Their Eyes Were Watching God Character Analysis

Throughout the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie takes on multiple personas based on her relationships, but she is never able to fully reinvent herself. In order for one to become a new person, one must know exactly who they are naturally. Since Janie spends her whole life controlled by others, her changing character is never a result of inward reflection, and therefore does not truly represent reinvention. Janie is not victorious in her attempts to begin a new, independent life on her own terms, and never succeeds in transforming herself. Janie’s changes in personality and lifestyle are all determined by whichever man she is in a relationship with, and she can never escape their influence. Her first husband Logan doesn’t understand how Janie feels she ought to be treated, and his steadfast decline towards treating her as a mule is what shapes her escape to her second husband, not her own choices. Joe Starks, the second husband, is the most notable figure in setting Janie back from a reinvention due to his loud voice and degrading personality. From the very roots of their relationship through their seventeen years of marriage, Joe decides how Janie will act. When they first arrive at Eatonville and he is elected Mayor, Joe stops Janie from talking in front of the crowd. He silences her with a simple “Thank yuh for yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home” (41). This is just one of countless examples of a man controlling Janie’s whole being. She lives her entire life influenced by someone speaking and deciding for her, so self-reinvention is not even possible as she has no concept of who she truly is. If Janie were to change personnas again, which she does utilizing Tea Cake’s youth, it would not be reinventing herself, but instead just an escape from the false woman Joe built up. Janie is constantly fooled by these relationships and believes she is determining the path of her life all by herself. She even believes that who she has become through Tea Cake is a reflection of her true self despite mentioning several times that she wears new clothes because “Tea Cake told her to wear it” (105) and it’s “everything he wants tuh see me in” (110). This is a perfect illustration …show more content…
The traumatic events induce her to start making decisions on her own and pay more attention to the deeper reasons behind her life thus far. Nonetheless, this is a journey of self-discovery, and not reinvention. At the end of the story, Janie has a much more accurate perception of herself, and may begin the process of reinvention, but in terms of her as a person, she is right back where she began as a little girl under a pear tree. Janie has finally reclaimed the horizons, or futures, set by her husbands and grandmother, even “[pulling] in her horizon like a great fish-net” (184). Yet she is simply herself in her purest form, as exemplified by the repeated imagery of flowers and summer in nature that occurs at the very beginning and end of the story. Just like the nature, Janie’s freedom does not come from anything new, just her long-forgotten true