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Janie certainly does, whether she has the ‘right’ or not, and this earns her a great deal of disapproval. Still, perhaps the nature of raising a child in an environment where she has security and privilege is that she also gains the right to make her own (sometimes-dangerous) decisions. Leafy and Nanny’s histories certainly would not encourage any appreciation for romantic love, and it makes sense that Nanny would want protection for Janie over passion. She might argue that this is because “most humans didn’t love one another nohow,” but a discerning reader notices that Janie actually possesses a rare privilege in being able to seek out the real, all-consuming love that others in her life never had the chance to find (90). Janie’s culture does not generally share her perspective. This love might vocalize itself in marriage, or sex, or friendship, certainly but most of all, the feeling two people share in their relationship must possess some overwhelming sensation of mutual naturalness about itself to really qualify as love in the eyes of Janie Crawford. To Janie, as both an imaginative girl and a reflective woman, love in its purest form will always be the junction of the bee and the bloom. The concurrence of nature’s unthinking loveliness with Janie’s attentive observation results in the creation of an idea that is entirely her own-the notion that romantic love has nothing do with society at all.
#Romantic notion definition free#
Hurston’s narration lapses into free indirect discourse as she cries out from Janie’s perspective, “Oh, to be a pear tree-any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!” (11). She glorifies the simple, idyllic purity of the natural exchange, the give-and-take of a bee and a bloom. She then lets Janie watch as “a dust-bearing bee” lowers itself into one of the tree’s blooms, becoming the quintessential embodiment of love as Janie would define it. Hurston uses the natural imagery of the “glistening leaf-buds” and the “snowy virginity of bloom” and “the panting breath of the breeze” to liken Janie’s blooming womanhood to the flowering of a pear tree. Janie’s first exposure to love is unique in that it does not come from a human mentor, but rather from the natural world and her own unchecked ideas.
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She uses Janie’s learning experiences to first determine what romantic love is not, and then she uses the negative space of Janie’s failed relationships to outline a turbulently sweet portrait of what Hurston contends true love is. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston approaches romantic love as a symbiotic element of nature and longing that, when finally realized, is too pure to exist for very long on an impure earth. It is dynamic, and evasive, and confusing. Romantic love is not a concept words can easily define, and it is not an umbrella that everyone’s experiences can squeeze underneath. In the words of Janie Crawford, “you got tuh go there to know there” (192). It seems that someone must find answer to the question of love for herself. Romantic love seems to be a complex, yet clumsily-assembled combination of every idea we attempt to describe it with. Alternately, it could be a side effect of social convention, or merely a child’s fantasy. Or maybe it is a preordained, God-given glimpse of some eternal force. Perhaps love is little more than an adaptation of an instinctive drive to reproduce. It is difficult to locate the exact origins of romantic love.