by Madonna Wilt

Created on: March 18, 2010   Last Updated: March 19, 2010

Role of Pear Tree Dream in Janie’s Identity Development:

In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the pear tree scene guides Janie’s identity development as a woman, throughout her marriages.  When Janie sees the “dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom,” and “the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace,” with an “ecstatic shiver,” she senses a “revelation” into the true nature of marriage and dreams of getting the same kind of unconditional love from a man that the blossom receives from the bee (Hurston 11). 

Hurston’s allusions to the pear tree trace Janie’s progress toward her dream and, as Keiko Dilbeck suggests in the essay Symbolic Representation of Identity, “[a]s the novel progresses, this connection becomes fleshed out” (102).  The thread begins in Janie’s first marriage as she learns “that marriage [does] not make love,” and her “first dream [dies] so she becomes a woman” (Hurston 25), and continues as Janie runs off with Jody in search of the respect and dignity that her first marriage lacks. 

At first, Janie believes that, “[f]rom now on until death” life with Jody can give her “flower dust and springtime sprinkled on everything [and a] bee for her bloom” (Hurston 32), but eventually she finds that Jody withholds freedom, thereby robbing her of her identity.  She says that, “It must have been the way that Joe spoke without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off things” (Hurston 43).  After Jody’s death, Janie returns to her dream of the pear tree.  As she considers making a new life with Tea Cake, she thinks “he could be a bee to a blossom – a pear tree blossom in spring” (Hurston 106). 

Although Tea Cake is not inherently different from her other husbands, by changing her own reactions to his power over her, Janie achieves a relationship of mutual trust and respect that mirrors her vision of the bee in the pear bloom.  Ultimately, Janie learns that like the sister-calyxes, in order to achieve power and fulfillment, she must first give unconditional love through submission to her bee. 

Work Cited

Dilbeck, Keiko. "Symbolic Representation of Identity in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Explicator 66.2 (2008): 102-4. Academic Search Complete. EBSCOhost. UMW Lib., Fredericksburg, VA. 13 Mar. 2010 <http://search.epnet.com>

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. First Perennial Classics ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1998.

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