Ending Chapters

Filed under: Literary Criticism, Characterization, Basic Comprehension, Group G — hurston at 10:28 pm on Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Chapter 19 starts off with Tea Cake being forced to bury the dead after the hurricane. I think it is terrible that they(blacks) had to do this. Especially because they had to pull out the white men so that they could be buried in a coffin. When reading this part, it says that they threw quicklime onto the bodies, and I was interested in what this was, so I looked it up.

Quicklime:
    also called lump lime, caustic lime, or unslaked lime. This was the name given the lime (CaO) as it was removed from the kilns and packed into barrels. It was “quick” to stick to the skin. Handling the product is hazardous, as it is caustic, takes water from the flesh, and gives off heat. This heat is enough to char wood, and warehouses and schooners shipping lime were known to catch fire.

It sounds like it is something that will help breakdown the bodies faster because higher temperatures means faster bacteria growth, and from the definition it seems to burn the skin.

 

After this, Tea Cake gets sick, and Janie finds out that he has rabies from the dog that bit him on the cheek. While Janie goes to see the doctor Tea Cake thinks that she is sneaking off to see Mrs. Turner’s brother. Janie finds a pistol of Tea Cake’s and notices that there are 3 shots in it. She rotates the clip so that he will not shoot bullets the first 3 times he pulls the trigger. I think that this is dumb, and you can sense the suspense coming. If i was her, i would have taken the bullets out so that he could not use it at all. When Janie comes back from the doctors again, Tea Cake accuses her again, and has his pistol. Janie defends herself after Tea Cake tried to kill her. This must have been a very hard decision to do for her, but it shows that she is in control. Through out the novel, Janie has been a possession and a object of a male all because she is a women; “Through this gesture, the act of shooting Tea Cake, Janie allows her self as subject to emerge — not, this time, as a fully realized sell as a unified subject, but as a subject freed from its dependence on the Other”(McGowan). I think this is definitely true, and that she is in control of herself and is her own person. Choosing Tea Cake over other men was a step towards this, because she knew that she wanted a man who was not as dominating. Shooting Tea Cake has completely freed her of an reason to be a possession of someone else. Even though she did love him, “she is not at all paralyzed by his loss”(Reich). If anything it helped her by getting further away from her grandmother’s idea that materialism and wealth are all you need to be happy.

—Andrew



2 Comments

115

   hurston

December 1, 2005 @ 1:08 am

How does everyone else feel about Janie not taking the bullets out of the gun? Is this a test to see if Tea Cake really trust her, or is she not thinking right? Do you think you could shoot someone you love if they were going to kill you?

–Andrew

117

   hurston

December 2, 2005 @ 2:13 am

I think that Janie purposefully left the bullets in the gun to reassure herself that Tea Cake would never truly wish to hurt/kill her. On the other hand, I think Janie was well aware that Tea Cake’s illness affected his mind and thought process, and that he may consider pulling the trigger. In a way, Janie was in denial that Tea Cake would ever turn on her and want to harm her in anyway. Before this scene occurs, Janie and Tea Cake talk about death during the hurricane. Janie says “People don’t die till dey time come nohow, don’t keer where you at” (151). She understands that death is inevitable and therefore it makes it easier for her to take Tea Cake’s life; she knows that it is his time and not hers. Emily

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.