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How does janie discover her own individuality
Critical analysis of jane austen
Critical analysis of jane austen
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Janie has developed from a little girl into a young lady over the years. She spends most of her days underneath the pear tree surrounding herself with nature. Under the pear tree, Janie is awakening to the idea of love and marriage. She is beginning to be attracted to the opposite gender seen previously from when she kissed Johnny Taylor, a guy who before she did not take interest in his looks. As Janie gazes at the intimacy of the flower and the bee, she sees how the tree is pleased in the end from this exchange. Then, this action dawns to Janie when she realizes this is how love should be, a give and take relationship where both parties benefited from each other. Janie from this experience sets up standards for what her future admirers would
The pear tree, the ocean, the horizon, the hurricane are how Janie views nature. Hurston uses spring as a sign of fertility, blossoming sexuality, and a new start. The pear tree represents Janie blossoming into womanhood. In Janie’s eyes the pear tree represents beauty and freedom because she is able to reflect on her life, and her future. No one is telling her what to do when she sits under t...
1) Talk about the life Janie and Tea Cake live in bean-picking, swamp country and contrast it with Janie's life in Eatonville. What is Janie's attitude to the contrast?
In the beginning, the pear tree symbolizes Janie’s yearning to find within herself the sort of harmony and simplicity that nature embodies. However, that idealized view changes when Janie is forced to marry Logan Killicks, a wealthy and well-respected man whom Janie’s Nanny set her up with. Because Janie does not know anything about love, she believes that even if she does not love Logan yet, she will find it when they marry. Upon marrying Logan, she had to learn to love him for what he did, not for that infallible love every woman deserves. After a year of pampering, Logan becomes demanding and rude, he went as far to try to force Janie to do farm work. It was when this happened that Janie decided to take a stand and run away with Joe. At this time, Janie appears to have found a part of her voice and strong will. In a way, she gains a sense of independence and realizes she has the power to walk away from an unhealthy situation and does not have to be a slave to her own husband.
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.
Janie and Arvay respond to their men in similar ways as well. Both women swing from extremes of doubt and distrust to passionate, all-encompassing love for their husbands. Moreover, both women reconfigure themselves to adjust to the man’s world, as when Janie moves to the Everglades with Tea Cake, and when Arvay goes out to sea with Jim on his fishing b...
In this novel the two contrasting places shows Janie as being loss and shows Janie as being found. This novel stands on that theme. Sometimes one would be loss but the problem comes in when they are never found. In Eatonville there was love of force but in the Everglades there was love of choice. Janie was able to find the bee pollinating the flower. “So this was marriage”. The contrasting places examine true love.
Identity is something every human quests for. Individuals tend to manipulate views, ideas, and prerogative. Janie's identity became clay in her family and friends hands. Most noteworthy was Janie's grandmother, Nanny. Janie blossomed into a young woman with an open mind and embryonic perspective on life. Being a young, willing, and full of life, Janie made the "fatal mistake" of becoming involved in the follies of an infatuation with the opposite sex. With this phase in Janie's life Nanny's first strong hold on Janie's neck flexed its grip. Preoccupation with romantic love took the backseat to Nanny's stern view on settling down with someone with financial stability. Hence, Janie's identity went through its first of many transformations. She fought within her self, torn between her adolescent sanction and Nanny's harsh limitations, but final gave way and became a cast of Nanny's reformation.
Under a pear tree in Nanny's backyard, however, Janie, as a nave sixteen-year-old, finds the possibilities of love, sexuality, and identity that are available to her. This image, forever reverberating in her mind through two unsuccessful marriages to Logan Killicks and Joe Starks, is what keeps Janie's spirit alive and encourages her quest for love and life. " It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep" (10). Under the pear tree on that spring afternoon, Janie sees sensuality wherever she looks. The first tiny bloom had opened.
At age sixteen, Janie is a beautiful young girl who is about to enter womanhood and experience the real world. Being joyous and unconcerned, she is thrown into an arranged marriage with Logan Killicks. He is apparently unromantic and unattractive. Logan is a widower and a successful farmer who desires a wife who would not have her own opinions. He is set on his own ways and is troubled by Janie, who forms her own opinions and refuses to work. He is unable to sexually appeal or satisfy Janie and therefore does not truly connect with her as husband and wife should. Janie's wild and young spirit is trapped within her and she plays the role of a silent and obeying wife. But her true identity cannot withhold itself for she has ambitions and she wills to see the world and find love. There was a lack of trust and communication between Logan and Janie. Because of the negative feelings Janie has towards Logan, she deems that this marriage is not what she desires it to be. The pear tree and the bees had a natural att...
