Their Eyes Were Watching God Essays - Janie's Life and the Pear Tree

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Their Eyes Were Watching God - Janie's Life and the Pear Tree

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story centered on the idea of life cycles. The experiences that Janie faces and struggles through in her life represent the many cycles that she has been present for. Each cycle seem to take place with the start of each new relation ship that she faces. Each relationship that Janie is involved in not just marriages, blooms and withers away like the symbol of Janie's life the pear tree from her childhood.

Janie's Grandmother is the first bud on her tree. She raised Janie since she was a little girl. Her grandmother is in some respects a gardener pruning and shaping the future for her granddaughter. She tries to instill a strong belief in marriage. To her marriage is the only way that Janie will survive in life. What Nanny does not realize is that Janie has the potential to make her own path in the walk of life. This blinds nanny, because she is a victim of the horrible effects of slavery. She really tries to convey to Janie that she has her own voice but she forces her into a position where that voice is silenced and there for condemning all hopes of her Granddaughter become the woman that she is capable of being.

The affect of Nanny is the marriage to her first of three husbands, Logan. He is a man that sees no wife in his relationship with Janie he sees a worker. The intelligence of Janie to realize this is a prime example of the capabilities that Janie possesses as an independent woman. Logan is the pollution to Janie's tree of life. He is good for one thing and that is delaying the inevitable; delaying Janie from realizing that she can be a woman with an inelegant thought not just a good house worker. He prevents the self-sufficient woman in Janie from reaching its potential.

The next cycle is that of Joe Starks. The role of this marriage is of a different nature. Janie no longer is a house slave. She chooses to take the role of a trophy wife in the times that this takes place in.

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