Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Choose one quote from the novel that represents either Janie's American Dream or that of the three communities she engages (North Florida, Eatonville, or the Muck) and explain how.

It would be hard not to associate Janie's dream with the pear tree episode:

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!

This passage represents not only a moment of sexual awakening for Janie but also the moment she describes as her awakening to consciousness. The mutuality and reciprocal pleasure associated with the pollinated pear blossom and the pollinating bee creates a natural benchmark for marriage and happiness.
All else in the novel is measured against what Janie sees in nature as an ideal relationship. In this image, Janie sees, though cannot fully understand, the role of agency and hierarchies. Nature here does not dwell in power and hierarchies (as both racial and gendered society do). The bee has the agency to pollinate the blossom; the blossom has the pollen to provide sustenance to the bee. Neither loses more than they gain in their encounter with each other, and both remain themselves.
In her marriages to Logan and Jody, Janie is asked to give up her agency—to become a "mule" for Logan, who sees a horizon no more expansive than forty acres of farmland, and to become an adornment or accessory to Jody, who only wants to simulate the tokens of power he associates with white culture. Janie's Caucasian attributes place her higher in his eyes because they are considered higher in white society. In both marriages, she loses crucial elements of her own self, most specifically her agency and her voice.
Logan Killicks (a name that means wooden anchor) and Joe Stark (whose name implies sparse fruitlessness) both suggest an approach to the natural world diametrically opposed to a pollinated pear tree. With Tea Cake, she becomes more autonomous and also more connected emotionally to her lover in a way that honors natural reciprocity. They give and receive differently but equally from each other. It is not surprising that Tea Cake (or Vergible Woods) enables her to experience the dream she discovered under the pear tree.
The last passage returns to the first page, where the novel claims that

women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

For Janie, because she has gone to the horizon and seen what she has seen, she can rest within the truth of her dream and act with the agency provided by having her memories of love and mutuality. The novel concludes with just this sense of triumph:

Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

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