Hope on the Horizon

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.” In literature, the horizon is representative of future, destiny, and hope. It means something different for each person, but for each person it represents a goal, a perpetual dream– always in sight, but forever out of reach. For some people, this stands as a harsh reminder of their inability to obtain it, but for some people it keeps them going and gives them something to work towards. Janie, from Their Eyes Were Watching God, is constantly working towards her horizon. Throughout this novel, by Zora Neale Hurston, the horizon symbolizes Janie’s undying hope for true love, happiness, and an ideal future for herself; however, her vision of these aspirations is altered and transformed by each person she meets, especially so by Logan Killicks, Joseph Starks, and Vergible Woods.

Before the death of Janie’s grandma, Nanny, Janie acquires the idea of what she believes to be love. One day, while Janie is sitting below the branches of a pear tree in blossom, a “dust-bearing bee sinks into the sanctum of a bloom”(11) and a “thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace”(11). As she sees the flourishing, immeasurable love flowing between the beautiful blooms of the pear tree and the visiting bumble bee, she falls in love with the idea of what love should be. She believes in a true, ideal love where both members are so indulged and truly in love that there is no question of its existence. With this very dream in the back of her mind and on the horizon in the distance, Janie makes an effort to deny the dying wish of her Nanny, which is to see Janie in the protective arms of Logan Killicks...

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...he most. She knows that “he could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking”(193). He lived on through her love, her appreciation, and her being. It was Tea Cake that helped Janie through the last steps on the way to her horizon. He was “son of the Evening Sun”(189), a huge part of her horizon, and who she follows to reach it. He gave her what she had set her heart on that one spring day so many years ago– her horizon, her dream, her pear tree love. With the memory of Tea Cake by her side, “[she] [pulls] in her horizon like a great fish net”(193). She has succeeded, and though her concept of the ideal love has been shaped and reconstructed by so many people, Janie is finally satisfied. “Here [is] peace”(193), here is the horizon. Here is the place where the gleaming ocean meets the vivid sun-lit sky. Here is where Janie’s dreams come true.