Characters and Characterization

At the opening of the novel, I realized right away that the "sitters" on the porch were gossipers. Hurston already on the first page describes them as being judgmental "lords of sounds and lesser things". Therefore these people had nothing better to do than sit on a porch and talk all day. I also clearly discovered that the women on the porch were envious of Janie. Hurston says "so they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish". Therefore they tried to dig up as much "dirt" they could find about Janie to talk about. The description of the women in Janie's town show that people were nosy and again, judgmental. They only talked about how young she looked and basically nonsense gossip. I noticed that in their dialogue, they were very opinionated and had strong accents. Being a New Englander for most of my life, it was difficult to easily understand the heavy dialect. Their speech characterized them in two ways. One thing you learned about these women is that they were not educated. The pronunciation and grammar of their dialogue was a mess. However it is understandable that Hurston wanted to stay true to their characters. I was amazed at how well Hurston had illustrated Janie physically. You could almost imagine what she actually looked like in your mind. I noticed maybe some foreshadowing when Hurston says, "It [her beauty] was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was hope that she might fall to their level some day". So maybe Janie will realize that her appearance will have no significance and will become like the rest of society in the future? I'm not sure, I'm just throwing all my thoughts out there. At first when I was reading about how Janie was explaining her story about how Tea Cake stole her money and abandoned her, I thought Janie was trying to make Pheoby pity her. Maybe Janie is going to be a conniving protagonist.......But overall in the first chapter Hurston has already established society in Florida and around Janie.