584 Huxley, Aldous
This kiss is the culmination of Janie’s discovery of
her sexuality, symbolized by the pear tree in which
she sees a bee darting in and out of the tree’s buds.
“This is love,” thinks Janie and so her romantic
notions of love and fulfillment are rooted in this
first witnessing of nature’s cycle. From this experi-
ence, Janie believes that she is ready to go out into
the world to make her own life. But Nanny changes
Janie’s future by choosing stability for Janie, instead
of romantic love.
Logan Killicks, Janie’s first husband, is highly
desirable as a husband to the local women. He
owns property and can therefore offer Janie a kind
of stability that to Nanny is the ultimate sign of
freedom. So Janie marries him, hoping that later
she will grow to love him. Although he begins the
marriage as an attentive husband, Killicks changes
and becomes interested only in Janie’s ability to help
him in the fields. The narrator observes that Janie
“knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s
first dream was dead, so she became a woman.” In
this instance, Janie’s understanding of love indicates
that fanciful notions about love have to do with
young adulthood; women, on the other hand, can-
not expect such frivolities and thus must make do
with the marriage that they have. Even though Janie
comes to terms with her marriage, it does not mean
that she has abandoned her idea of romantic love.
When Killicks leaves her to go and see a second
mule, Janie meets Jody Starks, the man she believes
will help her find the love she dreams of. Although
she recognizes that Jody does not share her ideas of
love in that “he did not represent sun-up and pollen
and blooming trees,” she also knows that he offers
her more because Jody “spoke of far horizon.” Janie
is intrigued and goes with him to Florida, in hopes
of finding a place for herself.
After they arrive, Jody becomes mayor and he
buys a store in order to build his wealth. Janie helps
him much as she did Killicks, but she soon learns
that Jody only wants to show her off as his posses-
sion. On the day that he opens his store, he tells her
to dress up because “he didn’t mean for nobody else’s
wife to rank with her. She must look on herself as
the bell-cow, the other women were the gang.” He
even requires her to wear a headscarf because “[s]he
was there in the store for him to look at, not those
others.” He sees Janie as his possession that he can
lord over the rest of the community. After a fight
with Jody, which culminates in Jody hitting Janie,
Janie’s ideal of love and marriage shatters, leaving
her in a loveless relationship until his death some 15
years later when she is almost 40.
When Jody dies, Janie changes back to the
women who left Logan Killicks. She looks at herself
in the mirror and finds a woman: “She tore off the
kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful
hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there.
She took careful stock of herself, then combed her
hair and tied it back up again.” Janie’s letting down
of her hair symbolically allows her to claim herself
again. She will no longer live by the rules that Jody,
much less anyone else, places before her. Rather, she
will live as she chooses, sitting on the porch with her
neighbors and playing checkers. Soon thereafter, Tea
Cake, a man of about 25, arrives in Eatonville and
begins courting Janie. He plays checkers with her,
takes her to a baseball game, and shows her that he
appreciates her for who she is. Rather than trying
to make her work, or use her to show off his wealth,
Tea Cake treats Janie as an equal, something she has
never experienced before.
Although this “marriage” ends tragically, Janie
has not had to sacrifice herself for Tea Cake’s image
of her. If anything, Janie’s choice of herself over Tea
Cake when he attacks her signifies a true under-
standing of her value. As she tells Phoebe at the end
of the novel, “Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh
theyselves. They got to go tuh God, and they got tuh
find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” This is Janie’s
true accomplishment: Her experience of three mar-
riages has taught her how to live for herself rather
than for others.
Nancy CardonaHuxLEy, aLDouS Brave New World
(1932)
In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
depicts the dystopian vision of a technocratic soci-
ety. The World State, as it is called, subscribes to
the motto of Community, Identity, and Stability.
To maintain stability, the World State controls its
citizens with the help of the drug Soma, which