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READING ACROSS THE DIVIDE: ETHNICITY,
THE IMMIGRANT HERITAGE, AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON

By
Theresa M. Kanoza

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1995

ABSTRACT

READING ACROSS THE DIVIDE: ETHNICITY,
THE IMNIIGRANT HERITAGE, AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON

By

Theresa M. Kanoza

This dissertation surveys widespread misrepresentations of minority
characters in canonical writing, the gains by which multicultural literary
criticism corrects such distortions, and the untoward nationalistic tendency of
some pluralist theory. It proposes dialogic readings of "classic" and ethnic-
American literature so as to engage otherness by interrogating familiarity.’
Toward that end, the study posits voluntary uprooting and relocation as a
rubric for examining textual overlap and thematic intersections across a broad
representation of ethnicities, from American Puritans to recent immigrants to
the United States. Beyond uncovering genre conventions that characterize
immigrant literature irrespective of writers’ native origins or dates of
relocation, this study extends the paradigm for dialogic readings from a basis
in the immigrant experience to an inspection of broader, often conflicting,
though sometimes complementary, worldviews. The work concludes that

juxtaposed readings of seemingly unrelated "mainstream" and "minority" texts

are a boon to producing an expanded yet comprehensible definition of
"American-mess."

The primary texts considered include the following: John Winthrop’s "A
Modell of Christian Charity," Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth
Changed Places, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Anzia Yezierska’s
Bread Givers Abraham Cahan’s leg, Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea Sandra

 

 

Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima and

 

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

 

a'Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature
(Berkeley: U of Calfornia P, 1992) 4.

Copyright by
Theresa M. Kanoza
1995

For my parents, Edward and Mary Frances,
who taught me the virtue of hard work

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the College of Arts and Letters for the fellowships which
allowed me to become thoroughly immersed in my work. My sincerest
appreciation also goes to my director, Barry Gross, whose enthusiasm for my
project never flagged. I am indebted as well to the rest of my committee,
James McClintock, Robert Martin, and Michael Lopez, without whose guidance
I could not have managed. I feel particularly fortunate to have studied closely
with Dr. Lopez over the course of my graduate program and hope this
dissertation attests, at least in some small way, to the high intellectual standard
he exemplifies in the classroom. I must also thank Lorraine Hart, Sharon
Tyree, and Rosemary Ezzo, whose practical advice and consistent good will
kept me moving forward. I am deeply beholden to Roberta Simone, my dear
friend and mentor, who sparked my interest in immigrant literature and
shared her invaluable insights with me. Special thanks Bill McCall: his

patience, interest, and devotion have seen me through.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One 1
Reading Multiculturalism: Bridges or Barricades?

Chapter Two 51
The Immigrant Heritage and the Legacy of Ambivalent Renewal

Chapter Three 132
John Winthrop, Le Ly Hayslip, and the Emigrant’s Goodbye:
You _C_a_n_ Go Home Again

Chapter Four 180

Flight from the Ethnic Enclave: Escape or Sojourn?

Epilogue 24
Difference, Dialectics, and Dialogicity:
The Example of Rudolfo Anaya and Moby-Dick

Bibliography 250

vii

CHAPTER ONE
Reading Multiculturalism: Bridges or Barricades?

Institutionalized multiculturalism, as is manifest in publishing trends,
curricular reform, and even hiring practices, is a topic of keen interest and
overt contention among citizens of so ethnically diverse a country as the
United States. Many participants in the debate over national identity hail
cultural pluralism as a redress for the forced concession of an old world
heritage to a new American-devised culture. These proponents of
multiculturalism often interpret historic methods of Americanization, such as
"English only" language policies, as relics of a well-intentioned but misguided
past or, worse, as weapons of cultural annihilation.‘ Objecting to past
practices of coerced Anglo-conformity, they believe that the freedom to become
reacquainted with an ethnic heritage or to maintain an uninterrupted link to
that ancestry will be the welcome outcome -of multiculturalism. On the
opposite side are those that fear cultural pluralism as the "unraveling of
America," the destruction of a common national identity? But the current
ethnicity debate is often facile in pitting pluralism against assimilation, for the
two are not fixed entities. In fact, to posit the concepts as poles of the identity

debate is reductive and misleading. As a standard metaphor of assimilation,

2
"melting pot" covers a range of often conflicting attitudes, just as "cultural

pluralism" includes many different points of view.

Although melting pot ideology is routinely criticized as forced
indoctrination into the mainstream culture, the history of that metaphor does
not evince a strictly hegemonic purpose. Over two hundred years ago, J.
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur posed his now famous question, "What is an
American?" and then set about answering it. His response featured a richly
composite personage rather than a monolithic model. No individual, he
explained, at least in the excerpt that follows, was exempt from the far-
reaching change that transformed the people in America into Americans:

[TJhe American, this new man....is neither an European nor the

descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood,

which you will find in no other country...._I-I_e is an American,

who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners,

receives new ones from the new mode of life he has

embraced....Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new

race of men.3

Ralph Waldo Emerson is similarly non-restrictive in outlining the
American character, which he lovingly describes as formed of smelted metals
which create more precious amalgams: "by the melting 8: intermixture of
silver & gold & other metals, a new compound more precious than any, called
the Corinthian Brass, was formed so in this Continent,—asylum of all nations,

the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles 8: Cossacks, & all the European

3
tribes,-of the Africans, & of the Polynesians, will construct a new race...which

will be as vigourous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of
the Dark Ages."

Likewise, Israel Zangwill, the Jewish immigrant and dramatist whose
play The Melting Pot (1905) propelled that phrase into common use, described
Americanization as a mutual adaptation from which none is exempt. David
Quixano, the play’ 5 protagonist-a Jewish immigrant, composer, and
symphonist—overcomes ethnic hatred and old world offenses to marry the
gentile he loves, a woman whose father took part in the Russian pogrom in
which his parents were killed. David’s marriage acts out the harmonious
combination of diverse elements that is his music, which itself symbolizes the
happy result born of the confluence of peoples. Invoking nationalities as far-
flung as those Emerson lists above, he rejoices that "the great Alchemist melts
and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the
Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. "5 Certainly some Jews and other
immigrants criticized Zangwill’s melting pot as the renunciation of one’s
religious or cultural heritage. But many other Americans—intellectuals,
reformers, and working class immigrants alike-shared the playwright’ s
emphasis on mutual ethnic fusion. Those such as Jane Addams of Chicago’s
Hull House Settlement urged reciprocity between aliens and natives, believing
that borrowing from and committing to the immigrant’ 5 old world values

would enrich all of America.

4
Werner Sollors locates this aspect of holistic merging well within the

context of American religious rhetoric. He reveals that Puritan ministers often
pointed to Christ as the model of merged opposites—the divine incarnate and
the reconciler of Jew and Gentile—as they deemed universal regeneration to be
the route to salvation. Preaching in 1654, John Cotton used the image of
melting to describe the way in which saints were thoroughly remade for God’s
purpose: softened and melted, the redeemed could transcend boundaries to
make their way to Christ. Moreover, St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, a
trenchant argument for Christian unity within diversity and a passage
frequently cited in the Puritan liturgy, prefigures the call for ethnic fusion:
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor
female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

John Dewey adapted the Christian regenerationist rhetoric to a call for
social cohesion among Americans. Championing complete ethnic merging, he
maintained that old stock Anglo-Americans enjoyed no advantage over the
foreign-born regarding the formation of a national aspect. He insisted that "no
matter how loudly any one proclaims his Americanism if he assumes that any
one racial strain, any one component culture, no matter how early settled it
was in our territory, or how effective it has proven in its own land, is to
furnish a pattern to which all other strains and cultures are to conform, he is a
traitor to an American nationalism. "7 Because America was undergoing

constant change and evolution, no one, in Dewey’s view, could remain exempt

5

from the nationalizing process. Americanization, in his esteem, was
continuous, all-inclusive assimilation into the dynamic, democratic republic.
Certainly, such seers as Crevecoeur, Emerson, Zangwill, and Dewey did
not sanction the preservation of an old world identity; but neither did they call
for its forfeiture. Instead, they claimed to embrace the effect that a wealth of
global cultural influences equally exerted on the new American character. Yet
not all assimilationists endorsed the cultural merger that would yield
Crevecoeur’s new man. Many subscribers to the melting pot spurned the
image of wholesale blending or fusion to focus instead on the metaphor’s
purgative capacities. Barely more sympathetic than the race theorists who
lobbied to restrict the immigration of "beaten men of backward nations" and
thus to guard the American gene pool, adherents of the melting pot as
cleansing crucible welcomed the newcomer as long as he completely shed his
foreign aspect. Inner-city reformer Jacob Riis was one such outspoken
proponent of Anglo-conformity, despite his own status as an immigrant or
perhaps because of it, since his Danish origins linked him to Anglo-Saxons. In
How the Other Half Lives (1890) Riis inveighs against the squalor of New
York tenements and chastises native-born Americans for not providing an
environment conducive to the immigrant’ s necessary transformation. Only
decent housing, fair wages, and moral models, he urged, would uplift the
downtrodden foreigners and neutralize their unwholesome influence on the

rest of society. To him and other like-minded reformers usually of similar

6

Anglo-Saxon heritage, "Americanization" was a "one-way process in which the
immigrant did all the adjusting."a

The rhetoric of these descent-conscious Americans who stressed the
melting pot as a crucible that would purge non-WASP characteristics evinces
its own link to American Christianity. Unlike universal regenerationists, who
maintained that every Christian had to be utterly remade in order to be saved,
"genetic salvationists" exempted themselves from that stricture. Early New
England Puritans had believed that their American-born children faced
damnation if they did not undergo a conversion experience. But they
fashioned a compromise based on ancestry with which to win their childrens’
redemption. Via heredity, the half-way covenant conferred salvation upon the
second-generation Puritans: "As scions of the American Israel, they had
received grace ’through the loyns of godly Parents/"9

Descendants of English settlers and the fully assimilated progeny of
other early Nordic immigrants invoked a similar privilege of hereditary
American nationalism. For them, Americanization was not Dewey’ s
thoroughgoing, continuous process of learning to live in a dynamic, democratic
republic; it was, simply, their birthright. Born in the US. of a lineage dating
back to colonial or revolutionary times, or at least to the first half of the
nineteenth century, they believed themselves naturally "Americanized" by
virtue of their bloodline. Many of these nativists descended from "old"
immigrants of northern and western Europe whose transition into American

life well before 1860 had been facilitated by their WASP appearance, Protestant

7

faith, English language proficiency, or skill in the trades.10 In contrast, "new"
immigrants-mainly unskilled non-English-speaking Roman Catholics and
Jews—fled the poverty or pogroms of Southern and Eastern Europe in massive
waves after 1880. These newcomers were conspicuously different from most
Americans and thus were considered exotic and inferior.

Yet non-WASP immigrants who would eagerly submit to an identity
make-over were often deemed too alien. Mary Antin, so strong a proponent of
Americanization that she began her autobiographical account of immigrating
from Russia to the US. with a jubilant testimony of her rebirth—"I was born, I
have lived, and I have been made over...I am just as much out of the way as if
I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to
tell""-was rejected by many as incorrigibly foreign. Antin’s contemporary,
Harvard English professor Barrett Wendell, summed up the exclusionist
outlook that limited status as an American to a birthright. Neither Antin nor
her children, he mused in 1917, five years after the publication of her

autobiography The Promised Land could consider themselves American. Not

 

until the third generation, born of parents born in the US, could her progeny
rightquy consider themselves American.12 Resigned to the influx of
newcomers but resenting their presence nonetheless, such begrudging
assimilationists looked to the melting pot to burn off the foreign aspect of the
immigrant and to enkindle in him American ideals.

The melting pot has been alternately featured as a vessel which fuses all

elements into a unique new whole and a cauldron that purges difference in

8

order to recast individuals from a master mold. In recent decades, the
hegemonic aspect of the metaphor has prevailed, thus imbuing assimilation
with the character of coerced homogeneity rather than mutual influence.
Cultural pluralism promises to replace this perceived Anglo-conformity with
tolerance, its mission being to explore and celebrate the varied wealth of
ethnicity which makes America a "nation of nations." Salad bowl, stew pot,
mosaic, quilt, or rainbow—the new pluralist metaphors preserve the integrity of
the separate components that comprise the whole.

But just as assimilationists varied in the thrust of their views, pluralists
fall along an ideological range as well. At its extreme, cultural pluralism is
warped into the virulent Afrocentrism of Leonard Jeffries (Europeans hail from
materialistic, cave-dwelling "ice people," whereas Africans descend from the
intellectually superior, humanitarian "sun people"); or Nation of Islam leader
Louis Farrakahn who calls for a separate African state in America.

Many pluralists, however, eschew such segregation, asserting that an
informed awareness of other cultures represented in the US. and a healthy
respect for difference will naturally underscore shared values and mend our
fraying society. Harvard educator Charles Willie defines the goal of
multiculturalism as "bringing together individuals and groups with different
histories and customs so they may mutually enhance each other....diversity is
essential to...creativity and problem-solving...and survival. "‘3 Willie’s
reasoning rebuts the charge that to embrace diversity is to encourage

divisiveness. Rather than arrange ethnic characteristics into polar opposition,

9

he contends, pluralism can place them on a continuum and uncover the
connection between difference and sameness, diversity and unity.“ Likewise,
African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes the range of
American culture as interactive and dynamic rather than as the fixed property
of any particular group. He cites one motive in his work to "recover" the "lost"
fiction of minority writers as the desire to make little known writing to
accessible to the general public. For cultural pluralism, Gates explains, must
fill in gaps rather than cordon off territory.15

Yet others detect a campaign for just such separatism and
territorialization under cover of the pluralist objective of tolerance. With the
deletion of a few letters, observes Werner Sollors, "pluralism" becomes
"purism," and he discerns a connection between the two terms that is more
than a morphophonemic coincidence.“ Perhaps he is cynical and straining to
be clever, but Sollors contends that "pluralism" can be "purism" in multi form-
distinct ethnic strains that coexist but do not mingle.

Sollors uncovers a tendency toward nationalistic separatism in the
original manifesto of cultural pluralism. Horace Kallen, German-Jewish
immigrant and Harvard philosophy student, first coined the phrase in M
and Democracy in the United States (1924) to protest America’s racist
assimilation process that stripped the immigrant of his identity. His ideal
America was a looser confederation, a commonwealth that respected
individual differences and deplored hierarchical homogeneity. As a means of

encouraging democracy rather than destroying it through enforced cultural

10
cohesion, Kallen outlined distinct nationalities that, although cooperating

through common institutions and the English language, would each retain for
its "emotional and involuntary life its own peculiar dialect or speech, its own
individual and inevitable aesthetic and intellectual forms." Kallen remained
committed to a politically and economically unified American commonwealth
but saw the purpose of that governing unit as guarding the "distinctive
individuality of each natio that composes it" and preserving the "homogeneity
of heritage, mentality and interest" of those who comprise it."

In varying degrees, the separatism implied in Kallen’s early pluralist
paradigm characterizes some contemporary multicultural scholarship, for
border-tending is often regarded as the way to observe ethnic tradition. The
Before Columbus Foundation, for example, which provides a forum for
American authors of non-European roots historically ignored by the academy,
ultimately seems most interested in designating labels and making inventories
of ethnic group membership. At first glance, the foundation’s field of vision
seems broad enough to take in both the forest and the trees, because it
acknowledges a multi-faceted but over-arching national culture: "The
ingredients of America’s ’melting pot’ are not only distinct, but integral to the
unique constitution of American culture—the whole comprises the parts. There
are no outsiders.""3 In this drive for inclusiveness, Before Columbus
denounces the "paranoid monoculturalists" who cling to the exclusive,
traditional canon; they instead "claim and affirm equal validity for one’s

heritage." Toward that end of parity and open membership, the foundation

11

dispenses with such hierarchical categories of authorship as "dominant
culture," "minority," or "alternative." Justifiably refusing to diminish the
contributions of non—European writers to mere ’tributaries,’ Ishmael Reed
proclaims American literature to be "more than a mainstream. [It] is an
ocean."19

Yet in nong thus for equality of merit and impact (the foundation
cites N. Scott Momaday’s long view of history which dates American literature
back a thousand years, the "Puritan invasion" just one of other subsequent
events in that history), Reed fashions a sea without confluence. Abandoning
categories that convey oppression or dominance, he simply reassigns people to
smaller, more rigid groups. The foundation had feared admitting
boardmembers who "classiffiedl themselves simply as ’white""° yet is
comfortable with the Latvian-, Italian-, and Irish-Americans it works with.
Likewise, the editors are proud of their magnanirnity in including "white male
Anglo-Saxon New York-based authors" in their literary competition.21
Presumably, if everyone belongs to a subgroup, no one is an outsider, or, more
accurately, all are outsiders equally, for there is no longer an inside.

