who is called Tea Cake (“Tea Cake! So you sweet as all dat?”), is the staunchest feminist in the novel.
I slightly disagree here, while I found him to be slightly confirmative to feminism. I thought his actions such as buying Janie a drink and bringing her strawberries were motivated solely out of love/sex. Hurston used these actions to show how he was better than Joe Stark, not to make a comment about how he was a feminist.
Why doesn’t Janie speak up sooner? Why can’t she go off alone? Why is she always waiting for some man to show her the way?
Here, the author makes a good point as to how Hurston seems to make the book about a powerful black woman yet chooses to make her reliant on the decisions of her spouses, often with spousal abuse being a byproduct in all 3 of her marriages. This passage illuminates that while "Finding a Voice" is a recurrent them throughout the book and one of the major reasons it regained notoriety in the 1970's, for much of the book, Janie herself doesn't really find her voice. Instead she is subject to the constant abuse that her first two husbands pour upon her. Pierpont makes a good point that if the theme is truly about finding herself and becoming comfortable with who she is, why doesn't she just leave Joe Stark instead of waiting 20 years for him to finally die of kidney failure.
There is, however, a great deal of poetry of observation running through her head, which we hear not as her thoughts, precisely, but in the way the story is told. Those who analyze “narrative strategies” have pulped small forests trying to define Hurston’s way of slipping in and out of a storytelling voice that sometimes belongs to Janie and sometimes doesn’t and, by design, isn’t always clear.
Here, the author makes reference to how Hurston uses narration to slip in and out of the past whilst telling of the story of Janie's life. Usually, I don't like when the author chooses to do this. However, in this book I almost felt like it added to the story by showing how far Janie had come with being comfortable with her true self. Just wondering what other people think here. -Ollie