The Life and Loves of Janie

Nanny to a fault reveals that Janie was the produce of a rape, implying that Janie's romantic dreams of love are just so much nonsense. Shocked and hurt by these revelations, Janie is manipulated into labor union with the farmer Logan Killicks. But as Williams explains, Logan "can't see any further than his plow, and Janie is smothered by his plodding nature" (Williams xii). Logan's betrayal of Janie comes in the unionize of mental cruelty, as he threatens to force her to work in the fields with him. This causes her to elope with the grocer-mayor of Joe Starks, who "provides Janie with the 'front porch' existence of Nanny's dreams" (Williams xiii).

Janie forgathers the office of dutiful woman of the house and store clerk for Joe, whose idea of a wife is that she should be seen and not heard. Women don't think, Joe says: "They just think they's thinkin'. When Ah see one liaison Ah understands ten. You see ten things and done understand one" (Hurston 111). o'er some fifteen years of marriage, Janie learns to curb her tongue and play the dutiful wife, while concealing "a host of thoughts she ne'er had expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. . . . She was redeeming(a) up feelings for some man she had never seen" (Hurston 112). At length, with Joe draw near death from kidney failure and the emotions of the marriage long shriveled, Janie confronts him: "Mah own brain had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me" (Hurston 133). Janie plays the soc

Janie and Tea cover's well-settled home(prenominal) life is disrupted only by a bulky event--a hurricane that causes widespread flooding and forces everyone in the "muck" to seek higher(prenominal) ground. During their perilous flight from rising waters, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog, and in the weeks afterward is struck by a fever that reaches his brain. His personality is transformed, and he turns rabid against Janie, who is toilsome to nurse him back to health. At the pitch of his fever, marked by suspicions of infidelity and other betrayals, he takes up a side arm to shoot her. She takes up a rifle. They struggle. He misses; she hits her mark, and he dies in her arms.

ial, public role of dutiful widow, but she burns her kerchiefs, a symbol of the long-term betrayal implied by her subservient role throughout marriage to Joe.

The fidelity intact, the love grows. Janie and Tea Cake relocate to the Everglades, where they both work in "muck" market-gardening fields by day and become the locus of just about social activity in "the quarters." Now Joe Starks's store porch had also been the center of attention, but "here, she could listen and laugh and even conference some herself if she wanted to" (200). That freedom and fullness of experience conciliate for the fact that Tea Cake is not very economical and not a good gambler. Janie's growing self-sufficiency also gives her the judgment to spot the combination of social snobbery and latent self-loathing in one Mrs. Turner, who like Janie has distinctive mixed-race features but who impertinent Janie "had built an altar to the unattainable--Caucasian characteristics" (Hurston 216). Mrs. Turner, who runs a cafe, tries (without success) to break up the Woodses' marriage and push her brother toward Janie. Tea Cake takes his jealousy out, first, on Janie, his skewed logic being that he needed to essay the Turners "who is boss." Secondly, he gets drunk and with friends engineers a plot to destroy Mrs. Turner's cafe.

fit in to Cannon (104), Hurston's novelist
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.