Janie

I really dislike Janie's character in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I understand how the author's portraying Janie as a naive young girl in the beginning of the story set the symbol of the horizon up. I love the idea of the horizon being this thing we can never reach no matter how far we go or how much we do, but I hate that through out the story Janie cannot seem to get over this idea of love. It's always there somewhere lying underneath everything. When Nanny sends her off to get married to Logan she wishes to fall in love with him so in marrying him for Nanny she also isn't miserable. Years later when she realizes that she will never fall in love with him and runs away with Jody thinking they'll "...have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything..." love obviously is still what's fueling her decisions. Two decades later and Jody dies. She has this new sense of independence and her dream is still budding at the horizon. It seems she just wants to live without a husband or this idea of love and figure out what this dream is and finally achieve it. However, when Tea Cake comes into the picture things seem to change drastically. She had been pushing away all of the men trying to court her, but because she feels Tea Cake treats as more of an equal she's comfortable and finds herself falling for him and they begin to date.
We see that Janie has always had this dream she's been going after and at first it was obviously love, but after being with Logan and Jody she feels love isn't lasting or real or something of that sort. We then see she still feels incomplete and has something she wants to go after in her state as a newly single woman. We have no idea what it might be and Hurtson keeps describing Janie as this woman who realizes she doesn't or want a man in her life. Again love comes into play with Tea Cake and it seems that this must be her dream. I have no idea what the ending of the book is because the only conflict I can see is Janie trying to reach her dream on the horizon. Her dream doesn't seem obvious to the reader or even Janie herself and so I can only expect her to fail because the horizon can't be reached because it's not a tangible thing and it moves along with a person. I really hope that by the end of the book I feel differently towards Janie because she does have some qualities in her that I respect and feel that I embody as well, but this constant recurrence of love keeps disrupting those qualities and causing the book to go in directions I don't like.