A woman with a man is a lot like a bird who can’t fly: She is unable to soar free, chained to being responsible for her significant other’s happiness, and she was stilted in the pursuit of her own joy. Janie easily relates to this because her own lovers caused her this pain. They all held her back from reaching her true potential. This is because Janie is an independent woman who doesn’t need a man to be happy. Logan easily took away her freedom, and he left her without any love. Joe was different than Logan. He treated her as something to be viewed like an animal at the zoo. Tea Cake may have been good for a while, but in the end she didn’t really need him at all. For these reasons alone, it’s easy to see that Janie would be better on her …show more content…
He’s perfect for Janie, except for the fact that’s he’s not. After going through two other relationships, one would think Janie would take a break from men, but of course not. Following her former husband’s death, Janie meets Tea Cake, “He frowned and struggled with the pegs of the imaginary instrument watching out of the corner of his eye with that secret joke playing over his face” (100). Janie sees Tea Cake’s antics, and interprets them the way that she wants. It almost seems to me that Janie sees Tea Cake as a fantasy. Fast forward a few chapters, and Tea Cake dies just as Joe did, despite being taken by a different disease. Leaving Janie, she’s left with these thoughts, “It was the meanest moment of eternity. A minute before she was just a scared human being fighting for its life. Now she was her sacrificing self with Tea Cake’s head in her lap” (184). Tea Cake wasn’t well at all, and yet Janie stayed with him until she had to shoot him. All of this heartache would have been avoided if Janie had just turned Tea Cake away. Back up a bit now, and Tea Cake is most certainly causing trouble with the infamous Mrs. Turner and her husband, “Mrs. Turner saw with dismay that Tea Cake’s taking them back out was worse than letting them stay in… So Mrs. Turner struggled into the mass and caught Tea Cake by the arm” (151). She ends up falling, and starts making a scene towards Tea Cake. This eventually creates backlash for Janie, and she gets a stern conversation from Mrs. Turner. It’s rocking the boat like this that makes Tea Cake a hard person to have a relationship with. Why Janie put up with him so long really baffles