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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end.”⁷¹ For Butler, this construction of gender identity intersects with race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and even regionalism,⁷² and becomes an ongoing performative process of constant repetition happening not in a vacuum, but “within the terms of discourse and power, where power is partially understood in terms of heterosexual and phallic cultural conventions.”⁷³ Gender is historically, culturally and politically inflected. Likewise, Elleke Boehmer, approaching gender discourse from the postcolonial perspective, compares concepts of gender to that of a nation and perceives them both not as natural but rather as “fabricated” entities where gender “is discursively organised, relationally derived, and culturally variable.”⁷⁴

      In his discussion of cultural constructions of Polish and Polish American women, John J. Bukowczyk asserts that race and socioeconomic class are fundamental to understanding derogatory stereotypes often attached to Polish American women.⁷⁵ Bukowczyk gestures toward the intersectional theory Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw developed to account for the varying degrees and modes of oppression that women are exposed to and experience. Crenshaw’s feminist analysis of various forms of sexual assault against women of color allows her to argue that their heightened vulnerability to assault results from their positioning at the intersection of multiple prejudicial factors such as gender, race, social class, sexual orientation, and sometimes also age. She believes that their situation is inherently different than that of other marginalized groups since they are placed at an intersection of both sexism and racism. Since Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality explains exclusion and sets identity within social and historical contexts, it offers a useful approach to the analysis of identity construction and gender performance of other ethnic women for whom “systems of race, gender, and class domination converge”⁷⁶ to create patterns of subordination and disempowerment.⁷⁷ This is also true of Polish immigrant and Polish American ethnic women, whose marginalization may be traced to the intersection of gender, social class, patriarchy, and even race.⁷⁸ While class identification may be changed through immigration, gender and race can never be separated.⁷⁹

      My analysis of gendered, classed, and raced ethnicity in Polish American literature has also benefited from the research into white ethnicities conducted by Mary C. Waters, who asserts that for European Americans ethnicity becomes a matter of choice;⁸⁰ by David R. Roediger, who traces the process by which some southern and eastern European immigrants moved from a racially suspect position to a privileged one when their whiteness was fully accepted;⁸¹ as well as by Ruth Frankenberg, who works with the concepts of transparency or invisibility of whiteness and highlights privileges associated with the normativity of whiteness.⁸²

      VI

      Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction both builds upon the work of my predecessors in various fields, and at the same time moves away from a broad discussion of immigrant writing in Polish or English and turns toward teasing out the specific: the construction of gendered ethnicity within the processes of assimilation and acculturation, combined with the tension between the dominant culture and the ethnic subaltern. While relying on evidence from several related disciplines, I concentrate on the analysis of female characters in Polish immigrant and Polish American ethnic fiction, written mostly by women, to trace the construction and evolution of gendered ethnicity roughly over the last seventy to eighty years. I posit that authors, while well aware of the benefits of white invisibility, are clearly conscious of the decades-long marginalization of ethnic women both by the mainstream and by Polish patriarchy, as well as by politically inflected models of gender performance. This study argues that in Polish immigrant and Polish American ethnic fiction, female characters fully cognizant of the agents of their victimization engage in a steady pushback against restrictions by deploying transgressive behaviors, passive resistance, ethnic cross-dressing, race switching, and performance of masculinity. The intersection of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity/race, national and Roman Catholic ideologies, and even politics becomes the place of struggle where, amid the constant tension, women from each generation write their identity. They continuously (re)construct ethnic identities and, over time, migrate from communal to personal ethnicity—from ethnic communities to the community of one—and, as John J. Bukowczyk asserts, their Americanness is inextricably connected to their ethnic identity.⁸³

      Polish American women writers featured in this study normalize an ethnic group that has been historically burdened with strongly negative stereotypes and give voice to ethnic women who have been rendered silent by both the mainstream and the Polish American patriarchy. By taking possession of the Polish American ethnic space, women writers transform it from a space of working-class marginality to that of middle-class success where women, through their close links to female ancestors, write Polishness into Americanness.

      The first chapter of this chronologically as well as thematically organized study enters the discussion of gendered ethnicity with an analysis of Monica Krawczyk’s literary output. Krawczyk, the matriarch of Polish American short fiction, normalized the Polish immigrant “other” in a series of short stories published in mainstream American periodicals from 1931 to the early 1950s. Even though her women seem firmly embedded in the traditionally female domestic sphere within its working-class, heteronormative, and racially uniform world, she grants them a voice and removes them from the realm of invisibility. She makes them fully cognizant of the restrictions embedded in two oppressive cultures—Polish and American—which conspire to limit their self-expression. Krawczyk’s characters work ingeniously and incessantly to liberate themselves both as new American women, empowered to bring education and innovation into their large families, and as ethnic women who keep the memory of their original Polish homeland alive.

      The second chapter recovers forgotten texts by amateur ethnic writers submitting to literary contests from the late 1950s and early 1960s and seeks to demonstrate the influence of a deep-seated class division within the Polish American community on the construction of gendered ethnicity. While, at midcentury, middle-class, thoroughly acculturated or even assimilated ethnic women face a highly restrictive secular ideal of American domesticity, the strongly ethnic, mostly working-class women depicted in these texts are similarly oppressed by the Polish Marianism promoted by the Catholic Church. In a desperate search for sources of female empowerment, several authors turn to the still-fresh memories of World War II to illuminate the full range of women’s accomplishments and potential on the home front and on European battlefields, sadly unrecognized and unrealized during peacetime.

      Each of the next four chapters focuses on the work of a particular writer or on a theme as it analyzes narratives which for the most part recreate Polish American communities and trace their evolution during a three-decade-long period. The third chapter explores Suzanne Strempek Shea’s construction of gendered ethnicity in Polish American, mostly working-class communities in New England. Strempek Shea’s thirty-something protagonists exist between two normative systems: the Polish American highly restricted, patriarchal, Roman Catholic, and working-class model of femininity and the growing American movement toward sexual freedom and gender equality espoused by the younger, college-educated representatives of the middle class. Strempek Shea’s characters forcefully reject masculinist restrictions imposed on them by Polish American secular and religious ideologies, yet they continue to identify themselves as ethnic women by using nonrestrictive ethnic markers. Suzanne Strempek Shea’s ethnic women characters, supported by extensive networks of female relations, friends, and ancestors, take firm control over constructing their gendered ethnicity.

      In Polish American immigrant and ethnic fiction, the relationship between mothers and daughters, the trope of an absent mother, as well as class-inflected enactments of motherhood garner much more attention than sexuality as active elements in constructing women’s identity. Chapter 4 centers on the working-class models of motherhood present in Leslie Pietrzyk’s and Ellen Slezak’s narratives, which explore the absence and the silence of mothers—the old-world mothers left behind when their daughters emigrated, or the new-world mothers missing from their daughters’ СКАЧАТЬ