The Theme Of Marriage In 'Their Eyes Were Watching God'

Their Eyes Were Watching God discusses the central question of “Does marriage mean love?”. This question is played throughout the novel as a whole and changes how readers understand the story. The entire novel as one answers the question by saying no, marriage does not mean love. Janie’s life allows readers to wonder if marriage leads to love. In Janie’s first two marriages she expects to to grow from them. The first one in particular shows that the person must love the person before you decide to marry them. At the beginning of the relationship, she feels nothing for her husband. She even asks her her grandmother if she will find love in this. These events answer the question by saying no, it is not possible to find love in a marriage if it does not already exists. The portion of the novel allows readers to understand the story line in the sense that love is hard to find, and the person may need to let go of their significant other if it was not there in the first place.
This relationship shows how being with someone you do not love can change your outlook on life. Since she was with Jody for close to 20 years, and only loved him at the beginning of the relationship, to keep this love, she became someone she was not. This means that this portion of the novel’s answer to the central question is that marriage does not mean love, and because of that, it is possible for one of the people in the relationship to lose who they are. This changes the understanding of the novel because readers now see another side to how pretending to have love can make a person change