Janie Crawford,
the main character of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God,
strives to find her own voice throughout the novel and, in my opinion, she
succeeds even though it takes her over thirty years to do it. Each one of her husbands has a different
effect on her ability to find that voice.
Janie discovers her will to find her voice when
she is living with Logan. Since she did
not marry him for love, tensions arise as time moves on and Logan begins to
order her around. But Janie is young and
her will has not yet been broken. She
has enough strength to say "No" and to leave him by running away with
Joe. At this point, Janie has found a
part of her voice, which is her not willing to be like a slave in her husband's
hands.
After Janie marries Joe, I think that she
discovers that he is not the person she thought he was. He tells her what to do the same way Logan
did, just a little bit more delicately by saying that it is not a woman's job
to do whatever he does not want her to do. Throughout her twenty years of life with Joe,
Janie loses her self-consciousness because she becomes like a little kid being
told what to do by an adult, Joe. She
does it without even questioning herself, which is why I think that she loses
the part of her voice that she has discovered by running away from Logan. At times, she has enough courage to say no to
Joe, but he always has something to say back that discourages Janie from
continuing her argument. But, in my
opinion, Janie does not lose her will to find herself and it might have even
become stronger because the reader can see that Janie is not happy with the way
things are now and that she will probably want to change them in the future.
When Joe dies and Janie marries Tea Cake, she
feels free because even though Tea Cake asks for her opinion when he does
something and cares about her. Since
this is Janie's first marriage where she actually loves her husband, she feels
free and discovers many new things in life that she has not noticed
before. She becomes more sociable, wants
to go places with Tea Cake, enjoys working with other people, and likes
shooting game. Although she never shot a
rifle before, she becomes a better shooter that Tea Cake, and he respects her
for that, which allows Janie to get back her self-respect which she had lost
while being with her previous husbands.
In a way, Janie's spiritual awakening begins when she lives with Tea
Cake.
As the reader can see, Janie has a hard life
where she has to struggle in order not to become inferior to her husbands. She succeeds when she is with Tea Cake, which
also marks the time when her inner voice starts to awaken. But not until after Tea Cake's death does she
realize that she has understood her place in life, or in other words, she has
found her voice.
No comments:
Post a Comment