Quotes About Janie's Death

Tea Cake is Janie’s prince in shining armor. He is her fairytale ending, at least for now. Tea Cake is the embodiment of true love. True love is expressed through respect, trust, and honesty. Tea Cake not only does these things, but he also bases his happiness off of Janie’s happiness, believes that Janie’s age is just a number, and eventually envelops Janie into his world. Tea Cake loves Janie so much that whenever she is happy, he is happy. This normally only occurs in cases of true love, because you need to be practically selfless in order to base your happiness solely on someone else's. When Tea Cake comes back to the store a second time to see Janie, he started humming and mimicking playing a guitar. He did not enter the building, but

After the death of her second husband, she meets a man named Tea Cake. Janie sets out find love between them but is very skeptical. “Tea Cake wasn’t strange. Seemed as if she had known him all her life. Look how she had been able to talk with him right off “(Hurston 99). His presence makes Janie feel warm and comfortable inside. She feels like they a connection but she does not want to move to fast. “So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth and quenching the thirst of the day” (Hurston 99). After Janie meets Tea Cake, the sunset foreshadows a negative theme later in the novel. Janie and Tea Cake become close friends and eventually

Throughout the whole novel, there was a plentiful number of scenes where the community and Janie are having fun. One scene that I thought of particularly, is when it was night time at the Muck and the Everglades were filled with wild energy and while the bars explodes with music and partying. Then Tea Cake’s house becomes a center of the community, a place where people can hang out and hear Tea Cake play his music. At first, Janie stays at home and cook’s meals, soon after Tea Cake gets lonely and begins cutting from work to see Janie at the house. Janie then decides to join him at work so they can be together the rest of the day. Working in her overalls and sitting on the cabin stoop with the other migrant workers, then Janie laughs to herself

At first Janie believes she can make herself happy in any situation. Later on she realizes that if a man is not willing to give her what she wants in a relationship that she will just leave him. She begins as a very dependent character, but then she grows confidence and courage throughout the book.

He thought the only thing she could do was work at home. Tea Cake has a very different idea about women. He thinks that Janie can do anything she wants to do, that she is just as smart as a man and has the capacity to learn and do many more things than what Joe would allow her to do. Throughout their marriage, Janie seems to have taken Joe’s ideas to heart and believes them herself. Tea Cake rejects these ideas and helps Janie begin to feel confident in herself and forget what Joe made her

From the beginning, Janie’s happiness is abundantly clear in her relationship with Tea Cake. Although she is now a woman in her forties, Janie acts very youthful and unrestricted with him. She wears “new dresses and...comb[s] her hair a different way nearly every day (111)”. Tea Cake allows for Janie to be herself, in stark contrast to misogynistic Joe who constrained her individuality daily. Janie reports that “Tea Cake love[s] me in blue, so Ah wears it (113)”.

They moved together to the Muck in the Florida Everglades and lived in Tea Cake's Shanty after the death of Joe. Tea Cake and Janie spent all the time they had together. They remained in constant tune with the nature and even went fishing together. This was the type of lifestyle Janie envisioned all her life. All of Janie’s previous relationships was based off of the spouse. Janie was never allowed to be herself and live the life she wanted. Tea Cake let her be herself. He loved her as she was and accepted all she dreamed of. He encouraged her to be what she wanted to be, to follow her goals, her dreams, and her aspirations. Janie had finally found her the man she had always been looking for. She loved him with everything she had. Janie would do anything for Tea Cake. They had the kind of everlasting love that she had hoped for all her life. Thing were going well for the new couple until a bad storm hit and Tea Cake gets bit by a dog trying to save Janie. Tea Cake ultimately get rabies and begins to act so distraught that Janie is forced to kill him. She killed Tea Cake in loving manner and could not bear watch him suffer

Tea Cake loved Janie so much that he would rather himself get hurt than her, which is something Janie had never experienced: true love. Without Tea Cake’s role in Janie’s life she would have never experienced true love and actual happiness. Tea Cake is a mysterious man from the

Although Tea Cake loved Janie from the start, Janie was skeptical but he reassured her by saying “‘Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom’” (Hurston 131). Janie most likely felt like she had the world in her hands while Tea Cake stated this about her. Her other marriages were not love and were not true, but Tea Cake’s love was another story and he had soothed her with what he had stated about his love to her. Most readers might think he is just playing he based on her old marriages but I believe Tea Cake means his words. He must truly love her to spend time so much time with her even when the town judged and labeled him as a gold digger. Tea Cake makes sure Janie knows how much he loves her because of her history and does not want to hurt her like the people in her past. Nanny hurt her by forcing her into marriage with Logan Killicks who treated her like a dog. Even when she ran away and married Joe Starks, he controlled her life for 20 years by telling her what to wear and how to act (since she was the mayor’s wife). He broke her apart of the lower class crowd even though those people were her friends and a life she wanted to live. Tea Cake was different from the other two because he was kind, treated her with respect and took her into consideration. He would not control Janie like Joe did and brought her back to the lower class ways because he means his love and has

Tea Cake has saved Janie’s life but not his. The bite from the dog gave Tea Cake rabies. Tea Cake later dies and Janie has now reached rock bottom again and cannot pick herself up anymore. Nature has once proved how it feeded Janie with her ambitions of love but crushed her dreams and ended her adventure in the most catastrophic way

Similarly, Janie makes another great sacrifice when she decides to leave her life of ease and luxury in Eatonville, so she can start a new life with Tea Cake. In Eatonville, she had authority as the store owner and as the former mayor’s wife, but she decides to follow her heart which ultimately leads to her fulfillment of self-actualization with the help of Tea Cake. Without Tea Cake, Janie could not have found herself, and his impact on her remains even after his death. Janie recounts her life lesson to Phoeby saying, “Love is lak da 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...Two things everybody’s got tuh do for theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves” (191-92). Through Janie’s words, the effect of Tea Cake on her is eminent through how Janie learn about life and herself and leads her to becoming independent. Because Janie sacrifices her luxurious life in Eatonville, through Tea Cake, she fulfills her need of self-actualization, a recurring idea in the book. Janie’s values concerning her life and of Tea Cake are also illuminated in her conversation with Phoeby before she leaves Eatonville. She and Tea Cake “‘...[had] done made up [their] minds tuh

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.

Janie was no longer letting anything control her any longer. She was making her own decisions now by talking to Jordan and not listening to her grandmother, who told her to respect her husband. With the results of this, Janie ran from Killicks to marry Joe for numerous years while waiting for her hunger for love to be filled. However it never was with Joe. After the death of Joe, Janie soon found Tea Cake, who gave her the love she starved for: “after a long time of passive happiness, she got up and opened the window and let Tea Cake leap forth and mount to the sky on a wind” (Hurston 107). Hurston gave Janie Tea Cake to show that she was no longer going to wait around and wait for love. She was now going to find it herself. Proving that she was no longer the naive girl who sat under a tree and dreamed all day.

Throughout the book Janie struggles to find the true definition of love and how to make herself happy with her relationships. She goes through several different ideas of love before finding that it is mutual compassion, understanding, and respect that makes her the most happy.

Janie's quest is for self-discovery and self-definition, but she encounters many obstacles while trying to win this quest.