Professor Paula Rothenberg places similar stock in the value of
assigning individuals to groups, as she defends her controversial textbook
Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study (1988) and the general education
requirement, "Writing About Difference," for which her anthology was

intended. She denounces the "white, European..middle-class...male" canon not

only for what she interprets as its arrogant claim to transcendence and

12
timelessness, but for the bad arithmetic on which it purportedly stands. She

contends that society errs in using "white male values and culture as the
standard by which everyone and everything else is to be measured and found
wanting" since "they" are actually outnumbered by the "true majorigg of people
in this society, ’women and minorities.”22 But in arguing for an appreciation
of difference that is long overdue, she commits the same transgression she
denounces. For While she explains that rich and varied cultures are rendered
invisible when the male, WASP model is allowed preeminence, she in turn
cancels out variety among white men. Her concession of merit to "white
males’ scholarship and perspectives" since the "contributions of that group are
valid and valuable: there is much to be learned from them"23 flattens out
difference into sameness. One white male speaks for all white men in her
atomized society of groups; consensus forms along lines of gender and
ethnicity.

Tallying group memberships, broadcasting "enrollments" large enough
to undermine the white "monolithic" patriarchy, and asserting written works as
a partyline of sorts, merely substitute one bogus homogeneity for another. But
to dispute such a numbers game is not to discredit the movement to recognize
the cultural heterogeneity of the US. Recent advances in critical theory and
literary historiography, in fact, have made badly needed gains in laying bare
the rich diversity within American culture.

Nearly fifty years ago, Robert Spiller’s Literag History of the United
States (1948) legitimated "minority" writing through such labels as

13

"regionalism" and "local color." But those terms, of course, relegated the non-
white, non-European, and, often, female, writer to the fringes of American
literary study. Such writers were included in Spiller’s volume but remained
peripheral to the "main current," that coherent, unified American tradition
which the fifty-five male contributors and their largely male subjects reified.
In reaction to and as a correction of that monolithic view of American letters,
the Columbia Litera_ry History of the United States (1988) is consciously self-
referential, acknowledging the impossibility of objective universalism in a
postmodern world: "There is today no unifying vision of a national identity
like that shared by many scholars at the closings of the two world wars....@
Columbia Literary History of the United Statesl acknowledges diversity,

complexity, and contradiction...and it forgoes closure as well as consensus!“
A post-structuralist undertaking, this volume works against a "philosophical
foundation [that is] realist and positivist...[against] the appearance of one
continuous narrative."25 Its scope of literature in America is comprehensive,
from the two thousand-year-old Indian glyphs in Barrier Canyon, Utah, to the
present-day experimental writing influenced by John Cage’s avant-garde
music; the offerings of its seventy-four contributors, sixteen of whom are
women, are admittedly—because inevitably-idiosyncratic and read as discrete
essays rather than as parts of a larger, coherent volume.

In Reconstructing American Literag History (1986) Sacvan Bercovitch
also positions his revisionist argument against the positivism of that 1948

volume, and he anticipates the advent of his recent Cambridge History of

14
American Literature (1995). Whereas Spiller’s achievement was to "consolidate

a powerful literary-historical movement," the new generation of scholars,
Bercovitch contends, must "reconstruct American literary history by making a
virtue of dissensusfa‘5 The contributors to this recent, multi-volume study
examine (or at least admit being subject to) the problems of historiography;
they reject the proposition that the story of American letters can be told with
any single authority, because no commentator is free of cultural determinants
or political ideology nor can determine the impact of his or her language.
Bercovitch’s essaysists, and new historicists in general, avoid consensus
concerning aesthetics or idealogy, committing instead to a dialogic flexibility
which opens up, rather than sums up, literary interpretation.

As the academy rethinks the conception of "America" and "American
literature" (possibly, in the spirit of dissensus, to forego any re-definition, since
Bercovitch denounces the concern over the "Americanness of American
literature" as yesterday’s business, a "parochial theme of the past”), the once
silenced minority voices are being heard. Over the last few decades and under
the auspices of the Modern Language Association have come such studies as
Minorig Language and Literature (1977), Afrngmerican Literature (1977),
Three American Literatures [Chicano, Native American, and Asian American]
(1982), Studies in American Indian Literature (1983), and EM’C Perspectives in
American Literature (1990). Founded in 1973, the Society for the Study of
Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States sponsors sessions for ethnic

literature at conferences affiliated with the MLA, and publishes quarterly its

15

journal of ethnic literary criticism, MELUS. The recent literary histories,

beyond proclaiming the theoretical need to resist closure, practice

expansiveness: The Columbia Literag Histog of the United States (1988), m

Columbia Histog of the American Novel (1991), and The Cambridge History
of American Literature (1995) include essays on diversity and ethnicity in

general, and specific sections on Native American, Mexican-American, Asian-
American, African-American, and even Canadian- and Caribbean-American
literature.

In "Toward a New Literary History of the United States," Wayne
Charles Miller called for the "writing of individual histories of all the various
ethnic literature. "23 The project has been well launched. The two-volume
Ethnic Literatures Since 1776: The Many Voices of America (1978) covers
twenty-five distinct ethnic groups including such lesser studied American
ethnicities as Slovenian, Ukrainian, and Estonian. Numerous ethnic groups
follow the lead of Black, Native American, or Jewish scholars who produce
book-length studies of the literature of their own people. It may not be
surprising that in terms of full-scale, single-group studies, Irish and Italian
literary scholarship follows closely behind Jewish studies, since, together with
German-Americans, immigration rates for these groups were among the
highest for all white ethnics. Most recently, Hispanic scholarship is prominent
for that same reason. But it speaks to the power of the times that there are
currently four separate book-length studies of the cultural tradition of

Armenian-American literature, two on Puerto Rican literature in the United

16

States, and one on Hungarian-American writers,29 when the Harvard
Engyclopgdia of American Ethnic Groups lists Puerto Ricans as comprising
0.8% of the American population, Hungarian-Americans 1.1%, and groups
Armenian-Americans with peoples figuring less than 0.3% individually into the
category of "all others."3°

Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s imperative for a speaker to appropriate
language and populate it with his own accent and intention rather than let his
story exist "in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other
people’s intentions”1 sums up the urgency of specialized ethnic literary
criticism. Jules Chametzky similarly urges "autonomous authorship to counter
the imperializing power of the word, for those who control language also
control cultural memory by absorbing the experience of the other and
interpreting it with seeming legitimacy and objectivity.

One’s own vision and voice are shaped by the special history and

normative patterns of rhetoric and thought of a region and a

landscape; by the race, gender, and ethnic group one is born into;

and with varying degrees of intensity, depending on the vagaries

of history and social circumstance, one’s ultimate fate. When, as

is often the case in our culture, matters of such magnitude are

relegated to positions of so-called marginality, or to mere accident

or inconsequentiality in the larger quest for literary "excellence,"

"centrality," or "universality," there is clearly a serious distortion

at work, a serious effort at appropriation and control.32

17
In the wake of the tumultuous 1960’s, when the slogan "question

authority" was so ubiquitous as to appear on bumper stickers, the social,
intellectual, and political climate is right for the ethnic writer and literary
scholar to correct the cultural hegemony of which Chametzky speaks. Jane
Tompkins’ Sensational Design_s (1985), though focusing on the cultural
transformation which women's sentimental fiction achieved among its wide
readership from 1790 to 1860, actually explains the goal of ethnic criticism
from the turn of the twentieth century onward: "The struggle now being
waged in the professoriate over which writers deserve canonical status is not
just a struggle over the relative merits of literary geniuses; it is a struggle
among contending factions for the right to be represented in the picture
America draws of itself. "33 Institutionalized multiculturalism grants the right
of self-representation to ethnic Americans, those who either were not featured
on the national canvas or were objectified and exoticized there by others. To
appreciate how immigrants and their offspring depict themselves in the
literature which society now countenances and even welcomes, it is instructive
to survey the portrayals of ethnic Americans in that "picture of America"
which is not of their own artistry.

The ethnic poor in American reform tracts bear a strong resemblance to
the pitiable inhabitants of eighteenth-century London slums, those whom

Tobias Smollet, Henry Fielding, and Daniel Defoe characterize as victims of the
31x ,

harsh class system. Through such books as Democrag and Social Egfléjcs

(1902), Jane Addams urged mercy and understanding for the worthy but

18

woebegone tenants of her Chicago settlement house. Journalist voyeurs such
as Hutchins Hapgood took to the Jewish ghetto and Little Hungary to render
the raw vitality of immigrant life into romanticized tales of sturdy, sensual
foreigners in his collections, The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902) and Types from
Cig Streets (1910).“

Away from the city and out on the prairie, the immigrant was often
characterized as tragic and romantic or conniving and social climbing. The
Bohemian immigrants of Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918), at least as the
narrator Jim Burden sees them, cover a range of stereotypes. Mr. Shimerda,
Antonia’s father, is too sensitive and fragile for the harsh life on the plains.
His delicate hands were meant for fingering fine tapestries or playing the
violin back home in Bohemia, not for pulling a living out of the hard Nebraska
earth. Shimerda’s suicide is made more tragic by the fact that a countryman,
Peter Krajiek, cheats him and other fellow immigrants for his own gain.
Burden romanticizes Antonia as an selfless, indefatigable earthmother. Yet she
is also a broodmare, certainly resilient, but scarred nonetheless by hard work
and seventeen pregnancies. Toothless and grizzled, she is "mama" not only to
her horde of children but to her puckish husband, who dances without her at
the street fairs she once loved.

Literary slummers of a darker frame of mind used the immigrant as a
vehicle for their gloomy naturalist message. Stephen Crane and Nelson Algren
present a damning depravity in urban ghettoes—New York’s Irish Bowery for

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Chicago’s Poletown for Algren’s Never

19
Come Morning (1942) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). Both locales

are ethnic enclaves to which neither writer belonged. The moral and physical
squalor of the ghetto-poverty, domes tic violence, deranged mothers, absent
fathers, alcoholism, sexual license, spiritual bankruptcy—inexorably doom the
pawn-like characters. Yet even when characters were removed from teeming
urban tenements, ethnicity often continued to determine—and deformntheir
character. In Frank Norris’s McTeagge (1899), set on the California mining
frontier, conspicuously ethnic characters play out stereotypes of human
degeneracy: the title character is an ignorant, brutish dentist of Irish descent,
Trina Sieppe is his greedy Swiss wife who hoards her lottery winnings, and
Zerkow is an odious Polish Jew who covets Trina’s money.

Though Upton Sinclair is sympathetic to his Lithuanian immigrants who
labor in Chicago’s filthy stockyards in The lungle (1905), his pity merely
underscores the Rudkus family’s pathetic vulnerability. A seven-week sojourn
in "Packingtown" provided Sinclair with the details for this proletariat novel,
yet he creates nothing more than cardboard cut-outs which he bends to his
socialist design Oddly lacking both religious grounding and community
orientation, common mainstays of immigrant life,35 the Rudkis family
dissolves under the pressures of brutal subsistence. Jurgis, the sole survivor,
finds sustenance and purpose only in the socialist party.

Perhaps the most insidious use to which foreigners are put is the
unrelieved, dismal background they form in many novels of late nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century social realism and modernism. The plots of many

20
such books, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), The House of Mirth (1905),

and Manhattan Transfer (1925), to name only a few, play out against a
backdrop of nameless, faceless aliens. To present immigrants thus in an
unindividuated mass is a political act which denies their rightful status as
human beings, differentiated entities. In Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the
American Novel (1985), Philip Fisher explains the perceptual changes that
occur within a society when cultural categories are collapsed or redesigned.
He reveals that in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for example, Harriet Beecher
Stowe taught her large audience a new way of perceiving slaves. By
endowing Tom with a big heart, heavy conscience, and strong faith, she turned
"a thing into a man," crystalizing abolitionist action against an institution that
had been in place for over two hundred years. James Fenimore Cooper
affected a perceptual change in the opposite direction. Collapsing such
categories of identity as Apache or Creek, Christian or farmer into the simple
"Indian," Cooper erased the individual humanity of Native Americans and
facilitated their removal.36

Immigration around the turn of the century was also a "hard fact" of
American society. The exotic foreigner from Southern and Eastern Europe-#-
non-Anglo Saxon, non-Protestant, and even non-Christian—threatened
America’s largely homogeneous social character. Although restrictive quotas
were enacted to stanch the flow of unwanted foreigners, the birthrate of
native-born Americans dropped around 1830, at the same time that

widespread European immigration began, and dropped more significantly

21
throughout the 1880’s with the arrival of Southern and Eastern European

immigrants”: race suicide, suggested Madison Grant in The Passing of the
Great Race (1916), was preferable to life among "this human flotsam...the
broken, and the mentally crippled...drawn from the lowest stratum of the
Mediterranean basin, the Balkans and...Polish ghettos."38 Yet nativism itself
challenged America’s self-perception as a bastion of democracy, a haven for
the oppressed. Fictional portrayals of ethnic Americans as an unindividuated
lump of subhumanity, therefore, salved the nation’s guilty conscience. The
hapless immigrants of early twentieth-century fiction predate the more recent
and fashionable status of "Other"; they are merely the social debris around
which protagonists gingerly step and at which they need not closely look.

Basil and Isabel March of William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New
Fortunes easily relegate the immigrant to a sub-human status. This couple
from prime English stock with a lineage dating back many generations in
America confront a "quality of foreignness,"39 when they leave their old New
England home to rent an apartment in New York. They are keenly aware of
"an east and west line beyond which they could not go if they wished to keep
their self respect" (58), yet they delight in the "squalidly gay" tenement life
which they observe from the safety of a coupe or a seat on the Elevated:

Roadway and sidewalks and doorsteps swarmed with children;

women’s heads seemed to show at every window....Ash barrels

lined the sidewalks and garbage heaps filled the gutters....a

peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the street and

22
mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the children

and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women....a drunkard

zigzagged down the sidewalk (57).

The Marches are stoical about the poverty they view but do not experience: it
is a natural fact of life, "transmitting itself from generation to generation and
establishing conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it
does to those of some incurable disease, like leprosy." They thus absolve
themselves of all human and civic responsibility, for the only way they see for
the poor to persevere is "to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the wolf; then
they can manage him somehow." Moreover, Basil hopes to capitalize on these
"children of discomfort" by capturing this "picturesque raggedness of southern
Europe" (48) in journalistic sketches.

Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth also views the
immigrants and wage-earners from a distance and "liv [es] comfortably with
the abstract conception of poverty...never conceiv[ing] of these victims of fate
otherwise than in the mass."‘° The barrier between Lily and the underclass
gives way as she plummets from high society to land on a "degrad[ed] New
York street in the last stages of decline from fashion to commerce" (297). But
rather than live among the "discouraged victims of overwork and anaemic
parentage,...superfluous fragments to be swept prematurely into that social
refuse heap" (325), she commits suicide.

Dos Passos, of illegitimate birth and Portuguese descent but raised on

the wealth of his genteel maternal grandparents,‘1 also presents foreigners as

23
a loathsome, undifferentiated mass. Ellen Thatcher in Manhattan Transfer

shrinks from contact with an immigrant, catching "the unwashed smell of his
body, the smell of immigrants, of Ellis Island, of crowded tenements....uneasily
she could feel the huddling smell, spreading in dark slow crouching masses
like corruption oozing from broken sewers, like a mob.“2 New York belongs
to the smart set who have claimed the city since "about the time the Ark
landed." They are disgusted by newcomers, "the scum of Europe, the
offscourings of Polish ghettos...dirty kikes and shanty Irish" (80).

For the most part, mainstream fiction erased an immigrant’s individual
personage by casting him as part of a general malign and malodorous
presence. And even when an ethnic character is drawn as a distinct individual
in these novels, he is almost always an undesirable. Manhattan Transfer’ 5
Laplander Matty, "a little yellow man who had a face like a toad, large mouth
[and] protruding eyes," is a barroom brawler who sports lewd tattoos (73, 74).
Congo Jake, the French African in that novel, is a bootlegger and pimp, well-
intentioned but dissipated by drink and sex. Producer Harry Goldweiser is a
Jewish lecher, poised to prey on Ellen, who feels "caught like a fly in his sticky
trickling sentences" which he forms "roundly with thick lips, continually
measuring her face with his brown eyes...his words press against her body,
nudge in the hollows where her dress clings" (160, 159). The abortionist is Dr.
Abrahms, a Jew with a "face like a rat and...short dollhands the color of the

flesh of a mushroom" (209).

