forces her to wed a much older man, Logan Killicks. Jones believes that Janie’s first efforts at marriage show her as an “enslaved and semi-literate” figure restrained to Nanny’s traditional beliefs about money, happiness and love (372). Unfortunately Janie’s dream of escasty does not involve Killicks. Her first dream is dead. Janie utters, “Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think” (Hurston 23).
Logan began to slap Janie for control over his marriage. He bought her a mule to plow with. Nanny’s idea of marriage comes crashing down. Hurston accedes that Janie notices her husband “has stopped talking in rhythms to her,” she sees the companionship of second husband Joe Starks, who promises her a life without the responsibility of plowing with a mule (25). The significance of this marriage for Janie’s progression toward self-awareness seems to crystallize when she decides to leave Logan for Joe Starks (Collins 146).
Joe provides Janie with the “front porch” existence of Nanny’s dreams, but in doing so, he isolates her from direct participation in any life except his own (Williams 101). He gives Janie possessions and status, but assumes that her identity will come only from her role as his wife (Bush 1037). Her status is high above everyone else’s, but her identity is still not shown. Johnson remarks, “Janie soon finds that her pedestal to be a straitjacket, particularly when it involves her exclusion –both as a speaker and a listener-from the tale-telling sessions on the store porch and at the mock funeral of the mule” (168).
Joe says, “[Janie] Ah aims to keep yuh in de dark all de time” (Hurston 60). Joe makes Janie wear her hair tied up while working in the store; he is very jealous of her. “Janie [feels] far away from things and lonely” (Hurston 44). Janie is a woman that cannot be herself, someone she doesn’t even fully know while married to Joe Starks. Jody took Killicks place, but Joe is a false dream too, “just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over” (Hurston 79). Janie does not want possessions and status for herself.
Joe’s verbal abuse dominates her through their marriage. Though Janie begins to emerge with a powerful voice when she defends herself from his coarse words, “You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ‘tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice. Humph! Talkn’ bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life” (Hurston 75). This triumphal scene in Joe’s store marks the immediate decline of her marriage with him, but also marks the next step she will take toward self-fulfillment.
Though, Joe responds with a pathetic command for silence and the wish that lightening strike Janie dead. Callahan concedes, “[Janie] keeps on talking and her voice hastens his imminent death (104). Janie is coming to her self-realization that she has a voice and can be heard. She is learning to open her mouth and stand up for herself. Joe’s physical abuse of Janie causes her to figuratively leave the marriage. “[Jody] slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears…” (Hurston 67). “Janie stood until something fell off the shelf inside her.
Then she went inside to see what it was. It was her image of Jody that tumbled down and shattered” (Hurston 67-68). At this moment Janie has read the system of signs sufficiently to experience inner change (376). The number of times that Janie is silenced by others testifies to the power, both potential and real of her inner voice (Kaplan 118). Janie again realizes that Jody Starks does not fulfill the image of the bee and the pear tree. Janie’s route to self-definition includes rejection of her grandmother’s definitions and those imposed on her by her two husbands (Jones 371).
With his big voice Joe Starks, in effect became Nanny’s successor, and so it’s appropriate that after his death Janie discovers her true feelings about Nanny” (Callahan 105). Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made-the horizon-for no matter how far a person can go, the horizon is still way beyond you- and pinched it in such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughters neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love. (Hurston 14) At last Janie thinks she has encountered love with a much younger man named Tea Cake.
Bush states, “She finds happiness in [this] third marriage by rejecting the hierarchical, materialistic codes others have imposed on her” (1038). Janie and Tea Cake enjoy being themselves portraying their own identity. “Tea Cake and Janie gone fishing. Tea Cake and Janie gone hunting. Tea Cake and Janie gone to dance” (Hurston 105). Janie ultimatly realizes that she can have fun without being bound by restrictions. According to Dalgarno, “Janie has an inside and an outside and suddenly she knows how to mix them” (531). Tea Cake treats Janie like a person and helps her understand who she really is.
Janie comes as close as she ever will to freely expressing her conscious desires while living with a man (Collins 146). It is clearly their love for each other that predominates. Janie can accept Tea Cake as an equal, without illusion, discovering love because she has finally accepted herself (Hemenway 75). “He could be a bee to a blossom-a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be a crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps” (Hurston 109). Tea Cake is not an ideal husband, but he does grant Janie the dignity of self.
Tea Cake seems to be the bee for Janie’s blossom, but he is the ultimate betrayal of Janie (Davies 153). Tea Cake makes Janie his “whipping mule” to reassure himself of possession as it also justifies his jealousy. He has a certain power over Janie that was left unnoticed throughout their marriage. Hurston’s indirect punishment for Tea Cake is the mad dog. He tried to save Janie from the vicious animal and instead got bitten. Davies suggests that his rabies developed, and he transformed into a “mad dog,” a condition that reflects the anger that precipitated his betrayal of her (155).
Janie put an end to the mad dog, and shot him dead because her love for him was stronger than death. Hemenway asserts, Janie has become a complete woman, no longer divided between an inner and outer self, a woman at home with the natural cycles of birth and death, love and loss, knowledge and self-hood. (77). For Janie learning about living means going to the horizon of her consciousness and establishing joyful relationships with others. Her eyes have been watching God-the God that expresses himself in nature, in other human beings and, especially, in our deepest selves (Bush 1038).
During certain phases of her journey her dreams were crushed and her horizons were clouded by disappointments and empty marriages, (Jones 371) but Janie emerges as a woman that has been to the horizon in reality, instead of her dreams. Callahan concedes Janie has seen it all and is glad her journey has finally come to a rest. Alone at forty she dreams of integrating the immensity and intimacy of experience in the unfolding of the story of her life (106). Janie has worn her path and has discovered that only she can determine where it leads.
She has been to the horizon and has become more aware of life and her inner-self. Janie is proud of who she has become in an existence full of mental, physical, and verbal abuse. She has come to be an independent woman with voice, identity, and a conscious. Janie now knows the truth and love of what life is made up of. “Increasingly Janie’s identity comes not in rebellion against someone else, but from the pleasure she takes in her reencounter with the world. Left to herself, she will not sit anywhere; hers is to explore, to move out from the sanctum of the pear tree” (Callahan 106).
