Comparing and Contrasting Relationships in Hurston’s Novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee
In Their Eyes Were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee, Zora Neale Hurston creates two protagonists, Janie and Arvay, and depicts their rich relationships with Tea Cake and Jim, respectively. This brief paper compares these two women and their interaction with their husbands. Contrasting the similarities of these relationships helps underscore deeper themes that Hurston draws from two ostensibly different women.
Tea Cake and Jim bear substantial resemblance to each other. They both carry a rather unsavory reputation around their towns, they both woo their new wives aggressively; they even take care of their women with occasional recourse to illegal improprieties such as liquor distilling and gambling (although they tend to spend their profits quite differently). Both men reduce to child-like behavior in key moments of affection with their wives; Tea Cake favors having his head in Janie’s lap, while Jim prefers his head resting on Arvay’s breast. Perhaps most crucially, both men exhibit communication and behavior that make their wives frantic with jealousy and fear. Jim, in his teasing of Arvay, and Tea Cake in his long absences, especially right after his marriage to Janie in
Jacksonville, make their respective wives boil over with internal anguish.
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...
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...her silent thoughts and how they pulled her away from her love for Logan and Jody, now those same silent thoughts preserve Tea Cake for her in perpetuity. And in Seraph on the Suwanee, Jim’s departure allows Arvay to realize the chasm between her and her past, and in so doing, realize that her struggles portray a woman destined to be a caregiver. For both Janie and Arvay, inner turmoil is quelled into a role that reconciles both themselves and their relationship with their men. And, perhaps most remarkably, this idealization of their partners persists despite – indeed, is even enhanced by – the fact that both women see their former love interests, those who came before Tea Cake and Jim, as now standing on cracked or even shattered pedestals. Both Janie and Arvay in the end take comfort in their new-found roles and those men who best compel them to adopt these roles.
All over the world, marriage is one of the main things that define a woman’s life. In fact, for women, marriage goes a long way to determine much in their lives, including happiness, overall quality of life, whether or not they are able to set and achieve their life goals. Some women go into marriages that allow them to follow the paths they have chosen and achieve their goals while for other women, marriage could mean the end of their life goals. For Janie, the lead character in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, who was married twice, first to Joe sparks, and to Vergil Tea Cake, her two marriages to these men greatly affected her happiness, quality of life and the pursuit of her life goals in various ways, based on the personality of each of the men. Although both men were very different from each other, they were also similar in some ways.
Harris, Trudier. "Celebrating Bigamy and Other Outlaw Behaviors: Hurston, Reputation, and the Problems Inherent in Labeling Janie a Feminist." Approaches to Teaching Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Other Works. Ed. John Lowe. New York: MLA, 2009. 67-80. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 285. Detroit: Gale, 2013. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
Janie’s character undergoes a major change after Joe’s death. She has freedom. While the town goes to watch a ball game Janie meets Tea Cake. Tea Cake teaches Janie how to play checkers, hunt, and fish. That made Janie happy. “Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play. That was even nice. She looked him over and got little thrills from every one of his good points” (Hurston 96). Tea Cake gave her the comfort of feeling wanted. Janie realizes Tea Cake’s difference from her prior relationships because he wants her to become happy and cares about what she likes to do. Janie tells Pheoby about moving away with Tea Cake and Pheoby tells her that people disapprove of the way she behaves right after the death of her husband. Janie says she controls her life and it has become time for her to live it her way. “Dis ain’t no business proposition, and no race after property and titles. Dis is uh love game. Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means tuh live mine” (Hurston 114). Janie becomes stronger as she dates Tea Cake because she no longer does for everyone else. Janie and Tea Cake decided to move to the Everglades, the muck. One afternoon, a hurricane came. The hurricane symbolizes disaster and another change in Janie’s life. “Capricious but impersonal, it is a concrete example of the destructive power found in nature. Janie, Tea Cake, and their friends can only look on in terror as the hurricane destroys the
...d feels that she is lucky to have him. Joe Starks, Janie's second husband, seems to be her singing bee when they first meet but she realizes that he is not. When Joe becomes what he strived to be, he tried to control Janie and change her into what he expected and thought for her to be. Only Tea Cake, Janie's final husband, truly cared for the person that she really was and treated her as his equal. He encouraged her to speak her mind and tell him her opinion so that they can gain a better understanding of each other. In the course of these marriages, Janie is lead toward a development of self and when she arrives back in her hometown she has grown into a mature, independent woman who was still left with the warm memories of love and laughter with Tea Cake.
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.
Your analysis of the Vodou imagery in Their Eyes Were Watching God is detailed, even though it is not comprehensive. Your assertion that the Vodou imagery Hurston uses empowers women is justified, because I contend that her husbands were all just stepping stones for Janie’s quest for self-discovery. After each husband Janie has, she progresses on her quest and becomes stronger. You claim that Janie’s tale serves to highlight the potential that exists within all black women (167). I concur, because Janie shows a degree of self-expression and independence that was unexpected of most black women at the time. Hurston’s use of Vodou imagery in Their Eyes Were Watching God serves to challenge the stereotypical representation of African American women in the early twentieth century.
Hurston, Zora N. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1937. Print.
Woman’s Search for Identity in Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Barnet, Sylvan, William Burto, and William E. Cain. Literature for Composition. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Print
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