Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gatsby from The Great Gatsby, June from The Joy Luck Club, and Edna from The Awakening

“My strength did not come from lifting weights. My strength came from lifting myself up when I was knocked down,”-Bob Moore. This quote demonstrates that people gain emotional strength from fighting through adverse experiences. This concept is shown in the texts “ The Story of Green-Blanket Feet”, an excerpt from Spider Woman's Granddaughter by Humishima, and the text Mary Rowlandson, an excerpt from “From a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” Both women go through similar difficult situations, however, they both find strength in protecting things close to them and they both come out of their difficult situations stronger. This concludes that a person’s greatest strength is protecting what they love. Green Blanket Feet gained her strength in protecting her children and Mary Rowlandson found her strength in protecting her religion.

[she longed] to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she... [was] waiting for the world to be made" (11). Janie, feeling herself opening like the petals of a flower, yearns to delve into the unfamiliar - to find the sweet marriage represented by the bees and blossoms.

Near the beginning of the book, Janie develops an idealistic view of love whilst lying underneath a pear tree. She is young and naïve, enthralled with the beauty of spring. She comes to the conclusion that marriage is the ultimate expression of love and finds herself pondering why she does not have a partner. In the rashness of her hormone clouded brain, she is drawn to Johnny Taylor, who is nearly a stranger. This is her first experience formulating ideas about

During the beginning of Janie’s Journey to be an independently minded woman, she loses her grandmother and moves away from her first failed relationship,. After Hurston sets the scene and Janie begins to tell her story, Janie mentions her grandmother from a young age raised her. Her grandmother, Nanny, is protective of Janie and disapproves of Janie having any type of romance outside of marriage. (19). Hurston alludes to the archangel Michael, the angel that guides the dead back to heaven, to prove Nanny is nearing death, “One mornin’ soon, now, de angel wid de sword is gointuh stop by me” (15). Clearly, Janie must come to terms with the fact that Nanny will not always be there and Janie will have to watch over herself. Even though Janie knows Nanny is dying, she still argues with Nanny about being married off, “Please don’t make me marry Mr. Killicks” (15). Through this argument, Janie proves that while she may not be ready to completely disobey Nanny, Janie begins to have her own voice. Notwithstanding Janie’s opinion, Nanny marries her off anyways. After reluctantly marrying Killicks, Janie realizes she does not like being bossed around, “Youse mad ‘cause Ah don’t fall down and wash-up dese sixty acres uh ground yuh got” (31). Janie empowers herself by standing up for herself in the face of her aggressor. While living with Nanny, Janie realizes that she does not agree with Nanny’s choices for Janie, but Janie stays silent. However, in the case with Killicks, Janie not only realizes that she does not agree with

In the beginning, Janie is captivated by a bee that associates with the blossom of a flower. She sees a “bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom” and meet with the “love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree” which was “creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight” (p 11). Hurston incorporates the bee and the blossom symbol to represent Janie’s desire for love’s pleasure. The author reveals to the audience of how she is taken away by the overwhelming desire and passion shown from the “creaming” of the tree and the bee. This marks her virginity as she is presented pleasingly to the desire of lovemaking, yet also conserve her purity through creating her expectations for her later affectionate lovers. Further, Hurston portrays the shattering of Janie’s bee and blossom dream when she is left to realize that being with Joe and his personality is an illusion as he slaps her. She “stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought” and saw that “her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered” causing her to have “no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man” (p 72). Hurston revealing Joe’s actual image to its reader depicts Janie’s apprehension of how he was never the man of her dreams and just persuaded herself to believe that he was just a better man than Logan. She is left with the

There are nine types of heroes in this world, each of them with their own unique stories, plots, cliches etc. Among those is the classic tragic hero, one who is destined to fail no matter what. In a Streetcar Named Desire, the tragic hero is Blanche Dubois, an aging Southern Belle living in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty. In this essay it will be discussed what makes Blanche a tragic hero and how she compares to a typical tragic hero.

Tea Cake, whose real name is Vergible Woods, is Janie's soul mate, both of them being tree metaphors. He’s the only one of her husbands who haven’t been described as dead wood. Hurston writes, “looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.” His nickname too holds significance in referring to something sweet, just as she has hope dor "things swee wid mah marriage" (24). Because Tea Cake is unconcerned with her money, for instance, in that he asks her to keep her savings aside and live from his current earnings, Tea Cake is clearly contrary to the norm of suitors who preceded him following the death of Joe, who didn’t want her for her. He is a man truly in love with Janie, a man who understands her. In instructing “Everytime Ah see uh patch uh roses uh somethin’ over sportin’ they selves makin’ out they pretty, Ah tell ‘em “ah want yuh to see mah Janie sometime.’ You must let de flowers see yuh sometimes, heah Janie?” (181), he shows that he too sees her mirroring, even competing with nature. It is with him, that Janie is pollinated to realize the meaning of the pear tree’s mysteries and

