January 2023
“It was a spring afternoon in West Florida… Waiting for the world to be made.” (10–11)
As she beholds the blossoming pear tree and the creatures that flock around it, Janie Crawford’s desire for love overwhelms her and brings vague notions of sex, life, and love to the surface of her consciousness, marking the start of her search for love. Janie’s search for that overwhelming and pure feeling is what drives much of the story, and the root of the conflicts in the story is the contrast between Janie’s search to articulate love and the restrictive agendas of people around her and how they stifle this agenda. Janie’s relative inexperience and desire for answers is what first describes the purpose behind the struggles she experiences in her two marriages before meeting Tea Cake.
Janie wants to join the breathing of the world, the personal answer and purpose that all other creatures seem to find in each other, but it “seem[s] to elude” her: Janie’s grandmother’s strict upbringing leads Nanny to prioritize protection over love. Nanny, Janie’s sole raiser and protector, has instilled ideas of marriage based on practicality and protection in Janie’s life that clash with Janie’s dreams, which drive much of the conflict in Janie’s marriages to Logan Killicks and Joe Starks. While they prioritize many things in their marriages — prosperity, power, and security — Janie is stifled, kept back from the “struggle with life” that she seeks. The struggle with life’s good and bad is what makes the world colorful and real to Janie, but it seems abstract and impossible to attain without going out to seek it, which is the purpose that drives much of the book and Janie’s actions against her first two husbands.
What is also significant is the abstract language used to describe love, and Janie’s inexperience at this point in time: nature seems to have a “personal answer for all other creations except herself.” Janie, in her youth, does not yet understand what love means to herself, and so she is unable to articulate why she is unhappy in her first marriages, even though she was told marriage begets love. Janie’s conflict with her husbands arises from not just her husbands’ agendas, but also Janie’s vague understanding of what love is and isn’t. That “personal answer” Janie strives to seek can only be gained through the life experiences that her grandmother and first husbands restrict her from.
Janie pursues a community and intimacy for much of her life, but Nanny’s warnings seek to restrict her by keeping her in unhappy union for much of her earlier life. While the pear-blossom speaks to Janie of the world, and how and what love could be, conflicting notions of her upbringing cloud what love means and set Janie on a lifelong journey to articulate what love is, outside of her fettered upbringing.
“Most of the day she was at the store…Janie had tried to show her shine.” (89–90)
At one of the lowest points in her life, Janie begins to question that internal struggle between real love and the material possession that her grandmother taught her to chase. The conflict between the agendas other people set for Janie and Janie’s own desires rears its head as Janie reckons on what her life has amounted to thus far. Beaten down by decades of unhappy marriage, Janie realizes she has been conditioned to run after things, and despite her attempts to make the best of her situation, Janie’s horizons have been pinched “tight enough to choke her”. From all of her grandmother’s upbringing, all of Janie’s life has been at the whim of other people, so much so that she never had a chance to develop the independence she needed to explore the world and find love, and so her dream is dead. There are no horizons for Janie when she is under the thumb of other people. Throughout Janie’s life, she expresses a desire to be part of the world and get involved in life. Love is one facet of her journey, but Janie desires, more than anything, to “find [people] and they find her.” Her drive extinguished over the years, Janie feels numb and dumb to desire; indeed, she feels that her pursuit of love has been savaged by other people. The consequences of being separated from life by Nanny and being separated from people by Joe are described in Janie’s mourning period. Having been separated from finding her purpose all her life by her grandmother and her husbands, Janie has stagnated, feeling that rather than pursuing the world, she has been set on display to the world and separated from it. The spark of life that all people have has been extinguished, erasing Janie’s identity in the process, since for her entire life she has been attached to another person.
However, Joe’s death and this period of lonesomeness also marks the end of Janie’s subservience to other people. Now, having gone through two marriages based on shallow materialism, Janie is able to affirm her identity free of the burden of societal expectations for married women and pursue a marriage based on love. This marks the beginning of Janie’s journey of self-discovery, which also acts as a second awakening after having been stifled for so long by others.
“The day of the gun… She called in her soul to come and see.” (192–193)
Janie grieves and remembers her life. Her reckonings on Tea Cake reflect her growth as someone who has loved and lost deeply. Throughout the novel, Janie has reached her horizons and explored the world she first fantasized about under the pear tree. This passage recounts the change in Janie’s character from relatively weak to an independent, vibrant woman who has experienced the best and worst of life and forged an identity out of the experiences and love she has gained. Especially significant is Tea Cake’s effect on Janie, and how he teaches her not just to love, but to live her life to the fullest. Janie, set free from societal expectations, knows that as long as she remembers the free and vibrant life he taught her to live, she can never be finished living and remembering.
Janie’s choice to live goes against the expectations of female characters tied to men, but also reflects her strong-willed identity that she has gained in her marriage to Tea Cake. Janie is not finished “thinking and feeling”: that is, Janie can never be finished exploring the world after Tea Cake showed her the beauty and vibrance in it. Now, she has the horizons of the world that Nanny had choked her from and her first husbands had stifled her from: her life experiences are drawn in with a “great fish-net” which enables her to “catch” the love and beauty in her life and draw it in for her soul to see. Janie’s soul, which first awakened in a frenetic desire for love and connection, is finally at peace having explored the world. Hurston uses Janie’s personal growth through even her most difficult trials and her inner peace to illustrate the beauty in life, and communicate that exploring the world to forge your identity is worth the pain, because to experience the beauty alongside it is what encourages growth.
