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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ absence by using memories, stories, and cherished mementos to invent new mother figures capable of helping them tame the foreignness around them. In a subtle way, this process frees ethnic women from some patriarchal controls internalized by their Polish peasant mothers.

      Chapter 5 continues to investigate Polish immigrant motherhood in Danuta Mostwin’s novella, “Jocasta.” Mostwin, a World War II émigré writer, explores the destructive quality of the Polish upper-middle-class model of patriotic motherhood embedded in the Matka-Polka (Mother-Pole) ideal. This chapter suggests that Mostwin’s character, incapable of discarding and freeing herself from class-inflected restrictions, becomes a tragic anachronism who destroys both herself and her beloved son.

      Chapter 6 isolates instances of rebellious and/or transgressive behavior that either openly or surreptitiously break constraints placed on ethnic women’s expressions of sexuality. This discussion draws evidence from several texts, especially from novels by Elizabeth Kern and Melissa Kwasny, and asserts that Polish American women’s sexual freedom may be curbed by several factors. In Polish American working-class heteronormative communities, women’s sexuality is circumscribed by patriarchal prohibitions supported by the Catholic Church’s teaching linking sexuality to sin and promoting an ideal of womanhood contained in the concept of the Virgin-Mother. This chapter posits that while Polish American heterosexual women who take ownership of their sexuality through entering forbidden premarital or extramarital relations may avoid censure from a Polish American ethnic community, homosexuality seems invariably relegated to a separate queer diaspora.

      The next two chapters bring the discussion of gendered and classed ethnicity forward to consider the developments of the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. Chapter 7 analyzes several narratives, many of them written in Polish, by representatives of the latest large immigrant cohort, the so-called “Solidarity cohort,” who left Poland for the United States and Canada as a result of the economic and political upheaval of the 1980s. This chapter argues that, just as the World War II émigré women are controlled by their Polish patriotic heritage, the “Solidarity” immigrants are constrained by the deeply rooted legacy of communist xenophobia, intolerance, and dubious morality. These fictional daughters of communist Poland firmly situate their identity at the intersection of whiteness, the middle class, and heterosexuality. Some of them achieve empowerment by marginalizing the racial and class “other” as well as by ignoring or actively breaking some of the most basic ethical rules with impunity. They perform their gendered ethnic identity within artificially constructed moveable relational homelands that can be transplanted from locale to locale without much effort.

      Chapter 8 continues the examination of the “Solidarity cohort” by identifying within it two distinct generational groups—the first generation of immigrant parents and the “1.5 generation” of immigrant children. This chapter asserts that the writers from these two closely related yet distinct generations engage in a literary dialogue that defines the Polish American ethnic woman of the twenty-first century. This latest incarnation of the Polish American woman has the advantage of full acculturation to the mainstream, the benefits of middle-class whiteness and education, as well as freedom from ethnic patriarchy since she lives outside of an ethnic community. Even though the immigrant past still exerts powerful influence over her construction of gendered identity, her American present allows her to choose from a full range of ethnic options. The independent but also isolated Polish American woman of the twenty-first century living in a community of one completes the trajectory of gendered ethnic identity over the last seventy or eighty years initiated by Monica Krawczyk.

      The final chapter offers its own timeline and illustrates the development of Polish American young adult and children’s narratives over the past fifty years. It posits that there exists a strong parallel between the models of gendered ethnicity in works for adults and for children and traces patterns of “girling,” the socialization of girls into the role of a future Polish American woman and mother. The early works within this genre seem much less disruptive to the patriarchal status quo than the adult narratives. For the most part, they equate Polish ethnic identity with strong working-class identification and promote traditional Roman Catholic family ideology. Narratives that provide models of empowerment for working-class girls do not appear until the late twentieth century. The effects that social class has on the construction of gendered ethnicity are particularly visible in World War II stories about empowered and assertive upper-class girls.

      * * *

      Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction seeks to augment the historical and sociological analysis of Polish immigrant and ethnic women with a discussion of gender and ethnic constructs offered by literature, particularly in long and short fiction published after World War II. By highlighting the boundaries of gender, ethnicity, race, socioeconomic class, community, and nation within discursive contexts of both the ethnic and mainstream cultures of American diversity, ethnic fiction reveals a complex female construct that draws from both Polish and American traditions and represents its own brand of feminism. This literary gender construct amplifies the negative effects on ethnic women not only of the American objectification of their bodies within a tightly controlled patriarchy, but also of the trifurcated Polish social-class legacy: of peasant fatalism defined by passivity and piety; of the intelligentsia’s model of heroism and patriotism embedded in the Matka-Polka ideal;⁸⁴ and, finally, of the communist model of a superwoman seamlessly combining a public-sphere career with a private-sphere devotion to family.⁸⁵ At the same time, the Polish American gender discourse is further complicated by American social and political turbulence of the last eighty years. Much of Polish American fiction focuses on the tensions brought on by such compounded Polish and American pressures bearing down on women and presents numerous acts of resistance, rebellion, and defiance that allow ethnic women to achieve visibility, empowerment, and self-actualization within a hostile environment of double marginalization due to both gender and ethnicity.

      1

      Faces of Resistance

       Monica Krawczyk’s Immigrant Women

      MONICA KRAWCZYK’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS a short story writer and her commitment to introducing the lives of Polish immigrant women to mainstream American readers, as well as to giving voice to the ethnic subaltern, secure for her a prominent position in the story of Polish American literature and identify her as the first popularizer of Polish immigrant women’s narratives in America. Even though Polish immigrant fiction flourished in the United States both in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as eloquently argued by Karen Majewski in her monograph, Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939, these immigrant texts were mostly inaccessible to the wide reading audience as they were published exclusively in Polish and distributed only within ethnic communities. Monica Krawczyk (1887–1954) took the ethnic narrative out of the insular communities and, as one of the first Polish American writers, broke into the American mass-circulation journal and magazine market. Beginning in the early 1930s, she published her work in a variety of popular periodicals such as Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, Journal of National Education, Canadian Home Journal, Country Home, Farm Journal, The Farmer’s Wife, Minnesota Quarterly, and others.¹ Born to a working-class family of Polish immigrants, Joseph Kowalewski and Anastasia Fortunska Kowalewska,² who settled in Minnesota in the late 1800s,³ Krawczyk defied gender, ethnic, and class stereotypes to succeed as a published author, a teacher, and a social worker whose life became defined by her devotion to everything Polish. In Winona, Minnesota, she worked with Polish American youngsters within a parochial-school setting to produce theatrical performances, and was the first one to organize “Polish classes at the University.”⁴ СКАЧАТЬ