In the book “Their Eyes Were Watching God” the author uses the pear tree, bees and the horizon as symbolism to describe her dreams and sexual discoveries. Janie’s ultimate goal is to find love. She want to have a relationship where she can connect on an emotional, physical and intellectual way.
The Pear Tree is used metaphorically to resemble how Janie grows as a person. In chapter two of the story, the author gives us brief information on the tree and about how Janie has been going to the tree since the trees first bloom. The tree is used as a comparison because as Janie seeks her wonders, she slowly develops and starts to grow as a person, same as a pear tree would. She tries and discovers new things throughout all her encounters with love
The Janie at the end of the novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, is far more different from the Janie at the beginning of the novel. As the novel continues, Janie goes through many life changing events due to the many communities she relocated to. In the beginning of the novel, Janie runs away from her first marriage with Logan Killicks for Jody Starks. Janie and Jody then moved to Eatonville, where they ran a store together until Jody’s final breath. Subsequently, Janie moves to different parts of Florida with Tea Cake, whom she met in Eatonville.
A pear tree blossom in the spring” (106) Janie saw Tea Cake and she automatically thought that he could be the one she falls in love with. This metaphor shows that love can make you think crazy things. Hurston also
Sanchez Pg.1 Perfection does not exist within the finding of a husband. Woman may unintentionally encounter several marriages and in the end it may seem like everything happens for a reason. Experiencing a horizon would be a blessing to protagonist Janie Mae Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She is an African American woman who deals with hardships while being married to her three husbands Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake, each having their own effect on Janie.
In his memory, the tree is a “huge lone spike”(13) or an “artillery piece”(13), but when he sees it again it looks small and innocuous. Though the tree itself has not changed, Gene's perspective, which has changed over the years, is what is enabling him to face the tree without it haunting him. At the time of the incident, in his youth, the tree was a symbol of fear and forbidding. At the end of the novel, the tree has become a symbol of profound changes in perspective that time and growth can give people. “This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age….”(14).
In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston traces Janie’s quest for independence and the search of her self-confidence through events that happened before and after her epiphany immediately following Joe’s death. Throughout the novel Janie’s view of life, her independence, and her view of love changed exceedingly depending on who she was married to. This story centers around an important epiphany that Janie has when Joe dies; that personal discoveries and life experiences help people find themselves. Before her revelation, when Janie is 16 years old, she experiences a moment of realization in she discovers new-found feelings about love, marriage, . Under the pear-tree, she has a perfect moment in nature, full of passion
With bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?” In this first symbol Zora uses a pear tree for Janie’s yearning of self-realization and personal freedom.
Their Eyes Were Watching God What do a bee and a flower have in common with marriage? Even if by accident, nature intends for a mutual relationship of growth and blossoming between two partners. Zora Neal Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, follows Janie Crawford, who attempts to find herself despite the presence of extreme sexism and two dominating husbands.
When Nunkie tries to lure Tea Cake with playful acts, and Tea Cake does not fend her off as promptly as Janie wanted him to, Janie feels “[a] little seed of fear was growing into a tree” (136). In other words, Janie starts to feel and develop bigger and growing jealousy and fear of losing Tea Cake because of Nunkie. The metaphor illustrates how Janie feels about such situation with visual matters, seed and tree; seed and tree symbolize the progress and growth. Also, in other perspective, readers can recognize Janie’s true emotion, the love, towards Tea Cake by relating to how Janie feels about losing someone, which she never felt during earlier chapters when she lost two husbands. Summing up the contents, the metaphor used for highlighting that Janie has a bigger love for Tea Cake than she did for any other and jealousy about Nunkie’s action.
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, we follow our protagonist, Janie, through a journey of self-discovery. We watch Janie from when she was a child to her adulthood, slowly watching her ideals change while other dreams of hers unfortunately die. This is shown when Jane first formulates her idea of love, marriage, and intimacy by comparing it to a pear tree; erotic, beautiful, and full of life. After Janie gets married to her first spouse, Logan Killicks, she doesn’t see her love fantasy happening, but she waits because her Nanny tells her that love comes after marriage. Janie, thinking that Nanny is wise beyond her years, decides to wait.
As Janie is laying down at sixteen years old beneath a pear tree in the spring, it becomes a symbol to her of the optimal relationship. Janie marries to Logan Killicks to please her Nanny before she dies. As Janie cries to her Nanny she says to her "Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage, lak when you sit under a pear tree and think." (p 24) she admits to not being happy with a relationship she is in with Logan. As the Pear Tree continues to grow, so does Janie’s understanding of her optimal relationship.
In life we all have goals and aspirations. So what we do is we spend our whole life searching for this satisfaction. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God the main character Janie was on an exhibition to find happiness. This exhibition was called “the pear tree goal”. Janie’s ambitions in her life were sexuality, marriage, freedom, maturity, and Family.
The pear tree represented simplicity and pleasure. Every man Janie had married had been older than her, and not exactly what she had envisioned under the pear tree. Finally, she met Tea Cake and felt the feelings she had been longing
Their Eyes Were Watching God Literary Analysis In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston used three different husbands to show how Janie’s definition of love and marriage evolved. With her first marriage, she learned that love doesn’t automatically grow after marriage. In the second marriage, Janie learned that love could be confining and eventually ruin a relationship. The third and final marriage taught Janie that she needed to depend on herself rather than someone else for contentment.
This leads her and others in her life to be at odds. Furthermore, illustrating Jaine's idealism of love by seeing the world in such detail and viewing it differently than most people, especially when considering a pear tree coming into bloom, as Jaine sees it as "every blossom frothing with delight," (Page 11) which helps to paint a detailed picture of the
In Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd incorporates the literary technique of allusion to assist the reader in delving into Lily’s thought process. Furthermore, to incorporate allusion, Kidd compares the message Lily interpreted from the arrival of the bees in her room to the plagues God sent to the pharaoh Ramesses. Lily ponders: Back in my room on the peach farm, when the bees had first come out at night, I had imagined they were sent as a special plague for T. Ray. God saying, Let my daughter go, and maybe that’s exactly what they’d been, a plague that released me (151).