Tea Cake's impact on Janie, both during his life and in death, is profound. She wasn't the only one he changed though. I'm not sure if I would say that the people of the Muck were changed by him; Motorboat, Sop-de-Bottom, and Stew Beef don't seem to change much from when we first meet them to when Janie leaves the Muck for the final time. I believe that instead it is the people of Eatonville that change due to Tea Cake. They are gossipy when Joe is around yes. They continue to gossip once Tea Cake comes and after he's gone, true, but they no longer live in the same way.
I would say Phoebe is a prime example of the town's change due to Tea Cake. When she cautions Janie about him at the end of Chapter 12 saying, "But anyhow, Janie, you be keerful 'bout dis sellin' out and goin' off wid strange men. Look whut happend tuh Annie Tyler. Took whut little she had and went off tuh Tampa wid dat boy...It's somethin' tuh think about" (Hurston 114). Phoebe is warning Janie out of love for her, but there is also a disapproval of Tea Cake that she tries to project onto Janie. By the end of Janie's story upon her return to Eatonville, Phoebe, "[A]in't saitisfied wid mahslef no mo'" (Hurston 192). She want's the love affair that Janie had, and she appears jealous of the fun nature of Janie and Tea Cake's relationship, though she wholeheartedly disapproved of him--and his fun care-free ways--earlier on.
Phoebe leaves Janie's presence at that point, in the middle of the night, to go fishing with Sam. Her nonchalant attitude about leaving Janie to go do that shows just how much the culture of the town has changed. When Janie goes with Tea Cake early on in their relationship to go fishing at night, "[S]he felt like a child breaking rules...Then she had to smuggle Tea Cake out by the back gate and that made it seem like some great secret she was keeping from the town" (Hurston 102). Granted, Sam is no Tea Cake, he seems respected by pretty much everyone, but still, where before it would have been a huge scandal, by the end of the novel it isn't something needing to be hidden at all. While Tea Cake may not have physically impacted the town any where near as much as Joe Starks did, in terms of social change, he may have done even more than the great Mayor Starks in all his years in Eatonville.
Interesting stuff--this post really points us outside the frame of the novel, to the possible effects of Janie's story (on Pheoby, and on those she tells it to, as Janie "deputizes" her to represent the tale to others). If the gossip represents the (jealous?) townspeople's assumptions about how the story probably went (Tea Cake left her for a younger woman, etc.), then maybe Pheoby's account could change their minds--and their basic assumptions about love and gender roles--in all kinds of new ways. For the reader of the novel, it's hard not to respect Janie once we know the hardcore stuff she's been through. Maybe the townspeople stand in for the reader(s) here, and Pheoby for Hurston's narrator.
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