Something that I remember closely from Their Eyes Were Watching God is how Hurston would use beautiful, pastoral images of the horizon almost as a meter of measurement to define Janie’s state of freedom. Not only is the horizon repeatedly present through the text, but Hurston transforms it from this far-off, unreachable sight to a tangible restraint, which chains Janie down and smothers her in her current circumstance.
This depiction of the horizon is introduced when Janie is recollecting about how her Nanny pushed her into her first marriage, and the cascade of events in her life therefore after.
“Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God had ever made, the horizon – for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you – and pinched it into such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her grand-daughters neck tight enough to choke her.” p102
This image of the horizon, of this far-off and almost holy scene being used to stifle Janie makes for a heartbreaking metaphor for her freedom – or lack thereof. What should be this unreachable thing to craft dreams upon is instead brought right up to her neck, not only blocking her airways but her vocal passages for speech too.
I believe the reason I find this metaphor so damning is because it was not her Nanny’s intention to suffocate Janie in this way. In recollecting her reasoning for marrying a young Janie off to a wealthy man, her Nanny tells of how her early life was spent enslaved on a plantation. All day, her Nanny would engage in this back-breaking work under awful conditions, and being born into slavery, this was the only life she had ever known. And so she would work under the hot sun, and whilst she worked she would look up to the porch of the farm house where the wife of the plantation owner would sit on her chair all day, doing nothing more but slowly fan herself. It was under these conditions that Janie’s Nanny would think: “my god, there must be no better life to be lived than to be sat up on the porch in the shade all day long, fanning myself.” Although the day comes when slavery is abolished and her Nanny has the whole world to be hers, she can never quite shift the idea of that perfect life to be had up on that porch. When the time comes when her grand-daughter is of the age to be married, her Nanny seeks out a wealthy man for Janie and organises a marriage between the two of them. At only sixteen, before Janie has had the time to dream her own dreams, she is sat up on the porch of her husband’s farmhouse, with nothing to do to pass the day but to fan the heat away.
What is so heartbreaking about Nanny’s idea of freedom is that for her, the best possible life out there is still confined to that horrific, grueling place. When Janie looks upon the horizon it swells out infinitely far beyond herself, but when her Nanny does the same, the horizon ends up on that porch.
“She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people would see her and gleam it around. But she had been set out in the market-place to sell. Been set for still-bait.”
As the novel progresses, Janie moves through life not settling for this position her Nanny set out for her. It seems that she can not quite find peace in staying in the same place, and Hurston puts this wonderfully in the dreamy little line:
“Now and again she thought of the country road at sun-up and considered flight.”
In the final lines of the novel, after Janie has endured and escaped two loveless marriages and lived through a tragically fulfilling one, the image of the horizon is returned to. After Janie attends her beloved Tea Cake’s funeral – the only man who didn’t force her into submission – Hurston writes:
“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulders.”
There is so much to this line, it is so zealous, so passionate, so tender and so beautiful. What once was “the horizon” is now “her horizon” and whilst it once constricted her she now possesses it. For what the birds can never even reach, Janie now grabs its velvety texture, the pure vastness of its light and transparency and loosely drapes it over her delicate shoulders. Zora Neale Hurston has a pure talent for the written word and this repeated metaphor of who yields our earthly horizon stands out beyond much of what I have read across literature.
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