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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ only recent book-length monograph devoted in its entirety to a study of Polish American women, The Grasinski Girls by sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans, situates its subjects, five working-class women born during the 1920s and 1930s, in the domestic sphere. Even though these women “constructed their identity mostly in the domestic sphere,” Erdmans concludes that a significant element of their identity is resistance to the limiting forces of patriarchy. As the “sites of resistance,” they chose what they could control: their own families and their minds. They also sought support from other women, since “being around women, they could more easily dismiss a male-centric set of values that devalued them.”⁵¹ Their personal resistance did not blind them to the waste of unfulfilled potential, but it did not turn them bitter.

      The other distinct waves of Polish immigrants began arriving in the United States as a result of World War II. Znaniecka Lopata separates them into two discrete cohorts: the displaced persons directly affected by the war, who saw themselves as political exiles, and the group of political asylees, separated family members, and temporary economic migrants that arrived after 1965.⁵² Mary Patrice Erdmans isolates the most recent period of vigorous immigration, the 1980s, when “the Solidarity union and democratic opposition in Poland emerged and the political and economic communist system began to crumble.”⁵³ The newest immigrants included a mixture of political exiles, expelled from Poland for their anti-communist activities, along with a substantial number of people exhausted by the everyday hardships of the failing economy who dreamt of a safe and prosperous life.

      The level of education for immigrant women improved dramatically with the arrival in the United States of the émigrés, exiles, and displaced persons who were forced out of Poland because of World War II or the political and economic pressures of the postwar communist system. In general terms, Polish women and girls reaching the United States after World War II had an advantage over the earlier arrivals. Many of them belonged to the Polish intelligentsia, a high socioeconomic class, and were educated in Polish schools during the interwar period. Some young women were university graduates or students before the war, since, as Anna Żarnowska suggests, “Educational aspirations stemming from the needs of everyday life were characteristic of the whole of the intelligentsia, males as well as females.”⁵⁴ They were, of course, also considered the elite group charged with spreading education to the lower classes,⁵⁵ and thus they exhibited a strong sense of mission. Even so, they were not free from “a rather strict division of social roles . . . deeply rooted as a principle in Polish consciousness, as a tradition-sanctified model to which all should aspire.”⁵⁶ More often than not, women were isolated in the private, domestic sphere while men were expected to perform in the public sphere.⁵⁷ The school curriculum, different for boys and girls, supported such separation.

      Women from the next generation of immigrants, the ones brought up and educated in communist Poland, were able to take advantage of equal educational experiences, and even preferential treatment in college admission if they came from the working class, whether rural or urban. The low standard of living in communist Poland, the constant consumer shortages, and the skewed currency exchange rate led, then, to paradoxical situations in which Polish professional women chose to migrate temporarily to the United States to work as domestics in order to purchase middle-class comforts for their families in Poland. On the other hand, the high educational achievement of many Polish women allowed some of them to enter professions upon their immigration and within one generation move into the American middle or upper-middle class. Yet, their high educational and professional achievement notwithstanding, they were not free of the constraints of the patriarchal family model. Krystyna Wrochno writes that as late as 1969, already a quarter of a century into Poland’s communist system, “the public opinion persists that family responsibilities are women’s main and basic responsibilities. The fact that a mother works, does not relieve her of her family duties. What is more, her occupational activity should not adversely affect the performance of her family functions.”⁵⁸ The confinement of a woman’s role primarily to her reproductive function and the framing of her preeminent “mission” as that of a mother have been strongly supported by the communist government and also by the opposition represented by the Catholic Church.

      Polish American literature by women writers published during the last seven or eight decades reflects this complex nature of Polish immigration to the United States as it constructs white gendered ethnic identity at the intersection of social class and educational level, political situation in Poland at the time of emigration, economically or politically motivated reason for leaving, as well as secular and Church-supported patriarchy.

      V

      My discussion of the discursive spaces of gendered and classed ethnicity has been informed by the postmodern attention to context and concepts of invention, constructionism and, in Gill Jagger’s formulation, “subjectivity, rooted in the work of Michel Foucault and, to some extent, Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Lacan,”⁵⁹ which has been embraced in the past thirty years by scores of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary critics. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm writes about the invention of a variety of traditions in late-nineteenth-century Europe that were “to ensure or express social cohesion and identity,”⁶⁰ while Hugh Trevor-Roper dissects the creation of Scottish highland traditions.⁶¹ In “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” the anthropologist Michael Fischer advocates incorporating autobiographical ethnic fiction “within the traditional sociological literature on ethnicity.”⁶² His investigation of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat (1975), and Marita Golden’s Migrations of the Heart (1983) leads him to conclude that ethnic identity is “reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual. . . . Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught and learned.”⁶³ Furthermore, he sees this invention of ethnicity as a process which offers a unique link between the past and future, since it is rooted in the past while it gestures to the future.⁶⁴ Writing in The Invention of Ethnicity, both Kathleen Neils Conzen and Werner Sollors dispute the traditional approach often seen in “historical interpretation”⁶⁵ of perceiving ethnic groups “as if they were natural, real, eternal, stable, and static units,”⁶⁶ while Matthew Frye Jacobson separates ethnicity from genetic and cultural inheritance and focuses on its flexibility in allowing self-construction.⁶⁷ Conzen, Sollors, and Jacobson see very little that is eternal and stable about ethnicity as well as about many other categories previously viewed as natural and immutable. Sollors employs the concept of invention as the key to a new understanding of not only ethnicity but such categories as gender, childhood, biography, and region, among others.⁶⁸ For Sollors, the proof of his theories lies in literature, which he continues to discuss in Ethnic Modernism (2002). Mary C. Waters reached similar conclusions, but, instead of fiction, Waters studied US census information and conducted interviews with ethnic Irish, Polish, and Italian Catholics. She found that each of her informants, mostly unconsciously, invented his or her own ethnic self by using a variety of sources of information, such as family stories passed on through generations, family documents, and family traditions and possessions, but also by absorbing the attitudes toward their ethnicity exhibited by the dominant culture and especially the media. Waters writes that one’s ethnicity is constructed from elements one selects not quite consciously from a personal—ethnic insider’s—repository of knowledge confronted with the outsider’s ethnic stereotypes, from what she calls “a cultural grab bag of Irish, Polish, or Italian stereotypical traits.”⁶⁹ This process of choosing and discarding can be especially complicated for ethnics of mixed ethnic background, who may choose to identify with only one or with multiple ethnicities and races represented in their ancestry.⁷⁰

      The poststructuralist focus on connecting texts to their linguistic and social origins and on subjectivity, so evident in the understanding of ethnicity which favors constructionism over essentialism, is paralleled by feminist theories of gender. In her seminal work, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler draws inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” and suggests СКАЧАТЬ