Theme Of Horizon In Their Eyes Were Watching God

Personal experiences often shape how people see the world. This can be said for people’s views of love and what love means to the individual. In Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character Janie searches for love and what true love is to her ever since she first got married. As Janie lives her life, she experiences marriage with three men: Logan Killicks, Jody starks, and Tea Cake, each of whom she initially believes she loves. However, as the story continues, she realizes that she does not truly love any of them except for Tea Cake. Exploring Janie’s journey of love, the novel utilises the motif of the horizon as she goes from one marriage to another, figuring out true love is something that comes with both choice, and

While horizons are usually depictions of sunsets or the sun in the sky overhead, the novel represents the horizon as the ideal future, an unknown future with hope for change to happen. Setting the audience up for this connotation for the preceding chapters, the first paragraph of the novel commences using the idea of the horizon and the sun, “Ship’s at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some, they come in… For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight”(1). For people whose dreams do not come true immediately, they still remain in their minds, in an ideal future where it can still come true eventually. They do not let the dream die if it seems that it will not come true. As Janie’s life progresses, she tries to reach her horizon, her ideal future of finding someone that she truly loves, and she gets closer as she goes through her

When Janie is sixteen years old, her nanny coerces her to marry a man named Logan Killicks to not disappoint her. Despite not loving Logan in the slightest, Jane marries him to make nanny proud, she goes along with it because she is under the conception that “marriage compel[s] love like the sun the day”(21). She believes that love will come eventually after marriage commences just as automatically as the sun rises each morning. Janie holds this idea with her because she wants to find love, and she thinks that marriage is the correct way of going about it. However, over the course of Janie’s marriage with Logan, she realizes this is not the case. She never feels in love with Logan like she thinks will happen after marriage, “Looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead”(25). As one dream ends, a new one begins for Janie as she looks to the horizon. Janie initially holds the thought of love because of marriage, with this not being the reality, she knows it is time to find a new dream. Janie would see that she did not love Logan before their marriage if she has a choice in whom she's marrying. This is a lesson that Janie learns from her first marriage, and this might lead to the impetuous decision of marrying her next husband, Jody. It is