We talked in class today about how Janie's relationships and I thought I would try to organize a few of my thoughts. (they probably won't be organized)
Someone said today that Janie's experience with the pear tree translated into her thoughts about relationships, which I thought was interesting. I've thought about it a bit, and I see the relation. I think her grandmother pushing her into her first marriage definitely affected her as well, and these two things together caused her to have more...unconventional (?) thoughts about marriage and relationships and that kind of stuff.
I wonder what would have happened if Janie had stayed with Logan. She clearly wasn't happy with her marriage, but very shortly after she meets Joe, she leaves with him, and then quickly starts becoming unhappy with their marriage. Her ideals and hopes for love seem to blind her into leaving Logan and going with Joe. I feel bad for Logan because he wants Janie to love him but he basically embodies everything she isn't looking for, since the land and the mule don't appeal to her. I suppose if she had stayed with him, she just would have remained unhappy. At least going with Joe gave her a short lived sense of freedom? Also I think she's going against her grandmother's wishes for her, and I kind of understand her reasoning, but I'm still not sure how I feel about that.
Maybe her opinions about love are too romanticized, which is a burden? I don't know, but at this point I just want to meet Tea Cake.
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I always saw Janie's idea of a pear tree as a sort of symbiotic relationship, I guess? Like, the bee pollinates the flowers, and in return it gets honey. However, in Janie's relationship with Logan, she feels that she hasn't gotten her fair share in return. Logan gets what he wanted-- a wife-- and in return, she gets a roof over her head and enough to eat. However, she isn't content with this because she wants an emotional relationship wit her husband, rather than a material one, so she runs off with Joe Starks in the hope that her second marriage will turn out better than her first. (It doesn't, though. He turns out to be a pretty awful husband.)
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, I feel that the main reason Janie and Logan did not really work out was because they both had very different views of "love", which you allude to. For Janie, Logan's lack of romantic charisma seems to be a deal-breaker, which is unfortunate because he wasn't really a bad guy. I feel that Janie has a very highly romanticized view of what a marriage should be like. I would like to think that her first two marriages being failures might lower her standards a bit. I have a feeling that all of this is setting up for Tea Cake's entrance in the novel. Lower standards from Janie would seem to be in Tea Cake's favor, no matter what his personality is like.
ReplyDeleteThis idea that Janie is somehow to blame for leaving Logan *because* her relationship with Joe "doesn't work out" has been floating around in class, and I admit I don't see the logic. She leaves Logan with the expectation of change, of *maybe* something better but unable to resist the urge to try. She doesn't see it as a sure thing, and the marriage with Joe is dramatically different in a number of ways. It decays over time--the scene where "something falls off the shelf inside her" is seven years into the marriage. She's with Logan for a couple months, and she never chose that relationship. She stays with Joe until death do them part, but for a range of reasons the marriage doesn't make her happy. (Or him either, it should be noted.) It's not clear any one person is to "blame" for this state of affairs, but I don't see the 20-year story of this sad marriage wherein the man and woman grow apart to the point of near-total alienation as a referendum on her decision to leave Logan. Logan just needed leaving, and Joe happened to be coming up the road.
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