Their Eyes Were Watching God Memory and the Past

Women reconstruct their pasts through selectively forgetting and remembering different aspects of their lives. In this way, women ensure that they see themselves as living out their dreams. It is interesting that Hurston starts off her novel by calling into question a woman’s ability to accurately look at her past because Their Eyes Were Watching God is largely one woman telling her life story. Does this imply that we aren’t supposed to trust Janie’s version of her past?

When beginning her story, Janie’s memories are shaped like a tree. This is appropriate because Janie’s whole life has been in pursuit of her experience underneath her pear tree—an experience of love and life that she constantly seeks to replicate. Janie’s tree of her memories and past, however, is quite different that the pear tree that symbolized what she hoped her life would be. The tree of her memories doesn’t contain blossoms, but both suffering and joy. Looking back on her life, she sees that her dreams were more idealistic compared to what her life turned out to be.

Memories are presented as a chain of events that reach into the deepest part of the human soul. First, memories are mere "mind-pictures" that then trigger emotions that finally blossom into full-fledged stories that are "dragged out" from the deepest recesses of the heart. Memories are, in themselves, fragments of a narrative.

The first time Joe beats Janie, her ideal and illusion of him is shattered. Janie realizes for the first time that her past with Joe has been very different that she previously thought. She realizes that his goodness was all an illusion to her, that Joe in reality "never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams" but "just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over." This harkens back to the first page of the novel (1.2) in which the narrator states that women create a version of their own past separate from reality in order to enforce the idea that their life is in line with their dreams. Here, Janie has just realized that her life and her dreams have not been at all aligned.

This statement implies that Janie usually pushes her negative thoughts about Joe aside. It is only when Joe insults her intelligence or limits her freedom in any other way that Janie’s memories are triggered and she thinks about how differently her marriage has gone from the way she envisioned it.

After Joe’s death, Janie’s memories of Nanny suddenly hit her with a new force and she interprets them radically differently. Her memories, tinged with the bitterness of her oppressive marriage to Joe, now seem desecrated. Nanny is no longer the loving grandmother who wanted only good for her child, but a woman who valued only material objects and subjected her granddaughter to horrors simply to obtain such trivial wealth. Thus, life experience can change the way one parses her memories.

Janie finds comfort, salvation, and even life in her memories. For her, Tea Cake is not dead; he cannot be until she can no longer remember him.

Now that Janie has lived her life to the fullest, she can look back and indulge in memories. She can now "live by comparisons," comparing her marriages to one another and appreciating little things like the bedroom of her Eatonville house now that it is rife with memories of Tea Cake, and even Joe. Now that Janie’s dreams have been fulfilled, she can recall that happiness at will and be grateful for it because she has lived in darker, less blessed times.