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

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СКАЧАТЬ Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America, and in Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers. Bona draws connections between writing and needlework as two activities that allowed Italian American women a measure of upward social mobility. She points to the power of storytelling, with its “linguistic codes that reveal their resistance toward a dominant culture that would keep them quiet,”¹⁶ and commends women writers for finding the middle ground between full assimilation into the American mainstream and the perpetuation of traditional Italian familial restrictions.¹⁷ Likewise, Sally Barr Ebest draws attention to the barriers erected by both the mainstream and the Irish American community that women writers had to struggle with. Barr Ebest asserts that some of the obstacles came from the rooted-in-Catholicism expectations of modesty and self-effacement¹⁸ that Irish American women must confront, and from the strong resentment that their gendered storytelling did not employ traditional Irish American themes of “camaraderie, drink, violence, and pub life, but also because they refuse to reify saintly mothers and spend much time on priests.”¹⁹

      Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction supports the existence of this trend also in Polish American women’s literature, as ethnic and immigrant women gain their voice and a secure narrative space after years of suppression from without through negative gender and ethnic stereotypes²⁰ and from within the community that denied them the right to be heard. Much of Polish American fiction, as is true of other ethnic American texts, explores domestic topographies as settings for character construction. Such settings, while suggesting important themes of home and family, are heavily gendered, and are at times dismissed as of lesser value in the construction of national or ethnic identity. Suzanne Strempek Shea, a successful Polish American novelist whose work fits comfortably within the category of domestic fiction, revealed in an interview that she was urged by sincere Polish Americans to write “about more ‘serious’ things—Polish historical topics, events, people—non-fiction.”²¹ Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction, which focuses on the ability of gendered ethnic literature to disturb male-centric cultural patterns, challenges attempts to undermine the value of ethnic fiction as another attempt at silencing women’s voices and at forcing them to speak in a male language of long-established literary forms.

      Shared religious traditions of Roman Catholicism underlie many common concerns expressed by Polish American women writers as well as authors representing other ethnic groups. Themes of gender oppression prominent in Polish American narratives also have a strong presence in post–World War II writing by Irish American women. Sally Barr Ebest identifies Irish American women’s fiction as a double battleground against patriarchy where women struggle both with patriarchal restrictions imposed by society and with “the Catholic Church, which created and reinforced them.”²² For Barr Ebest, the value of ethnic literature by women resides in its ability to foreground women’s issues that rarely fit within the long-established image of a particular ethnic/national character.²³ According to Mary Jo Bona, Italian American women writers also fault the Catholic Church for placing women in a subordinate and inferior position.²⁴ Similarly, Jennifer Bess in her analysis of Julia Alvarez’s novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, lists instances of Church-condoned patriarchal oppression and suggests that Yolanda, Alvarez’s alter ego, uses “silence as a means of revolution,”²⁵ a way to rebel against the oppressive status quo within the Caribbean American community. Polish American fiction, likewise, engages in devising and offering strategies—intentional rebellious silence, transgressive behavior, surreptitious undermining of the power structure—to overcome powerlessness and marginalization.

      Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction posits that Polish American literature offers nonethnic readers an easy point of entry into Polishness, just as other ethnic texts might invite the reader into Mexicanness, Indianness or Irishness, and serves as a site for construction of gendered and classed identity. Most ethnic writers—including Polish Americans like Suzanne Strempek Shea, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Dagmara Dominczyk, just to mention a few, as well as Mexican American Sandra Cisneros, South Asian American Bharati Mukherjee, Chinese American Amy Tan, and Korean Americans Catherine Chung and Patricia Park—rework many autobiographical elements in their fiction to normalize the ethnic milieu within the American mainstream. As Tace Hedrick suggests in her analysis of Chica Lit, they become “ethnic producers . . . exotic yet homegrown”²⁶ because Chicana fiction selects and employs easily readable ethnic markers in constructing ethnic identity and teaches its female readers, both ethnic and nonethnic, how middle-class ethnicity can be performed successfully. The constant tension between the exoticism of ethnicity and integration into the mainstream becomes an important topic in Ellen McCracken’s discussion of texts by Ana Castillo, Cristina García, and Denise Chavez. McCracken contends that Latina writers include “ethnographic passages” in their work as evidence of insider status and a way to attract audiences to their work, since, as she writes, “sameness is not as marketable in current conditions as is difference.”²⁷ Interestingly, some Polish American authors, such as Brigid Pasulka, Karolina Waclawiak, and Leslie Pietrzyk, move on to nonethnic fiction after their initial success with Polish or Polish American novels.

      Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction argues that, contrary to many other ethnic literatures that write poverty, abuse, violence, and racism into their narratives, Polish American fiction rarely deploys these themes. Post–World War II novels and short stories invite readers into the stable middle-class milieu, testifying to the success the Polish ethnic group achieved fairly quickly after their arrival (i.e., within one or two generations). Yet, at the same time, Polish American fiction by women engages with common ethnic themes of identity, belonging, loss, guilt, powerlessness, patriarchal oppression, and objectification that are of importance for most of the ethnic women existing in a liminal space between different cultural constructs.

      III

      Since Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction draws its evidence from ethnic and immigrant fiction and some autobiographical immigrant writing, it enters a readily recognizable multidisciplinary field of inquiry where not only literary scholars but also historians, anthropologists, and sociologists interested in migration and ethnicity turned their critical gaze upon literary sources both fictional and autobiographical as a rich mine of information. Karen Majewski’s pioneering study, Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939, brings to light nearly forgotten voices of immigrant writers who wrote in their native language for the audience of their compatriots. In her book, Majewski considers the writing of Polish American identity in family-focused narratives told by the representatives of stara emigracja (the old emigration). An anthology, Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent, edited by Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita Holmes Gladsky, presents introductory essays and excerpts of poetry, fiction, and autobiographical writing by a heterogeneous group of women writers of Polish descent from disparate time periods and immigrant cohorts. In his introduction to the volume, Thomas S. Gladsky problematizes the contradictions within the Polish American gender discourse and identifies “women in revolt”²⁸ rising against the immigrant conditions and ethnic prejudice they encountered in the United States. Building upon Majewski’s and Gladsky’s research, this study, for the most part, selects literary texts published during the second half of the twentieth century and the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. Although the majority of this volume discusses narratives written in English and published in the United States, it has been enriched by the inclusion of several immigrant texts written originally in Polish, since they often give voice to new arrivals that otherwise would be rendered voiceless. Polish-language immigrant fiction, as argued by Majewski, rightly belongs to a subcategory of American literature that includes works produced in a variety of languages, a practice she traces back to the early 1920s.²⁹ Likewise, Werner Sollors classifies “literature in languages apart from English”³⁰ within the canon of American ethnic literature, which corresponds with the recent trend in the study of ethnic archives that must contain texts in the initial languages, without which ethnic literatures would be rendered “illiterate and unreadable.”³¹

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