Janie's Feelings About Joe in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, author Zora Neale Hurston uses metaphor and imagery to express Janie’s feelings about Joe and her marriage, which was characterized by neglect, misogyny, control, and labor. When Joe assaults her after a disappointing meal, she finally articulates to herself the lie of her marriage, that she felt “no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening fruits where the petals used to be” (Hurston 68).

Throughout the novel, Hurston uses nature as a metaphor for love, marriage, and Janie’s sexuality, and Janie almost exclusively thinks about love and marriage through natural language.

Hurston’s comparison of nature and sex illustrates the central story arc of Janie’s character: her search for unconditional, meaningful, fulfilling love.

The first instance of nature being used to describe Janie’s sexuality occurs when Janie is sixteen years old, and learning for the very first time about the natural beauty of sex, when under a pear tree, “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!” (Hurston 11). Janie associates the beauty of the pear tree and nature with her first orgasm and her first orgasm with marriage, and spends the novel in pursuit of both the love and pleasure that she experienced.

When complaining to Nanny about her loveless marriage to Logan Killicks, she exclaims, “Ah wants thing sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think”(Hurston 23).

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And when she leaves Logan for Joe, she predicts, “from now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (Hurston 31). Then, after years of Joe’s condescension, bullying, insecurity, and finally violence, Janie realizes that Joe was not the man she dreamed of under that pear tree.

The quote has two metaphors that Hurston uses to describe Janie’s marriage. The first is of “blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man”. A blossom is the birth of a flower as it opens itself up to the world, just as Janie opened herself up to Joe. Janie met and married Joe when she was only seventeen years old, only a year after her sexual awakening under the pear tree. Pollen is the male gamete of a flower that is sent out to fertilize and create new life, and symbolizes the genuine love and affection that she showered on Joe.

The metaphor means that Janie once thought of her marriage to Joe as constructive, beautiful, and life affirming, and his assault shattered that illusion. The second metaphor is of “glistening young fruit where the young petals used to be”. Janie had blossomed in puberty and opened herself up to Joe, and in her ideal relationship, the flower of her youth would mature into the delicious fruit of a loving marriage. Because Joe did not want an equal or loving relationship with Janie, but instead treated her as a subservient prop to cook his meals, work at his store, pleasure him sexually, and act as a symbol of his status and power as mayor, Janie’s petals didn’t develop.

The petals are no longer there, and if they didn’t develop into fruit, they must have fallen off the flower entirely. In Janie’s mind, Joe therefore wasted her sexual awakening by misusing and abusing her. Joe failed to give Janie the love she so desperately wanted, the love she felt under the pear tree.