Long Form Essay TEWWG
... a long time and that she ran off with a younger man named Tea Cake; Janie then tells Phoeby that Tea Cake is “gone.” The entire beginning, then, foreshadows the culmination of Janie’s journey. The novel covers twenty-four years and we know this because Janie was sixteen when she begins telling about her adventure and by the time she returns to Eatonville, she was forty years of age. At the beginning, the novel presents a statement about the differences between the dreams of men and women. For some men, the ship comes in and the dream is realized very soon. For other men, the ship sails for a long, long time on the horizon. By the time these dreams finally can be realized, so much time has passed that the dreams are worthless. Women's dreams are different. Women don't wait and watch for their "ship to come in." Some women have dreams and some do not. And for women, just the possession of the dream is what matters: "The dream is the truth"(Hurston 1). At the end of the novel, Janie climbs the stairs to her bedroom with her night lamp. Shutting the window and brushing her hair, she remembers the day of the shooting and the trial. She sees visions of Tea Cake prancing around her. Tea Cake is not dead; while Janie is living, he will live on in her memory. Janie finally finds peace; “She pulls in the horizon like a great fishnet and drapes it over her shoulders. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see"(Hurston 193). Point Of View Though the novel is narrated in the third person, by a narrator who reveals the characters’ thoughts and motives, most of the story is framed as Janie telling a story to Pheoby. The result is a narrator who is not exactly Janie but who is abstracted from her. Janie recollects in the past tense and occasionally slips into the first person narrative. Character Janie, the protagonist of the novel, is a beautiful black mulatto woman. Most people call Janie "Alphabet" because she goes by so many names. Janie was forty when she tells the story and sixteen when the story begins. Janie spends the novel searching for fulfillment of her life goals: finding the horizon, finding a bee for her blossom, finding her voice. Janie's primary character attributes are her ability to dream and her ability to act when her heart tells her that she must. “She knew that marriage did not make love”: people must work out their own emotions and desires in word and action (Hurston 25). Phoeby Watson is Janie's best and only lifelong friend. In many ways, Phoeby could be described as stronger than Janie. Whereas Janie is the adventurer, living out her every dream, Phoeby is much more like us. She, due to the responsibilities of her marriage, is unable to pick up and leave. When the going gets rough, she cannot just run out of the front gate like Janie can. Phoeby endures. She endures the boredom of regular life, the same people day in and day out, the same husband. Phoeby serve as the audience in this novel, listening to Janie’s story. Logan Killicks is Janie's first husband. Logan is twice as old as Janie is. He is not the bee for Janie's blossom. He is unloving and too old for Janie. He treats Janie like a possession, like his mule. He cares for Janie and is upset when he realizes that Janie will leave him for another man, Joe Starks, but is powerless in convincing Janie that she should stay with him. Joe Starks is Janie's second husband. He is an appealing choice for Janie who admires his youthfulness and ambition. Joe rules Eatonville as its mayor, proving that blacks can be powerful leaders just as whites can. Hurston's main criticism of Joe is that he seeks power through the same measures as slave-era whites did: that is, he seeks power by taking power away from others. Joe control Janie’s intellectual and voice by controlling her life. Tea Cake is Janie's third husband, twelve years younger than Janie. Janie learns many things from Tea Cake: understands how to love, learns about her cultural roots, learns how to live life in a natural way, develops her skills at "playing," finds ways to have fun just living. Tea Cake is not perfect: he steals money from Janie, he beats her, he has a brief affair with another woman, and he helps run an innocent family out of town. However, Tea Cake is fun, adventurous and spontaneous; he is a gambler and a musician. Setting The novel occurs in the early twentieth century, presumably the 1920s or 1930s and takes place in rural Florida. In Zora Neale...