Their Eyes Were Watching God Analysis

7. The toxic environment of Graves’ schooling is, luckily, not the only one where he develops romantic relationships and explores his sexuality. Later in the memoir, the amount of people to whom he is attracted is equally spread between men and women, but his male crushes are more lasting and emotional. He claims to have fallen in love with a nurse named Marjorie after a head injury, but his confession that “My heart had remained whole, if numbed, since Dick’s disappearance from it, yet I felt difficulty in adjusting myself to the experience of woman love.” (204) suggests that she was a superficial attraction. Dick’s absence forced him to emotionally re-acclimate to women; a difficult task given his traumatic experiences with both recent combat …show more content…
Rather, he chronicles their marriage and brief courtship factually, and free of emotion. He states that he fell in love with her, and we are presented with no further evidence to corroborate that case. However—when he was still married to Nancy—Graves wrote the following passage about his first meeting of T.E. Lawrence as an adult, proving that Dick was not merely a youthful experimentation. “The formality of evening dress concentrates attention on eyes, and Lawrence’s eyes immediately held me. They were startlingly blue, even by artificial light, and never met the eyes of the person he addressed, but flickered up and down as though making an inventory of clothes and limbs.” (242) The flirtatious, almost whispery flavor of “Lawrence’s eyes immediately held me” is absolutely unique throughout his entire memoir. Graves never gives notice to any other pair of eyes, and for him to admit that eyes had a hold over him is definitely unusual. (He even went on to write an entire book about Lawrence.) If he was this passionate about Nancy, death might actually have been the one thing to “do them