eatens to force her to work in the fields with him. This causes her to elope with the grocer-mayor of Joe Starks, who "provides Janie with the 'front porch' existence of Nanny's dreams" (Williams xiii).
Janie plays the role of dutiful housewife and store clerk for Joe, whose idea of a wife is that she should be seen and not heard. Women don't think, Joe says: "They just think they's thinkin'. When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and done understand one" (Hurston 111). Over some fifteen years of marriage, Janie learns to curb her tongue and play the dutiful wife, while concealing "a host of thoughts she never
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