Janie's Search for Identity

Lei Dennis Osuagwu
“Their Eyes Were Watching God”
Janie’s Search

Janie's search for identity actually started long before she was born.Because Janie's search is

her family's search. Nanny and Janie's mother gave Janiea reason to search. Even as a young

girl, living in the materialistic world of her Nanny and her first husband, Logan Killicks, Janie

chooses to listen to "the words of thetrees and the wind" (23-24). This is the first evidence of her

searching beyondher boring life. This then leads to her everyday life left empty, because she

isalways looking farther than where she is at the time. So day by day, she ismore worked up into

leaving Logan, and searching for love. When she leaves Loganto run off with Joe, she thinks to

herself, "Her old thoughts were going to comein handy now, but new words would have to be

made and said to fit them" (31).

Joe aims to be a big voice and that is why he comes to Eatonville, Florida. He feels that

he will have a better chance at being a big voice in an all black town than in a white man's town.

The problem is that he has adopted white man's values and forces them upon the townspeople

and, most notably, upon his wife Janie. This relationship was just another setback in Janie's epic

search. Nevertheless, when her marriage to Joe collapses, she again decides, "So new thoughts

had to be thought and new words said" (77).

Her search seemed very close to a peaceful end. However, it was far from

over, when Tea Cake became sick after being bitten by a with rabbis. Janie's search for an

Identity for herself, free of the ideas she had grown up with, ties into bigger

Issues, important for her race as a whole. Nanny's vision of Janie's care free life on a

Porch somewhere is associated with being white. Janie's straight hair becomes tied up