Tea Cake By Zora Neale Hurston: Character Analysis

“Another thing, Joe Starks hadn’t been been dead but nine months and here she goes sashaying off to a picnic in pink linen. Done quit attending church, like she used to. Gone off to Sanford in a car with Tea Cake and her all dressed in blue! It was a shame. Done took to high heel slippers and a ten dollar hat! Looking like some young girl, always in blue because Tea Cake told her to wear it” (Hurston 105). Before Tea Cake, all the men were making moves on her and all the women were encouraging her to find a man. However, as soon as she goes off with this new man, they shame her because he’s younger. People made the assumption that Janie would need an older man, or a man of the same age to take care of her but no longer looked at her in the
So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” (Hurston, 122) In her first two relationships, Janie had kept waiting for love and waiting for something beautiful to happen between the awful men she was with at that time. Eventually, she had given up and become hard. She had “tucked her soul into a hiding place.” However, when she met Teacake, he respected her and didn’t push her into anything. He was good to her and treated her like an actual person instead of a broken porcelain doll, as her past two husbands had. “Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments,but my wife don’t know nothin’’bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat She’s uh woman and her place is in de home” (Hurston, 41) As shown in the quote, Joe Starks, the wonderful do-gooder, even treated her poorly. Teacake started out as a lover and unlike the other two men, she picked Teacake without any pressures. Her grandmother made her be with Logan and she only ran away with Joe because she couldn’t bear to be with Logan anymore. When she met Teacake she was financially secure and had been on her own for many months. She had actually decided that she wanted to be alone and that she didn’t want to try her luck again with a new man, but Teacake wasn’t like other men because he gave her the time and space she needed. When they finally connected, the soul that had been beaten and bruised and given up on love was able to
Turner forgive her for wearing overalls like the other women who worked in the fields. She didn’t forgive her for marrying a man as dark as Tea Cake, but she felt that she could remedy that” (Hurston,134). In present day times, we often see most women fighting or wishing for equal rights (for example, the recent Women’s March), yet in this novel we see women divided by class, race, age and other factors that turn them against each other. In this case, Mrs. Turner likes Janie due to her looks and that she is light-skinned. She obviously holds herself higher than others by the way she spoke of Janie saying that she would forgive her for dressing like the other women in the fields. There’s the stereotype that women who are lighter-skinned and have money should dress fancier and be with lighter-skinned men. However, Janie doesn’t believe in this stereotype and wants nothing to do with it. “They don’t worry me at all Mis’ Turner. Fact about de thing is, they tickles me wid they talk.” (Hurston 134) This quote shows how Janie couldn’t care less about what the other women thought about her marrying a dark-skinned man. She thought it was funny how they cared so much about her personal life. During her marriage with Joe Starks, she was forced to behave a certain way and put up a front for her husband due to his reputation as mayor of the town. “You gettin’ too moufy Janie. Go fetch me de checkerboard and de