Blossoming Love in Nature Famed philosopher and social critic, Bertrand Russell, expressed that “Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven.” In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston depicts a recurring theme of nature, especially the pear tree, as a metaphor for Janie’s romantic life. Hurston compares this flora to different elements of Janie’s various relationships to prove how love is an intrinsic part of life that should be cherished. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie searches for her ideal love through a series of failed relationships. Her quest for love begins with the “blooming pear tree in the backyard.That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called …show more content…
She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him” (72). In her second relationship, Janie clings to the hope that love will flourish between them, until she resigns and admits to herself that their relationship was an illusion that withers with time. After idealizing this relationship, she accepts the reality that he was never meant to be. Love and nature is about the trials and tribulations, a journey, where it takes multiple attempts for a seed to blossom. This all leads to living the fullest and experiencing the most, which is what love is. The natural world is love because it gives one the will to thrive in their environment. Janie’s final relationship, with Tea Cake, is the one where her pear tree comes to life. Constantly thinking of him, “He could be a bee to blossom–a pear tree blossoming in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung out with him. He was a
Tree Imagery in Hurston’s Novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee. Hurston uses the fruit tree as an important image in both of the texts: the blossoming pear tree for Janie and the budding mulberry tree for Arvay. Each holds a unique meaning to its counterpart. In looking at Janie’s interaction with her tree, I chose to focus on the passage on page 11, beginning with “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree.”.
In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford the main character goes through some big changes. Throughout this book Janie struggles to find her inner voice and purpose of love. She looks high and low for a sign of what love really is and she finds it as being the pear tree. The pear tree is very symbolic and ultimately shows Janie what love is and how it should be in a healthy relationship. This tree, with the bees pollinating the blossoms, helps Janie realize that love should be very mutual and each person needs to provide for the other equally. Janie tries to find this special kind of love through her three husbands, but she comes to realize it is going to be much harder then she expected. Each one of Janie’s husbands are a stepping stone for her finding her voice.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, everyone has different ideas of what marriage is. In the end Janie learned marriage is what you make of it. Love can only be found when your beliefs match with an others idea. Even today people find out the hard way that they are not compatible and that one’s view of marriage is different. This can be seen every day between couples who separate and among others whose marriages last the rest of their lives. Life is a learning process and we must take the bad with the good. Instead of searching for a nourishing life, Janie searched for someone to rely on. Although they were different types of reliance, she jumped from person to person so that she would not have to face life alone.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston centers around the life of Janie Crawford, an African American young woman, who is seeking ‘the horizon’ comprised of ideal living, experiences, and authentic love. After having two failed marriages, Janie meets Tea Cake, a suave, charming younger man who truly loves Janie. By exposing Janie to the world, and providing her with experiences and memories, Tea Cake directs her to the ‘horizon,’ where she can lead a fulfilling life. The selected passage begins as Janie concludes sharing her story with Phoeby. The flashback comes to its end, and the setting returns to Eatonville, Florida. I selected this passage because it reveals the great impact that Tea Cake has had on shaping Janie’s life.
"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" (8). When Janie was a teenager, she used to sit under the pear tree and dream about being a tree in bloom. She longs for something more. When she is 16, she kisses Johnny Taylor to see if this is what she looks for. Nanny sees her kiss him, and says that Janie is now a woman. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the main character, is involved in three very different relationships. Zora Neale Hurston, the author, explains how Janie learns some valuable lessons about marriage, integrity, and love and happiness from her relationships with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.
Path to Finding True Love “True love doesn't happen right away; it's an ever-growing process. It develops after you've gone through many ups and downs, when you've suffered together, cried together, laughed together.” This quote by Ricardo Montalban tells us that true love simply has to develop and it doesn’t happen right away. Janie is the main character from the book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and she struggled on the concept of true love. This quote explains exactly why Janie never found true love.
