Character Analysis Of Janie's Phoeby

Major Characters:

Janie Crawford: innocent, gentle, lonely,

Janie, lead character of the novel, is a somewhat lonely, mixed-race woman. She has a strong desire to find love and get married, partially driven by her family’s history of unmarried woman having children. Despite her family’s dark history, Janie is somewhat naive about the world.

Scene: Janie’s loneliness, desire for marriage and naive nature leads her to an ill-advised, and as a result brief, marriage to an older man named Logan Killicks. This demonstrates both her love longing and her lack of experience with love. Still, terrible as the marriage is, it is a learning experience.

Pheoby Watson: progressive, loyal, close friend

Phoeby is Janie’s best friend, and the narrator of the story. Throughout the story Phoeby is a friend Janie can lean on, and defends her choices to the other

Tea Cake is more fun and relaxed than the previous husbands. What’s more important however, is that he views Janie as more of an equal than either of the previous husbands. Both of Janie’s first two husbands viewed Janie almost on the same level as an object, or a piece of property. Tea Cake sees Janie more as an equal and a companion.

Scene: Tea Cake asks Janie to work with him at Everglade fields. This is an action that distinguishes Tea Cake from Janie’s previous husbands. Both her previous husbands had wanted Janie to work, but their motivation and their ways of getting her to do it were very different. Tea Cake wants her to work with him, to be closer to her, while her previous husbands wanted her to work because they thought of her as a tool to be used for their own ends. On top of this, Tea Cake asked Janie to work, while previous husbands told her to work. This illustrates Tea Cake’s role as the most progressive of Janie’s husbands, he doesn’t feel he is in charge simply by virtue of being a