Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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perhaps a garden of flowers! Like a picture,—hanging on a wall in some princess’s room! If she could only see the whole thing! But joy of joys, she had a piece of it! . . . And before she even began to sew on it, she held another piece. It was a rich red mohair with a long nap. She pressed it to her cheek to feel its softness. That was a covering for a rocker in the queen’s palace. . . . Oh! She would have the finest and richest quilt in the world!33
Mrs. Kulpek’s fantasy about the intended destinations for the different textiles she has incorporated into her quilt—the mayor’s office, the princess’s room, and the queen’s palace—provides for her an illusion of crossing the class divide. At least temporarily, she moves away from the images of working-class poverty that surround her to a realm of the highest luxury that, to her European imagination, can only be royal in nature. Mary Jo Bona, writing about Italian American women, posits that needlework provided for subaltern women a way to assert power as “women’s cloth expressivity enabled different kinds of mobility”34 and gave them a voice.
Mrs. Kulpek’s single-minded focus on her quilt, the one object of beauty in her drab life, allows her to continue with the daily routine of mind-numbing work. Every now and then, when she is alone, she spreads out the quilt, counts the squares, and admires its beauty: “She rose and hurried into the kitchen, where on a long table lay her quilt. . . . She spread it out, her eyes beaming with gladness. Two hundred fifty-one pieces were already sewed together!”35 Her quilt offers her not only dreams of being someone else, someone special, of seeing beauty only available to the few others in high positions, but her work also carries her back to the happy time of her youth in Poland when, free of her husband’s control, she practiced her needlework skills and produced her first masterpieces. It also allows her to continue the customs she learned in Poland of beautifying the home for the Corpus Christi holiday. But, most of all, she is able to resist her husband’s demands of dutiful wifely conduct and find some measure of freedom to express herself artistically, even if it is through a very traditionally female form of fiber art created and displayed within the confines of the home.
For Krawczyk, the tradition of women’s needlework turns into a discourse on immigrant identity and on patriarchy. Even though quilting has not been a craft traditionally practiced in Poland, Krawczyk’s protagonist applies the old-world skills of fine needlework to a new-world form of artistic expression. An immigrant woman actively constructs ethnic identity by combining elements of both the old and the new, while she achieves a measure of independence and self-fulfillment within an accepted framework of typically female occupations.
In her famous, award-winning story, “No Man Alone,” Krawczyk returns to the Kowalek family she introduced in two other short narratives, “After His Own” and “Wedding in the City.” In “No Man Alone,” a spunky farm wife, Kasia Kowalek, is heavily involved in the life of her small farming community and serves as a vivid contrast to her reclusive and distrustful husband, Stas. She is an active member of the women’s club, whose young college-educated American leaders (one of whom is her daughter-in-law) work on introducing immigrant farmers to efficient methods of farming and housekeeping. Stas, on the other hand, alienated from his American environment, is loath to attend club meetings even though his farming knowledge brought from Poland seems to be sadly lacking. Finally, Kasia, with the help of her daughter-in-law, is able to bring Stas to one of the meetings, during which he not only gains insight into soil conservation issues but also discovers his wife’s accomplishments as a seamstress and rug maker.
Kasia’s need for artistic self-expression through a traditionally female art form, one not acknowledged in her own home, prompts her to seek the approval of the wider audience at the community center. Not only are her creations on display for everyone to admire, but the rug she designed and made, which her husband barely noticed in their home, has found a buyer. “It was a pretty rug. Like a big picture with its wreath of bright red poppies and green vine. ‘Yes, it does look pretty,’ Kowalek said. And he had never even noticed it in the house!”36 When a wealthy collector from the city offers to buy it at any price, the rug acquires a different value. Suddenly, Kasia’s talent, unnoticed and unappreciated by her husband just like her unpaid and unvalued work within the home, becomes validated and assigned a monetary value, which challenges the economic relationship between husband and wife in this traditional marriage. Yet, Kasia’s triumph is short-lived. Not surprisingly, Kowalek refuses his permission to sell the rug. His overt reason seems to be pride in his wife’s accomplishment and the fact that she made the rug for their home. But, since the same rug has not mattered to him before, his decision represents an attempt to reestablish his male power and economic control, undermined temporarily by the external validation of the tangible value of woman’s talents and work within the domestic sphere.
In all three stories featuring the Kowalek family, Krawczyk endows Kasia with a steadfast persistence in overriding Kowalek’s decisions, especially his refusal to accept his son’s choice of a bride because Edith is an American and a city girl. Kowalek’s resistance to his son’s marriage outside of the ethnic community illustrates field research conducted by Eugene E. Obidinski and Helen Stankiewicz Zand, who found that “the parents as a rule were unhappy over such an event . . . [and] the community . . . in general, did not look kindly upon a marriage outside the fold.”37 Contrary to her husband, Kasia perceives the relationship between her son and Edith as both inevitable and positive, a sure sign of the family’s assimilation into American society. Still quite aware of her own limited opportunities, Kasia openly admires the independent womanhood represented by Edith, who is college educated and moves easily between the domestic and the public spheres. She holds a job outside the home even after her marriage to young Kowalek and takes on publicly visible leadership positions within their farming community. Krawczyk again advocates a model of womanhood in contrast to the expectations of the mainstream culture, where professional women were discouraged from continuing their careers after marriage because, after all, “marriage and family were all that really mattered”38 and they should seek self-realization as “‘professional’ housewives.”39 The marriage of Edith and young Kowalek represents a new type of a relationship built on consensus where both partners compromise: the wife sacrifices her city life so the husband can return to the beloved farm, while the husband sacrifices his expectations of a traditional stay-at-home wife so the wife can continue her thriving professional career. Gently, Krawczyk introduces a possibility of new aspirations for young women as well as a path for assimilation of Polish American families into the dominant society. As Eric Schocket suggests, “the working class will not be forever excluded from the political and social prerogatives of . . . white skin privilege.”40
“No Man Alone” occupies a unique place in Krawczyk’s oeuvre as it articulates a strong social message about overcoming political and social exclusion: the inevitable assimilation, or at least acculturation, of Polish immigrants into the dominant society can run smoothly in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding. Through her female characters, Krawczyk clearly identifies Polish immigrant women as agents in this process of claiming white privilege. Able to ignore the age difference, Kasia is ready to learn all about the American way of managing her household from her young daughter-in-law and to use her as a mentor in the process of acculturation, while Edith and her wealthy American parents are sensitive to and accepting of the Kowaleks’ ethnic culture. The optimistic vision of a harmonious, multicultural, yet unified society which celebrates the richness of its diversity, even if firmly rooted within the white Eurocentric tradition, is emphasized by the story’s final scene, when Kasia and her husband attend a concert featuring the musical heritage of all the different ethnic groups represented in their farming community.41
Krawczyk’s immigrant women strain against the bonds of masculinist culture not only by seeking self-fulfillment through the arts, but also by struggling to find educational opportunities denied them both in the old and in the new worlds. Without ambiguity, Krawczyk contends that through internalizing male configurations of power, women themselves become guardians of the oppressive system. She asserts that women’s passivity and the total focus on the domestic sphere are reinforced by their mothers who buy into the oppressive system. Assertiveness and experimentation with new ideas and patterns of living are immediately perceived as a threat to the comfortable, male-dominated status quo. Antosia, the heroine