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

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СКАЧАТЬ comments, “Always that quilt! You better tend to your house work,” and gives her direct orders: “‘Better sew a button on this shirt! I can’t go to work like this!’ Her husband spoke sternly. What was a quilt to him!”²³ Mrs. Kulpek also endures admonishments from Miss Leonard, who comes in the early afternoon to complain about young Frank’s misbehavior in school. The teacher is visibly taken aback by the disarray in the house: unwashed dishes, unmade beds, and Mrs. Kulpek still at the washtubs. Disregarding the housewife’s embarrassment, Miss Leonard condescendingly advises this overwhelmed and overworked woman: “‘you should do your washing in the morning,’ the teacher suggested, business-like.”²⁴ Undoubtedly, for Krawczyk, Miss Leonard, who appears to espouse paternalistic attitudes, represents common late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas that “more order and cleanliness” lead to “a stronger national fabric”²⁵ and the belief that immigrants have to be acculturated to these notions. Mrs. Kulpek is in a position which Magdalena Zaborowska calls “double ‘otherness’”²⁶ since she is marginalized in two cultures. In this not so subtle way, Krawczyk points to the tensions between the immigrant and the dominant culture and the practice of “othering” the immigrant culture as inferior. At the same time, the episode with the teacher points to a slow process of the immigrant woman taking on “some public functions as the family representative who in her husband’s absence dealt with teachers, priests, social workers, city officials, and policemen.”²⁷

      The reason for Miss Leonard’s visit to the Kulpeks’ house—the son’s unruly behavior—along with her reaction to her perception of an undisciplined and lazy subaltern female unable to keep order and ensure neatness in the home, suggest ethno-racial attitudes prevalent in the early twentieth century among white native-born Americans for whom the whiteness of some of the emigrant groups was questionable. The scene in Mrs. Kulpek’s kitchen illustrates well Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s contention that the coming together of “racism and xenophobia, class and gender” often characterizes locations where racialized women dwell,²⁸ underscored by the frequent references to dirty surroundings of the new migrants, linking poverty with race.²⁹ Not only Poles, but also Irish, Italian, and Jewish newcomers experienced this identification as a separate and inferior “race.”³⁰ A similar commentary on the intersection of race, gender, and class as well as women’s subaltern status is provided by Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska, who as Krawczyk’s contemporary emigrated from the part of Poland seized by the Russian Empire. In some of her short stories, such as “Children of Loneliness” and “Where Lovers Dream,” Yezierska deploys a link between personal habits of neatness, cleanliness, orderliness, and discipline with white American success. Similarly, she equates dirt, messiness, disorder, and poverty with immigrant habits.³¹ For Yezierska’s characters to pass as American and to move out of the working-class Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, they have to acquire “a different skin”³² from their parents: they need to change their race. In contrast to Yezierska, Krawczyk refuses to accept such ethno-racial oppressive power exercised over her characters by white American middle-class women, instead identifying them clearly as not only naïve but also grossly ignorant of the immigrant plight.

      In constructing gender within the domestic sphere of Mrs. Kulpek’s home, Krawczyk uses sexual discourse to identify the wife’s resistance to the husband’s power within the relationship. Mrs. Kulpek’s desire to seek self-expression through the only thing that is entirely her own creation leads her to reject or delay fulfilling her husband’s sexual demands. In the evening after the exhausting and frantic day, John Kulpek repeatedly insists that his wife go to bed instead of staying up late to finish the quilt. She flatly refuses. She is not joining him in bed, but would rather continue her piecing.

      With her life devoted to practical matters, Mrs. Kulpek struggles to rise above the utilitarian and create a little bit of luxury, which is missing from her own mundane existence. The act of transforming the random squares of fabric into a work of art has the power to transport her out of her daily drudgery:

      Her eyes devoured the beauty of each little piece! For a moment she held the first sample, a well made frieze with its shiny rayon weave of a rose pattern. Perhaps it was a part of a covering for a fine big chair in the mayor’s office, or the president’s. . . . She sewed it on closely, evenly, turning it over from time to time, to see the effect on the whole quilt. Then she took the next piece, a tapestry, a corner of a large pattern, perhaps a garden of flowers! Like a picture,—hanging on a wall in some princess’s room! If she could only see the whole thing! But joy of joys, she had a piece of it! . . . And before she even began to sew on it, she held another piece. It was a rich red mohair with a long nap. She pressed it to her cheek to feel its softness. That was a covering for a rocker in the queen’s palace. . . . Oh! She would have the finest and richest quilt in the world!³³

      Mrs. Kulpek’s fantasy about the intended destinations for the different textiles she has incorporated into her quilt—the mayor’s office, the princess’s room, and the queen’s palace—provides for her an illusion of crossing the class divide. At least temporarily, she moves away from the images of working-class poverty that surround her to a realm of the highest luxury that, to her European imagination, can only be royal in nature. Mary Jo Bona, writing about Italian American women, posits that needlework provided for subaltern women a way to assert power as “women’s cloth expressivity enabled different kinds of mobility”³⁴ and gave them a voice.

      Mrs. Kulpek’s single-minded focus on her quilt, the one object of beauty in her drab life, allows her to continue with the daily routine of mind-numbing work. Every now and then, when she is alone, she spreads out the quilt, counts the squares, and admires its beauty: “She rose and hurried into the kitchen, where on a long table lay her quilt. . . . She spread it out, her eyes beaming with gladness. Two hundred fifty-one pieces were already sewed together!”³⁵ Her quilt offers her not only dreams of being someone else, someone special, of seeing beauty only available to the few others in high positions, but her work also carries her back to the happy time of her youth in Poland when, free of her husband’s control, she practiced her needlework skills and produced her first masterpieces. It also allows her to continue the customs she learned in Poland of beautifying the home for the Corpus Christi holiday. But, most of all, she is able to resist her husband’s demands of dutiful wifely conduct and find some measure of freedom to express herself artistically, even if it is through a very traditionally female form of fiber art created and displayed within the confines of the home.

      For Krawczyk, the tradition of women’s needlework turns into a discourse on immigrant identity and on patriarchy. Even though quilting has not been a craft traditionally practiced in Poland, Krawczyk’s protagonist applies the old-world skills of fine needlework to a new-world form of artistic expression. An immigrant woman actively constructs ethnic identity by combining elements of both the old and the new, while she achieves a measure of independence and self-fulfillment within an accepted framework of typically female occupations.

      In her famous, award-winning story, “No Man Alone,” Krawczyk returns to the Kowalek family she introduced in two other short narratives, “After His Own” and “Wedding in the City.” In “No Man Alone,” a spunky farm wife, Kasia Kowalek, is heavily involved in the life of her small farming community and serves as a vivid contrast to her reclusive and distrustful husband, Stas. She is an active member of the women’s club, whose young college-educated American leaders (one of whom is her daughter-in-law) work on introducing immigrant farmers to efficient methods of farming and housekeeping. Stas, on the other hand, alienated from his American environment, is loath to attend club meetings even though his farming knowledge brought from Poland seems to be sadly lacking. Finally, Kasia, with the help of her daughter-in-law, is able to bring Stas to one of the meetings, during which he not only gains insight into soil conservation issues but also discovers his wife’s accomplishments as a seamstress and rug maker.

      Kasia’s need for artistic self-expression through a traditionally female art form, one not acknowledged in her own home, prompts her to seek the approval of the wider СКАЧАТЬ