For a short time Janie shared her life with her betrothed husband Logan Killicks. She desperately tried to become her new pseudo identity, to conform to the perfect "housewife" persona. Trying to make a marriage work that couldn't survive without love, love that Janie didn't have for Logan. Time and again Janie referred to love and her life in reference to nature, "Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think... She often spoke to falling seeds and said Ah hope you fall on soft grounds... She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether"(24 - 25). Logan had blown out the hope in Janie's heart for any real love; she experienced the death of the childish imagery that life isn't a fairytale, her first dose of reality encountered and it tasted sour.
In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the image of a pear tree reverberates throughout the novel. The pear tree is not only a representation of Janie's life - blossoming, death, metamorphosis, and rebirth - but also the spark of curiosity that sets Janie on her quest for self-discovery. Janie is essentially "rootless" at the beginning of her life, never having known her mother or father and having been raised by her grandmother, Nanny. Nanny even says to Janie, "Us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways" (Hurston, 16). Under a pear tree in Nanny's backyard, however, Janie, as a naïve sixteen-year-old, finds the possibilities of love, sexuality, and identity that are available to her. This image, forever reverberating in her mind through two unsuccessful marriages to Logan Killicks and Joe Starks, is what keeps Janie's spirit alive and encourages her quest for love and life. "It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep" (10).
There are various pieces of written work that do not fall into the category of literature work. This is because a piece of writing can be said to be literature when it has distinct features that follows the rules of literature writing. Some of the distinctive features that can be used to classify a piece of writing as a literature are the nature of language, themes and stylistic devices (Irmscher, 1975). Literature does not fully use the rules of grammar and may involve the use of informal writing. Hurston and Toni Morrison applied feature such as using colloquial language, development of various themes and some stylistic devices which have lead to their pieces of work being considered as important literary art. This paper will focus on two pieces of written work written by Hurston and the other by Toni Morrison Their Eyes Were Watching God and Beloved respectively and why they are considered important works of literature.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel that presents a happy ending through the moral development of Janie, the protagonist. The novel divulges Janie’s reflection on her life’s adventures, by narrating the novel in flashback form. Her story is disclosed to Janie’s best friend Phoebe who comes to learn the motive for Janie’s return to Eatonville. By writing the novel in this style they witness Janie’s childhood, marriages, and present life, to observe Janie’s growth into a dynamic character and achievement of her quest to discover identity and spirit.
Hurston wrote, "The vision of Logan Killicks was desecrating the pear tree, but Janie didn't
While Janie lies under the pear tree, she realizes her lifelong dream of true love. Finally figuring out the meaning of “marriage,” the pear tree gives Janie a “revelation” about what she wanted out of her life : true love equally felt between two participants (Hurston, 11). In this case, love reciprocated by two people shows in their respect for each
In Zora Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie Crawford was an attractive, confident, middle-aged black woman. Janie defied gender stereotypes and realized others cruelty toward her throughout the novel. Behind her defiance was curiosity and confidence that drove her to experience the world and become conscious of her relation to it. Janie’s idealized definition of love stemmed from her experience under a pear tree, an experience that was highly romanticized and glamorized in her sixteen year old eyes. Janie’s ability to free herself from the confining, understood, stereotypical roles enforced upon her allowed her to not only find true love but define true love as well.
“She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight,” (11). The novel, Their Eyes Were Watching, God by Zora Neale Hurston, tells a story of a woman, Janie Crawford’s quest to find her true identity that takes her on a journey and back in which she finally comes to learn who she is. These lessons of love and life that Janie comes to attain about herself are endowed from the relationships she has with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.
It is difficult for humans to allow life to flow without being proactive. This is especially true when it comes to love. One may try very hard to try to resist the attraction that they may feel to avoid the potential hurt that may result from being in love. In contrast, others may seek love and never find it. In the two novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Hurston and The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid the characters demonstrate that although one may attempt to manipulate the circumstances in which love is attained, there is no way of predicting how love will manifest itself.