24

In A Hazard of New PM Howells presents immigrants mainly en
masse, or, more accurately, in dehumanized pieces so that his protagonist
might find "continual entertainment" in the "interesting shape of shabby
adversity...of foreign birth" In the "hive of swarming populations," March
catalogues the "small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the
bare, cue-filleted skulls of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter
of Italians; the blond dullness of Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians"
(158-159). Yet Howells sets one immigrant apart from the jumble of foreign
riffraff. In fact, the book’s most principled character is the German socialist
Lindau. But having entered the US. before the Civil War and proved his
patriotism by losing an arm as a Union soldier, Lindau is an "old" immigrant,
distinguishable from the ranks of the "new." Wharton likewise sets off one
ethnic character in The House of Mirth, Sim Rosedale, and he is an unctuous,
Jewish parvenu.

Such portraits, ranging from shallow and idealized to cruel and
depraved, typify the ethnic subject in mainstream writing before multicultural
consciousness was heightened in the mid-twentieth century. Marginalized
Americans, of course, have always undertaken to tell their own stories,
although in the case of immigrants not usually until the second or third
generation, since the newcomer often lacked the luxury of spare time and
literacy. But because ethnic writing originated from a perspective outside the
mainstream, the establishment generally ignored or panned the material,

deeming it quaint at best, but, more likely, inscrutable or merely pointless.

25

Many of the themes and conventions prevalent in immigrant writing often
seemed to violate the high Euro-American tradition and thus prompted a text’s
banishment from public attention. The trap awaiting ethnic literature was
much like that which snared women’s writing: a reader unfamiliar with the
codes at work in fiction of the female experience generally dismissed the work
as inferior. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s call in Madwoman in the Attic
(1979) for male and female readers alike to learn to "penetrate the otherwise
unfamiliar universes of symbolic action that comprise women’s writings“3

can rightquy be extended to the field of ethnic literature.

"Decentralized" literature presupposes a poly-centric canon; pluralist
theory thus sets about uncovering and explaining the conventions that
characterize ethnic writing as a culture-specific corpus, a body of writing that
is coherent and distinctive. In other words, the multiculturalist critic sets
about identifying how writing is significantly Irish- or Italian-American. It is
wrong to assume, of course, that any ethnic experience is monolithic, since no
immigrant group yields to easy generalization: class, gender, education level,
religious affiliation, political orientation, date of emigration, and site of
relocation are just a few of the many variables that shape unique experiences
between and within groups.

Yet ethnic markers abound. Some styles and themes, though present in
the multifarious strains of ethnic writing as well as in Anglo-American texts,
resonate loudest among certain groups: Eugene Mohr contends that anger is

the trait which distinguishes Puerto Rican literature in the US. from the

26
writing of other American immigrant groups. Like all who elected to enter the

mainland U.S., Puerto Ricans sought betterment. But, contends Mohr, where
the fiction of many immigrant groups reflects hope and, often, ensuing
gratitude, Puerto Rican literature flashes frustration. Because many members
of this Hispanic minority group are Black, their assimilation has been dually
constricted. And the relative ease of return visits to the island has reinforced
the doubly marginal status: Nuyorican back home but spic in New York.“

Examining the conventions of Scandinavian-American writing, Dorothy
Skardal maintains that while fear of the unknown occurs naturally in
immigrant sagas of the Old World exodus and entrance into the New, it is
much more prevalent in the fiction of this group. She explains that, when
possible, most immigrants sought out occupations and geographical
topography similar to that which they had known in the old country, since this
modicum of familiarity was a source of comfort and security. The majority of
Scandinavians, however, settled in the northern plains states, where they found
terrain which bOre no resemblance to the mountains and seas they had known
at home and from which they were unaccustomed to drawing their
sustenance.‘5

Lorne Shirinian proposes that, as with Jewish writing, Armenian-
American literature is shaped by the weight of a tragic history, the genocide of
1915 and resulting diaspora. Frequently an ostensible subject in the novels of
Peter Sourian, Peter N ajarian, and William Saroyan, this collective symbol of

genocide is at work even when the Armenian massacre at the hands of the

27

Turks is not an actual topic: the recurring and profound sadness of many
characters stems from the irrecoverable loss of homeland and past; the
frequent emphasis on communication through letter writing and storytelling is
a trope for preserving and transmitting cultural memory.“

In The Exiles of Erin (1987), Charles Fanning identifies the Irish-American
element in style, genre, and theme. Overt didacticism characterizes the famine
generation of writing. Tantamount to propaganda, the literature of the mid-
nineteenth century aimed to preserve transplanted ways and values. Idealized
characters and formulaic, sentimental plots, suggested in such titles as E

Cross and the Shamrock: Or How to Defend the Faith (1853), Preached trust in

 

Irish culture, especially the Roman Catholic Church." Black and grotesque
humor, a legacy of Jonathan Swift’ s "Modest Proposal," also characterizes Irish-
American fiction The comedic sense as well as the New Journalistic
reportorial style, learned through this group's remarkable success in the
newspaper industry, come together in the lovable, loquacious character, Mr.
Martin Dooley, the fictional bartender created by Finely Peter Dunne.‘8

It is ironic but understandable that while ethnic authors usually sought
to correct their stereotyped depictions in mainstream writing, they often
reinforced those same negative images in their own work. For just as the
African American was initially allowed on the stage only in blackface to mime
white America’s version of himself, many ethnic writers proved capable of
their own stereotyping, possibly to pander to public expectations and thus to

guarantee a readership. In Lin Yu Tang’s Chinatown Family (1948), the Fongs

28
are the model minority, hardworking and making no demands on the white

society, happy to accept the United States on its own terms-a stereotype that
still seems to persist about Chinese immigrants. At the same time, Monfoon
Leong’s more realistic Number One Son (1975) was consistently rejected for
publication because it would not appeal to the mainstream.‘9 Better known is
Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969). This sensational story of the mafia
underworld found the readership which eluded The Fogpgrte Pilgg’m (1964),
Puzo’s earlier novel about a typical immigrant family struggling to survive
with dignity and eventually escaping the straitened conditions of New York’s
Little Italy. Likewise, the hardhitting cop, corrupt ward boss, and bitter
spinster in Irish-American literature, characters which became popular with the
reading public. Yet the basis for many cruel self-portraits such as these found
in Irish-American literary realism is also the germ of truth often present in
stereotypes. Such commonplaces as lonely, spiritually impoverished priests or
fathers driven to drink and mothers to early graves by the large families which
the Church demanded demonstrate Irish Catholicism’s heavy toll of sin, guilt,
and longing for uncertain redemption.so

Although some literary styles, themes, and motifs are indigenous to
certain ethnic groups, there is also much obvious overlap, not only between
groups but also within canonical writing. Multicultural scholarship, however,
documents and analyzes such commonality much less frequently than it does
ethnic distinctiveness. Given the distorted record of American letters in which

the fiction of marginalized Americans was deliberately ignored or casually

29

overlooked, the demarcation of ethnic territory against renewed literary
imperialism is understandable. Toward that end of marking distinct
boundaries of ethnic writing, the essayists in Robert DiPietro and Edward
Ifkovic’s collection, Ethnic Persgctives in American Literature (1983), attempt
to define the ethnic-American genre, yet they reach no consensus. Some locate
the decisive ethnic element in a novel’s setting; others find it in the descent of
the writer or even in the predominant nationality of the book’s readership.
Rose Basile Green, for instance, contends that the "Italian-ness" of Italian-
American fiction resides in the literature’s values when they are consistent
with those unique to the group.51

But such qualifiers actually confound rather than clarify the ethnic
genre. If setting and subject matter are a novel’s ethnic qualifications, the
sensational unmasking of the presumed Latino novelist Danny Santiago as the
WASP Daniel James was pointless; his books are set in the barrio and are thus,
according to a definition that relies on place, "authentically" ethnic. If descent
places a writer in the ethnic genre, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, or
Eugene O’Neill would be known as French-Canadian-, Russian-, or Irish-
American writers respectively, even though they do not ostensibly address
matters of their immigrant ancestry.52 Additionally, Mario Puzo’s IE
Godfather (1969) would qualify as genuinely ethnic by virtue of being written
by a second-generation Italian-American and set in New York’s Little Italy.
Yet in accord with Rose Basile Green’s position that ethnicity is born in a

novel’s group-specific values, the "Italian-ness" of The Godfather would be

30

"proven" in its characters’ ruthlessness and murderous vengeance, the very
misconceptions which many Italian Americans vehemently protested when
Francis Ford Coppola turned the book into a movie. Furthermore, the
complicated point of Puzo’s ethnicity would be rendered moot under Dorothy
Skardal’s logic, for she maintains that a novel’s huge readership which crosses
demographic lines cancels out its ethnicity; mainstream popularity, she claims,
invalidates a writer’s sub-group membership.53

The essentialism of a subgroup identity on which such critics as Skardal
or Basile Green seem to base ethnicity (e. g. uniquely Italian values that no
others share) is a watershed among ethnic writers and often an ideological
quagmire. Helen Barolini’s cultural heritage is clearly her creative focus, as
evidenced by her work: Umbertina (1979), a four-generation novel of a
family’s difficult but dignified past in Italy and their near dissolution in their
adopted American homeland and The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings
by Italian American Women (1985) are just two of her works that explore her
Italian ancestry. Barolini, however, resents and resists being pigeonholed as an
Italian-American writer. Though she maintains that Italian-American women
writers share a particular bond, since they have made their voices heard
despite the silence dually enforced by the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church
and the male-dominated household, she insists that their writing is
unquestionably unhyphenated American literature. She looks ahead to a time

when ethnicity can be celebrated but also transcended.“

31
William Kennedy takes an opposite stand on the meaning of his

ethnicity. He insists that his Irishness shapes his vision as a novelist and his
identity as a person:

I can’t be anything other than Irish American. I know...many

Irish Americans believe they are merely American. They’ve lost

touch with anything that smacks of Irishness as we used to know

it....But if they set out to discover themselves, to wonder about

why they are what they are, then they’ll run into a psychological

inheritance that’ 5 even more than psychological. That may also

be genetic, or biopsycho-genetic....there’s just something in us that

survives and that’s the result of being Irish, whether from North

or South, whether Catholic or Protestant, some element of life, of

consciousness, that is different from being Hispanic, or Oriental,

or WASP. These traits endure. I’m just exploring what’s

survived in my time and place.55

Despite their differing outlooks, both Kennedy and Barolini are among
those writers who heed Jules Chametzky’s call to articulate an ethnic
experience that is authentically and legitimately their own and which responds
to a legacy of misrepresentation and objectification in mainstream prose.56
The differing degrees to which they identify with their ethnic heritage and
regard it as their defining attribute does not undermine their respective
positions. But Kennedy’s rather awkward coinage, "biopsycho-genetic," reflects

the difficulty of understanding the cause of "difference." Moreover, his phrase

32

suggests a dubious tendency toward biological determinism to explain
ethnicity.

Social science makes compelling attempts at explaining the cause of
cultural distinctiveness. Sociologist Michael Novak, for example, finds that
ancestral memory feeds ethnicity. He claims that his "unmeltable ethnics,"
descendants of immigrants of Southern and Eastern Europe, defy assimilation.
They are bound to "a set of instincts, feelings, intimacies, expectations, patterns
' of emotion and behavior; a sense of reality; a set of stories for individuals—and
for the people as a whole—to live out. "57 Novak maintains in "Pluralism: A
Humanistic Perspective," his contribution to the Harvag Engrclogga' pf
American Ethnic Groups (1980), that ethnic identity persists through time,
though altered, of course, by diverse social changes. He admits the danger of
stereotyping, for example, the Germans as orderly or the Danes as melancholy,
but insists that values, expectations, and codes of conduct are internalized
from a long line of human tradition and passed on unconsciously from one
generation to the next.58

Although in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics Novak tends toward
genetic determinism as he features ancestral identity as an indelible imprint,
his conception of an innate yet dynamic identity is sound. Cultural values
reinforced over generations, he explains, distinguish, influence, and even shape
an ethnic group’s experience. Searching beyond the very real and pervasive
hindrance of bigotry, social historian Leonard Dinnerstein looks to this legacy

of distinctive ethnic values to explain further the quantifiable differences and

33

varying levels of achievement among American immigrants. He attributes the
notably sluggish climb of Polish Americans up the socio-economic ladder to
their strong attachment to the Catholic church and parochial schools, their
devout passivity, and their general distrust of education as a threat to family
cohesion. He also finds that the machismo which deemed it better to forgo
challenge rather than risk failure slowed the progress of many Mexican-
Americans and caused them to languish in the working class. Dinnerstein
points out in contrast that the persistent ideal of a life devoted to study, as
seen in the historically high degree of community respect for the Talmudic
scholar, accounts for the remarkable figures of Jewish school enrollment, high
scholastic achievement, and accomplishments in business and the
professions.” Francis Fukuyama similarly postulates that nothing so crude as
a genetic intelligence differential between Americans of Chinese and African
descent determines their markedly different success rates in US. enterprise.
He contends, rather, that strong Chinese paternalism, with its attendant family
network and sense of solidarity, promotes economic success, whereas, in
addition to the barrier of racism, the looser links between fathers and children
in many African-American families hinders entrepreneurial ventures.‘so

The causal relationship among ancestral heritage, ethnic characteristics,
and immigrant outcomes explains a good deal of cultural difference, and it
points to continuity within dynamic social identities. Yet even as distinct
ethnic personalities in American society are traceable to pre-migration ancestry,

the old world roots of such distinctions often remain buried. In addressing the

34

question of origins, Novak takes a circular route through the primordial and
side-steps frank clarification: "From earliest times, distinctive social groups
found themselves living under the shaping influence of a common culture. In
a sense, what made such social groups distinctive were the prior shaping
influences of diverse cultures."61

But the notion of a permanent and inevitable ethnic identity, extending
back through time immemorial and upon which the pluralist argument
frequently rests, does not easily square with the contention that nationalism
itself is an invention of the modern world. Notwithstanding the enduring
legacy of African or Native American tribalism, a sense of national belonging
has also proved to be consciously crafted, an identity intentionally defined
contrastively against what will be perceived (it is hoped) as a common enemy:
Romantics in Germany, for example, delimited a culture of things German to
forge a unified stronghold against a Napoleonic invasion and encroaching
French rationalism; republicans in England promoted a collectivist sense of
sovereign British peoplehood to wrest rights away from the Tudor and Stuart
monarchies.62 Identities can also be imposed from without, of course, as in
Edward Said’s thesis that "Orientalism" is a Western construct exported to the
East to justify imperialism, a fiction of the "Arab mind" as a homogeneous but
unruly and mysterious territory to be tamed and governed through intellectual
and political colonization.“

But neither an appreciation for the historic fluidity of nationalism nor an

awareness of the role of choice in determining human behavior need invalidate

35
the authenticity of ethnic distinctiveness. For shared language, cultural

practices, and religion, for example, certainly served to unite the English as
effectively as to separate them from the French. Yet difference, when regarded
as an unbridgeable barrier between age-old, iron clad identities, is often used
an excuse for hostility or isolationism.’ In response, many cultural critics
across the ideological spectrum see danger looming in the politics of
difference. Shelby Steele, for instance, maintains that "race-holding" demands
the forfeiture of personal identity and in its place asserts a presence thoroughly
dependent on group association.“ Although Steele and Henry Louis Gates

are often ideological combatants, the latter likewise cautions that the position
achieved by defining oneself contrastively against the dominant other

ultimately reinforces marginality and perpetuates a victim status.“5

 

Tn "Modern Hate: How Ancient Animosities Get Invented," Susanne and
Lloyd Rudolph provide a compelling example of how those who control
language (or the media, in the late twentieth century) certify history and
misappropriate the weight of the past through that rendering. Questioning the
assumption that pressure points around the globe are erupting under age-old
stress, the Rudolphs recount the often peaceable coexistence of Serbs, Croats,
and Muslims under Tito (a manner of living which is but a dim memory
today, given the war which rages in the former Yugoslavia), and the frequent
neighborliness of the Hindu and Muslim communities under Nehru. In pre-
nationalistic India, they explain, Hinduism was a loose web of multiple
doctrines, none with transhistoric authority-a free affiliation which usually
allowed easy relations with Muslim co-nationals. But when the conservative
Bharatiya Janata Party standardized this longtime ecumenism through
televised histories of Hindu deities, they fomented an attack, under the guise
of a religious crusade, on the upwardly mobile Muslims. Hindu nationalists,
rallying around their newly codified religion, were incited to raze the
sixteenth-century Babri Mosque, which was built, reportedly, on the birthsite
of the Hindu deity Rama, the idol of the BJP televised megaseries. See M
New Republic 22 Mar. 1993: 24-28.

