Quest For Love

In Zora Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the centralized character, Janie Mae Crawford, embarks on a long quest to find the meaning of true love. Like many people, she begins her journey not knowing what love is. Janie encounters many obstacles in her quest for love. But what is true love and how does one know when they have found it? Thesis: Janie’s blind quest for love. It seems that Janie’s destiny is decided for her despite her idealistic and naïve view of love and marriage. Even though it appears that “her dream was dead”, she accepts her fate and “became a woman”, Hurston shows us that though suppressed at times Janie never gives up her dream (25). The symbolic use of the pear tree not only sets the bar high for Janie’s expectation of marriage and love as a partnership like the “bee [sinking] into the sanctum of a bloom” leading to the “ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to the tiniest branch” but also a need for personal fulfillment (11). Her journey to find herself begins under the pear tree but she had to travel through her marriage to the respectable, dependable Logan Killick, wind through her marriage to the showy Joe “Jody” Starks and end up with the love of her life Vergile “Tea Cake” Woods.

Janie’s revelation under the pear tree foreshadows the journey that is about to begin. Janie’s first significant romantic experience occurred on spring, at the age of sixteen, when she observed bees pollinating a pear tree. She saw the dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to the 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 marriage. She had been summoned to beh...

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... perfect. [Also explain that love wasn’t about being rich or having nice materialistic things (Janie demonstrates this by the lifestyle in the muck, wearing overalls) Janie discovers that love was something shared as equal partners. Teacake was the person who got closest to fulfilling Janie’s desire for true love.

Janie also learns how to value and love herself as a person. She demonstrates this by having the courage to shoot Teacake towards the end. Given the few seconds she had left to decide whether she was going to live or die, she chose live which demonstrates Janie learning to love herself.

Janie learns that love is about taking chances and making mistakes because love is different with each person.

It is deniable that what she found with Teacake is love in its truest form; So true, in fact it stands unwavering against discernment, time, and even death.