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【Abstract】Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Awakening are two classic female novels in American literature. Both of them depict the typical female characters Janie and Edna, and the typical theme—the awakening and growth of their feminist consciousness. Through the study on their different ways of lives, this paper tries to explore the similarities and differences between the two female characters.
【Keywords】rebellious spiritmarriagequest for freedom and lovesearch for identity
【中圖分类号】G42 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】1009-9646(2008)10(b)-0235-02
1 Introduction
First published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God is Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)’s mostly highly acclaimed novel. A classic of black literature, it tells with haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy the story of Janie Crawford’s evolving selfhood through three marriages. Fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy as a child, Janie grows up expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being one man’s mule or another man’s adornment.
Published in 1899, The Awakening is Kate Chopin (1851-1904)’s masterpiece. It is a novel with an “emancipated” woman who insists on deciding herself about her own life. Edna Pontellier, the protagonist, is 28 years old and married to a New Orleans business man twelve years her senior. During a summer holiday at Grand Isle, she has a sensuous awakening. She becomes attracted to Robert Lebrun, a young man who flirts with her in the Creole fashion. Edna continues to question her purpose in life by leaving her husband and children, and living by herself. However, she doesn’t get the fulfillment but commit suicide.
2 The feminist consciousness of Janie and Edna
Janie and Edna are both shining and influential characters in American feminist literary heritage. Marriage is the key word for both heroines, through which they awaken and through which the authors explicate how they break the bond of patriarchal society, search for their identity, and develop into a woman with feminist consciousness.
There are something in common in their spirit, their behavior and their process to search for identity.
2.1 The innate rebellious spirit
Janie was born in a Southern black family in America. She didn’t know that she was a black girl in childhood, because she lived together with the white children. At the age of six, someone took photos for them, but she couldn’t recognize the dark child as herself. This was a shocking event for little Janie and showed the separation of Janie from her own race and her lack of self-consciousness.
Another influential event in Janie’s growing process is her sexual awakening. In the spring of her 16 age, Janie watched the pear tree and the visiting tree in the back-yard. “She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.”
This feeling made her long for a pear tree in blossom. “Oh 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 wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?”
This vivid and symbolic description reveals the sexual consciousness of Janie, she is eager to expect the coming of love and marriage.
Her grandmother Nanny asked Janie to marry the rich farmer Logan Killicks. However, Janie didn’t like Logan, she couldn’t accept a man she didn’t love.
In the persuasive words and tears of Nanny, Janie agreed to marry Logan. At first, Janie expected this marriage compel love like the sun compel the day, and she wish she would love Logan after they were married. She wouldn’t be lonely anymore.
Logan Killicks couldn’t understand Janie’s romantic love and marriage conception, let alone respond to her in spirit or physical. He was a materialist, in his eyes, Janie was his property, such as his land and his house, a working mute.
After the marriage with Logan, Janie couldn’t feel the romantic love and happy marriage she had dreamt. The marriage life was quite different from the wonderful feeling under the pear tree, so she was disillusioned. “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.
Although Janie was disillusioned by the first marriage, her innate rebellious spirit didn’t disappear. Before long, she met Joe Starks, in her eyes, although Joe wasn’t a flowing tree, he represented the far-off horizon, represented change and chance. So she went away with Joe. She untied her apron and flung it on a low bush beside the road, this apron symbolizes that she was only a working mule in the patriarchal society, the throwing of her apron indicates that she bid farewell to her mule stage of her life.
Edna was not a vulgar and ordinary woman, “even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”
Her innate rebellious character made her often question life. When she was a little child, she run away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, to walk through the grass in Kentucky. This is the expression of her courage to challenge the tradition and her spirit to pursue freedom. Her marriage with Mr. Pontellier was the result of the rebellious spirit. Besides the fancy there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, the violent opposition of her father and her sister to her marriage with a Catholic was an important reason for her to accept Leonce.
This innate rebellious spirit is doomed to be one of the most important reasons for their later awakening.
2.2 Their dissatisfaction and protest against marriage
Janie’s second husband Joe Starks was an ambitious and capable man. After he and Janie settled down in Eatonville, he led the villagers to build their own town, opened a store and a post office, bought the road lamp with his money. He was soon set up his own image in the town and became a big voice as he had expected. However, Joe was a male chauvinistic man, he always called himself “I God”, and he didn’t treat Janie equally. He was unconscious of Janie’s thoughts, he didn’t allow Janie to talk with other men and he asked Janie to tie up her hair in case other men might touch it in the store.
The life with Joe wasn’t happy. The wife of the Mayor was not just another woman as she had supposed. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy. She slept with authority, but she felt cold and fear and lonely.
