Juliet And Janie's In Their Eyes Were Watching God

Juliet and Janie both transition as they discover their sexual desires and the definition of romantic love. Their transitions, however are different in that Juliet becomes a woman to find her self-revelation while Janie has to become a girl again to find hers. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s transition to finding her selfhood is from a girl to a woman. Juliet begins as a young girl with no desire to marry and she does not have sexual desires. Juliet is not ready for the marriage her parents arrange with Paris because she does not yet understand feelings of love and sexual identity but she complies because it is societally correct and she is ignorant to the definition of romantic love and its power. Juliet’s girl-self is an innocent character

Janie began as a girl like Juliet had but, unlike Juliet, Janie had discovered her sexual desires and being. When Janie sat under the pear tree, she was her girl-self and explored her sexual desires in connection with nature but she did not have self-revelation because she had not yet learned the definition of romantic love. Janie’s girl-self where she was happiest was blanketed by Nanny’s dreams of marrying Logan and then her marriage with Jody. When Janie is with both Logan and Jody, her girl-self is not present. Her sexual desires, connected to her girl-self, are gone when she argues with Jody and tells him in front of the public that she finds him unattractive naked in his old age. She even goes further to express that she is not ‘petal open’ which refers to her not having sex with Jody. Her transition to womanhood is a negative thing which proves that she has not found her self-revelation when the narrator states, “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (citation). In her marriages with Logan and Jody, Janie is a woman but she has not found her selfhood because of her unhappiness and lack of romantic love and sexual desire. Janie’s sexual desires arise for the first time since her girl-self when she meets Tea Cake. He reminds her of her pear tree which is significant in that he brings her back to her girl-self. When she expresses her love for him as ‘self-crushing,’ everything that had been pushing her to become a woman, like Nanny’s dreams and her marriage with Jody, were crushed by her love for Tea Cake who brought her back to her happiest girl-self. Tea Cake is what finds Janie’s self-revelation but unlike Juliet, Janie’s self-revelation is the reincarnation of her girl-self. Both Juliet and Janie find their self-revelations through their sexual desires and being able to define