Their Eyes Were Watching God Essay, Draft 1

A pivotal moment in Zora Neale Hurston’s bildungsroman, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is when Janie realizes she won’t automatically love Logan, losing her idealism regarding the institution of marriage while continuing to pursue love itself with unrealistic expectations. This quest shapes the remainder of the novel, as Janie aims for true love with Joe and Tea Cake.

The bildungsroman navigates the protagonist’s journey from innocence to its binary opposite, experience. Janie’s initial “innocence” as a fifteen-year-old girl is defined by her naïve belief that “husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant” (21). Thus, she adheres to the hope that the institution of marriage alone will cause her to begin to love the much older, overweight Logan. Hurston links this naiveté to Janie’s bask under the pear tree at the beginning of the novel, as Janie claims that she “wants sweet wid [her] marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think…”(24).  The pear tree, like idealism itself, bursts with freshness and optimism, as evidenced by the bee’s fertilization causing the tree to become “frothing with delight” (11).  Pollination is the iconic pastoral image of novelty and rebirth, therefore it is only fitting that Hurston characterizes Janie’s idealism regarding marriage as a springtime pear tree.

In continuation with the pear tree’s “rebirth” motif, Hurston regards Janie’s hopeful perspective on marriage as a living (and thus, mortal) being. When months pass and she realizes that in spite of their matrimony, she will never love Logan, Hurston states: “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25). In monolithic terms of the concepts of “innocence” and “experience”, Janie has crossed the threshold between the two, transitioning to a knowledgeable, wiser state. Hurston applies a more nuanced version of the opposition, however, by shifting Janie’s optimism from a belief in the power of marriage to a belief in the power of true love: she retains her unrealistic expectations, but they are manifest in a different dream.

The alteration of Janie’s hope is evident after she has given up on her relationship with Logan and becomes enamored with Joe. Hurston claims that Janie no longer tries to cram her intimate relationships into the original naïve “pear tree” mold, but seeks to embrace their differences when she writes that “…[Joe] did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance” (29). She is in the process of contorting her expectations to suit reality, as epitomized by one of the initial passages of the novel, stating, “Women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (1).

Hurston illustrates the completion of this shift by likening Janie’s initial optimism with Joe to having “flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom. Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them” (32). The hope of the childhood pear tree has returned, but has taken on a new form: the starry-eyed pursuit of true love, rather than complete faith in marriage. One can observe this in her aforementioned optimism about her union with Joe, and her leap of faith that her connection with Tea Cake was “no race after property and titles…uh love game” (114).

Janie transitions from innocence to experience regarding her perspective of marriage when she fails to connect with Logan. Her blossoming, springtime naiveté lives on, however, throughout the rest of the novel, as seen in her journey for love with Joe and Tea Cake.