Womanhood (their eyes were watching god)

Nanny describes black women as the "mules" of the world - burdened with a load passed from white men to black men, to them. She hopes to save her granddaughter, Janie, from that fate with a strategic marriage to a well-off black man. 

Janie, however, is reluctant - because sitting under a pear tree one day, Janie saw beautiful visions of love and marriage. She' was awestruck, and longed to feel for herself what she saw in the blossom - "to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom!" But her romantic aspirations clash with Nanny's pragmatic socio-economic solution.

Nanny and Janie's ideas of womanhood were incompatible. Nanny was focused on the disadvantages of being a black woman, and hoped to help her granddaughter as much as she could. Her viewpoint reflected the harsh realities of the world and of her life, which from the story she told Janie, seemed to be full of mistreatment and hardship. Janie, on the other hand, seems to have had a pretty good life so far, if boring. To her, womanhood means joy and possibility. So when Nanny proposes the marriage she thinks not of the safety it would bring her, but of the life she might be missing out on. As Hurston writes, "She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her." 

But in the end Janie agreed to the marriage to make her grandmother happy, and with the hope that love would come with time. To her dismay, it didn't. At the end of chapter 3 Nanny is dead and her marriage feels empty. "Jane's dream was dead," Hurston writes, "so she became a woman."

The first three chapters of their eyes were watching god presents two interpretations of womanhood, and Hurston's dire wording could suggest that she shares Nanny's somber outlook on life. With the hardship faced by black women, it's a logical place to arrive at. However, in the first chapter, we see Janie returning from what seems to have been a heartbreak, and she didn't seem disheartened. And at the very least, we know that she experienced some of the wonders she saw under the pear tree that day. For that reason, I'm holding out hope that we'll see Janie reignite her dream, and that her version of womanhood will prove truer than Nanny's. 

Comments

  1. RyanOctober 21, 2021 at 7:17 PM

    I think the parts of the novel you highlight are interesting to compare to the novel's first reference to womanhood on page 1: "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." I think this quote in combination with the quote about Janie becoming a woman when her dream dies implies that maturing into womanhood is defined by realizing life's disappointments, but women in the novel still hold on to their broken dreams. But whether this is a criticism or a testament to resilience, I'm not sure. Either way I think the dynamic between these women and dreams that's being defined is interesting.

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    1. erin's blogOctober 22, 2021 at 7:29 PM

      Yeah I thought it was really interesting that Janie and the narrator's outlook on life almost seemed to be at odds. It makes me wonder if Janie will eventually come around to the narrator's way of thinking? But based on how she acts after returning from her thing with tea cake, I doubt it

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    2. erin's blogOctober 22, 2021 at 7:29 PM

      Or maybe after she returns she's learned what womanhood means in the world, and has accepted it? That's a slightly less happy posibility.

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  2. MaxineOctober 22, 2021 at 12:31 PM

    I feel really similar to you about Janie's future - it almost lightens the blow of seeing her lose this romantic pear-tree image of love and marriage when you know how she turns out decades later. She seems at-peace with the world, in a way, despite apparently returning home right after some kind of tragedy has taken place. But she doesn't come across as at-peace in the same way that Nanny and the narrator seem jaded and accepting of the world in a pragmatic way - Janie seems like she still has some of that hope, if in a different way than from when she was a teenager. She's learned about the world, she's travelled and experienced things, but she hasn't come away with quite the same view of the world that the other women did. Her first dream was dead, but that doesn't mean it was her last, or that she wasn't still able to find beauty in the world and her life.

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    1. erin's blogOctober 22, 2021 at 7:31 PM

      Definitely, I agree. (And reading the next few chapters supports this viewpoint I think). In general hope and optimissim seems to be a central part of Janie's character, and I hope it stays that way, because it makes the book very fun to read

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  3. Florence LinNovember 22, 2021 at 7:58 PM

    I really like your comparison of Nanny versus Janie's view on womanhood. This sort of situation is very real, and especially after now finishing the novel, very sad. The hopeful, romantic youth that Janie yearns for is found through Tea Cake, but is also imperfect and ends tragically. The ending can provide a hopeful spin, giving Janie yet another chance to start over. I hope that she has not lost the positivity and wish for love, as that was a beautiful characteristic of her character that I enjoyed reading of.

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