Throughout the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie faces the challenge of being herself and being what society expects of her. Her marriages show how she attempts to be herself and illustrate the stereotypical views of the female sex. Moreover, her husbands struggle in an attempt to fulfill their dreams, with varying degrees of success. Even though the quoted passage is the first thing in the book, it summarizes and captures the struggles experienced by characters like Janie, Jody, and Logan. The passage describes the fundamental difference between genders by talking about what happens to the dreams of men and women, and how people behave differently. The passage elegantly symbolizes hopes and dreams with ships on the ocean. The sentence “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board” …show more content…
However, her dreams have a different ending, if at all. From the passage, it appears as though the dreams don’t have an ending. The passage describes, “Now, 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.” This indicates that women continue seeking what they wish for, even if they don’t get it. Their dreams influence what they do, until there is no difference between reality and dream. In Their Eyes were Watching God, Janie wishes to find real love, as noted from her pear tree ideal. The continuation of her dream, after it is met with failure, is directly visible from her relationships. Under her first two relationships, she lived a oppressed life. Even when she broke out of her “disillusion of innocence,” her dream lived on because she had a relationship with Tea Cake, even though she was already forty years old. Her persistence in finding a partner who she could build a satisfying relationship remains to the end, in contrast to the