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Chapter 8 Summary
After the big fight, Jody moves his things into a downstairs bedroom. As he grows sicker, he consults a root-doctor, but Janie's best friend, Phoeby Watson, tells her a rumor was going around that the root-doctor told Jody that Janie must have "fixed" him. For that reason, he refuses all food from her. Janie does not really think he believes it, but he does it just to hurt her. Once he is confined to bed, people parade in and out of Janie's house to bring dishes and concern to Jody, taking no notice of Janie whatsoever. Desperate, she gets a doctor to come in from Orlando, but he tells her Jody should have been treated two years ago. His kidneys are shutting down now and nothing can be done for him.
Near the end, Janie presses herself on him, trying to make him listen. She says maybe she was not a great wife, but she had sympathy—he has just never given her a chance to use it. He is not the man she ran down the road to meet and keep house with; he never accepted her for who she was. Instead, he had to crowd out her own mind with his, and now he has to die to find out that he has to pacify someone else if he wants any love and sympathy. She tells him he never tried to pacify anybody but himself, because he was too busy listening to his own big voice.
Jody lashes at her disobedience, but the fury abruptly kills him. Looking down on his dead face, Janie feels pity for him. Jody might have been hard on the world, but the world was hard on him, too, and she wonders what happens "in the making of a voice out of a man." Then she goes to the mirror, where she lets down her hair and takes stock of herself. The glory is still there. She puts her hair back up and goesgoes to the window, where she cries to the people waiting outside that her husband is dead.
Chapter 8 Analysis
Jody's death is a powerful scene in which Janie finds her own voice again, the one Jody crowded out with his own. Even at the end, Jody refuses to recognize that he is dying, as if by exerting his will and blaming Janie he can control what is happening. However, Janie finally claims control, forcing Jody to listen when she tells him that he is dying; he has been too busy listening to himself to listen to anyone else. Here, Death is personified—given human characteristics—as a "strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West," a being who lives in a straight house with no roof, for "[w]hat need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him?" Hurston imbues Nature and natural forces with the real power, thus stripping all the power from those who rely on material things.
Many critics have commented that the men in Their Eyes Were Watching God fail to change, unlike the women, who courageously journey toward self-discovery and fulfillment. Jody is typical of the book's masculine characters—despite Janie's speech, Jody dies with the same fury and defiance that defined his treatment of her and the town. He fails to change, while his death finally offers Janie the opportunity of freedom, symbolized by the letting down of her hair. Before she can explore this new freedom, however, she must play the role of the grieving wife, and so she puts her hair back up.
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