Tea Cake
Tea Cake, as Mr. Mitchell fittingly put it, is hard not to fall in love with. When we and Janie first meet him, he is a whirlwind of youth and spontaneous romance and charisma. He is everything that Logan Killicks and Joe Starks never were and never could be. Most importantly, he was in love with Janie, and Janie was in love with him.
Logan Killicks had worked Janie and given her a deadbeat farm life to live, while Joe Starks hit and humiliated her; neither ever giving Janie the love she'd known she needed to find herself from the moment she had seen the pear tree. Tea Cake, as sweet as his name imagines, quite literally sweeps Janie off her feet with his witty jokes and honey-smooth tongue; not to mention the 'tapered waist' and 'broad shoulders' Janie's eyes snag on during their first encounter. He teaches her to play chess, asks about her as a person, takes her out. When he teaches her to shoot, she even becomes a better shot than him. Tea Cake is the first man who sees Janie as more than a head of pretty hair or a suitable ornament in the household. Tea Cake truly enhances Janie's personality; bringing out the youth she had never managed to live fully. Certainly, we can see Janie acting like a silly little girl in love -- denying her love at first in caution, but then eloping with Tea Cake and spinning thoughts of him in her head every minute of the day.
But as "Their Eyes Were Watching God" progresses, this 'dream man' facade starts to crack, little by little. When things concern Tea Cake, Janie's suddenly blur and waver; Tea Cake pushes the limits of what is love and what is toxic abuse and Janie lets him. When he hits her, it becomes a fantasy of domestic abuse viewed through rosy lens, which paint the bruises marking Janie's skin as proof of Tea Cake's love and the strength of their bond. Instead, it only signifies that 'awful fear' Tea Cake feels and the abhorrent gender roles -- we had thought Janie escaped the prison of projected female inferiority when he married Tea Cake, but now we find that he too is no different. He still views her as a possession, albeit a beautiful and beloved one, that he has dominion over. To hit Janie instead of Mrs. Turner's brother is to say, look at how far I can go and she still loves me. After all, it was key that Janie didn't resist; she only whimpered and cried and clung to Tea Cake -- the image of the delicate distressed damsel -- as the people gossiped and fantasized about how he hit her.
In the end, when Janie shoots Tea Cake dead, her journey is complete. We feared that while we wanted Tea Cake to help her blossom and grow strong and flourish, he was only making her more dependent and held her back. He probably did both, but when Janie chose her future over death with him, and ended it all with the gun he taught her to shoot, she had arrived at her answer: all she truly needed was herself. Tea Cake, like her other men, was, in the end, dispensable. He had helped her arrive at this answer, but when Janie returns home, she returns alone with her head held high and her heart sure. She don't need no man...
This was a really interesting interpretation of Janie's journey! I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head in describing the dynamics of Tea Cake's abuse of Janie—the message he's sending in the context of their society, and especially the way both of them view it as a sign of the strength of their love that Tea Cake is willing to inflict pain on Janie to sustain their bond. Your discussion of the ending is really interesting too, and I agree that it signifies an important shift in Janie's perspective from viewing Tea Cake and the horizon he signifies as the ultimate destination of her journey to seeing him as an influence on her broader journey of self-fulfillment, and still finding beauty and contentment in her life after he's gone.
ReplyDeleteHi, this was a really fun blog post to read and I never thought of some of the points you made before. I kind of thought that even though Tea Cake abused her (I'm not justifying this), he still gave her room for development and for her to become her own person. However, I like how you put it that he still treats her as a possession. I thought of it as the way you would treat a nice piece of chinaware versus a Solo Cup - they're both still at the end of the day possessions even if you would value one more than the other (idk if this makes sense). However, I do agree with your conclusion a lot - she eventually realizes that she is enough for herself and as you put it, needs 'no man'. Great job!
ReplyDeleteWow. I absolutely love how you've described Janie and Tea Cake's relationship progression- so eloquently phrased! I agree that while Tea Cake may be more charismatic and appealing than Janie's past husbands (and the first one she actually loves), Janie's relationship seems to represent a continuation of the theme of dependence on men in Janie's life. I'm not by any means saying that Janie is a helpless character, however, in her relationship with Tea Cake, her life is still dictated by what he wants to do or where he wants to go, just like with her past husbands. And I love your inclusion of Janie's killing of Tea Cake as part of her character progression. While some may have differing opinions on Tea Cake, I think the end of the book when Janie is alone represents her at her strongest and most developed self.
ReplyDeleteI love the way you wrote this! I especially like how you compared Janie to a young girl in the first paragraph because we can relate it back to how since she had an awakening as a young girl and decided she wanted to find love, she has been searching for many years and thinks she finds it with Tea Cake. I think that having these feelings when she is with him certainly brings her back to those years when she was younger. I also like how you describe Janie killing Tea Cake as her journey completing in the last paragraph.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog! You described Tea Cake's and Janie's relationship with ultimate precision. At first, Tea Cake is Janie's ideal, natural embodiment of love but as the novel progresses, Tea Cake's personality flakes away. I liked how you established that as their relationship progresses, Janie realizes that Tea Cake is only making her more dependent on other people. It's only when she finally gets rid of him that she realizes her own self-worth and capability for independence. Again, great post!
ReplyDeleteNice post! I agree with your views regarding Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship. Janie definitely deserves better than any of the men she was with but Tea Cake was the best out of the bunch. Regardless, I think Tea Cake’s character was meant to be a breath of fresh air in the sort of environment-pear tree analogy we see going on throughout.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post. I think it's very true that Tea Cake is lovable, which makes how he treated Janie in chapter 17 even more difficult to understand for me. It's certainly a complex issue.
ReplyDeleteI really like your reading of the intense ending of this relationship, with the two of them facing each other at gunpoint, with Tea Cake deranged by rabies and ready to murder her for perceived unfaithfulness. Edwidge Danticat, in her foreword to the novel, talks about Janie choosing life rather than death with Tea Cake in this moment, much as you read the decision to fire the gun. Though she clearly doesn't *want* to kill the love of her life, she believes she has no choice at this point, and indeed Tea Cake fires a bullet half a second after Janie--this is very nearly a double murder. The transformative effects of the relationship have taken hold, and Janie returns to Eatonville a confident and independent woman, almost unrecognizable from the wife of "the mayor." Everybody on the porch wants so badly to hear that things have worked out badly for her, but she refuses to see it this way.
ReplyDelete