Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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built by immigrant ancestors. Yet, they all acknowledge that the hold on Polish communal ethnicity has grown more tenuous as white ethnic urban communities gradually disappear. Interestingly, the demise of ethnic neighborhoods combined with the disintegration of the communist system in Europe reestablishes connections in Poland. Young, well-educated, and prosperous Polish American characters turn their gaze back on the ancestral homeland as they reconstruct gendered ethnicity in the twenty-first century. The evolution of identity constructs in Polish American fiction since World War II illustrates significant changes in ethnic patterns among Polish Americans: a gradual movement away from strong homogeneous ethnic communities toward individualistic neighborhoods of one. It also follows the parallel trend in contemporary literature with its continuing change of focus from large historical processes and events to a total concentration on the fate of an individual.11
In Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction, I argue that over the last three-quarters of a century, Polish American popular literature by women writers challenges the Polish American woman’s invisibility by offering a consistent image of her. My readings show that she is a woman well aware of being positioned at an intersection of several often-hostile forces where gendered ethnicity is inextricable from classed ethnicity. She contends with social-class restrictions and damaging expectations that often go back to the distant Polish past. She may have to cope with nationalistically inflected expectations of the intelligentsia class or struggle with the working-class patriarchal oppression supported by the Catholic Church under the guise of elevating her status in the image of the Virgin Mary. Her awareness of these restrictions, her refusal to internalize them, and her rejection of victimhood become acts of rebellion as she resists the need to please and constructs a gendered ethnic identity in pursuit of self-fulfillment. Ethnic, immigrant, and also in some cases migrant fiction12 becomes liberatory as it advocates empowerment against oppression and charts the deployment of female-centric patterns of resistance while showing how Polish American women successfully perform gendered, ethnicized, and classed Americanness.
Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction considers the ways women negotiate discourses of belonging as well as posits that it is women who, by writing their gendered ethnic identity, tell the story of Polish Americans and join other ethnic women in telling the story of America. In their narratives, Polish American homes become the sites where, through the efforts of women, ethnic consciousness has been forged and transmitted from generation to generation within female clans. Women have always been the force behind constructing Polish American identity, not only in the home but also in neighborhoods, where their tireless work in Polish American parishes and secular organizations sustained the larger ethnic community. Capturing their vision of themselves, Polish American women authors over the past seven or eight decades created an entry point into the ethnic story of Poles in America.
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The period immediately following World War II marked the particularly vigorous growth of ethnic fiction, since it was the time when Americans were taking a fresh look at ethnicity and race and were beginning a discussion of their place in American culture. Tracy Floreani argues convincingly that all ethnic narratives deepen our understanding of American culture.13 Polish American texts by women authors make an important contribution to the field of writing by ethnic women in the United States as they join in creating a space of self-expression for those who were often silenced and as they document women’s attempts to reclaim power and visibility. Even a brief comparison of Polish American texts with narratives by women from other immigrant groups uncovers interethnic commonalities in treatment of gendered, classed, and often raced ethnicity. Within such an environment, Polish American women writers take on an active role in contributing to the American multiethnic social environment through their focus on ethnic performance, advocacy of women’s empowerment, and development of gender-aware themes.
Many critical studies that focus on literary output of women from a wide range of ethnic groups such as Chinese American, South Asian American, Irish American, Italian American, Hispanic/Latina/Chicana American, etc., draw attention to the value of ethnic literature by women in ushering doubly marginalized groups, both ethnic and female, into the mainstream. Lucia Guerra-Cunningham, writing about Latina American women, sees their stories as a way to freedom from “the oppressive dungeon of silence.” She credits narratives with identifying the processes that led to relegating women to the position of the silent Other.14 Likewise, Karen M. Cardozo in her analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s South Asian American fiction praises Lahiri as well as Chinese American Maxine Hong Kingston for introducing two formerly ostracized ethnic groups into the cultural mainstream.15 The crucial role of fiction in bringing attention to ethnic women and in recognizing the value of their stories has also been presented by Sally Barr Ebest in her book, The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers, and by Mary Jo Bona in Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary, in By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America, and in Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers. Bona draws connections between writing and needlework as two activities that allowed Italian American women a measure of upward social mobility. She points to the power of storytelling, with its “linguistic codes that reveal their resistance toward a dominant culture that would keep them quiet,”16 and commends women writers for finding the middle ground between full assimilation into the American mainstream and the perpetuation of traditional Italian familial restrictions.17 Likewise, Sally Barr Ebest draws attention to the barriers erected by both the mainstream and the Irish American community that women writers had to struggle with. Barr Ebest asserts that some of the obstacles came from the rooted-in-Catholicism expectations of modesty and self-effacement18 that Irish American women must confront, and from the strong resentment that their gendered storytelling did not employ traditional Irish American themes of “camaraderie, drink, violence, and pub life, but also because they refuse to reify saintly mothers and spend much time on priests.”19
Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction supports the existence of this trend also in Polish American women’s literature, as ethnic and immigrant women gain their voice and a secure narrative space after years of suppression from without through negative gender and ethnic stereotypes20 and from within the community that denied them the right to be heard. Much of Polish American fiction, as is true of other ethnic American texts, explores domestic topographies as settings for character construction. Such settings, while suggesting important themes of home and family, are heavily gendered, and are at times dismissed as of lesser value in the construction of national or ethnic identity. Suzanne Strempek Shea, a successful Polish American novelist whose work fits comfortably within the category of domestic fiction, revealed in an interview that she was urged by sincere Polish Americans to write “about more ‘serious’ things—Polish historical topics, events, people—non-fiction.”21 Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction, which focuses on the ability of gendered ethnic literature to disturb male-centric cultural patterns, challenges attempts to undermine the value of ethnic fiction as another attempt at silencing women’s voices and at forcing them to speak in a male language of long-established literary forms.
Shared religious traditions of Roman Catholicism underlie many common concerns expressed by Polish American women writers as well as authors representing other ethnic groups. Themes of gender oppression prominent in Polish American narratives also have a strong presence in post–World War II writing by Irish American women. Sally Barr Ebest identifies Irish American women’s fiction as a double battleground against patriarchy where women struggle both with patriarchal restrictions imposed by society and with “the Catholic Church, which created and reinforced them.”22 For Barr Ebest, the value of ethnic literature by women resides in its ability to foreground women’s issues that rarely fit within the long-established image of a particular ethnic/national character.23 According to Mary Jo Bona, Italian American women writers also fault the Catholic Church for placing women in a subordinate and inferior position.24 Similarly, Jennifer Bess in her analysis of Julia Alvarez’s novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, lists instances of Church-condoned patriarchal oppression and suggests that Yolanda, Alvarez’s alter ego, uses “silence as a means of revolution,”25 a way to rebel