Janie and the Pear Tree in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The marriage is unsatisfying and lonely for Janie. Janie “...knew things that nobody had ever told her...the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, ‘Ah hope you fall on soft ground,’” (25). She spoke and connected with nature because she was still searching for the kind of love she had witnessed when laying under the pear tree when she was younger. After a big fight with Logan, Janie meets a man named Jody Starks who is charming and charismatic. He is extremely intelligent and Janie leaves Logan for him because even though “he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees...he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance." (28). Janie has not been able to find herself in her marriage with Logan because there was no real connection, she hopes to find love resembling the pear tree with Jody. Unfortunately Janie’s dreams of finding love with Jody fall flat. Jody is controlling and restricts Janie from expressing herself and he further isolates her from society.

In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie has allowed us to better understand the restraints that women in society had to deal with in a male dominated society. Her marriage with Logan Killicks consisted of dull, daily routines.  Wedding herself to Joe Starks brought her closer to others, than to herself.  In her final marriage to Vergible Woods, also known as Tea Cake, she finally learned how to live her life on her own.  In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie suffered through many difficult situations that eventually enabled her to grow into an independent person.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the protagonist Janie Crawford has experienced and had interactions with the nature around her. These interactions symbolised Janie’s quest for love, her own independence and personal freedom through each endeavor. Janie’s quest for her womanhood was directly influenced by the natural environment around her. For instance, the novel states that Janie “Saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a blossom” (11).

Near the beginning of the book, Janie develops an idealistic view of love whilst lying underneath a pear tree. She is young and naïve, enthralled with the beauty of spring. She comes to the conclusion that marriage is the ultimate expression of love and finds herself pondering why she does not have a partner. In the rashness of her hormone clouded brain, she is drawn to Johnny Taylor, who is nearly a stranger. This is her first experience formulating ideas about

The pear tree is her inspiration and her first true desire. She longs to bud and blossom, like the tree, and cannot wait to discover herself and all the wonders of the world.

Tea Cake, whose real name is Vergible Woods, is Janie's soul mate, both of them being tree metaphors. He’s the only one of her husbands who haven’t been described as dead wood. Hurston writes, “looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.” His nickname too holds significance in referring to something sweet, just as she has hope dor "things swee wid mah marriage" (24). Because Tea Cake is unconcerned with her money, for instance, in that he asks her to keep her savings aside and live from his current earnings, Tea Cake is clearly contrary to the norm of suitors who preceded him following the death of Joe, who didn’t want her for her. He is a man truly in love with Janie, a man who understands her. In instructing “Everytime Ah see uh patch uh roses uh somethin’ over sportin’ they selves makin’ out they pretty, Ah tell ‘em “ah want yuh to see mah Janie sometime.’ You must let de flowers see yuh sometimes, heah Janie?” (181), he shows that he too sees her mirroring, even competing with nature. It is with him, that Janie is pollinated to realize the meaning of the pear tree’s mysteries and

The pear tree experience, along with her Grandmother’s words to her, help Janie determine her expectations for her future relationships. The pear tree experience establishes the feeling she seeks for the rest of her life, as she wants just as intimate of a relationship as the bee and the flower. Janie’s grandmother’s initial goals for Janie are inscribed in Janie’s original ideals, even though she denies it. Her grandmother’s original intent by marrying her off to Logan, besides for her safety, was to find her a way out of the working life, and into one where she would be allowed to relax, and escape the life of toil that both Leafy and Nanny suffered through. While Janie

Janie’s quest begins with her grandmother forcing her to marry Logan Killicks; her compliance demonstrates her need to follow what others expect of her. Although she believes "[Logan] look like some ole skullhead in de graveyard", she marries him, simply because her grandmother tells her she will love him with time (13). She compares him to a “skullhead”, literally likening him, and subsequently their relationship, to death. Although she knows she wants to find love, and that she does not love Logan, she marries him to appease her grandmother. This shows how much Janie cares about what other people think of her, and what lengths she is willing to go to keep others pleases with her.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses Janie to show that one must have a voice in order to have a sense of who one is and have control over oneself. Janie is a dynamic character and other characters in the novel contributes to her attributes because each of them control specks of her life. To develop as a character, Janie undergoes quests to find her identity and retain it. It is arguable that Janie hangs onto pieces of who she is as she discovers more about herself and gain control over those aspects because Hurston sets the novel up as a frame story. With a frame story, there are reflections happening, so in turn, she must have learned from what she experienced between the beginning and the end of the novel. In addition

In the beginning, the pear tree symbolizes Janie’s yearning to find within herself the sort of harmony and simplicity that nature embodies. However, that

This quote demonstrates that the pear tree marks end of Janie’s childhood and the beginning of her journey to womanhood; as it is under the pear tree in which Janie has her first sexual experience as she longs to have the “love and affection from a man that the tree receives from the pollen-bearing bee” (Dilbeck, 102). When Nanny (Janie’s grandmother) sees her act on this sexual awakening by kissing Johnny Taylor, the narrator states that it was “the end of her childhood” (12), as Nanny then insists that she get married to Logan Killicks, and so Janie must quickly move into adult world of marriage. The quote also seems to assert that the only way for Janie to embark on her journey is to leave home (one of the major characteristics of the quest narrative) as “nothing on the place nor her grandma’s house answered her” (11).

     In Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, the reader is given a particular glimpse into Janie's life with reference to the men she has known.  Janie's three men are all very different, yet they were all Janie's husband at one point in her life.  Although they all behaved differently, in lifestyle as well as their relationship with Janie, they all shared certain similarities.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie’s journey towards spiritual enlightenment and her development of individuality, largely through Janie’s relationships with others. Hurston uses the themes of power, control, abuse, and respect, in Janie’s relationships with Nanny, Killicks, Starks, and Tea Cake, to effectively illustrate how relationships impact identity and self-growth.

The world of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God was one of oppression and disappointment. She left the world of her suffocating grandmother to live with a man whom she did not love, and in fact did not even know. She then left him to marry another man who offered her wealth in terms of material possessions but left her in utter spiritual poverty. After her second husband's death, she claims responsibility and control of her own life, and through her shared love with her new husband, Teacake, she is able to overcome her status of oppression. Zora Neale Hurston artfully and effectively shows this victory over oppression throughout the book through her use of

Nanny makes Janie believe that marriage makes love and forces her to wed a much older man, Logan Killicks. Jones believes that Janie?s first efforts at marriage show her as an ?enslaved and semi-literate? figure restrained to Nanny?s traditional beliefs about money, happiness and love (372). Unfortunately Janie?s dream of escasty does not involve Killicks. Her first dream is dead. Janie utters, ?Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think? (Hurston 23). Logan began to slap Janie for control over