The Importance Of Love In Janie's Love

A theme that was present throughout the novel was love is what you make it. In the beginning of the novel Janie has no idea what it meant to love someone and went into her marriage to Logan thinking that love is something you learn once you are married. “Yes, [Janie] would love Logan after they were married. She could see no way for it to come about, but Nanny and the old folks had said it, so it must be so. Husbands and wives loved each other, and that was what marriage meant.” (pg. 21). Janie had no idea what love meant and figured on her own that love came when you were finally married. When she meets Jody she sees the opportunity to change her path and learn what for herself what love truly is. In an academic journal by Janice Daniel she quoted Northrop Frye writing “According to Northrop Frye, the success of the heroin of a romance depends primarily on the current energy which is partly inside her and partly outside her.” (Daniel, 1991).

In the beginning of their marriage she admired Jody and his aspirations for the tiny town they moved to. But as his status in the town moved higher, Janie’s status also involuntarily moved along with it. In her marriage with Jody, Janie’s own thought and feeling are suppressed and she realizes that she was saving up her thought and feelings for a man she had never even met. “She found that she had a host of thought she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.” (pg.