For such kind of oppression and discrimination, Janie’s protest was useless. So, gradually she closed her mouth and learnt to be silent.
But Janie wasn’t silent forever. After being humiliated by Jody publicly, she retorted Jody seriously, “Your big bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but there is nothing to it but your big voice. Humph! Talking about me looking old! When you pull down your britches, you look like the change of life.” This retort was a heavy blow to Jody, he realized that all the meanings and his vanity bled like a flood. Janie had robbed him of his illusion of resistless maleness that all men cherished. This is a turning point of Janie, which signifies her change from a silent to a subject who has her own voice.
After Jody’s funeral, Janie burnt up every one of her head rags. These head rags symbolize the fetter of woman in the patriarchal society. Her burning of these rags marks that she finally broke up the fetters of traditional idea, and began to walk on her independent road, this is a new beginning of her life.
Mr. Pontellier was not a romantic man, he himself had his hands full with his brokerage business, so he didn’t have the spiritual communication with Edna. He was a materialist, he was very fond of walking about his house examining its various appointments and details, to see that nothing was amiss. He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, including his wife Edna.
The night they went to swim, Edna swam far from the shore, that made her feel appalled and feeble, she made no mention of her encounter with death and her flash of terror, except to say to her husband, “ I thought I should have perished out there alone.” “You were not so very far, my dear; I was watching you.” He told her. Actually, she needed the comfort words from her husband, however, he couldn’t understand her wife’s minds and thousands of emotions, while Robert could.
After they went home, she rested in the hammock outside their house, Mr. Pontellier asked her to go inside to sleep, but Edna refused. She needed a free time to make her mind clear. But Mr. Pontellier was impatient and irritated with her behavior. He ordered Edna, “I can’t permit you to stay out there all night. You must come in the house instantly.” “Leonce, go to bed.” She said, “I mean to stay out here. I don’t wish to go in, and I don’t intend to. Don’t speak to me like that, again. I shall not answer you.” This is the first time for Edna to be frank about her mind to a man, the first time she shows her dissatisfaction and protest against a man.
2.3 Their quest for freedom and love
After Jody’s death, Janie thought this freedom feeling was fine. At this time, she began to introspect her past time. Her point of view towards her grandmother Nanny changed. She hated her grandmother and had hidden it from herself all these years under a cloak of pity. “Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go to the horizon is still way beyond you.”
In Janie’s eyes, Tea Cake could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring. And she said to her friend Phoeby, “I done lived Grandma’s way, now I means to live mine.” This sentence shows her resolution to live independently.
In order to live a free life, Edna cancelled her habitual reception day. This made Mr. Pontellier unhappy, but Edna felt happy and lightened, she was inspired by the inward fire, which was her newly-discovered self.
After she came back to the elegant house in New Orleans, Edna’s quest for love and freedom didn’t lose because of Robert’s leaving, but became stronger and stronger. She found that she couldn’t live together with her husband, so that she moved out into a small “pigeon house”, this name clearly indicated her longing for freedom.
Going to the horse races was another step for Edna to go away from the traditional boundaries, just as Janie’s gambling with the men. She finally rushed out of the fetters that bound her so many years. In the pigeon house, she could engage in her favorite work—painting, through which she could support her own life.
When Robert came back from Mexico, Edna was excited. However, when Robert said that he wished her husband could set her free, Edna told him, “I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, ‘Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours.’ I should laugh at you both.” Here, Edna, as an independent woman, stands before our eyes.
3 The differences between Janie and Edna
Although both of the two novels dealt with the feminist consciousness of the heroines, Janie and Edna are different.
Janie was fulfilled after Tea Cake’s death, because she had got the true love that she had dreamt of. She had been to the horizon and back, now she could sit in her house with the memory of Tea Cake, that is a satisfactory ending. She told Phoeby that “Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.” Finally she realized that “Two things everybody’s got to do for themselves, they got to go to God, and they got to find out about living for themselves.”
However, Edna was not fulfilled. She finally walked to the sea, because Robert couldn’t be with her, he retreated from the pressure of the traditional worldly society, thus made Edna lost her courage and strength to resist by herself. “There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone.”
Edna was disillusioned about love.
4 Conclusion
The two female characters have many things in common, that is, they both try to break the bond of the patriarchal society and search for their own identity, they both explore the growth of their feminist consciousness. However, because of the different ways of their lives, they have different endings of their searching life.
References
[1] Wu Ding-bai.1998. An Outline of American Literature.上海外語教育出版社.
[2] Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Perennial Library, 1990
[3] Kate Chopin. The Awakening. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
[4] 封亚东.凯特·肖邦及其<觉醒>的沉浮.丹东师专学报.
[5] 程锡麟.谈>他们的眼睛望着上帝>的女性主义意识.四川大学学报.
