Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, is a novel about self-discovery, in which Janie Crawford is determined to find true love in marriage, and live life according to her terms. Janie's search begins in her Nanny's yard, as Janie lies beneath the pear tree when; "the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a flower; the thought of the connection brought to her attention the wonder and closeness of a soul mate. .
The moment Janie's grandmother realized that Janie's transition to a woman had taken place; she decided it was time to Janie to marry immediately. This would bring up severe ideological conflicts between Janie and her grandmother, which would prove to have long lasting effects on Janie's life. Janie's Nanny went through a lot of troublesome times during her life. Once a slave, Nanny told a story of being raped by her master, an act from which Janie's mother was brought into the world. With a crushing sense of personal sacrifice, Nanny tells sixteen-year-old Janie of hiding the light skinned baby from an angry, betrayed slave master's wife. The Nanny believed that black women "were the mules of the world. The black woman's relation to the mule is an important metaphor in the novel because Janie's husbands treated her the same way that they treated their mules. Because of her slave experience, Nanny does not want Janie to be a "mule of society" and wants her to live a secu!.
re and stable life. Despite Janie's wishes for a marriage filled with love, Nanny feels that love is not nearly as important as security in life. She therefore forces Janie to marry Logan Kellicks, simply because the man owned sixty acres of land. During Nanny's slave experience, owning land was something that only a white person could do, so for Janie to marry a man who owned sixty acres of land was enough for her to feel that Janie would live a safe and happy life.