Zora Neale Hurston
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At the end of Barbra Streisand’s Yentl, the title character sings a song called “A Piece of Sky.” The ending line Streisand delivers at her incomparable level of climax goes, “With all there is…Why settle for, just a piece of sky?” Yentl is a girl who must assume the identity of a man in order to follow her true love, studying the Talmud, because of the patriarchal environment of 19th century Jewish culture. The song symbolizes Yentl’s independence as she finally discovers her autonomous self. Despite her struggles and being alone, Yentl’s hopes and dreams will now buoy her journey, wherever it takes her. In a not dissimilar manner, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the lead character’s Janie is a black woman who travels a similar journey. Janie does not have to disguise herself in clothing as Yentl did to exist in a patriarchal society. Her disguise comes from hiding her true self, her true voice, inside herself. Janie wants more than the “piece of sky” she is offered by her relatives, the men in her life and materialism-the piece they sit fit for Janie being a limitation on her true soul. For one reason or another these pieces a black woman is offered are proffered from those who, because they did not resist the social, political and historical climate of their time, have died and lost their hope and their dreams of freedom and full exploration and enjoyment of life (for the good and the bad i
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and Janie. Janie can only resist these attempts to limit her own self by refusing to become what her husband’s picture her role. With Janie’s third husband, Tea Cake, she truly finds herself as a woman. She has gotten this far into the journey by holding on to her hopes and dreams, mainly by, “holding on to her dream of a loving partnership that recognized true equality between each member of the marriage team” (Awkward 1990). Some see this novel as Hurston’s copping out to the white man because she believes, as Booker T. Washington did, the journey she is traveling is a universal one for which the individual is responsible for making and nothing and no one else can alter it. It is not just because she is black or a woman. It is because this journey is the main connection between the individual and humanity. Romantic, independent, love and equality are not just the ideal state between man and woman. It is also the ideal state between black and white, red and white, man and man, the individual to society and society to others societies. Only in such an environment will all people be free and have the equal opportunity of exploring themselves to their full potential without being limited by the social, economic, political
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2538
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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