With Janie being a child, she is somewhat helpless to defend herself ... ... middle of paper ... ...of love the reader sees from Tea Cake is his rescuing Janie from the dog attack. This unravels the mystery, revealing that Tea Cake does really love Janie; he is her pear blossom on her pear tree. Hurston successfully uses speech and silence to create a fascinating story about a young woman who grows up to find her individuality and in the end, her pear blossom. Logan, Joe, and Tea Cake all play an integral part in Janie becoming the strong, independent woman she is, ultimately allowing her to break the chain of abuse suffered by her mother and grandmother. Silence is the barrier in Janie’s life that she endures; through the suffering, Janie emerges to honor the struggles in her life, transformed into a woman who is beautiful, mature, and strong.
At age eight, she announced that she wanted to be a poet; her mother was proud of her, but her father loathed her even more because of it. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston shows Janie’s struggle for self-realization through love by all of Janie’s conquests. From her search of love from: the pear tree, Nanny, Logan, Jody, and Tea Cake, Janie finds herself. The symbol of the pear tree relates to Janie’s coming of age, and makes Janie want to find marriage and to see the world. Nanny was dissolving this image by making her marry Logan Killicks.
In Zora Hurston, Their eyes were watching God, we see a major theme of love and dreams. Janie has an image of true love, and she strives to attain it. In the story Janie’s ideal future is often presented as romantic, idealistic and symbolic to her naive childhood. During the whole story the main Character Janie, has been Investigating love her whole life and she had dreams that she’s always wanted to chase but her grandmother’s teachings set her back. When she finally finds love with a man named tea-cake it changes her life and makes her see life in a new way.
Thesis: Janie’s blind quest for love. It seems that Janie’s destiny is decided for her despite her idealistic and naïve view of love and marriage. Even though it appears that “her dream was dead”, she accepts her fate and “became a woman”, Hurston shows us that though suppressed at times Janie never gives up her dream (25). The symbolic use of the pear tree not only sets the bar high for Janie’s expectation of marriage and love as a partnership like the “bee [sinking] into the sanctum of a bloom” leading to the “ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to the tiniest branch” but also a need for personal fulfillment (11). Her journey to find herself begins under the pear tree but she had to travel through her marriage to the respectable, dependable Logan Killick, wind through her marriage to the showy Joe “Jody” Starks and end up with the love of her life Vergile “Tea Cake” Woods.
This image represents Janie’s budding sexuality; Janie wants to find the love and affection from a man, that the bees share with the pear tree, thus sparking her quest to finding this love throughout the novel. Janie experiences three different marriages to Logan, to Jody, and to Tea Cake. Since Janie’s first marriage was arranged by her grandmother, Janie never found the love she was searching for and once her grandmother died Janie’s obligation to Logan died as well. Janie becomes free to marry whomever she wants and free to continue her search for love. Although Janie finds happiness in the second marriage to Jody, the love begins to fade because Jody is unwilling to treat her as an equal: “He wanted her submission and he’d keep fighting until he felt he had it” (Hurston 71).
Hurston generates a symbol of love by creating a blossoming pear tree. Hurston uses this symbol to show that it is beneficial to wait for ideal love, sometimes experiencing different kind of men gives you opportunity to attain the unflawed lover. The first way the author uses symbolism is when Janie is laying under the pear tree. Hurston says that the “ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on mystery.
Which lastly leaves Tea Cake, a younger man who looked at Janie as a prize but did not read her like Jody did. He respected her, and let her join in on activities that she was not able to do before. Tea Cake loved Janie and he was her true love and it was unfortunate in the story to have Janie kill her husband in such a way. Echidna every person who played a role in Janie’s life would show her who she was. In the end of the story she is indeed an independent woman, and has completely changed from who we met early in the
She learns from Tea Cake true love and how it feels to be that way. Upon his death Janie realizes and says this, “Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (152). Janie knows that she won’t ever find a love like her’s and Tea Cakes, so she feels alive and now she has all these lessons about life in her lap from her three husbands. Janie Crawford marries three men that seem to be very much alike; however, their motivations for their actions are different.
Janie chose Jody to fill in the feelings that were unsatisfied by Logan. She felt the need for change, but she did not live freely and peacefully with Jody. Her previous marriages had killed the life inside of her, and Tea Cake revived her. The last experience on her journey taught her everything there was to know about love. She learns that love acts differently than a grindstone and does not have the same effect on everything.
Her next marriage to Jody was an escape. In a sense it was Janie breaking free from the life that Nanny had planned for her, cutting loose from his scratchy toenails and portly stomach. Joe Starks was the knight who could rescue that damsel in distress. However, Tea Cakes started off with a “sweep you off of you feet” type meeting, which could not be turned down. He possessed charm and grace and had this unique ability to make Janie feel special.