Zora Neale Hurston Diction

Janie is very saddened by her memories, especially of Tea Cake and what happened to him. In this quote, “...out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing”(Hurston 183), Hurston uses diction and personification to describe how memories can send illusions and create emotions in a person’s mind. Janie’s memories are depicted as having voices, able to "sing," "sob and sigh." “Sobbing and sighing” are expressions of sadness and connote Janie feeling very saddened by her memories. However, “singing” usually means vocalizing a song but in this context it means that Janie was singing her sadness out of her. Their vocalizations are expressions of grief. Then it moves to lamentations that are beautifully sung and finally reduced to less controlled outpourings of sobbing and sighing. Therefore, Janie is very saddened by her memories and this is why when she starts to tell her story to Phoebe, she becomes sad. In …show more content…
This connects back to the idea of how her “singing and sobbing” because Hurston personifies both words to describe them as doing their own action without Janie’s help. Also, Hurston uses personification to describe how Janie after this quote, felt the presence of Tea Cake, who was dead at this time. For example, “Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees” (Hurston 183). Due to this, Janie personifies a spirit and convinces herself that Tea Cake will never be dead once she starts to think about him and this connects back to the pear tree because the pear tree will never be dead, but instead reproduce to create more pear trees. Overall, Hurston uses personification to describe the illusions that popped into Janie’s mind mostly about Tea Cake about how Tea Cake would always be in her