Tea Cake the Villain Anonymous College

Zora Neale Hurston’s well-acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God includes many controversial characters with ambiguous ethics. Janie Crawford’s lovers have been continuously analyzed by literary scholars such as Janice Knudsen and Mesa-El Ashmawi Yvonne, but certainly none more so than the character of Tea Cake Woods. Many debates have been conducted about his morality and his treatment of Janie, and hardly any provide a satisfactory conclusion. Is he a saint or sinner? A taker or giver? Or does he fall somewhere in between? Though many believe that he balances the line of righteousness and wickedness well, Tea Cake is the exclusive cause of Janie’s most impactful life crises.

Janie, simply stated, is consistently defined by her relationships throughout her story. Her character is shaped through the revolving door of lovers, husbands, and friends. She is a perfect depiction of what the father of self-psychology, Heinz Kohut, had theorized. He claimed that every individual is born with a mild sense of self, but one can only be truly realized when he or she begins seeing themselves as mirrored through a selfobject, a person who defines their identity. Nanny begins this mirroring pattern by shaping Janie into a girl who...