36

It is possible to aver that the recognition and free expression of
American ethnic diversity is long overdue but at the same time to be leery of
some pluralist scholarship that tends toward social fragmentation by
"belittl[ing] m and glorify[ing] plririb_u§."“ The cultural variety that
distinguishes Americans from one another is a wealth that warrants
affirmation. Yet such richly distinctive cultural inheritances do not cancel out
a shared Americanness; in fact the capacity to prize and retain such
distinctiveness proves an over-arching national character.

In "The Value of the Canon," Irving Howe contends that the broad
humanist foundation of the Western world enables America to acknowledge
and value its multi-ethnicity, since the bedrock of that liberal tradition, despite
its many violations, is autonomy of the self, freedom of opinion, and the rights
of oppressed groups.“ Although the canon Howe proposes is neither fixed
nor unalterable and includes non-Western literature, he makes no apologies for
its centeredness in "Great Books," because the classical tradition itself has
always encouraged dialogue, challenge, and change.“8 Many of the
disparaged dead white males, Howe contends, have been harsh critics of the
status quo: Emerson urged that America break with the "courtly’muse of
Europe," Dickens rendered scathing rebukes of the British bourgeoisie, Melville
pointed up the corrupting effects of capitalism. Howe further contends that it
is reductive to construe the writing of white, European males as forming a

monolithic vision of the world: Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke,

37

Nietzsche and Freud, Jefferson and Dewey, of course, yield widely varying,
often clashing, views."9

Furthermore, because history proves that the literary canon has
undergone continual updating and expansion, the heated contest over canon
reform is in some ways a moot issue. The development of "English" into its
present-day discipline of literary study reflects bold but steady transitions from
classical Greek and Latin to the literature of England and the eventual
incorporation of American writers. As the study of British and American
letters became an academic subject in its own right rather than a "handmaiden"
to such emphases as elocution or composition, codified reading lists for college
examinations increasingly included vernacular writing and titles that were
contemporary of the times.’0 Canon revision has always been inevitable. But
perhaps most illustrative of the unifying ethos Howe discerns is the fact that
many who charge the West with hegemony do so in the Western tradition of
protest, essentially invoking Western values. The classical humanist tradition
is difficult to root out, isolate, or even objectify, since, as Howe attests, "all of
us who live in America are, to some extent, Western: it gets to us in our
deepest and also our most trivial habits of thought and speech, in our sense of
right and wrong, in our idealism and our cynicism.”l

The pervasiveness of Western values (or the insidiousness, depending
on one’s response to the canon question) undercuts the pluralist argument that
ethnicity is always distinct, inborn, and virtually unchangeable and that the

high profiles which ethnic groups increasingly achieve are instinctive and

38

inevitable expressions of those discrete identities. Instead, it seems axiomatic
that the raging debate over multiculturalism points again to the elasticity of
the Western heritage, that it is one more interchange in the democratic,
humanist tradition which, grounded in free expression, accommodates dissent.
If so, the "unmeltable" ethnics and other nationalists who claim a natural
resistance to powerful cultural norming influences so as to assert their essential
identity are merely shadow boxing. In fact, the phenomenon of ethnic
revivalism actually testifies to the power of inter-group borrowing-an
influence not unrelated to assimilation. Much of the interest among third-
generation Americans to reclaim their ancestral roots arose from the Black
Power example, which, as an offshoot of the Civil Rights movement for equal
enfranchisement for Blacks, sprang from American democratic ideals.72
Moreover, Horace Kallen’s "pure pluralism" which sought to preserve the
diverse and distinct cultural homogeneity within the separate natios
represented in the United States was actually born of the cultural merging it
seemed to repudiate: Kallen started at Harvard as a renegade from his
Judaism, but, under the influence of his Anglo-American professor Barrett
Wendell, became a Zionist; his work resonated with the "many-ness-in-
oneness" motif borrowed from another of his professors, the Irish-American
William James; furthermore, although he admitted repulsion over fellow
student Alain Locke’s race, he strove to protect him from racism.’3 Katharine
Newman in Ethnic American Short Stories (1975) provides other ironic

examples of cultural borrowing used to preserve cultural uniqueness, such as

39
cassette tape recordings exchanged among tribes at Pan-Indian meetings so

that participants can later replay and study the orations of one another, or the
horse-drawn buggies of Pennsylvania Dutch—a trademark of their resistance to
modernizing influences-made more durable by rubber wheels."

Deconstructing multiculturalism, Stanley Fish declares it an ultimately
untenable ideology. A multicultural society, he believes, is more accurately a
society of uniculturalists attempting to live side by side. At one end of the
scale he posits "boutique multiculturalists," who, well-intentioned but shallow,
mouth acceptance and enjoy the trappings of otherness, such as ethnic cuisine
or artwork, but, when put to the test, are unable to tolerate the value system of
another which conflicts with their own deeply held beliefs. At the opposite
end he locates "really strong multiculturalists," who, if they tolerate
fundamental difference in the other, violate their own cultural tenets.
Ultimately, Fish maintains that to embrace basic cultural difference is to
exchange one value system for another and thus to become a reconstructed
uniculturalist. Only through "ad hocery," he maintains, can difference be
addressed and peace be negotiated on an "as-necessary" basis?“

Such reasoning, clever though it is, overlooks the fact that very little in
America’s hybrid culture is actually pure or homogeneous. Ethnic enclaves are

not static configurations; they are adaptable communities with permeable,

 

"Fish is equally pessimistic about the success of interdisciplinary borrowing
within the academy. He maintains that "when something is brought into a
practice, it is brought in in terms the practice recognizes; the practice cannot
’say’ the Other but can only say itself." See "Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very
Hard to Do," Profession 89 (MLA) 19.

40

expandable borders. The transformation of the Calabrese, Venezians, and
Abruzzese into Italian Americans is just one example of the fluid community-
building pattern in US. history. Although in Italy identity was primarily
associated with the village in which one lived, Americans simply lumped
together immigrants from this peninsula and regarded them as Italian. This
new perception produced a new ethnicity: at first, immigrants accentuated
their provincialism to retain the distinction of their village; however,
threatened by the presence of those who were even less familiar than those
from the far reaches of their homeland, they joined with their co-nationals. Yet
this newly constructed Italian-American cultural boundary was also
permeated, of course, as intermingling in public schools and the marketplace
led to inter-marriage, the biggest blurrer of ethnic identities."

To insist on a shared American identity is not to deny real difference.
Truth resounds in Horace Kallen’s claim that "men change their clothes, their
politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser
extent: they .cannot change their grandfathers)"7 Difference as dictated by
national descent is a fact of American history; coping with that difference is a
factor of ethnic literature. Whether a foreigner tenderly nurtures a
transplanted heritage so as to keep family history alive or attempts to sever
old world roots in favor of a completely fresh start in the US, his immutable
past always remains an issue.

But while the facts of ethnic descent are incontrovertible, the degree to

which an American identifies with that old world heritage is a matter of

41

choice. Oscar Handlin proclaims in The Uprooted that "we are all
immigrants." His statement, of course, stretches the truth, since African
Americans did not emigrate of their own volition and Indians were indigenous
to the continent long before Europeans came ashore. Yet Sollors explains that
all citizens of the poly-ethnic United States decide the extent to which they
define themselves by descent. A third-generation American with Polish
paternal grandparents and German maternal grandparents, for example, might
name both of these nationalities to describe her ethnicity. But she might also
select one over the other or reject them both to describe herself simply as
American. Even Blacks, though visually identified as such by others,
determine their own degree of identification with Africa: to be a Black
American or an African American is a matter of individual choice. Jews in the
US. enjoy a similar freedom to preserve or relinquish their ancestral identity.
The curfew, ghetto, and pogrom told the Jew born in pre-World War II Russia,
. for example, that he was always a Russian Jew and never just a Russian.
Likewise, a German-born Jewish convert to Christianity could never be
anything other than a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even in late nineteenth-
century France, where, prior to the Dreyfus Affair, Jews found general
acceptance, it was usually under condition that they give up their customs and
religion—their Jewishness, in short. By contrast, a hybrid Jewish-American
identity is of little note in the US. Furthermore, though anti-Semitism still
exists, many Americans of Jewish descent perceive of themselves, and in turn

are perceived, simply as American.

42
Anthropologist Fredrik Barth contends that ethnicity emerges as much

as-if not more than-it survives. Flouting ethnic essentialism, he argues that
because cultural homogenization is a powerful socializing force, Americans
counteract it with new ways to establish difference. The ethnic identity, then,
is not only passed on from generation to generation but also constructed or
consented to. In Barth’s appraisal, it is the ethnic "boundary which defines the
group" rather than "the cultural stuff that it encloses)“

Boundaries make life interesting for many reasons, not least of which is
that they are traversable and as such provide access to new worlds. Cultural
pluralism, rather than throwing up new barricades of biological insiderism or
ethnic essentialism,“ can provide the map for exploring new territories-
particularly now that postmodern criticism has expanded the traditional canon.
Yet, ultimately, the literary traveller in America’s multicultural society will not
discover alien lands as much as tour remote areas of his own terrain. For as
strong as Robert Rhodes’s case is, for example, that F. Scott Fitzgerald is
primarily an Irish writer (and it is strong, considering the sense of the outsider
that plagued the author and his many Irish-American characters, as well as

other ethnic characters, such as James Gatz),79 Werner Sollors makes a better

 

”T-Iissaye Yamamoto organized a boycott of Come See the Paradise a film
about American internment camps during WW II which she felt could not
adequately tell the story because it was not produced by Japanese Americans;
when the African-American film maker Bill Duke made The Cemetery Club, a
movie about a community of Jewish widows, he was criticized more
vehemently for crossing racial lines than gender lines, as was Jewish-American
director Steven Spielberg when he made the film version of Alice Walker’s

novel, The Color Purple.

 

43

case for cross-group membership. To assert an overriding ethnic inheritance
from Finley Peter Dunne to Fitzgerald ignores the modernist ethos at work in
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stein. Yet it is a superficial reading that misses
the modernists’ complex sense of ethnicity: Jean Toomer as African-American,
Stein as Jewish, Hemingway as an alienated WASP, for example.80 American
literature in all its cultural variety attests to a fertile cross-pollination rather
than a particular, idiosyncratic ethnic-American mind.

As Edward Said attests, the point of examining difference is to achieve
wider understanding. "Worldliness," which he maintains restores literatures to
their rightful global setting, is accomplished not by the "appreciation of some
tiny, defensively constituted comer of the world, but of the large many-
windowed house of human culture as a whole."81 The best approach to take
toward multicultural literature in the US. then is an integrative one. America
stands to learn much by exploring its dynamic syncretism—the wide historical

conditions and cultural features which all Americans share."2

Notes

1. Consider, for instance, the Carlisle Indian School, which, in the late
nineteenth-century, sought to destroy tribal culture by forcibly breaking Native
Americans of their traditions. Removing the young from the reservations and
educating them in the ways of the dominant white culture, school officials
intended the graduates to spread the white culture when they returned to their
tribe members. See Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger Nichols, and David Reimers,
Natives and Strangers: Blacks, Indians, and Immigrants in America, 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford UP, 1990) 205. Similarly, the Ford Motor Company
English School, teaching courses in the English language and US. civics to
foreign-born workers in the early twentieth century, mandated the immigrant’ 5
total break with the old world. The school’s graduation spectacle staged a
ship docking at a huge cauldron labeled "Ford English School Melting Pot"
while, the Ford Times records, a deckhand drove a group of "hunkies," all
shabbily dressed, into the kettle. As the newly transformed, neatly apparelled
citizens filed out of the melting pot, they proudly identified themselves not as
Polish or Polish-American, but simply as American, for "they [were] taught in
the Ford school that the hyphen is a minus sign." See Werner Sollors, Beyond

Ethnicigy: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford UP,
1986) 91.

2. Consider Arthur Schlesinger’s extended essay on cultural pluralism,

The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multi-cultural Society (New York:
Norton, 1992), especially "E Pluribus Unum?" 119-138.

3. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Let_ters from an American Farmer
(1782; New Yorlc Dutton, 1957) 69-70. But Crevecoeur’s amalgam, of course, .
consists only of Europeans; Africans are not included. Also, he ranks those of
the American admixture according to their virtues, and he places the Irish at
the bottom.

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The lournals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred Ferguson (Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1971) 299-300, vol. 9.

45

5. Sollors quotes Act IV of Israel Zangwill’s Melting Pot. See Beyond
Ethnicig 92.

6. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 84, 85.
7. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicig 88.

8. David Fine, The City, The Immigant and American Fiction, 1880-1920
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1977) 36, 8.

9. Sollors, Beyond Ethniciry 86.
10. Dinnerstein 184.

11. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912)
xii.

12. Sollors 89.

13. Charles Willie, "Multiculturalism Bashing," Change Jan/ Feb, 1992:
71.

14. Johnella Butler and Betty Schmitz, "Ethnic Studies, Women’s
Studies," Changg Jan/ Feb 1992: 40.

15. Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New
York: Oxford UP, 1992) v—xvii.

16. Werner Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Pluralism," Reconstructing
American Literag History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1986) 264-272.

17. Sollors, "Pure Pluralism" 269.

18. Ishmael Reed, "The Ocean of American Literature," The Before

Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology, eds. Ishmael Reed, Kathryn
Trueblood, and Shawn Wong (New York: Norton, 1992) xi, xii.

19. Ishmael Reed xxvii.
20. Reed xxi.
21. Reed xiii.

22. Paula Rothenberg, "Critics of Attempts to Democratize the
Curriculum are Waging a Campaign to Misrepresent the Work of Responsible

Professors," Debating PC: The Controversy over Political Correctness on
College Campuses, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Dell, 1992) 266.

46
23. Rothenberg 267.

24. Emory Elliott, gen. ed., Columbia Literary History of the United
States (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) xi-xiii.

25. Elliott xvi-xxi.

26. Bercovitch, Reconstructing American Literary Histog vii.

27. Bercovitch Reconstructing American Literary Histog ix.

28. Wayne C. Miller, "Toward a New Literary History of the United
States," MELUS 11. 1 (1984): 5-26.

 

29. For full volume studies of Armenian-American literature see Nona
Balakian, The Armenian-American Writer: A New Accent in American Fiction
(New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union, 1958); Margaret Bedrosian
The Other Modernists: Tradition and Individual Talent in Armenian-American
Literature diss., U of California, 1981 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1986) 8211705; or
Lorne Shirinian’s two books, Armenian-North American Literature: A Critical

Introduction: GenocideI Diasmra and Smbols (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen

P, 1990) and The Republic of Armenia and the Rethinking of the North-
American Diasmra in Literature (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen P, 1992). For
book-length studies of the Puerto Rican literature on the mainland see Asela

Rodriguez de Laguna, ed., Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two
World Contexts (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987) or Eugene V. Mohr, &

Nuyorican Exgrience: Literature of the Puerto Rican Minorigy in New York
(W estport: Greenwood, 1982). For information on the Hungarian experience
in American literature consult Leslie Konnnyu, A History of American
Hungarian Literature: Presentation of American Authors of the Last Hundred
Years and Selections from Their Writings (St. Louis: Cooperative of American
Hungarian Writers, 1962).

 

30. Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin, eds. Harvard

Engyclopgdia of American Ethnic Groufi (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard UP, 1980) 965, "Survey Research, Table 2."

31. This line from Mikhail Bakhtin’s "Discourse in the Novel" is
ubiquitous in multicultural criticism. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. "Race."
Writing, and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 1; Arnold Krupat
Ethnocriticism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) 19; or Jules Chametzky’s
paraphrasing in Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected
lewish and Southern Writers (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986) 4. M.H.
Abrams provides a useful gloss on Bakhtin under "Dialogic Criticism" in A
Glossyy of Literary Terms 6th ed. (Fort Wortlu Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1993) 230-232.