Janie’s first attempt at love does not turn out quite like she hopes. Her grandmother forces her into marrying Logan Killicks. As the year passes, Janie grows unhappy and miserable. By pure fate, Janie meets Joe Starks and immediately lusts after him. With the knowledge of being wrong and expecting to be ridiculed, she leaves Logan and runs off with Joe to start a new marriage. This is the first time that Janie does what she wants in her search of happiness: “Even if Joe was not waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good…From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (32). Janie’s new outlook on life, although somewhat shadowed by blind love, will keep her satisfied momentarily, but soon she will return to the loneliness she is running from.
Janie's Grandmother is the first bud on her tree. She raised Janie since she was a little girl. Her grandmother is in some respects a gardener pruning and shaping the future for her granddaughter. She tries to instill a strong belief in marriage. To her marriage is the only way that Janie will survive in life. What Nanny does not realize is that Janie has the potential to make her own path in the walk of life. This blinds nanny, because she is a victim of the horrible effects of slavery. She really tries to convey to Janie that she has her own voice but she forces her into a position where that voice is silenced and there for condemning all hopes of her Granddaughter become the woman that she is capable of being.
While Janie’s Nanny forces her into marrying Logan Killicks for security; Logan also lacks love and compassion for Janie and silences her. Janie cannot use her voice when she marries Logan Killicks because of her Nanny. Although Janie knows “exactly whut” she wants to say; expressing her voice is “hard to do” (Hurston 8). From the beginning, Logan does not resemble her perfect pear tree love, which to Janie means a man who instills confidence into his wife and listens to her voice. Logan falls short of fulfilling that dream as he isolates her from the community, leaving her with no voice whatsoever. Realizing her marriage lacks love and compassion which she longs for, Janie comes to understand that her relationship with Logan will not last long .Not only does Janie’s marriage to Logan stifle any hopes of exp...
Using nature like the pear tree and the horizon, compared with the destructive forces of naure as well, a sense of life, love, dreams, and death can be created out of words. Janie is able to achieve her dreams of finding love and keeping it even after Tea Cake is dead. She is able, “[pull] in her horizon like a great fish-net,” and to, “call in her soul to come and see” (pg. 193). Janie is able to reach her horizon and find herself and grow into a beautiful yet powerful woman, much like nature she is beautifully
When Janie is growing up, she is eager to become a woman and is ready to dive into the strain, maturity, and exhilaration of adulthood. In the beginning of Janie’s life story, Hurston introduces the metaphor of the pear tree, a symbol of Janie’s blossoming, and describes how “she had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her,” which successfully captures her excitement and perplexity of entering the adult world (11). Janie’s anxiety of growing up is also articulated with the image of her “looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made” (Hurston 11). In her teenage years, it seems as if her life revolves around the anticipation of womanhood. Even as Janie grows older, she continues to hold on to her aspiration of living an adventurous, invigorating, and passionate life. In criti...
Nanny Janie’s grandmother disapprove the kiss between Janie and Johnny Taylor under the pear tree (11). Janie was only sixteen years old and naïve to think that was love. Nanny knew Johnny Taylor did not mean to cause no harm, but she felt Johnny was trying to mislead Janie to hurt and humiliate her by being sexual that can be dangerous (Hurston 12-15). Likewise, Janie was forced into marrying Logan an older man, Nanny approved of because Janie will have a husband that will love her. Same as, Hurston describe Janie emotions of unhappiness within the marriage not having affection and desire for Logan, Hurston implies, “Ah ain’t got nothin’ tuh live for.” (118) Hurston also describes Janie as confident that caught men attention as well as her physique, the women were jealous of Janie implying “Janie will never fit in the upper class of white men because of her appearance.” (Hurston 41) The women try to make Janie feel worthless and unattractive of not having enough sexually appeal. . Hurston writing engage the character from love to lust in a unhappy marriage that lead to a prolonged period of difficulty