Emancipation

Janie also gets emancipation. Throughout the novel, we see how different her relationship with Tea Cake is. He had something that her previous husbands didn’t. He knew how to treat her right, how to make her feel like a woman. She got the freedom she always wanted with Tea Cake. Death is a symbol extremely important in this novel. Every time someone she knew, her husband or her grandma, died, something inside Janie would change as well. It was as if death was meant to be in her life in order to get her in the position she was in. What I found most ironic was the death of Tea Cake. As I mentioned before, he was the love of her life, the person she really felt comfortable with. At the end of the novel, Tea Cake doesn’t die of natural causes; Janie herself has to take Tea Cake’s life. This is ironic in the sense that the person she loved the most and the person, who helped her feel like a woman, was the person she had to kill. It was as if she killed the little hope of happiness that she had in her heart.