Shan’s Blog

The ending was not at all what I had expected. I thought all the rumors were true, and that Tea Cake would take Janie’s money and run off with another woman. I still don’t like his character very much, but he did prove his love to Janie when he saved her, and got sick and died because of it.

Janie returns to Eatonville, where she lets the gossip spread. She doesn’t care about what people say to her, because she has seen what lies beyond in the horizon. Tea Cake showed her what life was like without the constraints that society had on her, and that’s why she loved him. She’s found her voice and been to the horizon and is now completely at peace.

In class the other day, we talked about how Janie might be taking a step back, instead of making progress, when she went from Jody to Tea Cake. She had many suitors after Jody’s death, but she chose to run off with Tea Cake and move to the muck. It was a big change from her position as the mayor’s wife in Eatonsville.

Personally, I do not think she has taken a step back. It is true that she no longer has all the luxuries that she had when she was with Jody. However, she has gained the respect that she had craved. Tea Cake treats her as an equal, and lets her have her own voice, which was what she wanted in the first place. Unlike Jody, he lets her express herself and show her emotions. In that sense, I think she has gained more than what she has lost.

However, in Chapter 17, I was confused when Tea Cake beat her to show his authority over her. “Being able to whip her reassured him in possession… He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss” (147). This made me change my mind, and makes me think that Janie might have taken a step back. I was surprised that she didn’t stand up for herself more, and was acted passively in this act. She chooses not to speak and forgives Tea Cake easily.

These next chapters really show the transformation that Janie goes through, and we can see that it’s a big difference. Janie doesn’t care what the townspeople think of her anymore, and she openly has a relationship with Tea Cake. Even though the town gossips about it, she doesn’t care anymore. The part in chapter 11, when Janie falls asleep and wakes up to Tea Cake brushing her hair, just adds more to Janie’s new independent image. Her hair, as I’ve said before, represents her own power and freedom. When Tea Cake brushes it, I think he’s encouraging her to be her own woman. He helps her in finding her own voice, and how to express her emotions and understand her desires.

But Tea Cake, as much as I hate to say it, doesn’t seem like a consistent character. He keeps disappearing for long periods of time, leaving Janie to worry. I became especially wary of him when he took Janie’s money and left. Although he did earn the money back, it still makes him slightly untrustworthy that he would do something without Janie’s consent. I think this foreshadows their relationship and the hardships to come. It makes me believe that Tea Cake really would steal her money and run off for good, as was hinted by in the first chapter.

It seems like his book is going by pretty fast… Jody is dead, and within two chapters, we meet the infamous Tea Cake. But before that, we see the power being transferred to Janie. With Jody gone, she is able to, in a sense, free herself and express her emotions. We see her talking more with the people who come into the store, which she was not able to do when she was married to Jody. She frees her hair from the rags and burns them, which represents her emancipation.

I think everyone can relate to Janie in this way. Everyone has something that holds them back from pursuing their dreams and once it’s gone, they feel like nothing can stop them. When Jody dies, Janie becomes her own woman and enjoys being single, and not being tied down to a man. She embraces her newfound independence and doesn’t care what the townspeople think anymore.

Then we meet Tea Cake, who is unlike any other man Janie has been with so far. He treats her as an equal, which is shown when he invites her to play a game of chess with him. Janie enjoys his company, and it probably foreshadows their relationship together later on.

In these chapters, we see a little compassion on Jody’s part. He buys the mule from Matt (1) to free the animal from cruelty and (2) to make Janie happy. I think this shows that he really does care about her, even though he may not admit it. He’s not truly a bad character, he’s just extremely controlling, and it’s sad that the only way he can express his love for Janie is by buying things.

But even so, we see their relationship being strained. He still insists that Janie keep her hair tied up, which represents him trying to control her. In a sense, Janie’s hair might be a symbol for her independence and her own power, which she doesn’t have with Jody. Comparing her relationship with Jody, to her relationship with Logan, it’s obvious that they’re very different. With Logan, she was able to defy him, but with Jody, we see her surprising her feelings and emotions. She hides her irritation and goes along with him.

As the years go by, though, Janie’s marriage becomes empty and she feels lost. At the end of chapter 7, we find ourselves rooting for Janie when she finally sticks up for herself. After years or taking the emotional (and sometimes physical) abuse, Janie unleashes her pent-up feelings. She attacks Jody and his aging appearance and essentially strips him of his status in front of all the other men.. “Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible…” (79).

A lot happened in these three chapters. First Janie was married, then she’s not, then she’s married again. But the two husbands she has, Logan versus Jody, are two completely different characters. I think it’s interesting how the power in the relationship kind of shifts as she goes from one man to the other. In the first relationship with Logan, Janie has all the power. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t make her work, and she basically does whatever she wants to pass the days. But when she runs off with Logan, she loses that power. This is shown when he refuses to let her make the speech, and how he insists that she ties her hair back, which is supposedly her most beautiful feature. But it’s not only Janie that he tries to control; he tries to control the town as well. As soon as he settles into the new town, he buys land and builds stores, and installs a street lamp.

One quote that I thought was interesting about Jody was in chapter 4, when Janie first meets him. She says (pg. 29) that “he spoke for far horizon.” The horizon is kind of a cliché metaphor, and it’s almost a given that it always stands for freedom and the bright future ahead. But I thought it was interesting how the author said that he “spoke for” it.

I had a lot of trouble reading these first two chapters, merely because of the dialogue that was used. Sometimes, I had to read it out loud just to see what it would sound like, because I couldn’t understand it if I was just reading it in my head. It was difficult to read, and I had to go back and read some paragraphs twice to fully get what was trying to be told.

That said, I can understand why some people would be offended by this because it makes the characters seem uneducated by the way they talk. Compared to the third person narrative, the dialogue seems really inarticulate and even crude. On the other hand, if that’s how people really talk, then the author was just trying to be true to the people and times. However, I do think that she might have laid the dialogue on a little too thick. I found the Jim parts in Huckleberry Finn easier to read than this… mostly because she had her characters tell chunks of the story in their own dialect which, again, was very hard to get through.

One thing that I did find interesting was that she did have some parts that weren’t told by her characters. These parts seemed to be of interesting and defining moments. For example, the part where the author switched to third person narrative in order to talk about Janie and the pear tree, instead of having Janie herself relate that part. For this reason alone, it must be a key part in the book. It compares Janie, when she is sixteen, to the growing and blossoming tree.

“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!” (11) But she goes on to say that there were no “singing bees” for her and, in that moment, goes and tries to find the answer that will fulfill her needs.