Their Eyes Were Watching God: Comprehension and Analysis Blog

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

Chapter 12 opens up with the town gossiping about Janie and her new man, Tea Cake. “Tea Cake and Janie gone hunting. Tea Cake and Janie gone fishing. Tea Cake and Janie to Orlando to the movies” (Hurston 105). Phoeby confronts Janie about her capers with Tea Cake, why she isn’t mourning anymore, and that she should marry the undertaker with he huge house. Janie says that she and Tea Cake are “as good as married already” (Hurston 109) and that she’s leaving Eatonville to go off to Jacksonville and marry him. Then in the next chapter, Tea Cake goes off with some of Jane’s hidden money and throws a huge party for some of the locals. He doesn’t tell Janie about it until later, though, because he “‘wuz skeered you might git all mad and quit me for takin’ you ‘mongst ‘em’” (Hurston 119). Janie tells Tea Cake that she “‘aims to partake wid everything…don’t keer what it is’” (Hurston 119).
The next few chapters include Tea Cake gambling and winning big but getting stabbed, both of them moving down to the Everglades, Janie working alongside Tea Cake in the bean fields, and Janie fighting Tea Cake over his suspicious relations with Nunkie.
What I found most interesting about this whole section of the book was how even though Janie still holds the belief that Tea Cake has set her free, the relationship still limits Janie. The earliest example of this is the fact that Tea Cake starts picking out Janie’s outfits, simply because he likes her in blue. Janie doesn’t seem to mind at all, and in fact seems to like it, but all the same it seems like evidence of the control Tea Cake has over Janie. Tea Cake still puts Janie on a bit of a pedestal, too, like when he doesn’t invite her to the huge get-together he organized. “‘Dem wuzn’t no high muckty mucks’” (Hurston 118), Tea Cake tells Janie.
Also, Janie doesn’t work alongside Tea Cake until he asks her to. “She is so in love with him that her place is wherever he wants it to be, that she is able to let him slap ‘her around a bit to show he was boss’, that she waits for him at home or goes with him to work, as he wishes” (Reich, “Phoeby’s Hungry Listening”). There seems to be an air of dependency in the relationship, that of Pheoby’s dependance on Tea Cake, despite Janie’s presumption that the relationship is completely mutual with her and Tea Cake sharing everything. For instance, when Janie can’t seem to function while Tea Cake goes off for the first time. She just sits around all day and worries, revealing her dependence on him.
I know I wrote in a comment on one of Leena’s posts that I believed Tea Cake completely sets Janie free, but after reading chapters 12-15, I changed my mind. What do you guys think chapters 12-15 reveal about Tea Cake and Janie’s relationship?
~Sarah-Claire

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

Chapters 3-5 begin to introduce the reader to cultural influences from Florida.  The biggest historical influence from Florida at that time is probably the town of Eatonville.  When Joe and Janie show up, it is a town that is to be run and populated by all black people.  And that is in fact what is starts to turn into quite successfully into.  The Eatonville of the story represents the Eatonville of real life, which was indeed a small town in Southern Florida completely run by black people.  Hurston’s father was a powerful man in Eatonville, even the mayor for a while, and there was indeed a man named Joe Clarke: “…as well as the home of Joe Clarke’s store porch. The porch became a stage as neighbors sat around on milk crates skillfully transforming simple gossip into folktales” (Gale Research).  These overwhelming similarities leads the reader to believe that Their Eyes Were Watching God is an allegory for Zora Neale Hurston’s life.

     Another similarity between Zora’s life and Janie’s is that Janie is raised (and very much loved) by her Nanny.  Similarly, Hurston was reported to be very close with her mother: “Lucy Ann Hurston, a former country school teacher, was delighted with her daughter’s spiritedness” (Gale Research).  When Lucy Hurston dies when Zora is nine, Zora’s relationship with her father becomes increasingly strained and eventually falls apart.  Likewise, after Nanny dies in Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie’s relationship with the main male in her life, Logan, falls apart.  Are there more subtle ways shown to the reader so far in which the story is like Hurston’s life?

                                                                                                  -Kara Buchan

I think the role of women in Their Eyes Were Watching God is an interesting interpretation of women’s rights during that time period.  It would seem that the women are caught half way between two worlds.  On one hand, they are African-Americans who have just earned their right to freedom.  Then they are also women, who are in fact not entitled to all the same rights as men.  Janie, as a black woman, manages to escape actual slavery, but finds in the real world that black men have assumed the position of slave holders.  Logan Killicks tells Janie that: “You ain’t got no particular place.  It’s wherever Ah need yuh.  Git uh move on yuh, and dat quick” (Hurston 30).  He sees her as a slave.  I think it is interesting that in this particular scene, Logan is discussing going to purchase a new mule, yet he is talking to Janie like she is a mule that he can load up with his chores and she will go out and make his work easier. 

            Contrary to the wishes of her Nanny, husband, and even the society she lives in, Janie lives her life the way she wishes.  She embraces both her womanhood and blackness.  Her Nanny marries her off to Logan which is: “frustrating and futile for Janie, as her desire is to explore the world, to take risks, and to savor life’s possibilities- all qualities of and reserved for men in western cultures” (Lester 81).  It is an interesting action coming from Nanny who is indeed the patriarch and matriarch of her family.  She is land owner and the sole provider for the household, so she herself has taken on the more masculine role of the family.  Yet she slaps Janie for her insistence on wanting to travel and find love, Nanny will not allow Janie to have the same patriarchal lifestyle that she now leads.

            As Nicole mentioned in her post, the story is about Janie’s search for her identity.  Can we conclude from Janie’s current taste for freedom that her identity quest will take her towards a more manly identity?  Is it Janie’s embracing the rights of men even though she is a woman that makes her the heroine that women across the country love her for?  Or is it her integration of male characteristics into her womanhood that make her the heroine?

                                                                                                   Kara Buchan

The Forward to Their Eyes Were Watching God gives background information on the author, Zora Neale Hurston and the rebirth of this novel.  I think it is difficult to understand exactly what Mary Helen Washington, the author of the forward, is saying.  Since I have not yet read the entire novel, I cannot apply the analysis of Janie and Tea Cake with the story.  Although, I have made connections to previous works we have read.  Washington states this novel is about “a woman on a quest for her own identity and… her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into blackness” (Washington ix).  Like Joyce Carol Oates’s style of writing, this novel focuses on a search for identity.  In “Mark of Satan,” Flash is lost and unsure of his identity.  Washington tells the readers that Janie, too, is unsure of her identity.  Question: From the Foreward, are there any other aspects Washington leads the reader towards, that we have expierenced in previous literary works this semester?

In the Foreward, Washington awares the reader of some of Hurston’s main choices and implications.  Washington says that she loved this novel because of “its investment in black folk traditions” (Washington viii).  Clearly Hurston wanted to depict aspects of African-American life and use allegories of folklore.  Washington also implies that Hurston wanted to do this in a way that the women readers can relate directly to the characters: “women all across the country who found themselves so pwerfully represented in a literary text was often direct and personal” (Washington ix).  The readers like Janie because she’s a woman “who wasn’t pathetic, wasn’t a tragic mulatto, who defied everything that was expected of her, who went off with a man without bothering to divorce the one she left and wasn’t broken, crushed, and run down” (Rushing ix).  I think the readers look up to Janie for her strength and at the same time feel connected.