Free Literature Review On Their Eyes Were Watching God

In “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, Zora Neale Hurston explores the theme of love through her main character, Janie. An attractive African American woman, Janie is the object of desire of men around her and she becomes physically involved, through marital relationships, with three of her pursuers. Along her journey as a woman married with three different men, Janie experiences two failures and one success in love. She learns the absence of romance, from her first marriage, the emptiness and frustration of a façade relationship, from her second marriage, and the passion and intensity of true love, from her third marriage.
In her first marriage, Janie was forced by her grandmother Nanny to espouse Logan Killiks, an older man seeking a wife to help him around his farm, rather than a romantic relationship. Before marriage, Janie had an idealistic vision of love, inspired from the relationship of bees with the pear tree. “the thousand sister – calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight” (Neale – Hurston 15). Although these expectations seem to reflect Janie’s naivety, they nevertheless last across all her three marriages, as she seeks to experience the ecstatic experience of love.
The second marriage is where Janie experiences the psychological abuses of dominating husband who wants to change her personality, making her the product of his imagination, while aiming to squeeze out her real individuality. From this relationship Janie learns that love is more important than a social status or financial security, because she was not happy as the wife of Joe Starks, the mayor of Eatonville, but on the contrary, gathered frustrations for being an obedient wife. She understood from her failed marriage with Starks that she should not put aside her expectations about romantic love for the accommodating the projection of a selfish man who wanted to show off with her, as her grandmother would consider appropriate (Neale Houston 109).
Looking at Janie’s third marriage, with Tea Cake, there can be visible a maturity in terms of perceiving love. She finally feels the shivers of the ecstatic love that bees share with the pear tree are finally, as she allows herself to fall in love with the young man. But this time she was the one experiencing love, not observing it from the manifestation of nature. From her marriage with Tea Cake she learned that love was not only honey and sweet nectar, as she had imagined when she was younger. She understood that love was a mix of intense feelings, comprising jealousy and commitment, possession and trust. “He drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self – crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place” (Neale Huston 155).
After Janie’s third husband and first real love dies, the woman becomes independent and defines love in a more experienced way. “Love is lak the sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets” (Neale – Houston 230). Her failures and success in love makes her aware of the true nature of love, beyond idealization. Despite two failed, without love marriages, she feels the thrills of real love with Tea Cake, feeling more alive than ever. The fact that she experienced true love makes her self – confident and strong, feeling self – sufficient even in the absence of a man to love.