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.
"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).
Sexuality is closely tied to setting in the novel. Janie's sense of romance and her blossoming sexuality are free to express themselves in natural settings. When Janie is in nature, her curiosity about sex and her own sexuality comes to the surface. Hurston writes:
"She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to 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 a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid." (Hurston, TEWWG, p. 11)
Janie spends as much time as she can under the pear tree in West Florida. Every aspect of this scene in nature teems with sexuality and sexual innuendo. The bees are chanting, like monks performing the ritual of pollination. The breeze is like panting breath during a sexual encounter. Hurston's language describing Janie's observation of the bees pollinating the blossoms is abundant with sexual energy. As Marks notes, "To the passionate relationships Hurston attaches metaphors of natural fertility and sexuality, whereas she associates control relationships with physical deformity, decay, and technological, non-sexual productivity" (Marks, "Sex, Violence, and Organic Consciousness," p. 152). Janie watches the bees mate with the flowers, detecting the satisfaction and delight of the act. This spectacle brings Janie to orgasm, leaving her with a deep sense of eroticism and romance regarding the sexual act.
Shortly after this moment, one of Janie's first objects of romantic and sexual affection appears on the road. The language used to describe this figure mirrors the language used for the sexual and romantic aspects of nature. Hurston writes: "Through the pollinated air she saw a glorious being coming up the road. In her former blindness she had known him as shiftless Johnny Taylor, tall and lean. That was before the golden dust of pollen had beglamored his rags and her eyes" (TEWWG, pp. 11–12). The air is a cloud of pollen that both Janie and Johnny breathe in and are saturated by. The pollen carries a magical quality, removing Janie's blindness to Johnny's manly charms. It is as valuable as gold in its worth to Janie, to romance, and to sex.
Later in the novel, with the entrance of Janie's lover Tea Cake, Hurston again evokes poetic language and natural symbols:
"He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom — a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God." (TEWWG, p. 106)
Janie imagines Tea Cake through the same metaphor and symbolism as her earlier sexual experience with herself and with Johnny Taylor. Tea Cake is the new man she desires to be a bee to her blossom. There is a sensory dimension to this sexuality through the inclusion of smell. Much of Tea Cake's power and charm over Janie at this moment comes from his scent — just as flowers carry fragrances, and just as pheromones enter our systems and serve as aphrodisiacs. Marks contends: "The proliferation of these organic tropes in connection with Janie's passionate loves identifies these relationships as representative of the non-mechanistic, non-technological vision of social order Hurston essentially endorses. Both Johnny Taylor and Tea Cake are characterized by a physical and natural beauty which, for Janie, is mythic in its power" (Marks, p. 154).
"The muck as Shakespearean green world of romance"
"Urbane spaces linked to restricted female sexuality"
"Stark and Nanny as agents of sexual and social control"
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a compelling narrative with distinctive dialogue, use of language, and imagery. The lead character Janie is very dynamic and adventurous. The novel tells the story of Janie's discovery and authorship of her own life's story — a story she refuses to let anyone else tell or lead. Janie becomes involved with, and ultimately frees herself from, the men and women who oppress and restrict her, with particular regard to her sexuality and sexual expression. Hurston boldly takes on issues and themes that remain relevant to the female experience and the feminist movement to this day.
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