At a very young and tender age, Janie develops an ideal view on the concept of marriage and romantic relationships, which is soon shattered by her experiences in her first two marriages. Her ideal view is shaped and created by the time she spends under the pear tree. Many an afternoon Janie would bask in it's shade, and observe the bees “sink into the sanctum of the bloom”, and watch the “thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and ecstatic shiver of the tree from the root to tiniest branch” (Hurston 11). She assumes that the flitting of the bees around the pears is “marriage” and feels as if she has been “summoned to behold a revelation” (Hurston 11). These seemingly pure interactions between the bees and the pear tree

Janie 's visionary scene under the blossoming pear tree aroused her sexual awakening where she seeks to find the utopia where she evolves around love.Her insularity feeling of love sets her adventurous mislead of marriages.The pear tree in the beginning of the novel provides Janie the imaginative feeling of love and path to follow, but that love decays after being forced to marry Logan Killicks, a wealthy old man, whom Janie has no love for. But Janie is assured by Nanny that her love for Logan will unfold, so Janie spontaneously marries Logan.Nanny having gone through the rough life of a slave black woman and experience the mistress of women, acknowledge the role of

The imagery of the bees and the pear tree are the catalyst of Janie’s coming-of-age, representing her first “springtime” and the awakening of her sexuality. The moment Janie sees the bee pollinating the blossoms on the pear tree is when she becomes aware of her sexuality. She finds herself empathizing with the blossoms; both being young and undergoing the springtime of life. Contrastingly, however, Janie has no “bees singing for her” like the blossoms do (Hurston 11). In Janie’s eyes, the relationship between the bee

At the same time, however, Janie begins to confuse this desire with romance. Despite the fact that nature’s “love embrace” leaves her feeling “limp and languid,” she pursues the first thing she sees that appears to satisfy her desire: a young man named Johnny Taylor (Hurston 11). Leaning over the gate’s threshold to kiss Johnny, Janie takes the first step toward her newfound horizon. Nanny sees this kiss and declares Janie’s womanhood. She wants Janie to marry Logan Killicks, a financially secure and well-respected farmer who can protect her from corruption. The marriage of convenience that Nanny suggests is “desecrating … [Janie’s] pear tree” because it contradicts her ideal vision of love (Hurston 14). Because she did not have the strength to fight people in her youth, Janie’s grandmother believes that Janie needs to rely on a husband in order to stay safe and reach liberation. Ironically, Janie’s adherence to Nanny’s last request suppresses her even more because it causes her to leave behind her own horizon.

As a young woman, Janie wanted love, true love. In the beginning of the novel and Janie 's journey, she is under a blossoming pear tree where she spends most of her days. She is watching the bees fly to the blossoms, when she has an epiphany. “So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then

Following her Nanny’s death Janie began to pursue her own romantic desires more freely. Before long, she meets her soon to be second husband Joe "Jody" Starks. Initially Jody is a gentleman. He showers Janie with compliments and promises in order to flatter her out of her first husband’s arms. Still new to the world, Janie mistakes flattery for love and succumbs to her need to absorb more about life and love, leaving behind her substandard life with Logan in lieu of personal development. She anticipated that “from now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom" (31).After Jody has convinced Janie to run away with him, however, his affection begins to waver. This leads Janie to understand that "[Jody] did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees.” However, “he spoke for far horizon” (50). “Janie knows that Joe does not fulfill the promise of the pear tree; but she intuits that she must travel in order to grow, and Joe is going places, first literally and then figuratively” (Chinn).

Janie's grandmother was one of the most important influences in her life, raising her since from an infant and passing on her dreams to Janie. Janie's mother ran away from home soon after Janie was born. With her father also gone, the task of raising Janie fell to her grandmother, Nanny. Nanny tells Janie "Fact uh de matter, Ah loves yuh a whole heap more'n Ah do yo' mama, de one Ah did birth" (Hurston 31). Nanny's dream is for Janie to attain a position of security in society, "high ground" as she puts it (32). As the person who raised her, Nanny feels that it is both her right and obligation to impose her dreams and her ideas of what is important in life on Janie. The strong relationship between mother and child is important in the African-American community, and the conflict between Janie's idyllic view of marriage and Nanny's wish for her to marry for stability and position is a good illustration of just how deep the respect and trust runs. Janie has a very romantic notion of what marriage should be. "She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace . . . so this was a marriage," is how the narrator describes it (24). Nanny's idea of a good marriage is someone who has some standing in the community, someone who will get Janie to that higher ground. Nanny wants Janie to marry Logan Killicks, but according to her "he look like some ole

Daisy is an interesting and intriguing character in The Great Gatsby, her name literally means “day’s eye” which makes perfect sense because people are fascinated by her and she is described as a sweet woman, even though she acts and sounds more like a girl than a woman to me, but then again, she was the person to say that the best thing a girl can be is a beautiful fool.