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

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      The short stories from this prize-winning collection do not offer a single unified construct of Polish American gendered ethnicity at midcentury. Socioeconomic class identification strongly affects both the representation of women by male authors and the self-construction of gender by female writers. Stories anchored in the working-class milieu, for example, are characterized by a strong presence of Catholic teachings, and thus suggest a common pattern in the construction of gendered ethnicity regardless of the author’s gender identification. In these stories, Polish American working-class characters still inhabit the margins and seem hardly acculturated in the mainstream. Not only male but also female authors tend to proudly offer unwavering and unambiguous endorsements of a gender inequality firmly grounded in Catholic imagery and ethics, which circumscribe women’s roles and limit their range of acceptable behaviors.

      In an exception to the organizing principle of my study, which primarily discusses Polish American women authors, I include a brief analysis of “Hearts on the Pilgrims’ Road,” which won an honorable mention in the 1963 contest for Joseph S. Wnukowski (born in 1915). Wnukowski’s investment in comprehensively disempowering and shaming his young female protagonist within the context of a religious event cannot be easily classified as merely an example of Catholic misogyny. Several of the prize-winning women writers who explore the same intersection of working-class and Catholic identity, for example, likewise develop female characters who internalize and normalize male superiority. “Hearts on the Pilgrims’ Road” tells the story of a few hours in the life of a young woman, Wanda Kulpinska, who travels to the American Czestochowa,³⁸ a shrine in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Wanda is drawn from her home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Pennsylvania’s American Czestochowa together with a group of Polish American sodality women “prompted by her petition that the Miraculous Lady of Jasna Góra might help her find a husband.”³⁹ Consumed by her desire to get married, Wanda employs the only means acceptable within her traditional community to fulfill her wish. Since she has to simultaneously preserve her absolute innocence and purity as well as attract the attention of marriageable men, the only course of action open to her is to hope for a miraculous divine intervention secured through numerous religious exercises. Unfortunately, so far none of her novenas, devotions, and special prayers has produced the desired outcome. “Now at twenty-six, Wanda was beginning to feel the panic of a woman condemned to spinsterhood,”⁴⁰ especially since she does not hold a job nor pursue a career, but depends on the charity of an elderly working-class woman who adopted her as an orphaned Polish refugee child traumatized by her time in Stalin’s Siberian gulags. Thus, it appears that a marriage for Wanda would mean just a change of economic sponsorship from her elderly savior to a husband.

      During the pilgrimage to the American Czestochowa, she decides to take the matter into her own hands when she is attracted to a handsome young man with “a Polish patrician’s face.”⁴¹ She abandons even the pretense of piety and single-mindedly follows his movements both during the services and on the church grounds, devising ways to get close to him and strike up a conversation. Yet, such unwomanly behavior, which presupposes an active and assertive role for a female, cannot be rewarded: when Wanda begins to flirt innocently with the “patrician” young man, he introduces her to his attractive wife and child. At this moment, Wanda’s shame and mortification are great. She has been reminded of the rules: women do not act but are acted upon by men. Wanda has learned her lesson. She “was silent all the way back to Pittsfield. Despair had sealed her lips.”⁴² This is the time when mercy can be shown to the penitent woman: after all, a miracle happens. She is chosen by a man, the bus driver bringing the pilgrims back home, and asked on a date. If only she had waited patiently to be singled out by a man, any man, she would have been spared the embarrassment brought on by her forwardness. Even though she hardly noticed the driver before, she accepts the invitation gratefully.

      Pilgrimages to Polish or Polish American holy sites are favored as settings for other contest writers. They help transmit religious values as well as illuminate desirable gender characteristics sanctioned by the Catholic Church. In “Mary Kowalewski,” by Dianne A. Pomietlarz (born in 1945), identified as a college student, the protagonist-cum-narrator remembers her childhood in Poland. She describes her mother as a model of self-sacrificing womanhood who takes her small children on yearly pilgrimages to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Częstochowa and performs a great feat of physical endurance by carrying a sick six-year-old daughter all the way there. Her life, full of adversity and heartache, is devoted to the service of her family and God. Mary Kowalewski explains, “Though dad’s death was a great shock to her she always seemed more concerned with our welfare than her own. She told us always to be good children so that we’d be prepared to die when our time came. Mama was, it always seemed.”⁴³ Death comes to her suddenly at the beginning of World War II, during a bombing raid in Warsaw in 1939, and with her dying breath she encourages her son to become a priest. Now an orphan cared for by distant relatives, Mary emulates her mother in her devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the narrative progresses from one religious observance to the next. Each time, Mary is able to prove her compassion for others, her ability to sacrifice her own needs, and her willingness to serve others. Her life becomes a living example of what John J. Bukowczyk identifies as “the Marian virtues ascribed to—and prescribed for—the Ideal Polish Woman in this Marian formulation—meekness, mildness, long-suffering, empathy, purity, chastity, devotion, self-denial, self-sacrifice.”⁴⁴ For such a life of female virtue, Mary Kowalewski is rewarded during one of the pilgrimages when she meets a Polish American family, Joe and his dying mother. Again, she willingly takes on the care of the sick woman, who herself finds happiness in preparing spiritually for imminent death. Mary’s exemplary life of virtue and extraordinary piety leads her to great happiness: her marriage to Joe and emigration from communist Poland to the freedom of America.

      Even though Pomietlarz and Wnukowski represent two different generations, they both construct gender at the intersection of social class, ethnicity, and religion. In their stories, the ethics of Catholicism endorse desirable character traits of submission, self-abnegation, empathy, and service to others and severely restrict desirable life goals for women, limiting them to marriage, motherhood, and a good death with a promise of eternal life. Both protagonists from the stories by Pomietlarz and Wnukowski are constructed to exhibit particular devotion to Our Lady of Częstochowa, which serves as a strong support to John J. Bukowczyk’s claims that “Polish Roman Catholic Marianism has provided a discursive framework for the construction of an alternative model of the Polish and Polish-American woman.”⁴⁵ Roman Catholic Marianism is not unique to Polish and Polish American cultures, but rather is “a movement within the Roman Catholic church.”⁴⁶ Evelyn P. Stevens, discussing the influence of Marianism on gender discourse in Latin America and to some degree in Italy and Spain, suggests that religious practices strongly influence gender expectation in Latin societies. The practitioners of Latin marianismo link the image of an ideal woman to “semidivinity, moral superiority, and spiritual strength . . . [which] engenders abnegation, that is the infinite capacity for humility and sacrifice. No self-denial is too great for the Latin American woman, no limit can be divined to her vast store of patience. . . . She is also submissive to the demands of men.”⁴⁷

      Polish American professional and amateur female authors writing at midcentury often bifurcate their construct of gendered ethnicity as the social class divide enters fiction. Due to the postwar growth of educational opportunities as well as the economic boom, many Polish American women of the second and third generation join the ranks of the American middle class, assimilating into mainstream white culture and loosening their ties with traditional ethnic centers. They disappear into the white invisibility of the suburbs and, just like their nonethnic sisters, try to alleviate the pain of disempowerment with consumerism. Polish American women who remain firmly embedded within the working-class life of ethnic communities experience numerous obstacles created by the Polish patriarchy supported by the Catholic Church. Their gendered ethnicity is constructed out of the memories of homeland, while religious teaching and especially the veneration of the Virgin Mary confirm a traditional gender binary. For them, the only path to self-fulfillment leads through service to the family, the community, СКАЧАТЬ