Janie’s path towards the Horizon

The central story of Their Eyes Were Watching God features a young woman’s
spiritual, emotional, and physical journey toward self-knowledge. Readers are invited to
experience the novel as a series of adventures through which the protagonist obtains
experience and, increasingly, discovers her true self.
Nevertheless, the whole essence of the story can be embodied in the first pharses of
the novel:
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the
tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the
Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the
life of man.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember
everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then, they act and do things
accordingly. (Hurston: 1991, p.1)
From the first part of the quote the reader remains with the impression that every
man’s wishes seem to be very distant and far from being accomplished any time soon, but
nevertheless they leave a trace of hope as a consolation to the Watcher, a trace of hope that
drives the Watcher into an internal struggle between denying the life that has been attributed
to him by fate and circumstances, and continuing to dream on about the never fulfilled
whishes. And that is exactly what the novel emphasizes: hope, new beginning, the pursuit of
one’s dreams, and finally self-knowledge.
The second part of the quote continues the preceding idea but from the women’s
perspective, completing in this way the novel because in her book, Hurston also treats the
subject of black female sexuality realistically, making it an important aspect of the
protagonist’s process of self-actualization.
Moreocer, Janie describes her sexual awakening in the following passage: “She was
stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the
gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to
her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; 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. So this was a marriage! She had been
summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp
and languid.” (Hurston: 1991, p.11)
Throughout Janie’s story, the pear blossom becomes a recurring metaphor for
awakening possibility and more specifically for Janie’s sexual awakening.
For Janie Crawford, life is comprised of a need for adventure and a constant desire to
achieve something more. This natural part of her character defines who she is, but it also
compromises her integrity in the eyes of her community: “If she ain’t got manners enough to
stop and let folks know how she been makin’ out let her g’wan! She ain’t even worth talkin’
after. She sits high but she looks low.” (Hurston: 1991, p. 3)
Hurston’s knowledge of the oral language particular to that part of Florida, and her
intimate engagement with language assist is what brings authenticity to her work. Moreover,
“the focus on the spoken word is particularly appropriate in a novel whose central project is
giving voice to the heroine’s journey toward self-knowledge.” (Harold: 1999 p.16)
Apparently, Hurston illustrates her amazing capacity for metaphor in the symbolic
uses of trees throughout the novel. She uses the metaphor of the tree “to mark not only the
protagonist’s own desires but also the distance between her desires and the other persons in
her orbit.” (The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston: 2008 p. 56)
The protagonist of the story compares her life with a tree in many occasions
throughout the story :“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered,
things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches” (Hurston:
1991, p. 8)
The metaphor symbolizes a life in full bloom, a life full of the comic and the tragic, a
life full of learning experiences. The fully developed tree serves as fulfillment of the
adolescent wish: “Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing 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?
Nothing on the place nor in her grandma’s house answered her.”(Hurston: 1991. p.12)
Apparently critics disagree as to whether Janie actually achieves voice in the narrative
because “the protagonist renders the story in the third person and the narrative is based on
Janie’s recollections as told to her friend Phoeby”. (The Cambridge Introduction to Zora
Neale Hurston: 2008, p.62)
Janie’s desire for self knowledge gained through experience is expressed in her
references to ‘the Horizon.’ Slavery’s legacy of the sexual abuse and exploitation of black
women, embodied in Nanny’s story, was one of the primary obstacles to Janie’s autonomous
self and sexual development.
In addition, Janie reveals her wishes through her perspective on others. When, Joe
Starks, tries to make her leave her husband, “Janie pulls back a long time because Joe Starks
does not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he speaks for the far horizon”
(Hurston: 1991, p. 59).
Her consideration of a future relationship conveys her wishes in a predictable future,
like sun-up, pollen, and blooming. Nevertheless, she does not want to remain unnoticed and
stay back while Joe is attempting to reach the horizon. Janie seems to be afraid of being left
behind, as she values togetherness.
Joe’s desire to reach the far horizon worries Janie because her apprehensive self causes
her to focus on practicality and probability; she knows Joe will most likely leave her behind
chasing his dreams.
Moreover, Janie expresses that she values being noticed when the author describes her
as a woman who has plenty of “life beneath the surface but it is kept beaten down by the
wheels” (76). According to the critics, “Janie feels degraded by society who just pushes her
under; she wants to fight to the top, as she values authority and power”. The Cambridge
Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston : 2008, p.54)
But is it true? Isn’t she just a woman in search of her dreams and not in search of
power or authority, except regarding her own actions? Doesn’t she want to make peace with
herself and find in this way the path towards self-knowledge?
Their Eyes Were Watching God returns, via Janie’s recollection of Nanny’s
experiences under slavery and Leafy’s rape in freedom, to painful moments from African
American history. In order to gain her own experience, Janie needs to distance herself from
her grandmother’s experience and the historical narrative that had shaped it.
Janie believed she was making a major move toward the Horizon when she left Logan
Killicks to become Mrs. Joe Starks, but she later realized that the move only served to provide
her a supporting role in her new husband’s vision of the possibilities for his life and his
concept of the Horizon.
Nevertheless, her unhappy marriage to Joe Starks put her in the right place at the right
time for Tea Cake to make his appearance.
For some critics, Tea Cake functions as a trickster in the sense that” it is through her
relationship with him that Janie experiences a most profound transformation: her “soul
crawled out from its hiding place.” The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston :
2008, p 57)
In her statement to Phoeby before she leaves with Tea Cake, she clearly emphasizes
that she starts controlling her actions, saying: “Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means
tuh live mine.” (Hurston: 1991, p.57)
Janie expresses her understanding of freedom by articulating her awareness that she
has options and by exercising one of the options available to her.
Her feeling upon reaching the Everglades was that everything was big and new, an
expression which can be associated with the arrival at a place of salvation and renewal, like a
Promised Land.
Ultimately the relationship with Tea Cake, like the ones with Logan and Joe, serve as
a vehicle through which Janie gaines experience and self-knowledge. The experience she
obtaines from living and working in the muck, from her exultant love relationship, and from
the simultaneous achievement of sexual fulfillment and respectability, distance Janie from the
constraining effects of the narrative that has served to limit her grandmother’s options for
self-actualization.
Janie reaches in this way the freedom of choosing the right path towards self-
knowledge, towards her Horizon.
In addition to that, it is obvious that many of the tales that emerge from the general-
store porch are used to characterize relationships between men and women, an issue raised in
the novel’s opening paragraphs.
According to Daphne Lamothe, in “Vodou Imagery,” the opening paragraphs of Their
Eyes Were Watching God function much like a prayer that begins every Voodoo ceremony.
She believes that the novel’s opening also invokes Legba, “the keeper of the crossroads,
which is the gateway between the spiritual and material worlds.” (Lamothe: 1999, p. 171)
All in all, Hurston incorporates numerous additional elements of Voodoo and Hoodoo
into the novel and the result is a narrative that functions much like a ritual through which
Janie becomes the woman she desires to become, and in this way, Their Eyes Were Watching
God becomes its own organic oral form, finding the Horizon in herself.
 Bibliography

• Hurston, Zora Neal: Their eyes were watching God, University of Illinois,
1991

• Bloom, Harold: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
Bloom's Notes, Chelsea House Publishers, London, 1999.

• Lamothe, Daphne Mary: Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition and

Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were
Watching God, Callaloo - Volume 22, Number 1, Winter 1999, pp. 157-
175

• The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston, Cambridge

University Press, New York, 2008