Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God follows the development of Janie from an naïve adolescent full of dreams to a woman who has seen and walked with the weights of the world. As a young girl, Janie becomes enamored by the idea of love, as seen between the pear tree blossoms and the bees, and she longs for romance- innocently believing it will appear once she is married. This longing for love becomes the driving force behind Janie’s development as a character.
Janie’s grandmother raises her to follow orders and defer to a stronger will, and she tries to create a small, safe world for Janie to live in. Nanny wants Janie to have security, but ends up restricting her dreams; Janie later resents her grandmother for taking the horizon, full of endless possibilities, and pinching “it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her” (89). At sixteen, Janie had “glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her” (11). Nanny feared and could not understand Janie’s dreams, and as a result, found her granddaughter stability in a marriage to Logan Killicks.
Before Janie marries Logan, she expects marriage to “compel love like the sun the day” (21), but she soon learns that the life she had imagined for herself is unattainable with Logan. When Janie meets Jody, she believes she has finally found her bee, and she gladly gives up the life she was living to move forward with a man she thought she could love. With Joe Starks, however, life begins to slowly deteriorate. Joe wants Janie to be an ornament he can show off along with his wealth and power, and he bends Janie to his will just as Nanny did. Joe wants Janie to “look on herself as the bell-cow, the other women were the gang” (41), but as a result of his position as mayor, he makes it difficult for Janie to form friendships with the other women. Joe molds Janie into the wife he wants her to be, a soft-spoken shadow to tend the store, and she separates herself into two parts- an outside that she shows Joe and the community, and an inside where she continues to nurture her dreams.
After Joe’s death, Janie begins to enjoy freedom for the first time. When she meets Tea Cake, she does not start a relationship with him because Nanny arranges it, or to escape from an unhappy situation, but because she wants to. Janie blossoms during her relationship with Tea Cake, with him “her soul crawled out from its hiding place” (128). Though their marriage is not perfect, Janie is allowed to be her own person, allowed to talk when she wants to, tell tall tales, or play checkers, and she willingly joins Tea Cake in the fields so they spend less time apart. Together they travel from her home and store in Eatonville, earning money by working the land in the muck. With Tea Cake, Janie enjoys the labor- though Logan Killicks’ attempts to get Janie to work the land with him encouraged her desire to run away. As Tea Cake is struggling with madness, Janie refuses to put him in the hospital because she does not want him to feel abandoned- even though caring for him put her life at risk. After his death, Janie does not want another relationship, she is content to reflect on her love, full with the knowledge that “he could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking” (193). Janie finds peace because of Tea Cake, but she is strong enough to gather her experiences around her and continue living even after he is gone.
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