47
32. Chametzky 4.

33. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of
American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 201.

 

34. I have relied on David Fine’s excellent survey of early journalism

about urban immigrants. See The CigI The Immigrant and American Fiction,
especially 16-37.

35. Dinnerstein 163-165.

36. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel
(New York: Oxford UP, 1987).

37. Fine cites Francis A. Walker, "Immigration and Degradation," Forum,
11 (1891): 634-644 for data on population decline. See Fine 6.

38. Fine quotes Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 3rd ed.
(New York: Deforest Grant, 1944) 86-92. See Fine 7, 8.

39. William Dean Howells, A Hazarg ef New Pom (1890; New York:
New American Library, 1965) 48. All other references to the novel in this
chapter will be cited parenthetically in the text.

40. Edith Wharton, The Hoeg ef m (1905; New York: NAL
Penguin, 1980) 159. All other references to the novel in this chapter will be
cited parenthetically in the text.

41. Townsend Ludington, |ohn Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Centpry
Odyssey (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980).

42. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1925) 307. All other references to the novel in this chapter will be cited
parenthetically in the text.

43. Annette Kolodny quotes Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s
groundbreaking work in "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations
on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," Feminist
_St_ug.i§ 6. 1 (1980): 6.

44. Eugene Mohr, The Nuyorican Emrience: Literature of the Puege
Rican Minority (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1982) xii-xiv.

45. Dorothy Burton Skardal, "Scandinavian-American Literature," Ethnic
Perspectives in American Literature, eds, Robert Di Pietro and Edward Lfl<ovic
(MLA: 1983) 232-265.

48

46. Lorne Shirinian, Armenian-North American Literature: A Critical
Introduction (Lewiston, NY: Mellen P, 1990).

47. Charles Fanning, ed. The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Cean Irish-
American Fiction (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1987) 94.

48. Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes, eds. Modern Irish-American
Fiction: A Reader (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989) 16-19. See also
Charles Fanning’ s "Finley Peter Dunne and Irish-American Literary Realism,"

in Irish-American Fiction: Essays in Criticism eds., Casey and Rhodes (New
Yorlc AMS, 1979) 13-28.

49. Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the
Writinge and their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982) 313.

50. Margaret Conners, "Historical and Fictional Stereotypes of the Irish,"
Irish-American Fiction 1-12.

51. DiPietro and Ifkovic, Ethnic Persfl'ves in American Literature 11-
13.

52. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicigy 242.

53. According to Dorothy Skardal, the overwhelming popularity of Carl
Sandburg, a second-generation Swedish-American who frequently
romanticized his own and other ethnic groups in his poetry, disqualifies him
as an ethnic writer. For Skardal, he is simply an assimilated American

regionalist poet. See The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Exmrience
through Literary Sources (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1974) 47-48.

54. Helen Barolini, The Dream Book: An Antholegy of Writings by
Italian American Women (New York: Schocken Books, 1985) 55-56.

55. Charles Fanning, The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction
from the 1760’s to the 1980’s (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990) 312.

56. Chametzky 4.

57. Michael Novak, The Rise ef the Unmelrable Ethnics (New York:
Macmillan, 1972) 47-48.

58. Novak, "Pluralism: A Humanistic Perspective," The Harvard
Engrclomdia of American Ethnic Groups 773.

59. Dinnerstein 184-186.

49

60. Francis Fukuyama, "Making It, " rev. of T_r_ibes: How Race, Religion

and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy by Joel Kotkin,
The New Republic c19 Apr. 1993: 41-43.

61. Novak, "Pluralism: A Humanistic Perspective" The Harvard
Engclopedia of American Ethnic Groups 773.

62. Two recent discussions on the modern creations of national
membership are Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1701-1837 (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1993) and Liah Greenfield’s Nationalism: Five Roads te
Modernig (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).

63. Edward Said, Orientalism (New Yorlc Vintage Books, 1979).

64. Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race
in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990) 29, 132.

65. Gates, Loose Canons 185-188.
66. Schlesinger 16-17.
67. Irving Howe, "The Value of the Canon" Debating PC 160.

68. Bercovitch would disagree with this assessment of healthy, wide-
ranging dispute and debate among American thinkers; instead, he identifies an
undue tendency toward consensus-building in American rhetoric. See _T_he
American |eremiad (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978).

69. Howe 161.

70. Arthur Applebee, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English:
A History (Urbana, Il: NCTE, 1974) 11, 31-32, 37.

71. Howe 160, 169.
72. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 10.
73. Sollors, "Pure Pluralism" 264-272.

74. Katharine Newman, Ethnie American Short Stories (New York:
Washington Square P, 1975) 18.

75. Stanley Fish, "E Pluribus Plurum?" Michigan State University Lecture
Series, 23 Apr. 1993.

76. Dinnerstein 135, 136.
77. Sollors, Beyond Ethniciry 231.

50
78. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicig 27, 257.

79. Robert E. Rhodes, "F. Scott Fitzgerald: ’All My Fathers,” Irish-
American Fiction 29-52.

80. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 14, 15, 253.
81. Edward Said, "The Politics of Knowledge," Debating PC 185.

82. Werner Sollors, The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford,
1989) xiv.

CHAPTER TWO
The Immigrant Heritage and the Legacy of Ambivalent Renewal

The often uneasy relationship between canonical writing and ethnic or
multicultural literature in America rests on an assumed mutual exclusivity.
The ideological culture wars which are fought on college campuses nationwide
pit Anglo-centrism against American diversity. Positions are nuanced but in
broad outline, the noble, time-honored tradition, rooted in the Puritans and
blossoming in the American Renaissance, is threatened by second-rate, topical
fiction which would replace "reverence" with "relevance," since its merits are
sociological rather than aesthetic. On the flip side, proponents of pluralism at
last corral the hegemonic Anglo-Saxon male to free myriad subgroup writers
from the margins; new critical apparatuses uncover varieties of aesthetics
which old, standard ways of reading have kept hidden. The divide which
seems to separate ethnic from classic American literature, and of which both
sides are caretakers, obscures the overlapping cultural constants inherent in
much of the literature produced in the US.

Both sides in the debate advance compelling evidence. Literary

historiography from The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921) and
The Literag History of the United States (1948, 1972) up to Emory Elliott’s
iconoclastic Columbia Literary Histog of the United States (1988) attests to the

51

52
myopia of the traditional. Despite such post-modern challenges as Elliott’s or

Sacvan Bercovitch’s recent Cambridge Literary Histog of America (1995)‘, the
conceptual categories of the Puritan tradition, the frontier spirit, romanticism,
and realism remain largely in effect, and they convey the notion of a unified,
unbroken lineage of the Anglo-European tradition in America.2 Women and
people of color who have written from outside this elite line are relegated to
the ignoble categories of sentimentalism or local color, worthy of some note as
literary curiosities but not regarded as bona fide American writers. For
instance, though Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Joel
Chandler Harris are regularly included in anthologies of American literature,
they continue to be lumped together as quaint regionalists.3 Though F.O.
Matthiessen was widely praised for revolutionizing the study of American
culture by replacing the stuffy Victorians Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and
Lowell with the more "robust" writers, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman, he
nonetheless remained firmly committed to a WASP northeastern paradigm.‘
Furthermore, a spate of critical works over the last decade which promised to
examine Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman as regional
writers rather than as national icons in part reifies their domination: Michael
Colacurcio’s extended study of the American Renaissance scholarship industry
shows that despite some shakeups in Matthiessen’s roll of stars—Poe might be
added or attention to Thoreau reduced or "major" writers paired with "minor"

ones to show common influence, social constraints, or concerns-Matthiessen’s

53
construct remains, finally, the touchstone by which other writing is tacitly

judged, regardless of most alleged agendum to the contrary.5

The revisionist’s disdain for consensus is understandable, therefore,
since standards were set, accords reached, and the canon formed while the
ethnic writer was a persona non grata in American letters. Where the lone male
characters of such canonical giants as James Fenimore C00per, Herman
Melville, and Mark Twain have been taken as spokesmen for America, the
paradigm for any national experience has been obviously restrictive. Before
the rather recent advent of anti-foundationalism, the major works of American
literary criticism struck a tone of unyielding authority and finality, suggesting
that the books were written, the thinking done, and the whole lot chronicled
and catalogued for perusal but not for reappraisal. R.W.B. Lewis’s
presentation of the American as Adam, creating and self-created and thus
unmarked by the past, includes, for all intents and purposes, the hero’s dates
of birth and death, and thus suggests that Adamic vitality is no more.

Lewis’s period of study runs from 1820 to 1860 and covers major writers
of the American Renaissance and such historians and theologians as William
Prescott, George Bancroft, and Theodore Parker. Though he manages a half-
hearted attempt at continuity and inclusiveness for the Adamic tradition by
naming Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield, and even
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as heirs of this legacy of buoyant assurance, his
dolorous tone undercuts that optimism. His text becomes a lament for lost

potential, a dirge for purity forever sullied by the realities of twentieth-century

54

life in America. He regrets that Adam, known for "an air of adventurousness,
a sense of promise and possibility," is in retreat; the mythic hero is "no longer
very evident in our national expression....recently has the dialogue tended to
die away...has the old conviction of the new historical beginning seemed to
vanish altogether, and with it the enlivening sense of possibility, of intellectual
and artistic elbow-room, of new creations and fresh initiatives. Our culture
will at the very least be a great deal drearier without it.“

Lewis’s own narrow definition of Adam precipitated that hero’s
extinction. It is indeed a rare creature who fits the heroic mold of

an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of

ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of

family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and

self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the

aid of his own unique and inherent resources.’
And while Lewis crosses gender and racial lines to extend Adam’s lineage to
some women and blacks, the expansive gesture is ultimately empty. The
notion that figures of canonical fiction are able to "stand alone" is questionable
in itself, but certainly few minority figures in American literature are thus
freed from family, race, or history, as Lewis requires of a resplendent Hopeful.
The past, in the form of ties to the native land, remains a powerful force in the
lives of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants. Many ache over
the loss of cultural traditions left behind; others who aspire to be free of the

past are nonetheless constrained by it as the society they wish to join perceives

55

not a new American but a misplaced foreigner, a relic of the old world.
Furthermore, the anguished detachments of Ellison’s protagonist-his
invisibility, his namelessness-are the traits that, for Lewis, release him from
the mundane and set him aloft in the otherworldly. Even Lewis’s Adamic
exceptions to the Party of Hope, those belonging instead to the Parties of
Memory and Irony, will not accommodate America’s ethnic literary characters.
Lewis’s somber nostalgics are too freighted with the legacy of corruption and
inherited sin to include these immigrants who, perhaps naively, believed in the
possibility of a fresh start. Those of the ironic mentality sought to blend future
possibility with past tradition and thus bear a resemblance to America’s
newcomers, who by and large shared this objective; however, the singularity
and grand stature by which the ironies held themselves above life’s fray—Lewis
places the aloof, Jamesian aristocrat in this camp—distinguish them from
America’s immigrant. Instead, the ethnic is Lewis’s wrong kind of outsider, a
mangier sort who does not originate in America: he is "the dispossessed, the
superfluous, the alienated, the exiled"8 who throws the "real" Adam into
glorious relief.

Despite the literary disenfranchisement of those who do not fit the
narrow Adamic mold, much twentieth-century ethnic writing nonetheless bears
the imprint of the Anglo-European belletristic tradition. Such influence is not
surprising, of course, since as products of the American school system, which
taught an Anglo-centric curriculum, writers read widely beyond the literature

of their own ethnic or gender groups and modeled their work on what they

56

read. "Group" itself is a problematic configuring device since individuals
belong concurrently to various communities, as dictated not only by gender
and ethnicity, but by class, religion, education level, and geographical location,
as well as by choice in voluntary affiliations. Furthermore, these marginalized
writers knew where the power in publishing resided and often sought
approval from and admission into the literary establishment.9 Testaments of
influence by the high tradition abound: Zora Neale Hurston read widely in
Shakespeare, while Toni Morrison cites the inspiration of Virginia Woolf in her
work. Ralph Ellison proclaims his enormous debt to Marx, Freud, Eliot, and
Hemingway, among others, much as James T. Farrell credits his extensive
reading of French and Russian authors with shaping his career. Paule
Marshall attributes her skill as a novelist to her thorough grounding in
nineteenth-century British novels, and quite obvious is the Negro spiritual’s
reliance on the King James Bible.10

Yet even as these minority writers profess the influence of the dominant
culture, they also employ a vernacular beyond the literary tradition. A feature
common to ethnic writing is a marginalized character’s sense of "two-ness," the
outsider’s divided identity under which he or she negotiates the dominant
culture and that of the subgroup. This ubiquitous duality which W.E.B.
DuB'uo/is articulates in The Souls of the Black Folk (1903) is again manifest, for
example, in the literal and metaphoric bilingualism of Henry Roth’s C_all_I_t_
$912 (1934) as young David Schearl crosses between the Yiddish voice of his

home and the language of the larger world.“ It is at play as well in Paule

57
Marshall’s Brown Girl Brownstones (1959) as Selina Boyce is caught between

 

the assimilationist drive of her Barbadian immigrant kinspeople and her
longing to recoup the values they left behind on their island home. It is
likewise the case with Abraham Cahan’s Yelel (1896), where the title character,
a would-be Yankee from the Russian ghetto in Povodye, transforms himself
into "Jake" but whose Americanization is hindered by his wife’s old world
Judaism. Bi-culturalism, of course, is not always a successful mode of
traversing two worlds; the frequent result is alienation from both the family
and society.

Because this ethnic fiction often violated accepted aesthetic principles of
critical evaluation and developed themes unfamiliar to the mainstream, it was
routinely ignored or panned by the literary establishment. Thus, Carol
Gilligan’s contention that women speak "in a different voice" from men, one
that only seems inferior or inscrutable because it resonates from experiences
outside of dominant, male awareness, applies to pluralist writing as well.
Many scholars of ethnic literature point to this feminist model of difference
and likewise call for new ways of reading the extra-mainstream novel so that
its meaning can be understood and its significance appreciated.12

Arguing for a broadened paradigm that will open up non-mainstream
literature, revisionists contend that since readers are often conditioned to
identify rugged individualism—the much celebrated detachment of the self
from society—as the hallmark of great American literature, they cannot

appreciate or even comprehend multi-ethnic writing, lwhich is typically

58
grounded in the communal. Therefore, Paul Lauter, co-editor of the Heath

 

Anthology of American Literature (1990), which refigures standard
chronologies and thematic groupings to present the diversity of writing in
America, urges an awareness of social emphases in literature, in addition to
individual ones. His intention in making minority writing accessible to a
wider readership is "not to deny the significance of defining an isolated, heroic
self against the forces of nature—a theme...peculiarly persistent in the Romantic
fictions of American white males that have constituted the received canon."
Rather it is to note that "equally substantial and interesting are the social
issues...the sacrifices of community to self, difficulties of sustaining
community."13
Revisionists such as Lauter charge that the long-standing definition of
the American literary hero, crafted by Matthiessen, R.W.B. Lewis, and other
elevators of the WASP tradition and based on a small, homogeneous sampling
of writers, effectively excludes these characters who, instead of setting out
unencumbered to develop their self-potential, grapple with the trappings of
family and ethnicity.“ Without question, perspectives and experiences that
are beyond the norm of a more or less homogenous mainstream culture have
too long been ignored. The WASP school has long discounted the contribution
of minority writers and presumed to speak for them through their alleged

world-transcending literature. Significant differences do exist, and the

academy justifiably reworks the criteria that have privileged one model of

59

expression over another, so that the full range of literature in America can be
made accessible.

But many scholars of ethnic writing, apart from developing a broader
paradigm for reading that will make America’s diverse literature accessible,
cling to the legacy of disenfranchisement as their credentials for membership
in their own exclusive club. Instead of uncovering the syncretisms that exist
within dominant and subgroup writing, or of underscoring the similarities
along with the differences that exist between Anglo-centric and ethnic-pluralist
literature in America, multicultural literary theory too often proceeds as a
mission to stake out and guard an impenetrable ethnic domain. Mindful of a
past where minority writing was routinely dismissed and the ethnic American
given no control over his or her (mis)representation in mainstream fiction,
pluralists often attempt to mark territory that is uniquely theirs, to claim
literary ground that cannot be invaded or reabsorbed by the dominant culture.
Henry Louis Gates laments a pervasive "do unto others what they did unto
you" mentality at work in this separatismls where ethnic essentalists proclaim
a nearly hermetic paradigm of "otherness," which they maintain is rightftu
and necessarily incomprehensible, or at least unfamiliar, to the Anglo reader.

