Anatoliy Souksov

Paper #4

The Tree, the Mule and the Everglades: Hurston’s Mastery of Metaphors and Poetic Style

in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In poetry, a major part of a work’s beauty is not just the poet’s story or message, but the

language itself, and how the poet manipulates rhyme, rhythm and intricate symbolism to convey

a mood and a message. In prose, it usually the story itself, rather than the language, that takes

center stage. Yet occasionally a writer will work language and poetic devices into a novel so

well that the line between prose and poetry becomes blurred and indistinct. Zora Neale

Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is one such novel. Their Eyes tells the life story of

Janie—a black woman living in the South sometime in the early 1900s—from her youth and

adolescent days being raised by her grandmother, to her coming of age, her three individually

tragic marriages and a resilient quest for true love. Despite being remarkable prose, in Their

Eyes Hurston employs many poetic elements, particularly a liberal and effective use of

metaphors. Three of these metaphors—the blossoming pear tree, the mule and the fertile

Everglades—are incredibly poignant and are a testament to Hurston’s highly versatile writing

style.

Hurston’s first metaphor is that of a blossoming pear tree and it comes early in the novel.

At the age of sixteen Janie finds herself enthralled with a beautiful blooming pear tree. “From

barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to the snowy virginity of bloom.

It stirred her tremendously” (Hurston 10). The tree, and the accompanying birds and bees that

Janie is so enamored with as well, is of course a metaphor for Janie’s own blooming into

womanhood and sexual maturity. It is no coincidence that Janie’s experience with the pear tree

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coincides with her first kiss and her grandmother’s own realization that Janie is now a woman in

desperate need of a man who would be able to support her (Hurston 10-14).

Another metaphor in the novel is that of Matt Bonner’s old, skinny mule that the entire

town of Eatonville, including its owner, badgers and bullies for its own amusement (Hurston 56).

The mule, and the townspeople’s treatment of it, is a powerful metaphor of slavery. The mule,

much like black slaves in the United States, is indispensable to its owner’s and the town’s

prosperity and economy. Yet, much like the slaves, it is disrespected, underfed, mistreated and

used as an object of mockery and amusement. Even Janie acknowledges this similarity and

strengthens the metaphor when she compares Jody’s purchase and freeing of the mule to the

noble actions of Lincoln. “‘…Abraham Lincoln, he had de whole United States tuh rule so he

freed de Negroes. You got uh town so you freed uh mule. You have tuh have power tuh free

things and dat makes you lak uh king uh something’” (Hurston 58). The mule stands as a strong

metaphor not only for the everlasting scar slavery left on the African-American community

despite its physical abolition, but of how quickly the oppressed can become the oppressors and

unleash their torment unto a weaker being.

Yet another metaphor in Their Eyes is that of the fertile Everglades. When Janie’s third

husband Tea Cake takes her down to the Everglades, the area is fertile and blossoming with

“[g]round so rich that everything went wild” (Hurston 129). And while in the beginning life for

Janie and Tea Cake is good and they are prospering both financially and emotionally, eventually

the area is tragically devastated and destroyed by a massive hurricane. In many ways the tragedy

that befalls the Everglades is a metaphor for all three of Janie’s marriages. All three, or at least

the last two, begin as ripe and blossoming romances, only to have those romances end, tragically,

with either a loss of love, death or both (Hurston 32, 87, 184).

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 While Hurston’s Their Eyes is undoubtedly a remarkably moving work of prose, as the

metaphors of the tree, the mule and the fertile Everglades attest to, it is littered with metaphors

and symbolism. By incorporating these literary devices artfully and skillfully into her already

masterful writing style, Hurston not only adds beauty to her work but blurs the line between

prose and poetry.

Works Cited

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: HarperCollins, 1937.