Janie's Tragic Marriages

In Janie's first marriage with Logan Killicks, she is severely unhappy because of several reasons. The main reason Janie is upset is because of the lack of love and passion between her and Logan. From a very young age, Janie has had this very specific idea about what marriage and love should be like. Just as she briefly gets a view into what that kind of life would be like, Nanny immediately marries her off at the age of 16. While it's often the case that young girls who involuntarily get married off don't tend to feel the happy emotions traditionally associated with marriage, this lack of feeling was exaggerated in Janie's case because she had extremely high and romanticized expectations. That said, I don't think the failure of the marriage is entirely Janie's fault - Logan made it worse by trying to control Janie and force her to do manual labor instead of just letting her be. In class, we briefly touched on the idea that Logan's behavior towards Janie isn't totally unrealistic since it does require lots of work to tend to a large amount of land, but I think he could have gone about it a different way.

Before even leaving Logan, Janie meets and falls for Joe Starks. Part of Joe's appeal is that he is a mysterious stranger who says all the right things and promises everything that seems too good to be true. At the same time, though, I think Joe seems amazing simply because he is viewed in comparison to Logan, who was treating her pretty harshly. Going into her second marriage with such high expectations again, Janie is once again disappointed. At the beginning, Joe seems to treat her with love and kindness like she would want but as the marriage goes on and he gets more power and status in society, his true controlling nature is revealed. It wasn't surprising that he didn't want Janie conversing with the other men or how he always sent her back to the store to manage it when he was unhappy with her, or even when he made her put her hair up in a rag because he was jealous of her beauty. I was, however, surprised when I read that Joe hit Janie. Despite all the horrible ways that Joe was treating her, I still thought that underneath all that hostility was his love for Janie. From the very beginning, I was somewhat suspicious of Joe's motives but for the most part, I was fairly neutral about him until he started yelling at and hurting Janie. When he started lashing out at Janie because he could feel himself getting old and unattractive, I thought he completely deserved to feel insecure like that. It was as if all of his past mistakes were finally catching up to him. Though it might seem cruel and undeserved, I like that Hurston gave Joe a somewhat painful death - it reflected on how awful of a person and husband Joe had been. (28)

Looking back and comparing both of Janie's marriages, I realize that they weren't in fact all that different because both Logan and Joe treated Janie horribly with no consideration of how Janie would feel. The main difference is that Janie actually left Logan whereas she stuck with Joe until his end. I do think, though, that Janie would have had the courage to leave Joe if he wasn't dying because she already had that "independence" and strength to do it once. What made it hard for her to leave Logan was that it was Nanny's wish for them to be married and since that wasn't the case in her marriage with Joe, I don't think she would have had any reservations about leaving him.