Toward that segregationist end, some pluralists administer litmus tests
to writers to screen for "valid" ethnicity. For example, second-generation
Swedish-American Carl Sandburg often examined in his poetry the lives of
immigrants who settled in the rnidwest. Dorothy Skardal, a scholar of

Scandinavian-American literature, however, would revoke his status as an

60

ethnic writer on the basis of his wide mainstream appeal: because he is
"completely assimilated," Skardal argues, he "by no stretch of definition can...be
considered anything but wholly American."“ Other pluralists comb texts for
shibboleths that "prove" ethnicity, or they impute a foreign meaning to a
commonplace expression. Werner Sollors cautions against this tendency to
exaggerate difference and erect a seemingly impenetrable boundary between
peoples, thereby exoticizing ethnicity in literature. He scoffs at an ethnicist

who glosses Mario Puzo’s line in The Godfather "She called herself Kay

 

Adams," as a literal translation of an Italian idiom for the English "her name
was...," and thus as a purported password to be spotted only by biological
insiders." Many revisionists cut an unduly wide swathe between themselves
and the dominant tradition The modish, out-with-the-old battle cry, such as
that "the reading of Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and their successors
amounts to little more than a usable past for a white, northeastern, male"18
resounds regularly. While it is wrong to read these canonical writers as
having the last word on the American experience (or the first one, of course), it
is just as wrong to assume that they no longer have anything to say, or that
they only speak to a specialized group which forms along class, ethnic, gender,
or geographical lines.

But division and categorization, unfortunately, are often standard
practice when ethnicity scholarship is primarily committed to outlining and
preserving difference. As the pluralist campaign routinely contrasts the

communitarian thrust within seemingly discrete and homogeneous subgroups

61

against the individualism of the Anglo-centric mainstream, they rely on a
specious dichotomy.19 In the past, juxtaposing the ethnic character, portrayed
as virtually indistinguishable from his subgroup, against a classic protagonist
who exhibited personal autonomy heightened fear of foreigners for their
supposed socialist leanings, but it now indicts the WASP for selfishness. Both
uses unjustly polarize the central issue of the individual’s role in society.

While "difference" as the basis for ethnic literary scholarship establishes
distinct identities and neat boundaries, it proves overly restrictive and
ultimately untenable. Such is Carolyn Heilbrun’s concern over the dangers
inherent to the "difference" school of feminism, which she believes surrenders
too much of the human identity in its attempt to define one that is uniquely
feminine. Heilbrun laments that the powerful old guard of American
Renaissance scholars put forth a male paradigm of experience and called it
human, for they effectively nullified other modes of existence. But it is that
misappropriation-«he male lock on what is humannwhich she hopes to rectify.
What has been drawn from the human experience and labelled male, she
insists, must be reclaimed rather than continually surrendered: 'Tf women
identify all adventure as ’male’ and not for them..., if women forfeit the culture
men have dubbed ’male’ when it is in fact human, they will have deprived
themselves of too much."20

Heilbrun’s argument speaks volumes for the diversity debate. It is just
as wrongheaded to label as male those broad human attributes that are not

gender-specific (or to label as requisitely human those narrower, distinctively

62
male traits) as it is for the WASP paradigm to claim and the ethnicity school to

yield such basic human behaviors and experiences as individualism and self-
expression or, conversely, for pluralists to claim a monopoly on concern for
community. "Difference" feminists who advocate a uniquely female culture are
wrong to deprive themselves of male discourse, for, maintains Heilbrun, that
very discourse is "not all ’male’....much of it is human discourse that society
has denied to women."21 Likewise, when marginalized groups assert far-
reaching, essential differences that separate the ethnic from the WASP, they
actually acquiesce in the hegemony of the dominant group. "Ignor-ance"
works both ways: where the elite literary establishment would not see beyond
its own sphere, ethnicists cite a reverse foreignness in American literature and
deem many of its values and themes as beyond their scope of recognition and
relevance. Ethnic literature shares a broader overlap with the themes of
canonical literature than perhaps either side, adherents to the traditional canon
and advocates of diversity, has wanted to admit.

When pluralists charge classic American literature with obsessive self-
interest and communal indifference, it is usually to highlight their own
collectivist values, which seem less crass and more noble. But to invoke this
trite and over-simplified division is to interpret narrowly much of American
literature, and thus to obscure very real parallels between the two types. (It is
a stretch to refer to them as different genres, as is often done.) Ellen
McCracken’s claims in "Community-Oriented Introspection and the

Demystification of Patriarchal Violence" are representative of this lamentably

63

frequent reliance on faulty absolutes. McCracken describes Sandra Cisneros as
a revolutionary, since Esperanza, the hero of House on Mango Street (1984),
challenges the oppressive patriarchal social organization which traditional texts
presumably would not see. She further praises Cisneros’s daring originality
for centering Esperanza’s consciousness in the broad socio-political reality of
the Chicano community rather than in customary narrow individualistic
introspection.” But while Cisneros’s work is praiseworthy, it is not nearly as
ground-breaking as McCracken presumes, since American protagonists have
regularly exhibited social concern and patriarchal defiance: for instance,
Sinclair Lewis’s Carol Kennicott defies the classist, misogynist caste system
entrenched in the middle-American Midwest of Main Street (1920), and
William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson challenges his strong father as well as
the unseemly patriarchal social structure of the South in Absalom, Absalom!
(1936). These writers—Cisneros, Lewis, Faulkner, and a host of others
representing America’s full range of diversity-continue a pattern of social
reform and revolt against the patriarchy, which Thomas Paine began over two
hundred years ago, when, in Common Sew (1776), he rallied the colonial
"children" to defy their British "parents" in the American Revolution.”3

Paul Lauter, too, though he undertakes the important duty of creating
an aesthetic that promotes a fuller understanding of all American literature,
finally offers reductive readings of the canon. To prove his dubious point that
communal concern is the sole property of multi-ethnic writing, he posits ego-

centrism as the rule for the WASP. In "The Literature of America: A

64
Comparative Discipline," Lauter indicts his sampling of white males—Melville,

Twain, and Crane, among others-for solipsism. He contends that the
canonical writer spoke only to a small, specialized segment of the population
about abstract and idealized private battles, and thus missed the crucial matter
of life with which everyone else struggled.

...individual confrontations with whales or wars were never

central, for the issue was neither metaphysics nor nature but the

social constructions called "prejudice," and the problem was not

soluble by or for individuals...but only through a process of

SOCIAL change" [his emphasis].

Ethnic criticism often makes this facile distinction between old-stock
American interest in the personal and subgroup concern for the community:
in the introduction to her collection of writings by Italian-American women,

for instance, Helen Barolini uses Thoreau’s Walden (1854) as a ready point of

 

contrast to her group of authors. In her simplified reading, Thoreau is an anti-
social recluse, his non-humanist outlook utterly opposite of the Italian mind
which prizes human interchange.“5 But it is a superficial reading of Melville
that would interpret Moby-Dick as a mere "confrontation with whales,"
describe The Red Badge of Courage simply as a war story, or fail to see the
purpose of Thoreau’s sojourn to Walden Pond as an extended reflection on the
individual’s responsibility to the community. Social awareness has always
been central to American literature; the strong desire to withdraw to the forest

or the open seas, in fact, attests to the weightiness of social concern. Solitude

65

is the state in which many protagonists re-evaluatenand often recommit to--
their communal involvement. The appropriation of social responsibility by
ethnicists and their assignation of ego-centrism to mainstream writers is a
flawed equation. The tension between self-reliance and social interest drives
American literature, canonical and marginal alike. And within the diverse
range of American writing, rarely is the individual or the community a clear-
cut victor. In the best literature, any resolution holds the two competing forces
in balance.

Lauter’s narrow interpretation of canonical literature misses its concern
for society. Though Moby-Dick’s monomaniacal Ahab would break his bond
to humanity so as to "reach outside...by thrusting through the wall" toward the
godhead, Melville also stresses the communal ties that the captain rejects. As a
unit the m crew rely on the varied and complementary roles of the
diverse members to bring in and harvest a whale. In "The Monkey-Rope"
chapter, Queequeg and Ishmael are physically linked and mortally dependent
on each other as they begin the dangerous cutting-in upon a whale, and in "A
Squeeze of the Hand," Ishmael is mesmerized by the crew’s routine of
manipulating the fragrant spermacetti and overcome with goodwill for his
fellow shipmates. These are just two of that novel’s affirmations of human
interconnectedness. Both chapters reveal that human bonding limits the
individual will and blurs a distinct identity, but they stress as well that such a
link is crucial to human survival and psychological well-being. Melville, in

fact, illustrates the horrors of solitariness in "The Castaway," where Pip falls

66

overboard as his crewmates pursue a whale: "out from the centre of the sea,
poor Pip turned his...head to the sun, another lonely castaway....The awful
lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of
such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?"26 Pip is rescued but
forever mad since facing his solitary vulnerability and insignificance in the sea.
And though Ishmael is the lone survivor at the novel’s end, his life is spared
only through the indirect intervention of another; he stays afloat long enough
for the Eagle; to locate him by clinging to the coffin of his trusted friend
Queequeg.

Lauter’s paradigm similarly ranks Stephen Crane among the self-
absorbed, white, male individualists, yet Crane is a fervent advocate of social
change. Certainly his naturalistic world is bleak: nature is coldly indifferent
to humanity, which itself lacks the awareness necessary to improve the mortal
condition. Such mean circumstances produce sad endings: Maggie’s lonely
suicide in the East River; the misunderstood Swede’s expulsion from the
Palace Hotel and his subsequent, senseless murder; the crew members’ mighty
struggle to beach their boat, only to lose the good oiler along the way; a
regiment turned by war into an unfeeling (and, to make matters even worse,
largely ineffective) fighting machine.” But throughout all of these stories
chronicling the breakdown of human communion, Crane is outraged rather
than resigned. Human survival, he urges, is in collective effort: just as easily
as the five patrons collaborated in the Swede’s murder, they could have joined

forces to accept him; when Henry Flemming feels disenfranchised from

67
humanity because he has fled from battle, the power of shared identity and

human sympathy, at work in Jim Conklin’s own admission of fear, allows
Henry to re-enter the ranks of mankind.

Hawthorne too is an easy target for proponents of wholesale change,
those who would shift the focus from the traditional canon to previously
ignored writers. His animosity toward his female literary rivals, that "damn’d
mob of scribbling women," whose books outsold his own, is frequently
interpreted as his support for an elitist, male agenda that would privilege
"individual self-realization, intellectual control, and a take-charge attitude
toward experience" over domestic issues and social concern, which were then
more popular.28 But the theme of integrating the self within society runs
throughout Hawthorne’s work. Surely Hawthorne’s fiction features egotists
who pursue "super" human knowledge that would divide them from the
community, but such a quest is ultimately damning and deforming.
Chillingworth and Rappaccini, for instance, go the route of Ethan Brand, who,
cruelly using a mortal being to test the limits of the human constitution,
commits the "sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood
with man, and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own needs."
Brand, like the other egregious hubrists, breaks "the magnetic chain of
humanity" and destroys his own soul.” Yet even Hawthorne’s sympathetic
characters are likewise punished for breaking their societal bonds: Hawthorne
celebrates Hester’s sensuous vitality which is not dulled by austere Calvinism,

but he nonetheless returns her to the settlement at the novella’s end, where she

68

makes reparation to the community she has defied through her sexual liaison
with Dimmesdale. Richard Millington’s Practicing Romance: Form and
Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction (1992) further dispels the image
of Hawthorne as a mere romance writer detached from social reality.
According to Millington, Hawthorne recognized fiction’s "crucial cultural role"
through which he critiqued society’s growing fragmentation and mercantilism,
urging instead a "vision of human connection."30

Revisionists similarly mine Emerson’s essays for evidence to condemn
the traditional canon as the handbook of self-interest. In some readings,
Emerson’s legacy is the root of ethnic discord: David Marr charges that by
teaching America to value the status of the apolitical, private citizen over all
else, Emerson has "truncated [our] capacity to recognize the excluded Other as
human."31 Joyce Warren, by lifting short lines out of longer passages, also
presents Emerson as a solipsistic egotist who shuns the social and political
world. By decontextualizing such quotes as "Trust thyself....Nothing is at last
sacred but the integrity of your mind," or positing such reductive glosses as
that the "American Scholar Address" exalts a "picture of a nation of
individuals, each acting for himself and governed only by the dictates of his
own nature," she indeed reveals a self-absorbed anti-communitarian.32 Yet
Warren’s narrow focus cannot take in Emerson’s expansiveness. The selfhood
Emerson encouraged went far beyond the petty individual to be centered in
the collective unconscious. And, as Lawrence Buell observes, the very nature

of Emerson’s frequently used medium—the lecture, a modified sermon to be

69

delivered to an audience—attests to the outward direction of his vision rather
than to a sterile or vain inwardness, as is often charged.33 Though much of
Emerson’s writing describes the proper role for the scholar as one of
contemplative passivity, Merton Sealts in Emerson on the Scholar (1992)
chronicles Emerson’s transition from private citizen to activist committed to
social reform. Sealts presents Emerson as a figure increasingly involved in the
social and political world, one eventually moved from thought to action,
particularly in protesting slavery and Indian removal.“

Mark Twain’s plan for Huck to "light out for the territory," an escape
patterned on Rip Van Winkle’s twenty-year sabbatical, has similarly come to
symbolize the rejection of society and quest for autonomy that the received
canon presumably expounds.35 Yet The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885) is not Twain’s advocacy for escape through flight; it is his plea for
reform. Huck’s solitary flight, after all, is only proposed on the last page of
the novel, the focus of which has been Huck’s grappling with the weighty
social problem of how and whether to break the law by transporting Jim to
freedom. Much like the ethnic character who is caught between two worlds,
Huck is torn by his conscience and the dictates of society. The bulk of flak
Egg is not an idyll of carefree bucolic adventure but rather a biting indictment
of corrupt society as Huck and Jim encounter it along the river. Likewise,
Satan’s revelation at the end of The Mysterious Stranger that "nothing exists.
All is a dream. God—man—the world...have no existence. Nothing exists save

empty space-and you," is not a statement of abject existentialism but a call to

70
action and an appeal for productivity, for he urges Theodor Fischer to "dream

other dreams, and better." Thus, when Huck decides to "go to Hell" rather
than to turn Jim in, or when Jim allows himself to be recaptured instead of
abandoning the wounded Tom, Twain illustrates that individual acts of
compassion can improve the condition of the "damned human race."

Criticism which (inaccurately) reduces literature to negative qualifies—
e. g. canonical fiction is not concerned with society and ethnic writing does not
glorify the individual over the group—artificially preserves and even widens
the gulf between what only seem to be America’s unrelated literatures. The
will to alter one’s destiny, the hope, albeit often unfulfilled, that the US. is the
land where this desire might be acted upon, and the conflicted conscience as
community concerns war with self-interest when one is impelled toward this
change recur in literature as disparate as, for example, Benjamin Franklin’s _The
Autobiography (1774) and Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991), both of which
feature the rub between self-invention and social constraints. But besides
isolating ethnic from mainstream writing, this polarizing methodology also
obscures commonality within pluralist fiction, implying that ethnic writers
create art in a vacuum. Certainly the varieties of ethnic literature are rooted in
distinct cultural traditions: Amy Tan’s account of four daughters’ growing up
under the strong influence of their Chinese immigrant mothers in My
Luck Club (1988) differs significantly from Anzia Yezierska’s story of Sara
Smolensky who in Bread Givers (1925) rejects her father’s orthodox Judaism to

develop both personally and professionally in society at large. Both, however,

71

describe the plight of the second generation as they alternately disappoint and
gratify their parents on their own quests for American identity. Subgroups in
the US. share many similar experiences by the fact of their minority status.
Diverse tales of migration (from foreign lands to the US. or from the rural
south to the industrial north) to flee hardship (whether cultural or religious
persecution or economic or political oppression) generally feature, in varying
degrees, accounts of alienation and loss, assimilation or cultural resistance, and
the cumulative toll or reward visited upon the individual or family who
undergoes this transplantation.

