Their Eyes Were Watching God Symbolism

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Relationships are implied to be necessary to a fulfilling life. In these relationships, men and women provide each other things that they need but do not acquire. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie liberates herself from her unfulfilling relationships with Logan and Jody that interfere with her journey. Janie views fulfilling relationships as reciprocal, which she then discovers with Tea Cake. Hurston’s symbolic use of the horizon and the pear tree express the main message that most individuals have a great need for unconditional and reciprocal love.
Janie’s goals and dreams of fulfillment with unconditional love are represented through the view of the horizon. When Janie came back …show more content…
Janie was sitting underneath the pear tree as she watched “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” (Hurston 11). To teenage Janie, she considered the bee sinking into the blooms of the pear tree to a “love embrace” whose “ecstatic shiver” creates a “creaming in every blossom and frothing delight”. This whole experience is so beautiful to Janie, and now she is sure that this is what unconditional love and marriage must be like. After Janie and Tea Cake’s little feud one day, Janie tried so hard to think about him scornfully, though she ended up thinking that “he could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring” (Hurston 106). In her mind’s eye, Janie already sees Tea Cake as a bee to her pear blossom, even though she is struggling over getting involved with a man as young as him. Janie’s life-long goal is finding unconditional love, and she immediately realizes she has that with Tea Cake. Throughout Janie’s relationships, the image of the pear tree symbolically mirrors her values and end
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