We discussed both when Joe hits Janie and when Tea Cake hits
Janie a fair amount in class. But we didn’t really get to discuss Chapter 15,
in which Janie hits Tea Cake.
The chapter begins with “Janie learned what it felt like to
be jealous” (136). A woman named Nunkie has been flirting with Tea Cake and how
Tea Cake flirts with her in return. When Janie finds Tea Cake and Nunkie
wrestling for some tickets she goes home: “It wasn’t long before Tea Cake found
her there and tried to talk. She cut him short with a blow and they fought from
one room to the other, Janie trying to beat him, and Tea Cake kept holding her
wrists and wherever he could to keep her from going too far” (137). The fight
ends with Janie and Tea Cake having sex.
First off, to me violence seems pretty out of character for
Janie. We see her fighting verbally with Joe and expressing her opinion pretty
forcefully with Tea Cake. I’d say that for the most part, she deals with
problems with other people either through talking it out or quiet defiance.
This scene is also really isolated within the novel. While
the scenes in which Joe and Tea Cake hit Janie both lead into other scenes
before the end of the chapter, the scene in which Janie hits Tea Cake is a
standalone, three-page chapter and doesn’t really relate to the chapters before
and after.
In class we talked briefly about why Hurston portrays Joe’s
domestic violence as bad but Tea Cake’s as good. I think the reasons we came up
with were that Tea Cake and Janie are in love and that their relationship is
somewhat based on turbulence. I can’t help wondering if Hurston included
Chapter 15 as an excuse for Tea Cakes violence because Janie is also violent
and actual violence is somehow a natural result of their violent love. Even if
that’s what Hurston was going for, though, the circumstances are pretty unequal.
Tea Cake actually flirts with Nunkie but he knows that Janie has been entirely
faithful to him and Tea Cake leaves bruises on Janie but seems to be able to
mostly stop her from hurting him.
Mostly it just makes me sad that a relationship that is in
many ways so amazing includes violence but I’m interested in what you all think
of the chapter.
Tea Cake and Janie love each other extremely intensely. Perhaps Hurston is suggesting that with intense love comes other intense emotions, some of which that can provoke physical violence? It's scary to think that a strong feeling for another can elicit someone to behave uncharacteristically. It's like a balancing act. You can't have that passionate of a relationship without both love and hate.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason now I'm seeing this chapter as an episode of a T.V. sitcom, and the episode is titled "Janie Learns About Jealousy" or something else really cheesy. And taking this perspective further, if this chapter is like an episode of the TEWWG sitcom, then it shows character development in a way that doesn't really have a huge effect on the overall story of the show. Maybe this chapter is just meant to represent another aspect of their relationship that otherwise wouldn't come up?
ReplyDeleteActually, I'm realizing what I'm saying is kinda weird, but hopefully you see where I'm going.
I think that Janie's relationship with Tea Cake's relationship is supposed to seem more egalitarian than her other relationships, so she also attacks Tea Cake. But at the same time, Hurston could still be trying to make the point that double standards and power dynamics between husband and wife are always there and always bad, and so the ways in which the two attacks play out are very different to show that imbalance? Maybe she's trying to represent the relationship as better but still problematic in some ways.
ReplyDeleteThere is a kind of parallel to the later scene with Tea Cake here: by physically attacking Tea Cake, Janie is able to communicate how much she cares for him and how "crazy" her love is, even if it's through the context of "jealousy" over Nunkie. He seems to take it this way: he holds her hands and tries to prevent her from hitting him, he takes his due punishment, and as you note, the fight quickly morphs into "make-up sex." Likewise, in a way that's a lot harder for many readers to stomach, Tea Cake's violence against Janie is cast as a way of showing how much he cares by sending this "message" of possession to Mrs. Turner's brother. We recoil at this means of sending a message, of course, on a number of levels--but within the cultural context of the novel, this is how the men and women on the muck interpret it, and apparently how Janie does as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's not hard to see her punching Tea Cake as an expression of love; contrast the scenes in Eatonville, where Janie "talks back" to Joe and humiliates him in front of everyone. She does more damage with her words than with her fists.