To assert meaningful parallels between canonical and ethnic texts is not
to revalorize the classical model on the false premise that it is transcendent
after all in its capacity to accommodate marginalized literature. On the
contrary, to identify significant overlap between classic American texts and
those of the diverse cultures transplanted to the US. in many respects de-
exceptionalizes—or even de-Americanizes—the classical model of literature in
the US. The theme of willed change, the conscious decision to break with the
past and begin again, as expressed in Sollors’ thesis of consent championing
over the dictates of descent, is indigenous to Americans in a land of refuge
and opportunity. Yet this "American" theme increasingly is a characteristic of
literatures throughout the destabilized, post-cold war world, as other countries
become "nations of nations" with their own influx of immigrants and asylum-

seekers.

72
Multicultural theory at its best counters the exceptionalism that can

distort American literary history on both fronts: the traditionalist position that
the classical canon transcends barriers to represent the full range of existence
in the US. and the pluralist claim that primordial differences inexorably divide
ethnic literature from the mainstream and necessitate separate consideration
The revisionist Heath Anthology of American Literature, for instance, neither
privileges the white, male, elite northeastern point of view nor sequesters
minorities under a celebration of essentialist difference; by refiguring the
standard "crippling habits of chronology/'3“5 it wrests the traditional and
marginal away from their exclusionary rationales to present a diverse but
integrated chronicle of American literature. Once neutralized, the
supercharged terms and categories that have presented American literary
production as an undertaking primarily of the WASP writer lose their ability
to vaunt and pigeon-hole: individualism is no longer the primum mobile of
American literature, and ethnic writing becomes more than an expression of
subgroup identities.

To break the entrenched modes of perception that automatically
reinforce conventional thought and foster blind spots, Annette Kolodny
advocates a "defarniliarization of the familiar"-a moratorium on the study of
standard texts and criticism in favor of an immersion in non-canonical texts
and recent theory. Thus, broken of conditioned responses and old habits of
mind, a reader can appreciate the non-traditional and re-approach the formerly

familiar with a fresh receptivity. The result can be new decipherings:

73

"interconnections will appear that had not before been visible. Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s ’representative man’ may be identifiable in the recurrent self-
inventions of Frederick Douglas, while Emerson’s hoped-for American Scholar
may be discovered in the intellectual independence of Margaret Fuller."37

This balanced perspective allows the critic of American literature to
fuse, in a sense, the dual vantage points of Jonathan Swift’ 5 traveller, Lemuel
Gulliver. For while Gulliver examined the Brobdingnagians up close and the
Lilliputians from a distance, he saw neither group accurately. A divided focal
point in fact chronically distorts the Americanist’s vision. Emphasis on what
sets ethnic writing apart from mainstream fiction gives necessary credence to
this body of literature, just as an eye trained on distinctively "American"
aspects of art once helped separate this tradition from the English; but
attention to commonality is important as well, since the most accurate vision
perceives at once the fine detail and the broad stroke.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese enunciates the soundness of this dual and yet
unified perspective in "Between Individualism and Fragmentation: American
Culture and the New Literary Studies of Race and Gender." She is committed
to a common American culture, but not one that mandates conformity; she
endorses heterogeneity but not to the point of social atomization. She thus
chastises extremists on both sides of the culture war: those who would ignore
"otherness" and those who sequester themselves behind "difference." The
integrity of American culture, she maintains, is comprised of—not fragmented

by—its diverse parts.

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...to be an American means something more than to belong to a

specific group of Americans. To be an American is forthrightly to

acknowledge a collective identity that simultaneously transcends

and encompasses our disparate identities and communities.

Unless we acknowledge our diversity, we allow the silences of

the received tradition to become our own. Unless we sustain the

ideal of a common culture, we reduce all culture to personal

experience and sacrifice the very concept of being an

American.38

Cultural theorists who possess this "integrity of memory"39 view
conunonality and difference as part and parcel of an American identity; their
broad-ranging and yet penetrating vision takes in both the general and the
particular in American literature. This expansive mode of seeing makes
apparent paradoxes comprehensible, such as that consensus can reside in
discord. Warner Berthoff, as a case in point, invokes such present-day
malignities as "continuity" and "cultural universal," but the theme he identifies
as constant throughout American literary history is, in fact, discontinuity. He
identifies as central to the American character the impulse to disrupt the flow
of time in order to begin anew, a theme whose far-reaching applicability can
encompass American diversity.

But Berthoff’s emphasis on the American’s radical disrespect for cultural
continuousness, rooted in the country’s originating covenants which describe

the conditions of voluntary rupture and renewal-John Winthrop’s 1630 Arbella

75

sermon, the Declaration of Independence, the US. Constitution, to name a few-
-seems to reiterate R.W.B. Lewis’s narrow thesis of the American Adam, that
self-created being who steps out of the past into a fresh new existence. In
"Literature in the American Situation," in fact, Berthoff draws heavily on the
same nineteenth-century figures that Lewis examined. But while Lewis fixes
his attention on the product of such renewal, Berthoff focuses on the process:
the "exemption from history...[the] escape from either continuity or
consequence in the cycles of elected experience."‘°

Berthoff’s emphasis on reinvention as an act of will, a conscious choice
to begin anew, puts the humble immigrant of much ethnic fiction into the
company of the nineteenth-century American Adam, for central to the
immigration story is the choice to forsake an old existence for a new life which
promises control over one’s destiny through personal liberty and release from
rigid class structures. Even the more tangible aspects of ethnicity-broken
English, foreign customs, the practice of a non-Protestant faith, such remnants
of the old world which separated the immigrant from R.W.B. Lewis’s fresh,
new, representative American-would join the two figures under Berthoff’s
schema. For while Lewis perceives Adam as "happily bereft of ancestry,
untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritance of family and race,“1 he is
not as free of the past as Lewis presumes; history is the force that impels him
toward a new beginning. Even in Leslie Fiedler’s appraisal of the canonical
protagonist, where Adam is an orphan shorn of family ties or a Faustian figure

who flees from home and thus from the inferior position of child or

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subordinate,‘2 the past nonetheless exerts itself in the figure of the parent,
that absent presence whose earlier, unseen action sets the story in motion.
Fiedler’s catalogue of literary runaways, orphans, and victims of abusive
parents establishes fatherlessness and strained family relations as fixtures of
American literature. Early fiction features unsponsored offspring in Susanna
Rowson’s Charlotte’s Daughter, or The Three Qphans (1793), where Lucy
Temple, a bastard girl, would marry her biological brother, and Ar_thr1r_
_Merm (1799), where Charles Brockden Brown’s title character is alienated by
his father’s marriage to a lusty young servant girl and leaves home, ill-
prepared for the city to which he escapes. James Fenimore Cooper’s celibate
woodsman rejects his baptismal name, and thus his parentage, to be known
alternately as Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder, and Leatherstocking. Later, in
Hawthorne’s fiction, suffering at the hands of a parent is routine: Giacomo
Rappaccini uses his daughter as the subject in his deadly experiments; Hester’s
father commits her to a loveless marriage with Chillingworth, himself a
demented father figure; generations of Pyncheons suffer a curse first provoked
by a villainous family founder in The Hog of me Seven Gables (1851); the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale never acknowledges Pearl as his daughter; and
Miriam Schaeffer of The Marble Faun (1860) hopes to evade not only the reach
of papal authority but the memory of her own father, with whom she shares
an incestuous secret. Melville’s Isabel in firm (1852) is a bastard, and in
Moby Dick (1851) Ishmael signs on as a whaler to escape a cruel stepmother;

Billy Budd has no family ties, and Redburn is an orphan sadly dependent on

77
his deceased father’s out-of-date guidebook to lead him through the horrors of

Liverpool. Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym takes to the sea to escape his parents,
while Crane’s Maggie eventually drowns herself after she is turned out by
both her lover and her drunken, abusive parents.

Clearly, orphans and disaffected offspring abound, yet parental
influence is felt all the more; Robert Con Davis’s The Fictional Father:
Lacanian Readings of the Text observes that the influence of the father is
overwhelmingly found in the trace of his absence.‘3 Fiedler’s thesis of literary
fatherlessness actually attests to America’s obsession with paternity and
genealogy, despite the protestations of characters (or authors). Fiedler’s
attendant proposition that American literature tells the story of adulthood
postponed as protagonists flee society and its commitments of marriage and
parenthood further proves the central role of family: the degree to which
marriage and parenthood are assiduously avoided attests to the weightiness of
these social institutions. Additionally, so conditioned to life within the family
structure is the American hero that even when happily freed from the confines
of parents and siblings, he eagerly forms a makeshift family. Fiedler’s roll of
orphans doubles as a list of surrogate parents and siblings: Jim is alternately
father and mother to Huck, much as Chingachgook and Uncas are Natty’s
father and child, respectively. Ishmael and Queequeg bond as brothers and
even as husband and wife at times; Hawthorne’s Roman travellers-Miriam,
Hilda, Donatello, and Kenyon-both natural and willful orphans as well as

fugitives from authority, form a family among themselves.

78

The grand Adamic figures of Cooper’s novels, Emerson's essays, and
Whitrnan’s poetry share with the humbler foreigners of ethnic literature this
American penchant for discontinuity and renewal, the desire to throw off the
eternal yoke of the past. All are determined to recreate themselves by leaving
home or renouncing their origins, and yet none is ever completely free from
history. Adam and ethnic immigrant alike are American antinomians who
reject received lessons in favor of free choice, unaware that they nonetheless
repeat the pattern of incessant change.“

Berthoff asserts that Americans ignore history, Sollors that they
disrespect heredity; the basis for both of these related claims is choice
unconstrained by dictates of the bloodline. Theoretically, the US. grants its
citizens the opportunity to mold their fate regardless of their origins. The
promise that consent rather than descent would dictate life in the new world
drew English laborers to colonial America, where, after serving the terms of
their bond, they became property holders. Such freedom has spurred
voluntary migrations to the US. ever since those indentured servants achieved
social and economic mobility. This power of consent over descent also drove
the civil rights movement, as a people fought for their right to be judged on
"the content of their character," thus on the basis of their moral and ethical
expressions rather than on the color of their skin, a trait determined solely by
descent. The presumed preeminence of willful behavior over genetic
determinism also underpins the argument for lifting the military ban on

homosexuals; many proponents of change argue that conduct, what one

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chooses to do, provides a fairer gauge of rectitude than the accident of one’s
sexual orientation.

There are obvious and important exceptions to the rule of freedom of
choice as the official American modus operandi. The dictates of biology, in the
form of skin color and gender, have determined the course of many lives in
the US. Africans who were enslaved and exported to the American colonies
did not leave their homelands by choice. Furthermore, the "one drop of blood"
rule that segregated and disenfranchised blacks until the middle of the
twentieth century proves that the social code remained firmly rooted in
genetics; in the case of the African American, an achieved identity was not
allowed to pre-empt an ascribed one.‘5 Nor did Native Americans, pushed
west under the US. government removal policy, elect their migration. And
while American Indians often deemed heredity superior to rational choice (as
in the belief of some that leadership was passed on through bloodlines and
thus the reluctance to elect tribal chairmen as the US. government had
instructed“), those who embraced Anglo—conformity programs in the Indian
schools and sought to remake themselves as white citizens were not later
accepted into the dominant culture. American Indians were driven back to the
reservations by their extremely low employment rates in the mainstream
trades for which such schools as the Carlisle or Haskell Institutes had trained
them.”

Women and children seem the other obvious exceptions to the rule of

freedom of choice and expression of will in American life. Many were

80
immigrants and are thus rightfully included in the ranks of those who

voluntarily transplanted themselves to America, but they were often reluctant
travellers, powerless over their destinies as the family patriarch charted the old
world exodus. Yet just as Annette Kolodny finds in The Land Before Her
(1984) that frontier women had their own dreams of westward resettlement
and were receptive to change, many immigrant women were similarly resilient
and resourceful. Social historian Dorothy Weatherford recounts that among
the Bohemians, women were the advance scouts who travelled alone from
Czechoslovakia to America to work in cigar-making shops and to establish
living quarters before sending for their husbands and children. Irish and
English Canadian women also came unaccompanied in large numbers.‘8

Helen Barolini’s novel Umbertina (1979) attests to the woman as initiator of
change. Her title character is the matriarch who orchestrates her family’s flight
from their impoverished Calabrian village so that they might pursue a better
life in America; she remains a spur to action for her extended family
throughout the four-generation saga.

Immigrant children, though initially little more than their parents’
baggage in the trek to the US, are actually the true representations of
American choice once they are transported. Lodged in the facsimile of the old
world which their parents tried to recreate but beckoned by the new one, the
offspring of immigrants frequently sacrificed their ethnic heritage to forge their
own identity. In Harry Mark Petrakis’s Lion at My Heart (1959), for instance,

immigrant Angelo Varinakis intends for his sons to marry Greek women so

81
that they will continue the traditions of his beloved homeland. But his eldest

son Mike, a US. army veteran of World War II, foils those plans. In love with
Sheila Cleary, a woman of Irish descent who is as Americanized as he, Mike
scoffs at his father’s old-fashioned ideas: "That old country crap is for the
birds. If you love a girl, it don’t make any difference whether she is damn
Greek or not. " Angelo views his son’s interest in Sheila as the renunciation of
heritage; he maintains that for Mike to marry a non-Greek would be to "forget
church and house you born in. Forget memory of mother. Forget father and
brother and everything.“9 Mike nonetheless breaks with his father over the
marriage, and the two men never reconcile. Yet those who chose acculturation
rather than total Americanization were also arbiters of their identity as they
forged a compromise between the competing demands of descent and Anglo-
conformity, selecting which American and old country aspects to incorporate
into their new lives. Such is the case with Amy Tan’s daughters in Ih_e_]ey
Luck Club (1989), whose American lives are enriched by lessons learned from
their Chinese immigrant mothers. Furthermore, hope of change thrOugh self-
empowerment also underlies accounts of the failed American dream; the
revocation of seemingly proffered opportunity drives such tales of prejudice
and social injustice as Michael Gold’s lews without Money (1930), a bitter
lament of ruined lives on New York’s impoverished Lower East Side.

Fulfilled or broken, the promise that consent rather than descent shapes
lives in the US. pervades canonical and marginal literature alike. Belief in the

opportunity to determine the course of one’s life drew immigrants to America,

82

and it fuels the contest between self-reliance and social responsibility. The
perceived right of both native- and foreign-born Americans to exercise their
elective power as they are seemingly released from the dictates of the past
underlies those themes which Berthoff explains are integral to all "literature in
the American situation": choice is central to both the "covenants of settlement
and community" and the "fortunes of liberated and unsponsored selfhood."5°

Berthoff’s integrative view of fiction is the antithesis of much pluralist
criticism. Under his gaze, the self and society are not torn asunder to be
featured separately in different literatures, as determined by an author’s
ethnicity or what some might judge to be a lack thereof; instead, the
unyielding impulse for choice and change sets off a struggle between the self
and society that ranges throughout all literature in America. Andrew
Delbanco, on a tack like Berthoff’s that is similarly integrationist and yet
attuned to diversity, perceives immigration as the paradigm for American life.
He maintains that risk, renewal, and the attendant need to balance the
competing demands of self and society when the newcomer is faced with
increased personal liberty define the American experience. Delbanco’s model
is further integrationist as he extends that paradigm of willful new beginnings
from the Puritans, who fled Anglican England for Massachusetts in the
seventeenth century, to the most recent immigrants from battle-scarred
southeast Asia.

Delbanco’s connection between early WASP settlers and the immigrants

who later suffered under Anglo-centric nativism (as well as his lack of

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attention to the persecuted indigenous peoples, a justified criticism) often
strikes revisionists as sacrilege. Yet many reformers are unprepared to
recognize the human vulnerability of the Puritans and instead construe the
early colonists as flat figures or rabid idealogues. The basis of many theorists’
interest in seventeenth-century Anglo Americans is condemnation: J. Hillis
Miller for the Puritans having "massacred the Indians and established the self-
righteous religion and politics that determined American ideology"; Bercovitch
for their having used "the Biblical myth of exodus and conquest to justify
imperialism before the act"; Ann Kibbey for their having subordinated their
religious beliefs to the goal of "communicating the absolute rightness of their
own social ideals [through] extreme act[s] of prejudice [and] mass killing."5‘
Francis Fukuyama places Anglo Americans beyond the scope of his discussion
of ethnic groups in the US; he nullifies the deracinated circumstances of their
old world exodus by asserting that the English were "never immigrants or
outsiders....They were, rather, the dominant social group."52

Oscar Handlin certainly exaggerates when he exclaims in the opening of
his Pulitzer prize history The Uprooted (1951, 1973) that "immigrants WERE
American history"53 [his emphasis]. If immigration implies a willful
relocation, Native Americans and African Americans are then effectively
excluded from Handlin’s view of history. Yet the Puritans, as America’s first
deliberate immigrants, set in motion that cycle of continuous discontinuity that
would subsequently propel massive waves of voluntary immigrants to the US.

who ultimately account for the majority of the population (though of course

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not all who share this predominant heritage of relocation by choice belong to
the dominant culture). An American newcomer’s decision to change his or her
life and the conununal repercussions of this willful act, despite the variables of
national origins and dates of entry, link immigrant writing as disparate as John
Winthrop’s sermon A Modell of Christian Chariry, which he delivered aboard
the _ArbeLle while en route to Massachusetts Bay in 1630, and Le

Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989), the account of
her flight from Vietnam to the US.“ Both texts, one quintessentially WASP
and the other of dual alienation as female and Asian in America, reveal the
complicated negotiations between the self and the group in a strange and new
environment.

