The Importance of Land and Porches

Filed under: Basic Comprehension, Group C — hurston at 9:39 pm on Thursday, November 17, 2005

Hurston seems to be putting an emphasis on the possession of land in the novel so far.  Janie’s first husband, Logan, seems to be obsessed with keeping the land and having it.  He is always out in the fields, and needs Janie to help out.

More importantly, in Chapter 5, Jody buys land for the community of Eatonville and he helps them with the money that he has.  He then becomes mayor, which implies that land is equivilent to power.  “Take for instance that new house of his.  It had two stories with porches, with banisters and such things” (Hurston 44).  The fact that the house had these porches seems important.
In Chapter 6, Janie describes the enviornment of the store that she works in.  When describing the store she says “When the people sat around on hte porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice.  The fact that teh thought pictures were always rayon enlargements of life made it ever nicer to listen to” (Hurston 48).  This implies that the porch is a place of significance. 
Also, Janie is telling the story on her own porch with a current friend of hers.  The porch seems to be the place where people can be themselves and must represent something of importance.

 Cassie Covollo



6 Comments

46

   hurston

November 18, 2005 @ 1:09 pm

I agree with what Cassie says about the importance of land and the significance it has on Janie. A porch seems to be place where friends get together and talk. This seems to be something Janie is jealous of in some ways. She watches the people on the porch at the store, just as she watches must of the town. Shes looked up and inprisoned within the land each of her husbands own. The only way she was able to get away from Logan (and his land) was for another man who consequencely did the same thing her first husband did. I believe this might be a pattern that only Janie will be able to break.

-monica

47

   hurston

November 20, 2005 @ 12:18 am

I think that the empahsis that Cassie says Hurston puts on land, it is really the time period that lends itself to the importance of land. It can be infered from the publication date that this book takes place around the 1920s. The amount of land someone owned, around this time, showed how wealthy he (or she) was. The obessions that Janie’s husbands have with land signfys their greed and desire for power. Literary critics Barabara Johnson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. state that “Joe, we know, sees, himself, and wishes to be seen as the God-figure of his community” (Modern Critical Interpretations 73). He sees himself as the dictator of Eatonville since Joe recurited families to live there. Therefore he sees himself as a “creator” of Eatonville.

-Nicole Leva

49

   hurston

November 21, 2005 @ 9:19 pm

I agree with Nicole’s post except for one thing, when you said, “The obessions that Janie’s husbands have with land signfys their greed and desire for power.” It does not signify THEIR greed, it can signify Jody’s greedy, but absolutley do not see how it would be showing Janie’s greed. Everything that Janie and Jody own is a by product of Jody. And in many cases Janie thinks the things that they own are ridiculous, not necessary, and demeaning to the rest of the community aroudn them who can not afford the type of things that they can. Jody buys himself and Janie seperate golden spitting pots and she can not figure out why. “It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you to wonder” (Hurston 45). Janie and Jody clearly do not have the same opinions on wealth and possesions.

EMILY DESTEFANO

70

   hurston

November 27, 2005 @ 7:43 pm

Coming to the new town, the first thing Joe buys is land and after that he doesn’t stop; he buys a lampost for the town, nice things for his house, and creates a store (which gives him money). I agree with Nicole; he does want to be the “creator” of Eatonville. I think it is interesting how just as God created the world and “let there be light,” Joe is the creator of Eatonville and buys a lampost so there can be light, symbolizing a new life and birth of the town.

Coming to Eatonville with more money than anyone there, Joe is able to buy things and develop the town, which gives him power. Like most people with power and money, he becomes controlling. This affects his marriage with Janie because he is no longer affecionate and respectful of her. Janie did care and have feelings for him before they came to the new town, but those feelings diminished.  The importance of porches in this novel is that they are where all the story telling takes place; “…the reader should remember Hurston’s conception of the store porch as a stage for the presentation of black folklore” (Hemenway).  Janie is not allowed to take talk with all the men on the store porch, showing how Joe does not allow her to have any verbal freedom.

Rachel*

82

   hurston

November 28, 2005 @ 12:40 am

“From the point of view of Black self-determination, it is not the front porch of the white house, but rather the porch of Starks’ store that best exemplifies the strengths of Eatonville and its people. If Janie’s front porch represents empty pretensions and the back porch intimate conversation, it is the porch of the store that provides the middle ground between public and private worlds”(Crabtree).

I agree with what everyone has said about the porches, and this quote I foung goes along with it nicely. I believe that the Stark’s store is the strength of the town. It is where everyone talks and socializes. It allows the community to be a community. I think that this is important for the charachters and the setting of the book.

-Andrew Portolese

107

   hurston

November 29, 2005 @ 2:43 am

Cassie has made a very good point: the porch and land have high significance in this story. However, I feel that they each have their own separate reasons for importance. For a black person to own land is a sign of wealth and importance. It places him a notch above all the other black people in the social hierarchy. For example, Jody does not want Janie listening to the conversation on the porch so he pulls her inside saying: “Ah can’t see what uh woman uh yo’ stability would want tuh be treasurin’ all dat gum-grease from folks dat don’t even own de house dey sleep in” (Hurston). It is interesting because this same idea was raised in The Bluest Eye. People who own the land they live on and their houses are greeted with respect, where as those who simply rent the land and looked down on. And while both stories focus on all or mostly black communities, I think the same feelings are still held today, even here in Springfield. It is the norm for a child to live in a house properly owned by his or her parents. The children who live in say, apartments, do not come from families with as much money and are therefore missing out on something. But moving back into the time period of the novel, the land is particularly important because Janie is among the first generation of black people in America who are capable of owning their own land, not just in the North. We, the reader, know that Janie’s Nanny was a slave, so she could not have been brought up among land owning black people. But now that the African-American culture has been freed from slavery, owning land is one of the quickest ways for them to show that they can have made it and have come up in the world. Now they are just like the white man who held them down for so long.
I do not feel that the porch is of the same social significance that the land is. The porch is important because it is the social meeting place. The porch is the place where traditions such as folklore live on. It is where heroes are made, such as Joe Starks and Matt’s freed mule become part of town legend.
-Kara Buchan

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