Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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responsibilities. The fact that a mother works, does not relieve her of her family duties. What is more, her occupational activity should not adversely affect the performance of her family functions.”58 The confinement of a woman’s role primarily to her reproductive function and the framing of her preeminent “mission” as that of a mother have been strongly supported by the communist government and also by the opposition represented by the Catholic Church.
Polish American literature by women writers published during the last seven or eight decades reflects this complex nature of Polish immigration to the United States as it constructs white gendered ethnic identity at the intersection of social class and educational level, political situation in Poland at the time of emigration, economically or politically motivated reason for leaving, as well as secular and Church-supported patriarchy.
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My discussion of the discursive spaces of gendered and classed ethnicity has been informed by the postmodern attention to context and concepts of invention, constructionism and, in Gill Jagger’s formulation, “subjectivity, rooted in the work of Michel Foucault and, to some extent, Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Lacan,”59 which has been embraced in the past thirty years by scores of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary critics. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm writes about the invention of a variety of traditions in late-nineteenth-century Europe that were “to ensure or express social cohesion and identity,”60 while Hugh Trevor-Roper dissects the creation of Scottish highland traditions.61 In “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” the anthropologist Michael Fischer advocates incorporating autobiographical ethnic fiction “within the traditional sociological literature on ethnicity.”62 His investigation of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat (1975), and Marita Golden’s Migrations of the Heart (1983) leads him to conclude that ethnic identity is “reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual. . . . Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught and learned.”63 Furthermore, he sees this invention of ethnicity as a process which offers a unique link between the past and future, since it is rooted in the past while it gestures to the future.64 Writing in The Invention of Ethnicity, both Kathleen Neils Conzen and Werner Sollors dispute the traditional approach often seen in “historical interpretation”65 of perceiving ethnic groups “as if they were natural, real, eternal, stable, and static units,”66 while Matthew Frye Jacobson separates ethnicity from genetic and cultural inheritance and focuses on its flexibility in allowing self-construction.67 Conzen, Sollors, and Jacobson see very little that is eternal and stable about ethnicity as well as about many other categories previously viewed as natural and immutable. Sollors employs the concept of invention as the key to a new understanding of not only ethnicity but such categories as gender, childhood, biography, and region, among others.68 For Sollors, the proof of his theories lies in literature, which he continues to discuss in Ethnic Modernism (2002). Mary C. Waters reached similar conclusions, but, instead of fiction, Waters studied US census information and conducted interviews with ethnic Irish, Polish, and Italian Catholics. She found that each of her informants, mostly unconsciously, invented his or her own ethnic self by using a variety of sources of information, such as family stories passed on through generations, family documents, and family traditions and possessions, but also by absorbing the attitudes toward their ethnicity exhibited by the dominant culture and especially the media. Waters writes that one’s ethnicity is constructed from elements one selects not quite consciously from a personal—ethnic insider’s—repository of knowledge confronted with the outsider’s ethnic stereotypes, from what she calls “a cultural grab bag of Irish, Polish, or Italian stereotypical traits.”69 This process of choosing and discarding can be especially complicated for ethnics of mixed ethnic background, who may choose to identify with only one or with multiple ethnicities and races represented in their ancestry.70
The poststructuralist focus on connecting texts to their linguistic and social origins and on subjectivity, so evident in the understanding of ethnicity which favors constructionism over essentialism, is paralleled by feminist theories of gender. In her seminal work, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler draws inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” and suggests “that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, 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
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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,