The cast of Their Eyes Were Watching God has been steadily growing as we get deeper into the book. One character in particular has me feeling conflicted: Joe Starks.
When we first see Joe he's a "cityfied, stylish dressed man" with three hundred dollars in his pocket and big dreams. He promises to treat Janie like a lady, and when she throws off her apron to run away and marry him, I was cheering for her (at the very least, Joe seems like a big step up from Logan Killicks).
But soon it becomes clear that Joe is extremely patronizing/sexist. According to him, "a woman's place is in de home," when a woman speaks they are getting "too moufy," and even a game like checkers is "too heavy fuh de brains" of a female. It seems as though his vision of a woman is one who remains silent and sits pretty for the men to stare at ("she was there in the store for him to look at"). To make it worse, he hits Janie when she insults his pride, or when she cooks a dinner he doesn't like.
Yet when we get a little bit of insight into Joe's own thoughts, we can see that he acts the way he does for good reasons. He wants to "make a big woman outa" Janie. He believes that by making "a pretty doll-baby like Janie sit on de front porch and eat p'taters dat other folks plant just special for her," he will make her happy. In his eyes Janie is above the "gum-grease" of society and he does his best to keep her out of unfavorable social events.
I think it's important to note that he also performs a lot of good deeds for the town: saving a mule from its misery, giving free food to the poorer people of the town, etc. Here Joe's actions are generous but it's possible that the motivation behind them was just to gain more status in society. In fact, Joe could be trying to put Janie on a pedestal just to make himself look better.
Good guy, bad guy, it's kind of hard to tell, but maybe the switch from Logan to Joe wasn't so glorious after all.
We definitely share the same thoughts about Joe. I feel he's too afraid of losing Janie. It was a little surprising that she left with him after knowing him for a only a short amount of time, and he wants her for himself. It's interesting that he thinks Janie is above the "gum-grease" of society, yet he treats her as such. I don't know if this is over simplifying it, but I think that Joe is just too cautious, and to him this is allowing Janie to be a perfect wife, but for her, he's not allowing her to love him as much as she can, and as much as she did when they first met. I think he's probably more of a bad guy, but he really does want what's best for Janie, except they have different ideas of what's best for her.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with your unsure views of Joe. He does, I believe really want the best for Janie, is not using purely as a means to gain a higher status in town. He is however blatantly sexist, and does not treat Janie very well all the time. I feel as though Joe is not bad at heart or trying to hurt people, but he does have a number issues in his character (such as the sexism) that keep him from being the prince charming and make us worry about his true motives.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a good example of how Hurston's use of free indirect discourse works effectively. Logan and Joe are both depicted by Janie as men whose initial intentions are deceiving -- having their own notions of power over Janie and her "proper" place and function. At the same time, you point out that Joe does not have purely selfish intentions. Hurston takes us into Logan's hurt when Janie threatens to leave him and describes Jody's jealousy and pain in a similar, sporadic fashion so that she conveys Janie's oppression in an honest manner, pointing out the significantly misguided notions of characters in a way that does not use black and white, illustrating the "humanness" of them as well.
ReplyDeleteAfter Joe passes away, a lot of men are interested in Janie (even though she turns them all down). This goes to show that she has a lot of beauty and is quite attractive in general, but when Joe is with her he actually tries to keep that away from the other guys. He makes her cover her hair for example, and for the most part, while she has beauty, he tries to save that just for himself. So the thought that he wants to show her off to elevate himself in terms of status may not work out after all.
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