Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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as by well-meaning American women, teachers, and social workers, who from their privileged position took on a mission to educate the ethnics and socialize them into the American culture of phallogocentrism. Krawczyk engages her women in personal acts of rebellion even though she rarely leads them to a full victory. They move their agendas forward in small, often symbolic steps, yet their resistance is strong and fully conscious, as it hinges on their recognition of the familial and societal constraints that bind them.
Krawczyk chooses to focus her fiction entirely on the working-class women who hail back to the 1870–1914 great wave of economic migration from the Polish homeland partitioned among the neighboring imperial powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In the home country, her immigrants had been, for the most part, poor farmers or destitute landless farm hands who, upon immigration to the United States, sought to realize their American Dream on Midwestern farms or in urban industrial centers.16 David R. Roediger would classify them together with other newcomers from eastern and southern Europe as “new immigrants,” a term which, at the time of which he writes, carried a strongly negative ethno-racial connotation. Roediger asserts that the newcomers were viewed as racially inferior to the “whiter and longer established northern and western European migrants.”17
Krawczyk’s working-class women—even though products of different historical conditions, different socioeconomic classes, and different ethno-racial attitudes—anticipate the distress of the next generation of women so eloquently presented by Betty Friedan in her 1963 feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique. Krawczyk herself, a second-generation ethnic and a first-generation college-educated middle-class woman, was closer to Friedan’s mostly well-off and well-educated subjects than are her Polish characters. Yet, with great sensitivity, she reveals the depth of feminine anguish felt by simple immigrant women. Such anguish permeates “Quilts,” Krawczyk’s brief story about one day in the life of Mrs. Kulpek, a wife and a mother of five young children. By making quilting an integral part of this story, Krawczyk once again proves her awareness of the changing interests of her reading audience. According to Glenda Riley, the 1930s witnessed a resurgence of this craft as women “purchased less and made more themselves [and] . . . the home again became the focal point for American families.”18 In Krawczyk’s story, Mrs. Kulpek, on the eve of the Feast of Corpus Christi,19 tries frantically to finish her beautiful quilt so the house will be properly adorned for the holiday. She is one of Krawczyk’s women who, as Edith Blicksilver claims, “perpetually strive to create and maintain beauty.”20
On the surface, nothing extraordinary or dramatic happens on that day. It is filled with an endless stream of mundane activities. Mrs. Kulpek gets up early after spending most of the night piecing her quilt; cooks breakfast; readies her children and her husband for school and work; takes care of the baby; washes a mountain of soiled clothing at a washtub in her kitchen; cooks a noonday meal; cleans the house; finishes sewing a blouse commissioned by a neighbor; endures an unpleasant visit from Miss Leonard, her son’s teacher; cooks another meal; and finally, when everybody is again in bed, returns to her quilting. Acting outwardly as an automaton, she is emotionally separated from the service to her family while her inner focus is directed toward artistic expression through quilting. To her horror, she realizes that she lacks the required number of pieces to finish it. Even though, during difficult economic times, many quilters worked with used fabric from old clothing or flour and seed bags,21 Mrs. Kulpek is fortunate because she has designed her quilt entirely with the upholstery fabric samples brought from the mill by her husband.22 But now there is talk about a strike. If nothing else, it would mean no more samples for Mrs. Kulpek. Maybe her husband could ask other weavers if they have any unused samples to spare, she begs. After long negotiations, he grudgingly secures one final batch of squares for her, but continues to denigrate her piecing as he reminds her that her devotion to the quilt impinges on her duties as a wife and mother. When she explains that she has not managed to finish ironing towels for his morning toilet, he comments, “Always that quilt! You better tend to your house work,” and gives her direct orders: “‘Better sew a button on this shirt! I can’t go to work like this!’ Her husband spoke sternly. What was a quilt to him!”23 Mrs. Kulpek also endures admonishments from Miss Leonard, who comes in the early afternoon to complain about young Frank’s misbehavior in school. The teacher is visibly taken aback by the disarray in the house: unwashed dishes, unmade beds, and Mrs. Kulpek still at the washtubs. Disregarding the housewife’s embarrassment, Miss Leonard condescendingly advises this overwhelmed and overworked woman: “‘you should do your washing in the morning,’ the teacher suggested, business-like.”24 Undoubtedly, for Krawczyk, Miss Leonard, who appears to espouse paternalistic attitudes, represents common late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas that “more order and cleanliness” lead to “a stronger national fabric”25 and the belief that immigrants have to be acculturated to these notions. Mrs. Kulpek is in a position which Magdalena Zaborowska calls “double ‘otherness’”26 since she is marginalized in two cultures. In this not so subtle way, Krawczyk points to the tensions between the immigrant and the dominant culture and the practice of “othering” the immigrant culture as inferior. At the same time, the episode with the teacher points to a slow process of the immigrant woman taking on “some public functions as the family representative who in her husband’s absence dealt with teachers, priests, social workers, city officials, and policemen.”27
The reason for Miss Leonard’s visit to the Kulpeks’ house—the son’s unruly behavior—along with her reaction to her perception of an undisciplined and lazy subaltern female unable to keep order and ensure neatness in the home, suggest ethno-racial attitudes prevalent in the early twentieth century among white native-born Americans for whom the whiteness of some of the emigrant groups was questionable. The scene in Mrs. Kulpek’s kitchen illustrates well Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s contention that the coming together of “racism and xenophobia, class and gender” often characterizes locations where racialized women dwell,28 underscored by the frequent references to dirty surroundings of the new migrants, linking poverty with race.29 Not only Poles, but also Irish, Italian, and Jewish newcomers experienced this identification as a separate and inferior “race.”30 A similar commentary on the intersection of race, gender, and class as well as women’s subaltern status is provided by Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska, who as Krawczyk’s contemporary emigrated from the part of Poland seized by the Russian Empire. In some of her short stories, such as “Children of Loneliness” and “Where Lovers Dream,” Yezierska deploys a link between personal habits of neatness, cleanliness, orderliness, and discipline with white American success. Similarly, she equates dirt, messiness, disorder, and poverty with immigrant habits.31 For Yezierska’s characters to pass as American and to move out of the working-class Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, they have to acquire “a different skin”32 from their parents: they need to change their race. In contrast to Yezierska, Krawczyk refuses to accept such ethno-racial oppressive power exercised over her characters by white American middle-class women, instead identifying them clearly as not only naïve but also grossly ignorant of the immigrant plight.
In constructing gender within the domestic sphere of Mrs. Kulpek’s home, Krawczyk uses sexual discourse to identify the wife’s resistance to the husband’s power within the relationship. Mrs. Kulpek’s desire to seek self-expression through the only thing that is entirely her own creation leads her to reject or delay fulfilling her husband’s sexual demands. In the evening after the exhausting and frantic day, John Kulpek repeatedly insists that his wife go to bed instead of staying up late to finish the quilt. She flatly refuses. She is not joining him in bed, but would rather continue her piecing.
With her life devoted to practical matters, Mrs. Kulpek struggles to rise above the utilitarian and create a little bit of luxury, which is missing from her own mundane existence. The act of transforming the random squares of fabric into a work of art has the power to transport her out of her daily drudgery:
Her eyes devoured the beauty of each little piece! For a moment she held the first sample, a well made frieze with its shiny rayon weave of a rose pattern. Perhaps it was a part of a covering for a fine big chair in the mayor’s office, or the president’s. . . . She sewed it on closely, evenly, turning it over