Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka

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СКАЧАТЬ stage of her writing career coincided with and may have been helped by the interest generated through the government-sponsored insurgence of writing by minority women, often women of color, who “revealed different cultures to the mainstream American reading public . . . [and] wrote books about their history, folklore, and customs.”⁵ Krawczyk’s focus on female characters within the Polish or Polish American milieu persisted throughout her whole writing career, which spanned almost a quarter of a century from the early 1930s until her death in 1954. It is impossible to overestimate Monica Krawczyk’s role as a pioneer of Polish American literature in English who educated her American readers about being ethnic and who became a crucial bridge between pre– and post–World War II sensibilities. Her narratives reflect her understanding of what much later Judith Butler would call “women’s common subjugated experience.”⁶ Krawczyk’s immigrant or ethnic women struggle with double marginalization, both from the mainstream American culture, where the economic hardships of the Great Depression “underwrote a reemphasis on women’s domestic roles as wives and mothers,”⁷ and from the Polish strongly patriarchal and Roman Catholic culture that endorsed similarly rigid gender roles. For her ethnicized or even racialized women, gender is not performed in a vacuum, but intersects with constructions of urban or rural working-class as well as ethno-racial and heterosexual identity.⁸

      In 1950, the Polanie Club of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, a cultural organization of Polish American women of which Krawczyk was a founding member, collected her best short fiction and published If the Branch Blossoms and Other Stories. In his introduction to this collection, Eric P. Kelly situates Krawczyk’s writing among the work of literary women of her generation such as Amy Lowell and Willa Cather and identifies her as a literary heir to Sarah Orne Jewett, “whose earlier stories cling as much to Anglo-Saxon trends as do Mrs. Krawczyk’s to Polish.”⁹ Likewise, Krawczyk’s sensitivity in constructing women characters anticipates the narratives of Tillie Olsen, who just like Krawczyk was a child of European immigrants, although her Jewish parents came from Russia and not from Poland. Olsen’s short stories, such as “Tell Me a Riddle” and “I Stand Here Ironing,” are populated by women who look back to the turbulent 1930s and 1940s as they consider their attempts to resist the forces that make them forgo their own needs and “move to the rhythms of others.”¹⁰ Although Krawczyk’s stories offer much more optimistic messages than Olsen’s narratives, the value of female resistance for both authors rests in the conscious effort to defy, and not necessarily in defiance’s ultimate success, which may after all be unattainable.

      Cover of If the Branch Blossoms and Other Stories (1950)

      Eric P. Kelly believes that Krawczyk does not “build her stories in epic form,”¹¹ but feels most comfortable within a domestic story, often set in a severely restricted space of a kitchen or a couple of small rooms. Yet, her characters, Polish immigrant or Polish American ethnic women, are anything but small. Edith Blicksilver calls them “visionaries” who “link the traditions and superstitions of the old country with the new,”¹² while Thomas S. Gladsky characterizes them as “adaptable, persuasive, independent, future minded, and persistent.”¹³ They are quicker than men to construct a new self and to respond to their new, foreign environment. These assertions of female power notwithstanding, Gladsky surprisingly sees Krawczyk’s texts as strong proponents of “traditional values.”¹⁴ However, a close analysis of Krawczyk’s construction of gender suggests that her stories may be more subversive than previously thought, even though she works within and conforms to the gender discourse promoted by the mass-market periodicals she published in, which “were overwhelmingly domestic in orientation, emphasizing women’s roles as ‘professional’ housewives . . . [and in which] women were assumed to be wives and mothers, or aspiring to this ‘exalted’ condition.”¹⁵ In many of her narratives, it is apparent that domesticity becomes a contested ground where masculinist values are challenged rather than endorsed. On this ground, female characters engage in a struggle for personal fulfillment, autonomy, and individual development against the restrictions imposed on them by their familial responsibilities maintained by the male members of the family, by their own internalized traditional ethos of a Polish upbringing, as well as by well-meaning American women, teachers, and social workers, who from their privileged position took on a mission to educate the ethnics and socialize them into the American culture of phallogocentrism. Krawczyk engages her women in personal acts of rebellion even though she rarely leads them to a full victory. They move their agendas forward in small, often symbolic steps, yet their resistance is strong and fully conscious, as it hinges on their recognition of the familial and societal constraints that bind them.

      Krawczyk chooses to focus her fiction entirely on the working-class women who hail back to the 1870–1914 great wave of economic migration from the Polish homeland partitioned among the neighboring imperial powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In the home country, her immigrants had been, for the most part, poor farmers or destitute landless farm hands who, upon immigration to the United States, sought to realize their American Dream on Midwestern farms or in urban industrial centers.¹⁶ David R. Roediger would classify them together with other newcomers from eastern and southern Europe as “new immigrants,” a term which, at the time of which he writes, carried a strongly negative ethno-racial connotation. Roediger asserts that the newcomers were viewed as racially inferior to the “whiter and longer established northern and western European migrants.”¹⁷

      Krawczyk’s working-class women—even though products of different historical conditions, different socioeconomic classes, and different ethno-racial attitudes—anticipate the distress of the next generation of women so eloquently presented by Betty Friedan in her 1963 feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique. Krawczyk herself, a second-generation ethnic and a first-generation college-educated middle-class woman, was closer to Friedan’s mostly well-off and well-educated subjects than are her Polish characters. Yet, with great sensitivity, she reveals the depth of feminine anguish felt by simple immigrant women. Such anguish permeates “Quilts,” Krawczyk’s brief story about one day in the life of Mrs. Kulpek, a wife and a mother of five young children. By making quilting an integral part of this story, Krawczyk once again proves her awareness of the changing interests of her reading audience. According to Glenda Riley, the 1930s witnessed a resurgence of this craft as women “purchased less and made more themselves [and] . . . the home again became the focal point for American families.”¹⁸ In Krawczyk’s story, Mrs. Kulpek, on the eve of the Feast of Corpus Christi,¹⁹ tries frantically to finish her beautiful quilt so the house will be properly adorned for the holiday. She is one of Krawczyk’s women who, as Edith Blicksilver claims, “perpetually strive to create and maintain beauty.”²⁰

      On the surface, nothing extraordinary or dramatic happens on that day. It is filled with an endless stream of mundane activities. Mrs. Kulpek gets up early after spending most of the night piecing her quilt; cooks breakfast; readies her children and her husband for school and work; takes care of the baby; washes a mountain of soiled clothing at a washtub in her kitchen; cooks a noonday meal; cleans the house; finishes sewing a blouse commissioned by a neighbor; endures an unpleasant visit from Miss Leonard, her son’s teacher; cooks another meal; and finally, when everybody is again in bed, returns to her quilting. Acting outwardly as an automaton, she is emotionally separated from the service to her family while her inner focus is directed toward artistic expression through quilting. To her horror, she realizes that she lacks the required number of pieces to finish it. Even though, during difficult economic times, many quilters worked with used fabric from old clothing or flour and seed bags,²¹ Mrs. Kulpek is fortunate because she has designed her quilt entirely with the upholstery fabric samples brought from the mill by her husband.²² But now there is talk about a strike. If nothing else, it would mean no more samples for Mrs. Kulpek. Maybe her husband could ask other weavers if they have any unused samples to spare, she begs. After long negotiations, he grudgingly secures one final batch of squares for her, but continues to denigrate her piecing as he reminds her that СКАЧАТЬ