In chapter 13, Janie experiences her third marriage with Tea cake. However, in the previous chapters, Janie is dreaming of having a true marriage that is full of love. She also has the image of someone that will take her a way form the difficulty of this life to the horizon. In her first marriage with Joe, Janie is looking forward to her dream to become true, but their relationship is only husband and wife by name. There is no spirit in their marriage. Because of the bad treatment that she gets from Joe, she lost the love that she has for him. She has a gap inside her, and she wants someone to fulfill it. After the death of Joe, Tea Cake is the person who gives her the things that she is missing. Janie left her city with Tea Cake to start a new life away from her bad memories with her previous husbands. Therefore, Janie looks to Tea Cake as the savior of her concept of love and marriage.
Janie’s concept of marriage is marriage that is full of love. She describe that with sweetness and selfishness. We see that when she is going to leave her city with Tea Cake that she is been called “ Hurry up and come because he was about to turn into pure sugar thinking about her”(116). Janie has this idea of marriage as something sweet, and she has this concept since she was young. Also, she always think about herself. She feels that she want someone to give her the things that she is missing not to give her love what he misses.
Janie’s previous marriages make her careful with her relations because she can not trust people until she deals with them. At the beginning of the chapter, we see Janie is keeping her money away from Tea Cake because she is thinking that all men are the same. Through her dealing with Tea Cake she finds that he is different than her other husbands. She starts to love him and to like to be with him. When he is away from her, she does not think badly of him. For example, when she thinks that he left her, she starts to change her thoughts and think that he might get hurt, she says “But oh God, don’t let Tea Cake be off somewhere hurt and Ah not know nothing about it. And God, please suh, don’t let him love nobody else but me.”(120). Janie’s love for Tea Cake appears in her praying because he is the only person that will help her to make her dream to be true because she finds in him the qualities of a husband that she is looking for.
When Janie looks to her past and her previous marriage she finds Tea cake is a savior. When she looks to her first marriages and the way that she lived with Joe, she loves Tea Cake more and more. That Joe used her as a luxury in his life without giving her any of her rights as a wife even with expressing her feeling that we see from the previous chapter “She pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor” (71). With her relationship with Tea Cake she is able to express what she feels. We see in the chapter13 that after he came to her she is telling him rules to make their marriage happy that she said “ Looka heah, ’Tea Cake, if you ever go off from me and have a good time lak dat and then come back heah tellin me how nice Ah is, Ah specks tuh kill yuh dead. You heah me?”(124). This passage shows that her relationship with Tea Cake gives her the ability to express her feelings which make Tea Cake her savior from the miserable life that she had.
Therefore, the love that Tea Cake is giving to Janie makes her more safe and keeps her thoughts about the love and marriage more realistic. Before she knows Tea Cake, Janie thought love between husband and wife is something that is not true because she had two marriages and she did not experience this love with any of them. Her relationship with Tea Cake changes her thoughts about love. She finds it with him because he gave her what she is missing. He gave her the ability to express her feelings and to tell him what she likes and what she does not like. Tea Cake saved her dreams and also her personality by giving her the love that she is dreaming of. However, in the end of the chapter that their love becomes true when she tells him about the money that she has and when Tea Cake tells her about his friends. That saves their love relationship because they become more open to each other.
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