Their eyes were watching god

Their Eyes were Watching God The conversation between Nanny and Janie, in Chapter three of the novel, clearly indicates the difference between these characters’ worldviews. In this scene, Janie is waiting to marry Logan. She understands that she does not love Logan, but anticipates that once they get married, love will come naturally. After a magnificent wedding, she visits Nanny for pieces of advice because she is afraid that her love for Logan will never grow. However, Nanny decides to send her back to her husband because according her, relationships are a matter of expediency. Nanny feels that Logan can make a good husband because he is honest, well-off, and hardworking. The plot of this novel is set in a postwar era when it was difficult to accumulate wealth, but Logan still managed to offer physical security and shelter. This paper, therefore, analyses the difference between Nanny and Janie’s worldviews in relation to the theme of Love and Relationship versus independence as presented in chapter three scene.
Janie perceives Nanny as a former slave who had no independence and, therefore, she would have such a perception. Her life has been characterized by hardship and poverty, and any progress to acquire material wealth has been derailed by her skin color. Therefore, according to her perception, Logan who owns his own land and has financial independency is the ideal husband she could dream of when she was still young. However, according Janie, a woman in her current age should pursue something more than material wealth from a man. She is looking for some kind of completion that offers both emotional connection and passion. Emotional and physical connections are significant in her life and inseparable from her understanding of love. This is the reason she describes Logan as “ ugly” and “ he doesn’t speak beautifully to her” (Hurston 27) when explain why she does not love Logan. This implies that she neither feels physical, nor intellectual, nor emotional connection to him. In the pursuit for physical and emotional connections to a man, she decides to run away with Jody. She believed that her real man was hiding somewhere. Janie believes “ God tore down the old world every evening and build a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take the form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making” (Hurston 32). This is a sign of Janie’s romantic desires. She is even ready to compromise or abandon these desires for the possibility of change.
In conclusion, the conversation between Nanny and Janie, in Chapter three, describes how Janie struggles to achieve a strong sense of self and independence. Janie feels that relationships should be based on mutual respect but, not on Nanny’s suggestion of material wealth. This is the reason she decides to liberate herself from her unfulfilling and unpleasant relationship with Logan, who is a barrier to her personal journey. Her later relationship with Tea Cake, in Chapter 12, gives her a feeling that Tea Cake’s spirit resides within her and of a deep connection to her surroundings. This is the reason why she does not feel alone even after Tea Cake’s death.
Works Cited
Hurston, Zora N. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Print