TEWWG Journal #1

How do you perceive Janie?


I perceive Janie as a woman that has been through a good amount of turbulence and change in her life, which makes her come across as wise and mature. However, I also see a more distraught, troubled and lost Janie behind the grown, silent woman all of her friends see when she returns home. The darker side of Janie jumps out more than the wise Janie because when she is talking with her best friend Pheobe in her backyard, she says, "Yeah, Pheobe, Tea Cake is gone. And dat's de only reason you see me back here - cause Ah ain't got nothing to make me happy no more.." (Hurston, 9). This line Janie says, shows that she does not want to be home and she preferred her life with her old husband, Tea Cake. This preference of her old life connects to the "lost" feeling about Janie I get when reading this first chapter. I think that because, now that she is back, she doesn't know what to do with herself anymore since she has no husband and has grown older.

How do you perceive the narrator?


Okay, this may seem like a large assumption, but to me, I think that the narrator was made to come across as a white person. I'm not entirely sure why Zora Neale Hurston would make a decision like that, unless she were trying to use this book to connect with white people during the time period of the Harlem Renaissance. She might have done it to try and break through the social barrier, by using a more educated sounding narrator than her characters so that the white people of the time could connect and understand the narrator better and therefore relate to her story. I also think that the narrator may be white, because of the contrast in language between the characters and the narrators speech. The characters often use words such as "Ah", "de", " 'bout", and "dat", whereas the narrator uses more descriptive full words like "monstropolous" and "dialated" and "zest". This contrast really stands out to me and I think it is the authors way of differenciating the narrator from the characters in terms of education. I'm not trying to say that it is a bad thing, just that it is a different way of going about it, especially with the racial tensions of the time period.