After she marries a man she doesn’t love, who her grandmother thinks is suitable, Janie’s first impression of his home is that it looks “like a stump in the middle of the woods where nobody had ever been.” This characterization can be contrasted with the description of a blossoming tree that Janie imagined her love life would be. In particular, after she imagines “the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch,” she thinks “So this is a marriage!” Later, she cries about her loveless relationship and tells her grandmother, “Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 8
With reference to the dearth of information about his wife and other women in this narrative, Winifred Morgan writes “The black women in Douglass’s narrative are by nature subordinate to the men. They serve as examples of victimization, such as his aunt, or as shadowy helpmates, such as the free woman he marries” (82).
The scenario described, in which a master would feel “compelled” to send his own child away “out of deference to the feelings of his…wife” echoes the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah. In Genesis 21, Sarah sends her handmaid, Hagar, away when she is mocked by the son Hagar bears for Abraham. Likewise, a master might have been compelled to send his child away if a slave mistress felt like the child of her husband and an enslaved black woman made a mockery of her marriage.