[6] 邓建华.为自由而生—评<觉醒>中的女性主体意识,东北大学学报.
【Keywords】rebellious spiritmarriagequest for freedom and lovesearch for identity
【中圖分类号】G42 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】1009-9646(2008)10(b)-0235-02
1 Introduction
First published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God is Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)’s mostly highly acclaimed novel. A classic of black literature, it tells with haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy the story of Janie Crawford’s evolving selfhood through three marriages. Fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy as a child, Janie grows up expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being one man’s mule or another man’s adornment.
Published in 1899, The Awakening is Kate Chopin (1851-1904)’s masterpiece. It is a novel with an “emancipated” woman who insists on deciding herself about her own life. Edna Pontellier, the protagonist, is 28 years old and married to a New Orleans business man twelve years her senior. During a summer holiday at Grand Isle, she has a sensuous awakening. She becomes attracted to Robert Lebrun, a young man who flirts with her in the Creole fashion. Edna continues to question her purpose in life by leaving her husband and children, and living by herself. However, she doesn’t get the fulfillment but commit suicide.
2 The feminist consciousness of Janie and Edna
Janie and Edna are both shining and influential characters in American feminist literary heritage. Marriage is the key word for both heroines, through which they awaken and through which the authors explicate how they break the bond of patriarchal society, search for their identity, and develop into a woman with feminist consciousness.
There are something in common in their spirit, their behavior and their process to search for identity.
2.1 The innate rebellious spirit
Janie was born in a Southern black family in America. She didn’t know that she was a black girl in childhood, because she lived together with the white children. At the age of six, someone took photos for them, but she couldn’t recognize the dark child as herself. This was a shocking event for little Janie and showed the separation of Janie from her own race and her lack of self-consciousness.
Another influential event in Janie’s growing process is her sexual awakening. In the spring of her 16 age, Janie watched the pear tree and the visiting tree in the back-yard. “She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.”
This feeling made her long for a pear tree in blossom. “Oh 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 wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?”
This vivid and symbolic description reveals the sexual consciousness of Janie, she is eager to expect the coming of love and marriage.
Her grandmother Nanny asked Janie to marry the rich farmer Logan Killicks. However, Janie didn’t like Logan, she couldn’t accept a man she didn’t love.
In the persuasive words and tears of Nanny, Janie agreed to marry Logan. At first, Janie expected this marriage compel love like the sun compel the day, and she wish she would love Logan after they were married. She wouldn’t be lonely anymore.
Logan Killicks couldn’t understand Janie’s romantic love and marriage conception, let alone respond to her in spirit or physical. He was a materialist, in his eyes, Janie was his property, such as his land and his house, a working mute.
After the marriage with Logan, Janie couldn’t feel the romantic love and happy marriage she had dreamt. The marriage life was quite different from the wonderful feeling under the pear tree, so she was disillusioned. “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.
Although Janie was disillusioned by the first marriage, her innate rebellious spirit didn’t disappear. Before long, she met Joe Starks, in her eyes, although Joe wasn’t a flowing tree, he represented the far-off horizon, represented change and chance. So she went away with Joe. She untied her apron and flung it on a low bush beside the road, this apron symbolizes that she was only a working mule in the patriarchal society, the throwing of her apron indicates that she bid farewell to her mule stage of her life.
Edna was not a vulgar and ordinary woman, “even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”
Her innate rebellious character made her often question life. When she was a little child, she run away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, to walk through the grass in Kentucky. This is the expression of her courage to challenge the tradition and her spirit to pursue freedom. Her marriage with Mr. Pontellier was the result of the rebellious spirit. Besides the fancy there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, the violent opposition of her father and her sister to her marriage with a Catholic was an important reason for her to accept Leonce.
This innate rebellious spirit is doomed to be one of the most important reasons for their later awakening.
2.2 Their dissatisfaction and protest against marriage
Janie’s second husband Joe Starks was an ambitious and capable man. After he and Janie settled down in Eatonville, he led the villagers to build their own town, opened a store and a post office, bought the road lamp with his money. He was soon set up his own image in the town and became a big voice as he had expected. However, Joe was a male chauvinistic man, he always called himself “I God”, and he didn’t treat Janie equally. He was unconscious of Janie’s thoughts, he didn’t allow Janie to talk with other men and he asked Janie to tie up her hair in case other men might touch it in the store.
The life with Joe wasn’t happy. The wife of the Mayor was not just another woman as she had supposed. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy. She slept with authority, but she felt cold and fear and lonely.
For such kind of oppression and discrimination, Janie’s protest was useless. So, gradually she closed her mouth and learnt to be silent.
