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 …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