Janie Crawford, the main character of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God,
strives to find her own voice throughout the novel and, in my opinion, she succeeds even
though it takes her over thirty years to do it. Each one of her husbands has a different
effect on her ability to find that voice.
Janie discovers her will to find her voice when she is living with Logan. Since she did
not marry him for love, tensions arise as time moves on and Logan begins to order her
around. But Janie is young and her will has not yet been broken. She has enough
strength to say "No" and to leave him by running away with Joe. At this point, Janie has
found a part of her voice, which is her not willing to be like a slave in her husband's
hands.
After Janie marries Joe, I think that she discovers that he is not the person she
thought he was. He tells her what to do the same way Logan did, just a little bit more
delicately by saying that it is not a woman's job to do whatever he does not want her to
do. Throughout her twenty years of life with Joe, Janie loses her self-consciousness
because she becomes like a little kid being told what to do by an adult, Joe. She does
it without even questioning herself, which is why I think that she loses the part of her
voice that she has discovered by running away from Logan. At times, she has enough
courage to say no to Joe, but he always has something to say back that discourages Janie
from continuing her argument. But, in my opinion, Janie does not lose her will to find
herself and it might have even become stronger because the reader can see that Janie is
not happy with the way things are now and that she will probably want to change them in
the future.
When Joe dies and Janie marries Tea Cake, she feels free because even though Tea Cake
asks for her opinion when he does something and cares about her. Since this is Janie's
first marriage where she actually loves her husband, she feels free and discovers many
new things in life that she has not noticed before. She becomes more sociable, wants to
go places with Tea Cake, enjoys working with other people, and likes shooting game.
Although she never shot a rifle before, she becomes a better shooter that Tea Cake, and
he respects her for that, which allows Janie to get back her self-respect which she had
lost while being with her previous husbands. In a way, Janie's spiritual awakening
begins when she lives with Tea Cake.
As the reader can see, Janie has a hard life where she has to struggle in order not to
become inferior to her husbands. She succeeds when she is with Tea Cake, which also
marks the time when her inner voice starts to awaken. But not until after Tea Cake's
death does she realize that she has understood her place in life, or in other words, she
has found her voice.
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