I believe Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel of Janie’s self enlightenment. it starts with “Now, women forget all the 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.” This sets the precedent for the novel, she goes through her life trying to find the truth, trying to find what really matters to her.
Janie starts off as a naive, young girl with idealized ideas of what life and love should be; she has a very romantic view of things-coming from a relatively secure home for the time- and is oblivious to the hardships of life. While resting under the pear tree she has a “revelation” of the beauty of love, but no perception of the work it…show more content… Anything “good” that Janie ever had only came after she experienced the bad. “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and Doom was in the branches.”(Chapter 2 pg. 8) When Janie says this near the beginning of the novel she’s reflecting on all the events that have taken place in her life, looking back on all her experiences. Every defining moment of her life was one of revelation or one of derailment of previous values due to consequential events: she kisses a boy, then is forced into a labor filled marriage devoid of passion; she marries Jodie, and experiences sexism and loses her freedom; she loses Teacake to rabies, after only a short time of marriage; she comes back to her old home where she spent the majority of her adulthood in her second marriage and is judged by everyone, husbandless, and getting old. Despite all these maladies in her life, after each of them, she grows and changes. She develops her values based on what she knows doesn’t work, she realizes that “marriage doesn’t make love”. She realizes her worth as a person isn’t based on her worth as a woman. She realizes she deserves respect, and is capable of work, of making something of herself on her own. She learns to overcome jealousy, she finds out what real love is, and she learns how to move on after loss, she learns how to deal with judgement, to continue with her life despite ill looks from others. It all goes back to what she said in the beginning: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” -pg. 21. She finds out the answers, the truth of questions she’s asked over the years after each new thing that happens and it’s confirmed that “Janie full of that oldest human longing-self revelation.”
