Hurston’s Novel TEWWG
In Hurston’s novel “TEWWG” she uses the characters to speak similarly to few others in American literature, and their vocabulary, distinctive grammar, and tone mark their individuality.
Humanity is the human race or human beings collectively, and Hurston uses things in her novel to make a point about humanity by including the pear tree, the horizon, janie’s hair, and the hurricane to define how humanity functions and the things that are given value by the human race.
The pear tree and the horizon reveal Janie’s glorified perspective of nature. In the bees’ interaction with the pear tree plants, janie observes a perfect second in nature, full of erotic energy, passionate interplay, and glad harmony. she chases after this ideal at some point of the rest of the book.
Similarly, the horizon represents the far-off thriller of the herbal global, with which she longs to connect. janie’s hauling in of her horizon “like a great fish-net” at the end of the radical event suggests that she has carried out the harmony with nature that she has sought since the second underneath the pear tree. Janie’s hair is a symbol of her strength and unique identity; it represents her durability and distinctiveness in three ways.
First, it signifies her self-reliance and defiance of lesser community standards. The town’s criticism at the start of the book demonstrates it is deemed degraded for a woman of Janie’s age to dress her hair down. Her defiance to bow down to their rules clearly mirror her powerful alienated spirit.
Second, her hair works as a phallic symbol; her braid is repeatedly described in phallic terms and works as a symbol of a typically male power and vigor, which confuses gender lines and threatens Jody.
Third, because of her hair’s straightness it is represented as a symbol of whiteness; Mrs. Turner praises Janie due to her Caucasian characteristics and straight hair. Her hair adds to the normally caucasian male strengths that she possesses, which assists her in distracting traditional power relationships (male over female, white over black) throughout the book.
