How Does Janie Show The Loss Of Innocence In Their Eyes Were Watching God

Joe is power hungry and seeks to dominate Janie, who cannot be held back and craves the freedom to manage her own life. With such caustic tension, it seems odd that Janie would stay with Joe until his death. Clearly, she was not afraid to walk out on a husband, so why did she choose to stay? Though Joe was frequently an oppressive dictatorial husband, he still offered more love to her than the cold, quasi-emotionless Logan Killicks. Only after finding love with Tea Cake, however, would Janie realize one of the major themes of the novel: in order to gain true happiness, you cannot sacrifice one desire for another, in her case freedom from oppression for love.

People grow and develop at different rates. The factors that heavily influence a person's growth are heredity and environment. The people you meet and the experiences you have are very important in what makes a person who he/she is. Janie develops as a woman with the three marriages she has. In each marriage she learns precious lessons, has increasingly better relationships, and realizes how a person is to live his/her life. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie's marriages to Logan Killicks, Jody Starks, and Tea Cake are the most vital elements in her growth as a woman.

Therefore, both Joe and Janie are looked up to by the townspeople. To some extent, this could be considered a form of equality. Unfortunately, this is about where the equality stops. While Joe gains prominence through his own actions and words, Janie gains some prominence by doing what she is told to do. She is not permitted to voice her own opinions or join in the lighthearted gossiping which occurs outside of their store. Janie is expected to be the dutiful wife. If she makes a mistake, then she should have known better and therefore should accept her punishment quietly. Joe holds the obvious upper hand in the relationship until his death whereupon Janie inherits a large amount of money and learns to enjoy the freedom of living as her own person.

Near the beginning of the book, Janie develops an idealistic view of love whilst lying underneath a pear tree. She is young and naïve, enthralled with the beauty of spring. She comes to the conclusion that marriage is the ultimate expression of love and finds herself pondering why she does not have a partner. In the rashness of her hormone clouded brain, she is drawn to Johnny Taylor, who is nearly a stranger. This is her first experience formulating ideas about

Even before Joe’s death, Janie “was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew not how to mix them.”(75) Joe’s influences controlled Janie to the point where she lost her independence and hope. She no longer knew how to adapt to the change brought upon her. When she finally settles and begins to gain back that independence, the outward existence of society came back into play. “Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing. Dey needs aid and assistance.”(90) Except this time Janie acted upon her own judgment and fell for someone out of the ordinary. Tea Cake was a refreshing change for Janie, despite the society’s disapproval. “Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.”(128) This was what she had always dreamt of. When she was with Tea Cake, she no longer questioned inwardly, she simply rejected society’s opinions and acted upon her own desires.

Love is a life-changing event. It is an event that causes you to embrace another person in your life. It can be a positive or a negative experience for a man or woman. It is a cycle of connection then death, however; some people will not last to death due to death of divorce. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie explores the themes of love, beauty, and evolves into the woman that she is at the end of the novel through three different marriages. When Janie gets married to all three men, she loves them progressively as she goes from one marriage to the next;however, in the end she ends up loving Tea Cake more than any of her past husbands.

The imagery of the bees and the pear tree are the catalyst of Janie’s coming-of-age, representing her first “springtime” and the awakening of her sexuality. The moment Janie sees the bee pollinating the blossoms on the pear tree is when she becomes aware of her sexuality. She finds herself empathizing with the blossoms; both being young and undergoing the springtime of life. Contrastingly, however, Janie has no “bees singing for her” like the blossoms do (Hurston 11). In Janie’s eyes, the relationship between the bee

Thus, when considering the sexualized symbolism of the pear tree blooms, Janie reveals she comprehended the idea of what a marriage should be through witnessing the pollination of a bee into the blossoming pear tree.

Janie is married to two men, before she finds Tea Cake, that both suppress her individuality in their own ways. Janie's first husband, Logan Killicks, suppresses her by keeping her in a marriage that she can't fully, or at all, love the man she's married to. "Cause you told me Ah wuz gointer love him, and, and Ah don’t. Maybe if somebody was to tell me how, Ah could do it." Janie says she needs to be told how to feel about Logan in order for her to be able to love feel anything towards him at all. Janie is a mixture of the people around her because they're telling her to live and how to think. Janie can't bring herself to figure out how to do these things on her own so she ends up looking for the answers in the man she married, her grandmother, and her society. Joe Starks, Janie's second husband, keeps her from showing who she really wants to be by

Joe was on his way to Eatonville to make a better life for himself, he asked Janie where her parents were and Janie explained that she is married and her husband was out getting a mule for her to plow. Joe expresses that that is not a way for her to be treated and asks her to leave Logan and marry him.

Finding one’s soul mate is a difficult and lengthy process for most, as it is for Janie in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. She marries Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake Woods who seem to be alike; however, the motives for the actions they each take are completely different.

But if we look at the conditions that she went into her relationship with Tea Cakes and that of her life after the death of Joe we can see that her relationship with Tea Cakes was “less a “cause” of freedom than a derivative benefit” ( Baker, Jr. 37) as Houston A Baker, Jr. states in Ideology and Narrative Form. After the death of Joe she knows what she wants now and she takes grasp of her own freedom, from burning her head rags to the start of it all when she yells at Joe on his death bed, finally becoming the independent, self aware person she is. Tea Cakes, Janie saw as a benefit of her freedom, someone she could love and be with that would accept her and further her personal expression. Tea Cakes is not the initial cause of her personal freedom he does have a large effect on expectations for herself and relationships. By jumping into a relationship with Tea Cakes so fast while at first there were no romantic expectations in the eyes of Janie, she was able to discover the amount of respect she desires from a friend and

Throughout Janie’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God, she has a different set of clothes that she describes wearing in each marriage. These outfits represent the type of relationship she is in. Throughout the book, they also show how she evolves into a strong, self confident woman. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, clothing symbolizes where Janie is in her life and the type of relationship she is part of. When Janie finds out that her grandmother wants her to marry Logan Killicks, she is horrified because she is not attracted to him.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie’s past has been filled with orders from her grandma. She’s a strong individual but seems to let men brainwash her by controlling her feelings. Joe, Janie’s bossy second husband, brainwashes her by being the dominant controlling figure in their relationship. Tea Cake, Janie’s lively third husband, brainwashes her by making her believe it’s normal to slap her. Both men consider gender roles to be a part of why they’re treating Janie like so, because she is a woman.

Sal’s mom before she left Sal found her kissing a tree, she saw that her mom put blackberries in her mouth, then kissed the tree, ever since that happened Sal has been kissing trees with black berries in her mouth. Her mom told her to hug and love and kiss the trees because they keep us alive and help us breath they are our friends in this world, Sal was nice and was friends with the tree