But Janie wasn’t silent forever. After being humiliated by Jody publicly, she retorted Jody seriously, “Your big bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but there is nothing to it but your big voice. Humph! Talking about me looking old! When you pull down your britches, you look like the change of life.” This retort was a heavy blow to Jody, he realized that all the meanings and his vanity bled like a flood. Janie had robbed him of his illusion of resistless maleness that all men cherished. This is a turning point of Janie, which signifies her change from a silent to a subject who has her own voice.
After Jody’s funeral, Janie burnt up every one of her head rags. These head rags symbolize the fetter of woman in the patriarchal society. Her burning of these rags marks that she finally broke up the fetters of traditional idea, and began to walk on her independent road, this is a new beginning of her life.
Mr. Pontellier was not a romantic man, he himself had his hands full with his brokerage business, so he didn’t have the spiritual communication with Edna. He was a materialist, he was very fond of walking about his house examining its various appointments and details, to see that nothing was amiss. He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, including his wife Edna.
The night they went to swim, Edna swam far from the shore, that made her feel appalled and feeble, she made no mention of her encounter with death and her flash of terror, except to say to her husband, “ I thought I should have perished out there alone.” “You were not so very far, my dear; I was watching you.” He told her. Actually, she needed the comfort words from her husband, however, he couldn’t understand her wife’s minds and thousands of emotions, while Robert could.
After they went home, she rested in the hammock outside their house, Mr. Pontellier asked her to go inside to sleep, but Edna refused. She needed a free time to make her mind clear. But Mr. Pontellier was impatient and irritated with her behavior. He ordered Edna, “I can’t permit you to stay out there all night. You must come in the house instantly.” “Leonce, go to bed.” She said, “I mean to stay out here. I don’t wish to go in, and I don’t intend to. Don’t speak to me like that, again. I shall not answer you.” This is the first time for Edna to be frank about her mind to a man, the first time she shows her dissatisfaction and protest against a man.
2.3 Their quest for freedom and love
After Jody’s death, Janie thought this freedom feeling was fine. At this time, she began to introspect her past time. Her point of view towards her grandmother Nanny changed. She hated her grandmother and had hidden it from herself all these years under a cloak of pity. “Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go to the horizon is still way beyond you.”
In Janie’s eyes, Tea Cake could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring. And she said to her friend Phoeby, “I done lived Grandma’s way, now I means to live mine.” This sentence shows her resolution to live independently.
In order to live a free life, Edna cancelled her habitual reception day. This made Mr. Pontellier unhappy, but Edna felt happy and lightened, she was inspired by the inward fire, which was her newly-discovered self.
After she came back to the elegant house in New Orleans, Edna’s quest for love and freedom didn’t lose because of Robert’s leaving, but became stronger and stronger. She found that she couldn’t live together with her husband, so that she moved out into a small “pigeon house”, this name clearly indicated her longing for freedom.
Going to the horse races was another step for Edna to go away from the traditional boundaries, just as Janie’s gambling with the men. She finally rushed out of the fetters that bound her so many years. In the pigeon house, she could engage in her favorite work—painting, through which she could support her own life.
When Robert came back from Mexico, Edna was excited. However, when Robert said that he wished her husband could set her free, Edna told him, “I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, ‘Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours.’ I should laugh at you both.” Here, Edna, as an independent woman, stands before our eyes.
3 The differences between Janie and Edna
Although both of the two novels dealt with the feminist consciousness of the heroines, Janie and Edna are different.
Janie was fulfilled after Tea Cake’s death, because she had got the true love that she had dreamt of. She had been to the horizon and back, now she could sit in her house with the memory of Tea Cake, that is a satisfactory ending. She told Phoeby that “Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.” Finally she realized that “Two things everybody’s got to do for themselves, they got to go to God, and they got to find out about living for themselves.”
However, Edna was not fulfilled. She finally walked to the sea, because Robert couldn’t be with her, he retreated from the pressure of the traditional worldly society, thus made Edna lost her courage and strength to resist by herself. “There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone.”
Edna was disillusioned about love.
4 Conclusion
The two female characters have many things in common, that is, they both try to break the bond of the patriarchal society and search for their own identity, they both explore the growth of their feminist consciousness. However, because of the different ways of their lives, they have different endings of their searching life.
References
[1] Wu Ding-bai.1998. An Outline of American Literature.上海外語教育出版社.
[2] Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Perennial Library, 1990
[3] Kate Chopin. The Awakening. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
[4] 封亚东.凯特·肖邦及其<觉醒>的沉浮.丹东师专学报.
[5] 程锡麟.谈>他们的眼睛望着上帝>的女性主义意识.四川大学学报.
[6] 邓建华.为自由而生—评<觉醒>中的女性主体意识,东北大学学报.