haj7’s Blog

“Janie, you’se yo’ own woman, and Ah hope you know whut you doin’. Ah sho hope you ain’t lak uh possum — de older you gits, de less sense yuh got. Ah’d feel uh whole heap better ’bout yuh if you wuz marryin’ dat man up dere in Sanford. He got somethin’ tuh put long side uh whut you got and dat make it more better. He’s endurable.”

This quote was said by Pheobe and it seems to summarize the town’s feelings towards Janie being with Tea Cake. It seems that this quote just isn’t limited to the town, but it can also be applied to society’s gender roles. The big issue that people have in the town with Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship is that Janie seems to be the one with more power. Janie, with the money that she made from previous marriges and her strong will, seems to flip the expected gender roles upside down. When Jody, a charismatic buissness man who actually buys a town gets an already married teenage girl who basically has nothing there seems to be no problem. However, when Janie (who is an adult with a decent amount of money) marries off with a young man who has nothing, the town basically flips and starts to ask her if she knows what she’s doing.

This kind of makes me think about how crazy society’s expectations are and what is acceptable and what not. In this book, it’s alright for a man who has established himself to marry a girl who has nothing, but the other way around causes so much contraversy. I wonder why these slight differences can be seen as such a big deal. Is it human nature to do this or is Western society just full of hypocrisy? It’s interesting to see how a difference in gender can completely change society’s prespective on something. As for western culture, the different gender roles seem to be rooted in Medeval times with the codes of chivarly and the overall strict atomosphere of the time. Western culture has such peculiar divisions on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.