Theme Of Love In Their Eyes Were Watching God

In this novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie experiences different kinds of love. Throughout the novel, Janie searches for the love that she has always desired. That kind of love she searches for is represented by the marriage between a bee and a blossom. As a result of her quest for this love, Janie gains her own independence and personal freedom, which makes her a true heroine in the novel. She also deals with different types of love with her past life.

Love is different for each person. For some, like Janie, it happens much later in life after her two unsuccessful marriages. For others, it comes easy and early in life. That reason being Janie’s grandmother, Nanny raised her to be attracted to financial security and physical protection

instead of looking for love. As a teenager, Janie formulates her ideal of love while sitting under a pear tree; one that fulfilled her intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and physically. Nanny did not want her to marry just anybody especially a black or “colored” person. Janie’s nanny said to her, “Whut Ah seen just now is plenty for me, honey, Ah don’t want no trashy nigger, no breath-and-britches, lake Johnny Taylor usin’ yo’ body to wipe his foots on” (Hurston 13).
Going more into the novel, Janie experiences a love that is protective from her caring grandmother, Nanny. She yearns for Janie to have a better life than she did. This protective love that Nanny bestows on Janie serves as the driving force behind Nanny's plot to arrange Janie's marriage to Logan Killicks because he values financial security and responsibility over love. What Logan represents for Janie is security since he owns a 60-acre potato farm. However, for Janie, this protective love does not satisfy her for the love she always desired. She soons run into Joe Starks who helps her escape the protective and unsatisfying love from Logan and soon starts to like him.
Therefore in searching for love, she gains her independence. She holds a spark of independence when she gains the courage to leave her loveless marriage with Logan in order to run away with Joe Starks. Her independence grows throughout the novel with her marriage with Joe. As joe keeps treating her like his possession or trophy Janie begins to build up her inner strength. One day Janie decides that enough is enough and stands up for herself while in the presence of the porch sitters. Finally after Joe’s death her inner strength and independence grow stronger, Janie is now free from the man she once thought loved her which, turned out to be a loveless marriage and exhibits her freedom from him.
Janie has dealt with a differents type of love.

Her version of love is associated with innocence, openness, understanding, and equality between the lovers. For her, love is also an essential part of life; without it, her spirit practically withers and dies. Janie sees him as a "desecration" of her vision of true love, based on her experience underneath the blossoming pear tree. Her marriage with Logan she experienced being dominated being treated like an object for him to put to use. “Six months back he had told her, "If Ah kin haul de wood heah and chop it fuh yuh, look lak you oughta be able tuh tote it inside. Mah fust wife never bothered me ‘bout choppin’ no wood nohow. She’d grab dat ax and sling chips lak uh man. You done been spoilt rotten.” (Hurston

26).
At first Janie was attracted to Joe because of his stylish looks. “It was a cityfied, stylish dressed man with his hat set at an angle that didn’t belong in these parts. His coat was over his arm, but he didn’t need it to represent his clothes. The shirt with the silk sleeve holders was dazzling enough for the world. He whistled, mopped his face and walked like he knew where he was going. He was a seal-brown color but he acted like Mr. Washburn or somebody like that to Janie.” At first, Janie only knows that Joe values her, but as she realizes that Joe values her as a possession rather than as a human being, she becomes emotionally distant. From Joe’s viewpoint, since Janie is a woman, she has no intelligence, voice, or autonomy and should be entitled to none.
Janie soon becomes a widow and lives happily as a single woman until she meets a slick and fun-loving vagrant named Tea Cake.

In the end, Janie speaks out and lays out all of Joe’s crimes to him on his deathbed, but like the big voice he is, Joe refuses to listen and dies cursing Janie. Even though Tea Cake is 12 years younger than Janie, but with him she finds the true love she has dreamed of all her life. In their relationship, both sides experience bouts of jealousy, but eventually find happiness working in the fields of the Everglades and mingling with the migrant workers. Janie experienced a more protective and jealous love. As a result he gets bitten by a dog with rabies from the storm he could have avoided, but stayed for the money and is shot by

Janie.
In conclusion, Janie did not find the love she was looking for like the bee and the blossom. In a result of hurrying to look for love she got married to a man that treated her like an object that treated her like a man. He soon dies from old age and still doesn’t respect her as a women till his dying breath. Another man she thought she “loved” turned out to be a very jealous, pretty boy who only cared about money, and himself. In the end do not rush into love if you are not sure what love really is.