In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does the horizon mean for Janie symbolically?

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora
Neale Hurston uses the image of the horizon to symbolically
represent Janie’s aspirations for equality within marriage. Early in the novel, Hurston
employs the symbol to represent Janie’s hope that she might find love in the wake of her
marriage with Logan. Janie abandons this unsuccessful marriage in favor of a union with
Joe Starks. Having made the decision to leave Logan, Janie experiences a “feeling of
sudden newness and change.” Hurston writes, “The morning air was like a new dress. That
made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush
beside the road and walked on.” Janie leaves Logan in search of equality within
marriage. The apron symbolizes Janie’s domestic oppression, which she attempts to leave
behind on the side of the road. Janie hopes Joe Starks embodies the newness and change
she searches for, and she measures him against the perfect image of the pear tree: “he
did not represent the sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far
horizon.” She marries Joe believing that he offers change
and relief from Logan’s domestic oppression. However, she fails to realize that she
merely trades one type of prison for another.

 Joe proves
to dominate Janie with his “big voice.” He fails to represent the horizon
and it is only in the shadow of Joe’s death that Janie can reflect on
herself. She lifts the burden as she tears “off the kerchief from her head and let[s]
down her plentiful hair. The weight, the glory was there” (87). Janie’s hair symbolizes
her confinement. Once tied up underneath a kerchief, her hair can now flow freely. Joe
attempts to dominate Janie, but with his death she is liberated from burden and finally
has time to consider her
horizons:

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 She had been getting ready for her great
journey to the horizons in search of
people; it was important to all the world that she should find them
and they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road
after things. It was all according to the way you see things. Some
people could look at a mudpuddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that
other kind that loved to deal in scraps. Here, Nanny had taken the biggest thing God
ever made, the horizon – for no matter how far a person can
go the horizon is still way beyond you – and pinched it in
to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck
tight enough to choke her.

In
other words, Janie views the horizon as endless, boundless,
and eternal. Janie derives her definition of the horizon
from the pear tree, a symbol of the voice of nature, which teaches Janie
of equality aside from social burden. In contrast, Nanny fit the horizon
into the social construction of marriage, where it pinches and suffocates
Janie. Following Nanny’s guidance, Janie blindly journeys after “things;” instead of
equality Janie discovers the “scraps” others in her position endure, such as abuse and
oppression. Those who “deal in scraps,” such as Nanny, fail to question the limit of
their horizon. Nanny, Logan, and Joe all reinforce social
limitations. In the light of Joe’s death, Janie decides to widen her
horizon through violating societal expectations by entering
a union with Tea Cake, a man regarded as her social inferior. Critic Dolan Hubbard
expands on Janie’s attempt to enlarge her horizon. He
contends that Janie must turn her world “upside down in order to make it right side
up…Janie, in her quest, unknowingly sets out to smash a fiction that has outlived its
usefulness – black women as mules of the world.”