The Mirage of Marriage: Does Janie Need a Rock or Her Rights?
Typically in westernized society, it is common culture that young women are and have been indoctrinated with the underlying assumption that their future happiness is equivalent, or essentially, belongs to the condition of their future marriage with their spouse. American women, similar to Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God, are indirectly influenced to believe that achieving the highest form of self-contentment means committing themselves to another fully in the promise of marriage. This mindset causes women to fantasize about needing a man’s proposal to feel secure with their everyday lives and causes the romantification of being a wife, an idea that was more heavily supported during the time …show more content…
Nanny sustains the patriarchal message that a woman needs a man for both economic and physical support and that Janie must get married in her teenage years in order to provide permanent security for her lifetime, an opportunity that Nanny could not provide for herself while in slavery and equally not provide for her daughter; therefore feeding into the traditional gender roles that Nanny herself was taught through society in which “...cast men as rational, strong, protective, and decisive...” while they also “...cast women as emotional, irrational, weak, nurturing, and submissive” (Tyson 85). By force, Janie is offered to a much older and therefore, “established” famer, Logan Killicks, like an animal, basically on one condition: that he always takes care of her. Janie’s first exposure to the patriarchal construct of marriage clearly displays the power struggle in the relationship of matrimony because she still lives in the dream world that marriage is the solution to her dissatisfaction in life and holds the importance of having a husband over her own emotions with this
Typically in westernized society, it is common culture that young women are and have been indoctrinated with the underlying assumption that their future happiness is equivalent, or essentially, belongs to the condition of their future marriage with their spouse. American women, similar to Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God, are indirectly influenced to believe that achieving the highest form of self-contentment means committing themselves to another fully in the promise of marriage. This mindset causes women to fantasize about needing a man’s proposal to feel secure with their everyday lives and causes the romantification of being a wife, an idea that was more heavily supported during the time …show more content…
Nanny sustains the patriarchal message that a woman needs a man for both economic and physical support and that Janie must get married in her teenage years in order to provide permanent security for her lifetime, an opportunity that Nanny could not provide for herself while in slavery and equally not provide for her daughter; therefore feeding into the traditional gender roles that Nanny herself was taught through society in which “...cast men as rational, strong, protective, and decisive...” while they also “...cast women as emotional, irrational, weak, nurturing, and submissive” (Tyson 85). By force, Janie is offered to a much older and therefore, “established” famer, Logan Killicks, like an animal, basically on one condition: that he always takes care of her. Janie’s first exposure to the patriarchal construct of marriage clearly displays the power struggle in the relationship of matrimony because she still lives in the dream world that marriage is the solution to her dissatisfaction in life and holds the importance of having a husband over her own emotions with this