Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a pivotal example of a bildungsroman.
The novel explores the meaning of maturing – by knowing who you are, and what
your place is in the world. Janie’s journey throughout the novel from youth to
maturity, and who she is as a grown woman on her own, is straddled by the
struggles she, as all people growing up do, faces: the repression of personal
identity. The repression of herself by all the people in her life: her Nana,
her husbands, and the people who would impose their belief of who she is onto
Janie as a person – immolating her say in her own identity by shoehorning her
into what they want her to be. Whether that is a mourner, a wife of the mayor,
a good housewife, or a trophy to put on the porch. It is when Janie lets her
hair down, the symbol of her innate, feminine power, that she accepts her role
not as what people deem her, but the role of herself. Of Janie, and only Janie.
The surrounding characters of the novel either mock,
subjugate or revere Janie for her hair. It is seen as something that should be
touched, a treasure, a symbol nearly parallel to that of the myth of Rapunzel;
whose hair was let down for others, but not for Rapunzel herself. Because of
its beauty, Joe Starks fears what it might mean for other men to see it, and he
forces her to wear it up. This action makes her “scalp itch under the rag” –
she feels wrong and uncomfortable, and not herself.
Later,
with her hair freed but her body aged, the length of her hair is mocked as a
symbol of what women her age shouldn’t have. She is mocked for it, like a woman
that is hiding herself by acting more youthful than she truly is. But the
symbol of Janie’s hair goes beyond just hair – just youth, or beauty – Janie’s
hair is her own identity. Janie’s hair is her. Janie’s hair is Janie.
It is telling that, before the scene in which she lets
down her hair, her feelings and emotions and voice are so horrendously silenced
by her marriage with Joe. Before that, even, her real feelings and desires are
ignored in favor of what is believed to be best for her – her marriage is
loveless with Logan because she had no choice in it, no sense of identity in
the marriage because her free will was ripped from her. Her dreams, herself,
died. And she “became a woman.” Janie may have grown, but she never realized
her true self during this. Her marriages forced her own self further down, if
anything. Any opinion she has is put behind clenched teeth, and once she
explodes – at Joe, no less – the road to her own self-actualization becomes
paved for her.
And when Joe dies, the hair comes down. The mask comes
off. Janie rises to the forefront as who she is – guarded, until Tea Cake’s
arrival into her life, but beginning to return to the self – and she wields her
hair like a sword, a symbol of her power. With her hair, she becomes far more
powerful than she was, than Joe was to her, when he exerted his power wrongly
over her.
Tea Cake is the man who furthers her self-actualization.
Which isn’t to say that he’s the entire cause of it – their relationship is
fraught with Janie’s doubts about herself and her own worth in his eyes. The
flirtation he gives to a younger woman makes her skin crawl, as it would do to
anyone who had had the experiences that Janie had. Her life with Tea Cake is
what allows her to find a voice. Where her previous relationships had done
nothing but take from her, her relationship with Tea Cake was instead a mixture
of both. He gave, and took. She took, and gave.
There
was an equality in the relationship, which she had never had before. Janie had
her own agency and independence in this relationship. Arguably, one could say
that Tea Cake allowed her to be an adult just for giving her what all the men –
and her grandmother – should have given to her in her lifetime.
The
difference between the men who show her attention after the death of her
husband and Tea Cake is that he allows her this power. Those other men only
salivate over it, hoping to contain her as Joe Starks had contained; as Logan
had; as her grandmother had.
The difference between those men and Tea Cake is not that
he, like the past men in her life, has fought her and tried to oppress her. It’s
that he allows her to fight back, even a little. Tea Cake allows Janie to be herself,
to take matters into her own hands, even if he does – at times – do much the
opposite. His death is what allows Janie to be reborn as herself. His death is
the birth of her real voice, and the story she tells is her putting it all into
words, realizing it.
The novel is the story of her growth, her death and
rebirth at the hands of her ‘three loves’, and how her identity is centered and
shifted by their effects. As such, she grows through this. Becomes herself and
evolves because of the relationships that she has, for good and for bad.
