Sexuality and Romance in Their Eyes Were Watching God
This paper examines how Zora Neale Hurston employs nature imagery and symbolism to represent sexuality and romance in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Through close reading and secondary literary criticism, the paper argues that natural settings—the pear tree, pollinating bees, and the Everglades muck—symbolize Janie's sexual awakening, romantic freedom, and authentic selfhood. Contrasting these symbols, urban and domestic spaces associated with characters like Nanny and Joe Starks represent sexual repression, capitalist control, and social hierarchy. Drawing on critics such as Donald R. Marks, Carol Batker, and Molly Hite, the paper demonstrates how Hurston constructs a coherent symbolic system that aligns nature with erotic freedom and industrialization with imprisonment of female desire.
- Introduction: Nature as the Language of Desire: Thesis: nature symbolizes Janie's sexuality and romance
- Sexual Awakening and the Pear Tree: Pear tree scene as erotic awakening and symbolism
- Tea Cake, Pollen, and Organic Symbolism: Tea Cake described through nature and sensory imagery
- The Muck as a Space of Romantic Freedom: The muck as Shakespearean green world of romance
- Urban Settings and Sexual Repression: Urbane spaces linked to restricted female sexuality
- Joe Starks, Nanny, and the Control of Female Sexuality: Stark and Nanny as agents of sexual and social control
- Conclusion: Hurston's Symbolic System: Nature versus industry as Hurston's feminist symbolic framework
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper anchors its argument in a clear thesis — that Hurston uses natural symbols to align readers with Janie's sexuality and romance — and returns to that thesis consistently throughout.
- It balances close textual analysis (the pear tree scene, the description of Tea Cake) with secondary criticism from Marks, Batker, and Hite, giving scholarly weight to its observations.
- The binary structure — nature as freedom versus urban space as repression — provides a coherent organizing framework that makes the argument easy to follow.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of extended metaphor analysis. Rather than treating individual images in isolation, the writer traces a single symbolic system (nature = sexuality/freedom; industry = repression) across multiple characters, settings, and plot moments, showing how the pattern accumulates meaning throughout the novel.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a dramatic epigraph and an introductory thesis paragraph. It then establishes the symbolic system through the pear tree and Johnny Taylor scenes before moving to Tea Cake as the fullest embodiment of organic, natural romance. The argument pivots to contrast: Nanny, Joe Starks, and Eatonville as forces of sexual control. A concluding paragraph synthesizes the symbolic dichotomy and connects it to broader feminist themes. Secondary sources are integrated throughout rather than clustered in one section.
Introduction: Nature as the Language of Desire
"They fought on. You done hurt mah heart, now you come wid uh lie tuh bruise mah ears! Turn go mah hands! Janie seethed. But Tea Cake never let go. They wrestled on until they were doped with their own fumes and emanations; till their clothes had been torn away, till he hurled her to the floor and held her there melting her resistance with the heat of his body, doing things with their bodies to express the inexpressible; kissed her until she arched her body to meet him and they fell asleep in sweet exhaustion."
~ Page 138
Sex and romance are at the forefront of Their Eyes Were Watching God. The protagonist, Janie, is a romantic who seeks real love — in herself and in the men of her life. When she is unsatisfied, she moves on to a new situation where the potential for real love and romance is greater. Much of the tension between Janie and her grandmother, as well as between Janie and other women, has to do with Janie's radiant sexuality. Other characters are jealous of her sexuality; the women in her family work to repress it and keep her removed from the sexual realm for as long as possible. Once Janie enters the sexual world — which is also the world of adulthood — they attempt to shame and disgrace her for radiating a charming sexuality. Characters in the novel are attracted to Janie because of her sexuality, but ultimately come to resent it, trying to extinguish it, control it, and control her.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, trees, flowers, and nature frequently symbolize sexuality and romance. They function as figures for sexuality and romance in general, but they also represent Janie's own sexuality, her sexual awakening, and the sense of romance that permeates her perspective as she moves through childhood, adolescence, and adult maturation. This paper argues that the reader is meant to understand sexuality and romance through the use of natural symbols.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story of many themes: freedom, discovery, adventure, identity, and sexuality. The novel's symbolic system aligns Janie with nature and with the visceral and primal — literally the birds and the bees, the trees, the flowers, and sexual activity. These symbols make Janie a figure for what is natural and what is sexual, because nature itself is deeply sexual and the sexual aspects of nature are vividly described and highlighted by Hurston. One of the novel's ultimate messages is that if one adheres to one's ideals of romance and sex, satisfaction and fulfillment are possible — even for a Black woman. As Nanny observes, "De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see" (Hurston, TEWWG, p. 29).
References
Batker, Carol. "Love Me Like I Like to Be: The Sexual Politics of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women's Club Movement." African American Review, 32(2), 199–213, 1998.
Hite, Molly. "Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage: Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." A Forum on Fiction, 22(3), 257–273, 1989.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Perennial Classics, New York, NY, 1998.
Kaplan, Carla. "The Erotics of Talk: That Oldest Human Longing in Their Eyes Were Watching God." American Literature, 67(1), 115–142, 1995.
Marks, Donald R. "Sex, Violence, and Organic Consciousness in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Black American Literature Forum, 19(4), 152–157, 1985.
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