Tea Cake And Janie Character Analysis

Tea Cake and Janie headed to the Everglades in hopes of Tea Cake finding a job. The money he earned would be used to get them whatever they pleased. When they arrived, “To Janie's strange eyes, everything in the Everglades was big and new. Big Lake Okechobee, big beans, big cane, big weeds, big everything” (Hurston 129). Most people would probably consider the Everglades rundown and ugly but Janie saw it positively. Janie, coming from a small, dirt road town, saw the Everglades as beautiful and flourishing; probably the reason she was described as having strange eyes. Higher class people of that time, not that there were many, would most likely consider it dirty and worthless. Considering the conditions of it being full of crops and rich soils it is a place of work to pick crops and plant new ones.

This new environment to her was familiar to Tea Cake. Tea Cake knew a few people there and one happened to make Janie jealous. A woman followed Tea Cake around and Janie’s, “...little seed of fear was growing into a tree” (Hurston 136). As Janie watched Tea Cake working she notices an admirer staying close by him. Nunkie was constantly on Tea Cakes toes and almost throwing herself at him. Janie describes how she noticed Tea Cake not fighting her off as much as she expected. She could have gotten scared hat he was intrigued by Nunkie. The idiom that her fear was growing into tree shows that she was only a little nervous at first but once she watched closely, she realized that she should be worried about Tea Cakes loyalty. Tea Cake not fending Nunkie off as much as Janie expected could actually mean that Janie hoped Tea Cake would avoid contact with any other woman while she was dating him. There was a theme of fear in this chapter since Janie said she was fearful or implied it through her actions in multiple instances. Janie seemed scared that Tea Cake was seeing Nunkie before he left and was continuing to do so while he dated her as