Janie's Last Relationship
We clearly see that Janie doesn't have the best of luck when it comes to finding the perfect man. However, Tea Cake was one of the better ones and a nice one to end the story off. Yet, there were a lot of actions that Tea Cake did that were really questionable - Tea Cake hitting Janie. This was something that we talked about in class but it was something that I wanted to talk some more about. It seemed like something that Tea Cake didn't want to do, but did it anyway. This bothered me as I continued reading because it was something very unlike how he acted in the book earlier.
This is a pretty clear example of how I think the book shows vulnerability. I think Tea Cake acted out as a way to keep the "power dynamic" even if it doesn't really matter to Tea Cake. It is something we actually see in the other relationships that Janie was in. It seemed like Tea Cake was pressured into doing it. We see this with Joe also, during his relationship with Janie. He made Janie wear a hair rag because he was scared. When Janie starts having social reactions with other people, Joe gets scared and pushes her back into the back of the store. I think this book does an actually great job of showing that fear and the responses to the fear.
In the end, I think we stopped at a great point. She eventually settles down and becomes independent, somewhat. Yet, she still is caught up in the memories of the past. Her whole life seems to be defined by the people she is with and it is nice to see her exit and finally seem to settle down. Yet, part of me dislikes this new life she is living. She stopped being the adventures self and is now like a granny, thinking back to the "good old days." What do you guys think about the ending? How do you feel about how the last relationship went?
This is a pretty clear example of how I think the book shows vulnerability. I think Tea Cake acted out as a way to keep the "power dynamic" even if it doesn't really matter to Tea Cake. It is something we actually see in the other relationships that Janie was in. It seemed like Tea Cake was pressured into doing it. We see this with Joe also, during his relationship with Janie. He made Janie wear a hair rag because he was scared. When Janie starts having social reactions with other people, Joe gets scared and pushes her back into the back of the store. I think this book does an actually great job of showing that fear and the responses to the fear.
In the end, I think we stopped at a great point. She eventually settles down and becomes independent, somewhat. Yet, she still is caught up in the memories of the past. Her whole life seems to be defined by the people she is with and it is nice to see her exit and finally seem to settle down. Yet, part of me dislikes this new life she is living. She stopped being the adventures self and is now like a granny, thinking back to the "good old days." What do you guys think about the ending? How do you feel about how the last relationship went?
The scene where Tea Cake hit Janie raised a lot of questions for me. As you said, it didn't really seem like something he really wanted to do. Even so, it was terrible and I think it says things about his character. I think this scene shows Tea Cake's flaws. Even though he is much better than Janie's other two husbands, he is still very flawed.
ReplyDeleteThe scene of Tea Cake hitting Janie also stuck in my head, along with other questionable things he did, like stealing her money and disappearing without notice, or coming home to "check" on her throughout the day. I was especially disturbed with how Janie took the beating and didn't retaliate at all. While he may not have loved doing it, it still seemed like Tea Cake was desperately trying to show he still controls Janie, which I think matters a lot to him. It was hard for me to decide how I felt about Tea Cake at the end of the book, but the fact that Janie was at peace and didn't have any bad feelings made me think more positively of him.
ReplyDeleteThe most striking difference between the incident of domestic violence with Joe and the one with Tea Cake is that Hurston's narrator seems to take a completely different approach to each (and we can take the narrator as largely representing Janie's own view, or how she talks differently about these events when telling the story to Phoeby). With Joe, we hear about how something falls permanently off a "shelf" inside Janie, her "image of Jody" which will never recover, and it is clearly presented as a turning point in their marriage, from which he will never recover. With Tea Cake, Hurston almost seems at pains to explain and excuse the violence as nothing serious, "just a slap," a "message" to the Turners that everyone will understand. We are asked to accept that Tea Cake's violence is an expression of love, which Janie endorses and agrees with, and her image of him doesn't alter at all. If anything, she feels good that he is so threatened by Turner that he would communicate his feelings in this way. As much as the act of violence itself, it's this "excuse" by Hurston that makes many feminist readers bang their heads against a wall.
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