In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston continually uses animals as symbols to show Janie’s struggle against conforming to her Nanny’s definition of a black woman. The most prominent symbols utilized are the mule and the bee. The mule is a stark contrast to Janie’s youthful vision of the “dust-bearing bee.” These symbols are recurrent throughout her marriages to Logan, Jody, and Tea Cake.
The Bee as a Symbol
Janie is only sixteen at the time of her first marriage, but even then she has dreams of finding “kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! … She had bursting buds… Where were the singing bees for her?” (Hurston 11). Her first marriage to Logan Killicks is set-up by her grandmother; ironically, in this marriage Janie becomes what her grandmother most fears, “de mule uh de world” (14) controlled by her husband. Even though her grandmother has “been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different” (14) for Janie, it is all she knows. Logan Killicks crushes Janie’s hopes of finding the perfect bee/pear tree relationship of total equality when she discovers that “marriage [does] not make love” (25).
Jody Starks becomes Janie’s means of escaping the marriage to Killicks. Her first instincts tell her he is not her bee, “he [does] not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees” (29). However, this chance at change renews in her a since of hope in finding “a bee for her bloom” and she vowed that “from now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (32).
The Mule as a Symbol
The mule is placed center stage in the antics concerning Matt Bonner. The dilapidated mule is the subject of front porch banter by the men folk, which Janie is restricted from taking part in. Janie reacts strongly when the men maltreat and tease the old mule stating,
“They oughta be shamed uh theyselves!
teasin’ dat poor brute beast lak they is!
done been worked tuh death; done had
his disposition ruint wid mistreatment, and
now they got tuh finish devilin’ ‘im tuh
death. Wisht I had mah way wid ‘em all”
(Hurston 56).
Janie can sympathize with the mule because she has undergone the same hardships making the reader think back to Nanny identifying the black woman as the mule of the world. Following Janie’s comment, Jody purchases the mule to live out its days without work. It is only when she tells her tale to Phoeby from the female space of the back porch that her audience is aware that Janie is calling attention to the enslaved condition of women (102).
Janie’s third husband Tea Cake Woods allows Janie to be the woman she has always wanted to be. In him she finally saw her bee and when they make love the imagery echoes that of her vision: “she arched her body to meet him and they fell asleep in sweet exhaustion” (Hurston 138).
A mule, being the cross of a donkey and a horse is barren and only bred for work; until Tea Cake, Janie was a mule and unable to bear children. With her first two husbands she has no “blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be” (Hurston 72). The fact that Janie found her bee man and thus satisfied her journey of self-fulfillment is the main point of the novel.
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