Their Eyes Were Watching God Nature Essay

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie, often focuses her attention on nature and makes many comparisons of situations in her life to things, such as pollen and a pear tree, in nature; the nature comparisons reveal her love-centered nature and her hopeful visions in the future for a love-filled life. During the early years of Janie’s life, she often sees situations in a way related to nature, as a child this reveals her love-centered nature. One day while her grandmother is sleeping, she goes outside to lie “beneath the pear tree[,] soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees”(Hurston 13), and while she was out there, her mind drifted to thoughts of love. Although the pear tree is mentioned

While still a young woman, Nanny weds Janie off to Logan Killicks, and before Janie is forced to live with a man she doesn’t love, she goes “back and forth to the pear tree continuously wondering and thinking”(25). The thoughts plaguing her mind are no doubt about the forced marriage that she does not agree with. And as her mind tugs at her from within, she moves to the place that represents her vision of love, a blooming pear tree. She seeks comfort in a time where her desires, to have a flourishing love and to please Nanny, become conflicted by moving to the source of the desire she wishes to side with: love. Although she struggles against Nanny’s objectifying commands, pleading how she “wants things sweet [with her] marriage [like] when you sit under a pear tree and think”(29), Nanny ultimately demands that Janie follows through with her orders. Janie becomes terrified of what’s to come from her relationship with Logan. A marriage that is like lying beneath a pear tree is simple and sweet and comforting. The mention of the pear tree, in the context of Janie stating it, represents lying under love. The love is what shelters and comforts the marriage, and to have that vision Janie so hoped for in the future shattered, she becomes horrified of what’s to come. And as seasons pass, years go by, and love falls apart, Janie’s heart

She often refers to love and the way love can blind her as pollen. Before Janie is sold off to Logan Killicks, she fights in her head over what love is, and when she realizes that although she is being married off to someone she doesn’t love, marriage doesn’t make love “the pollen again [gilds] the sun and [sifts] down on the world”(29). Unable to have the love she once idolized, the kind brought together and bound by marriage, she shifts her views and decides that she may not get love from this current marriage, but love can still exist and be created. And the love that drifts from her heart once again floats down and pollinates the pear tree in her heart. Janie is going about her mundane, love-lacking life with Logan one day when she met Joe Starks, he interests her; however, he doesn’t represent what she looks for: “he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees”(35). She needs someone who can shower her the way bees shower flowers with pollen when they accidentally drop some when buzzing by. He offers her a future beyond the horizon, but she doesn’t see the pollen that would spread from his heart to hers and lead to the growth of a blossoming pear tree of love between them. And despite this, he offers her something which was more than Logan did, so she runs away with Joe, and over time she began to love him. But that love was one-sided. Janie adores Joe and his