Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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for—the Ideal Polish Woman in this Marian formulation—meekness, mildness, long-suffering, empathy, purity, chastity, devotion, self-denial, self-sacrifice.”44 For such a life of female virtue, Mary Kowalewski is rewarded during one of the pilgrimages when she meets a Polish American family, Joe and his dying mother. Again, she willingly takes on the care of the sick woman, who herself finds happiness in preparing spiritually for imminent death. Mary’s exemplary life of virtue and extraordinary piety leads her to great happiness: her marriage to Joe and emigration from communist Poland to the freedom of America.
Even though Pomietlarz and Wnukowski represent two different generations, they both construct gender at the intersection of social class, ethnicity, and religion. In their stories, the ethics of Catholicism endorse desirable character traits of submission, self-abnegation, empathy, and service to others and severely restrict desirable life goals for women, limiting them to marriage, motherhood, and a good death with a promise of eternal life. Both protagonists from the stories by Pomietlarz and Wnukowski are constructed to exhibit particular devotion to Our Lady of Częstochowa, which serves as a strong support to John J. Bukowczyk’s claims that “Polish Roman Catholic Marianism has provided a discursive framework for the construction of an alternative model of the Polish and Polish-American woman.”45 Roman Catholic Marianism is not unique to Polish and Polish American cultures, but rather is “a movement within the Roman Catholic church.”46 Evelyn P. Stevens, discussing the influence of Marianism on gender discourse in Latin America and to some degree in Italy and Spain, suggests that religious practices strongly influence gender expectation in Latin societies. The practitioners of Latin marianismo link the image of an ideal woman to “semidivinity, moral superiority, and spiritual strength . . . [which] engenders abnegation, that is the infinite capacity for humility and sacrifice. No self-denial is too great for the Latin American woman, no limit can be divined to her vast store of patience. . . . She is also submissive to the demands of men.”47
Polish American professional and amateur female authors writing at midcentury often bifurcate their construct of gendered ethnicity as the social class divide enters fiction. Due to the postwar growth of educational opportunities as well as the economic boom, many Polish American women of the second and third generation join the ranks of the American middle class, assimilating into mainstream white culture and loosening their ties with traditional ethnic centers. They disappear into the white invisibility of the suburbs and, just like their nonethnic sisters, try to alleviate the pain of disempowerment with consumerism. Polish American women who remain firmly embedded within the working-class life of ethnic communities experience numerous obstacles created by the Polish patriarchy supported by the Catholic Church. Their gendered ethnicity is constructed out of the memories of homeland, while religious teaching and especially the veneration of the Virgin Mary confirm a traditional gender binary. For them, the only path to self-fulfillment leads through service to the family, the community, and the Church in hope of the eternal reward. Not surprisingly, the stories in the collection do not suggest changes even if they, like Kosturbala’s “The Guest,” acknowledge the marginalization of women. Monica Krawczyk’s advocacy for self-improvement and self-fulfillment through, among other things, artistic endeavors seems long forgotten. On the other hand, immigrant authors representing the Polish interwar intelligentsia approach some sense of female liberation when they explore the heroic narratives of the recently ended World War II and construct women war heroes. Their stories prove that in times of crisis, when traditional cultural barriers disappear, women demonstrate patriotism, courage, assertiveness, and intelligence. Immigrant women authors write Polish patriotic traditions into gendered ethnicity as they celebrate women soldiers willing to assume roles that for centuries have been deemed acceptable for men only. Their fearless female fighters often out-soldier male combatants. These two attitudes illustrate the generational, class-based split within the Polish American diaspora: ethnic women writers whose ancestors were working class understand and therefore construct their gender identities in ways that are fundamentally more traditional and obedient than those characters constructed by later arrivals from the World War II émigré class. The fact that stories written by representatives of both groups appear in the collection means that, though individual stories may represent limited, distinct understandings of gender, the collection as a whole shows the nuances that define the larger Polish American community.
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Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Gendered Ethnicity in the 1970s and 1980s
I
THE AMERICAN LITERARY SCENE during the final decades of the twentieth century was energized by the work of a group of women writers who hailed from strong ethnic traditions and whose fiction probed the complex experiences of immigrants and their children caught between the ethnic and the dominant host cultures. Their female characters have often been placed in an unenviable position of double jeopardy, since they not only represent a marginalized ethnic group but also face prejudice due to their gender. In constructing a female perspective, fiction writers such as the Chinese Americans Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan, the Native American Louise Erdrich, the Puerto Rican Judith Ortiz Cofer, the Dominican American Julia Alvarez, and the Polish American Suzanne Strempek Shea have forced many of their characters into a process of reinventing both their gender and ethnic identities within a class-conscious environment. The American-born Suzanne Strempek Shea represents a generation of Polish ethnics often far removed from the immigrant ancestors who left the old country, mostly for economic reasons, and came to the United States among the large waves of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century east European peasant immigrants who eventually developed a strong working-class culture. Thus, for Strempek Shea, like for other Polish American writers such as Leslie Pietrzyk and Ellen Slezak, the ethnic home and the working-class neighborhood in the United States (not in Poland) become the primary sites for the invention and performance of gendered ethnicity. Four of Strempek Shea’s five novels, featuring a Polish American female protagonist situated within a strongly ethnic community during the 1970s and 1980s, clearly continue the ethnic and gender conversation initiated by Monica Krawczyk decades earlier. Strempek Shea’s twenty- or thirty-something women find themselves in a situation similar to that of their literary grandmothers in Krawczyk’s short stories as they engage in an often-difficult process of constructing their Polish and American identity, while at the same time pushing against the gender restrictions imposed on them by the patriarchy embedded within the family structure and supported by the Roman Catholic belief system.
In her first three novels, Selling the Lite of Heaven (1994), Hoopi Shoopi Donna (1996), and Lily of the Valley (1999), Suzanne Strempek Shea chronicles the small-town Polish American neighborhoods found among the slightly dilapidated working-class settlements of New England, very much like Krawczyk, who focused on similar communities within urban centers three or four decades earlier. In such “insular social worlds”1 ethnicity gained visibility, as Richard Alba suggests, “in the names and nature of their small businesses, in the style and exterior decoration of their housing, and of course in the skin color, speech, and surnames of their residents.”2 A strong sense of nostalgia for the familiar and comfortable albeit far from idyllic life within such an ethnic enclave infuses Strempek Shea’s writing about a fragile world endangered both from within and from without. Suburbanization, the disappearance of the family farm, divorce, and intermarriage all seem to add urgency to her writing, as if a record must be completed before even the memories disappear. Ironically, the sensitively drawn female characters who are caught within the tension created by the often-conflicting values and demands embedded in the Polish traditions represented by their immigrant parents or grandparents and the seductive promises of American society become themselves the agents of change. As they struggle for an understanding of self, their ethnic consciousness becomes intricately intertwined with gender awareness, and in the constant process of constructing gendered identity the heroines of her novels reinvent the Polish American community.