Winthrop’s sermon, hailed as "the first great communitarian statement
in American literature,"55 actually appeals to self-interest in order to achieve
the cohesion necessary to erect the "city on a hill," the model for succeeding
ecclesiastical plantations in America and Europe. While he cites love for one
another as the bonding agent that will unite the New England Puritans as
though a close-knit family or single functioning human body, the way to this
harmony is self-love:

...the Lord love the creature, soe farre as it hath any of his Image

in it; he loves his elect because they are like himselfe, he beholds

them in his beloved sonne. Soe a mother loves her childe,

because shee thoroughly conceives a resemblance of herself in it.

Thus it is between the members of Christ. Eache discernes, by

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the worke of the Spirit, his owne Image and resemblance in

another, and therefore cannot but love him as he loves himself.56
Winthrop’s message is not self-denial as much as it is self-expansion. Love of
humanity is inextricably tied to love of the self, in whom the "other" is
mirrored. The success of Calvinist polity in New England hinged on a series
of choices: unfallen Adam’s original bond with God, which was the covenant
of works whereby man promised but failed to regulate his life according to the
law of nature; the covenant of grace, in which God promised Abraham that He
would grant salvation to those who believed, and which replaced that earlier,
broken pact;57 and the anguished decision of the individual immigrants to flee
to America where they might retain and perfect their religion, which in Europe
was becoming a mere regimen of self-discipline or a savvy business practice.58
Yet, ironically, pivotal to these voluntary covenants is the agreement to limit
the freedom to choose, to keep the self in check by thwarting the
individualistic impulse toward dissension or non-conformity with a
commitment to the common purpose. Personal concern, however, does not fall
by the wayside: for though the group could save the Church, people were
saved individually.

Hayslip’s book, as well as many others that deal with emigration and
resettlement, recapitulates this symbiotic relationship between individual and
group interests as a new identity is forged. America is a safe haven for
Hayslip after she flees the Viet Cong. Yet later as an American citizen visiting

her homeland, she longs to remain in Vietnam and rejoin her native culture

86
and her extended family. Love for her sons and the opportunities available to

them in the US, however, convince her to return to America, a selfless yet
self-gratifying act since her children’s welfare nourishes her pride and sense of
accomplishment.

While Delbanco respects the hardship and commitment of the New
England Puritans, he posits their significance for American history not in any
inherent Anglo transcendence but in the rather mundane fact that they
initiated the pattern of willful relocation that later immigrants followed. In
fact, far from vaunting their exceptionalism, his text The Puritan Ordeal (1989)
takes full note of the Calvinist settlers’ human limitations, presenting them first
and foremost as foreigners beset by fear and uncertainty in a strange
environment. He further de-emphasizes the especially American nature of this
immigration theme begun with the Anglo colonists by regarding their
movement out of the native land as a broad pattern of general human
behavior: as life-cycles evolve through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood,
offspring naturally, regardless of nationality, move away from the safety of
home into the unknown world. Yet Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart.
Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985) returns to American
possession this theme of removal and relocation. He concludes that no culture
evinces as strong a tendency as the American drive to sever family ties as one
generation distinguishes itself from the previous one; the American Dream is
lost, in effect, if children merely recreate their parents’ lives and assume their

same socio-econornic station. He finds as peculiarly American the ready

87

acceptance of an offspring’s departure for distant locations to pursue
ambition.59

Placing the WASP beyond the pale of ethnicity as many multiculturalists
do disallows the common ground that ranges throughout the human
consciousness as it evolves over time in America."0 In the spirit of dissensus,
descent-based ethnicity "separates Americans of different ethnic backgrounds
and most especially all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants...from all non-
WASPs...[and] assumes that there is no shared history and no human
empathy)"1 But while some contemporary ideological critics employ
"ethnicity" as a means of unreconcilable division that juxtaposes a myriad of
non-Anglo subgroups against a bland, homogenous mainstream, Werner
Sollors is egalitarian in his use of the term. He observes that contrastive uses
of the word denote both a feared alien and an attractive alternative, yet he
rests with a definition of ethnicity as a marker erected between groups. These
cultural constructions—moral, mental, social, and aesthetic—function as
moveable boundaries. No group possesses fixed borders or an essential
ethnicity; rather each constructs its content as a means of social distancing or is
the recipient of a label likewise intended to segregate.“2 Ethnicity then is
unfailingly renewable and democratic because it can apply to every group in
America. This inclusive definition of ethnicity is not a procrustean attempt to
forge a uniform. history, for Sollors concedes that America’s consent-based
cultures also reveal significant differences among them, just as Delbanco

cautions that similarities among immigrant groups must not be exaggerated.“’3

88
But while ethnic differences are real, they need not impede mutual

understanding nor limit the recognition of greater syncretisms and cultural
convergences,“ such as that voluntary relocation and reinvention is exactly
the history that many Americans share.

Construing immigration as a willed decision to leave home and begin
one's life anew makes possible a comprehensible narration of paradigmatic
human events."5 To examine this phenomenon at its inception, in the
immigrant roots of Puritan New England, is to uncover the cultural interplays
that unite a good number of Americans across the ages. Differences in
national origins and accompanying cultural traditions remain, of course, yet
they become points of distinction among broader overlap and similarity.

The metaphor for immigrants as a chosen people being led out of exile
into the American promised land recurs throughout ethnic literature.
Interpreting their migration figurally, the Puritans were biblical types on a
divine mission to prepare the way for Christ: as they increasingly saw
themselves as distinct from the old world, America became the "new Canaan"
and the "new Israel," its leaders often described as "new Moses" or "John the
Baptist. "“ Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish writers similarly
invoked ancient Hebrew millennialist rhetoric to describe their fortunate
journey to America, as Mary Antin does in The Promised Lane (1912) and
Sidney N yburg in The Chosen People (1917). Writers from other ethnic groups
also employ this theme of exodus and deliverance, though the well-being these

novels celebrate is decidedly more material or psychological than the religious

89
health which Puritan writing examined: Stuart David Engstrand’s They

Sought for Paradise (1930) recounts the eventual fulfillment of the lives of his
Swedish immigrants; in The Free Man (1943), Conrad Richter tells of a German
indentured servant who comes to prosper in America; a Greek community in
Mary Vardoulakis’s Gold in the Streets (1945) transplants itself from Crete to a
Massachusetts milltown, where it soon flourishes; a hardworking Sicilian
immigrant ascends the economic ladder in Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pflm’
(1964); Evalina Chao’s Gates of Grace (1985) is the story of a Chinese family’s
upward mobility in the US. In addition to these portentous titles, "golden
mountain" or "beautiful land" are frequent names for America, particularly
among characters in Chinese-American novels.” Even those novels which tell
the grim side of immigration employ the paradise motif, as they invert it to
convey disenchantment and frustration: No Adam in Eden (1967) is Grace de
Repentigny Metalious’s woeful tale of a French-Canadian family’s
disintegration in a Massachusetts milltown; Terez Stibran’s The Speets are not
Paved with Gold (1961) describes a Hungarian-American family’ 5 hardship
and disillusionment in Cleveland.

Exodus, which of course is integral to any immigration story, is an
irrefutably constant strain throughout the history of the ancient Jews, the New
England Puritans, and the foreigners who came to America in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. But persecution attendant upon minority status, a
related theme of the immigrant experience, is frequently overlooked in the case

of the Puritans, and it is a slight or omission which further isolates the Anglo

90

American from the national history of immigration and seals the later ethnics
in exceptionalism. Claims that English culture transported easily to America
and dominated the land without challenge or competition“3 disregard the
pressures exerted on the Anglo immigrants. It is true that the Puritans had no
intention of absorbing the culture they found in America, a position that later
immigrant groups could not reasonably take (except those small religious sects
which sought to isolate themselves in enclaves, as Marcus Bach depicts in his

1949 novel, The Dream Gate about a community of German Hutterites

 

relocating in South Dakota). But to assume that they easily transplanted their
English ways or met no obstacles or demands from competing cultures
wrongly diminishes their experience as immigrants. Such a diminution
ironically magnifies their migration beyond the realm of human nature by
implying that as religious missionaries the Puritans were morally impervious
to the conflicts and temptations that beset later immigrant groups. But the
record of the Puritans as insecure yet hopeful mortals rather than as unearthly,
arrogant, and moralistic "saints" overlaps significantly with the sagas of later
American immigrants. (In fact, Puritan use of "saint" designated their humble
status as members only of the visible church of striving sinners, those
uncertain of but longing for membership in the invisible church of God’s
elect”) In fact, the ranks of the colonists were reduced not just through
sickness, warfare with Native Americans, or return migrations, but through
assimilation into Indian society. Native American culture proved seductive for

many whites: incidents of settlers fleeing their villages to live with Indians in

91

the wilderness or to recreate that way of life on their own are noteworthy, as
are accounts of women who refused to rejoin the white community when they
were "rescued" from Indian captivity.’o

Furthermore, like the Jews who were expelled from Russian shtetls, the
Armenians who escaped massacre by the Turks, or, in a more general sense,
the European and Asian peasant classes who fled hunger and poverty, all to
seek refuge in America, the Puritans were a persecuted minority before they
ever left home. As Protestants seeking to purify the Church of England of
Roman Catholic vestiges approved by the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559,
Puritans were enemies of the state. Animosity within their ranks divided them
as well: Presbyterians believed in state-mandated membership in a church
comprised of geographical units and overseen by a governing hierarchy; in
contrast, Congregationalists held that a member’ s voluntary commitment to a
covenant with God was the basis for self-governing churches. These two
factions, which opposed each other as well as the Episcopal Anglicans, also
clashed with Puritan Separatists, those who committed what was tantamount
to treason by blatantly breaking with the national Church to found the openly
Congregational colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.71 Perry Miller
maintains that the stress typically exerted on an outgroup never subsided for
the Puritans, but rather intensified after the ostensibly Presbyterian removal to
Massachusetts Bay in 1630. European Calvinists saw New England’s covert
Congregationalists as betraying the Reformation; as the old world grew

skeptical, hostile, and eventually indifferent to the colonial contingent, the New

92

Englanders’ "errand into the wilderness" lost its meaning, both in Europe and
in America. What remained was an overwhelming sense of loneliness, a fear
that they were forsaken not only by their church in England but by God as
well.”2

Although Perry Miller describes the Puritan outgroup status as ongoing,
it persisted, in part, by the New Englanders’ own design, for it lent their
undertaking a useful cohesiveness. Before emigrating, the Puritans formed a
solid coalition against Church corruption; they were "pressed into comradeship
by their sense of difference....forged as a spiritual movement in a minority
experience)“ But alone in New England and an ocean away from their
persecutors, they lost their sense of solidarity. Fearing their own dissolution
and weakened common purpose, the foundering Puritans sought a cause
around which they could again rally; they found it in persecuting Indians,
Antinomians, Quakers, and suspected witches. By viewing themselves as
different from and threatened by heathens and dissenters, they temporarily
shored up their identity. Ultimately, though, they lost the essence of the faith,
for sin, in the early Calvinist view, was estrangement from God, not something
as crude as evil located in another."

Much multicultural writing reveals a similar indebtedness to the label of
"other." While ethnic literature attests to the hostility and hardship endured by
those who differ from the cultural mainstream, it illustrates as well that those
who define themselves oppositionally often accept and utilize the animosity

directed at them as outsiders, for ostracism can preserve a subgroup’s

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solidarity. Many Armenian-American writers who recall the Turkish massacre
and mourn the irrecoverable loss of their native land celebrate the trauma they
endured as immigrants in America. In The Dove Brings Peace (1944), for
instance, Richard Hagopian credits the poverty that his Armenian immigrants
experience in their Massachusetts shoe factory town with keeping family
members dependent on each other and connecting the entire ethnic community
to their cultural traditions. Hunger is the overwhelming sensation that Levon,
Hagopian’s narrator, recalls from his childhood. Ill health and old age prohibit
his parents from holding consistent employment, so Levon and his siblings are
responsible for supporting the family. But when Mary, the eldest daughter
who has excelled in school, gets the opportunity to pursue a lucrative career in
the larger community, her father forbids her from taking the job, a refusal
which the narrator affirms. Though the family desperately needs the income
she could provide, the possibility that a profession might lure one of their own
away from the Armenian enclave looms too great. Similarly, when Levon’s
brother Reuben wants to marry May, a woman from outside the tight
Armenian circle, his parents force an end to the relatinship: Though the
intended bride is, like Reuben, working-class and presumably of immigrant
stock, she is unsuitable because she is not Armenian. The entire family is
relieved by the break-up, as they recall the disgrace that a distant relative
brought upon his family by marrying an Irish woman. Ironically, America
protects the Armenian immigrants from Turkish genocide, yet the freedom and

security which the US. provides threaten to weaken their culture through

94

dilution. To be labelled as "other" and thus separated from the dominant
culture grants ethnics an effective means to reinforce and preserve their own
distinct identity, as they in turn apply that label to all who do not belong to
their subgroup.

This anti-assirnilationist theme, prevalent in many Armenian novels75
and recurring widely in the literature of other immigrant groups, seems
antithetical to the American agenda of breaking with the past to forge a new
existence. Yet as fervently as American immigrants since the seventeenth
century have embraced the prospect of renewal, they have also sought to
mitigate its countervailing mandate, change. Certainly immigrants welcomed
the fresh start that America offered, and many were eager to throw off the
bonds of the past. But the drawing card for many newcomers was not the
opportunity to forget their old lives, but the chance to live those same lives in
the new world, where they and their children could live them better.
Consistent with this preservationist vein, the Great Migration from Europe to
the American colonies was not undertaken as a radical act of schism but rather
as a crusade to protect and purify the corporate Church by eliminating its
traces of Catholic or Episcopal practice. Before setting sail for the new world,
Puritans took vows of conformity to the Church of England. Since a break
with the established Church would brand the Puritans as subversive, many
were covert Congregationalists and ostensibly Presbyterian. And while at the
time of departure many were separatists at heart and then later in fact, they

always believed themselves adherents to the true church, its sole guardians.

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America allowed them to be intolerant of the tolerance which ranged in Britain
and threatened the dissolution of the Church. Under suspicion of separatism,
new world Puritans regularly had to reassure their English counterparts that
they were not deserters." But the threat of dissension loomed not just
between the old world and the new, but within New England itself.
Winthrop’s Aid]; sermon explicitly forbade heresy and nonconformity in the
ecclesiastical Massachusetts colony, yet the ranks of the settlers remained
vulnerable to division. When Thomas Hooker took his congregation from
Boston to Connecticut, a change which according to Perry Miller owed more to
Hooker’s need to escape John Cotton’s immense popularity than to ecclesiastic
rebelliousness, the move fanned fears of nonconformity and secession.

Although Perry Miller repudiates the notion that Hooker erected a
democratic settlement in Connecticut and argues that the Hartford Settlement
was in fact a theocracy consistent with the Boston model,’7 individual
empowerment eventually spelled the end of English Calvinism in America.
The Puritans had left England not as bold rebels breaking with the Church, but
as conservatives hoping to save it from British leniency and to keep themselves
from settling into an increasingly mercantilistic society. Andrew Delbanco
explains that their preservationist efforts ultimately failed.

The founding of New England was a retreat from the eruption of

the modern self—the self as a disciplined being committed to

vocation, to ambition, and to self-definition....Upon their arrival

they began-with pain and eloquent lament-to succumb to their

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sense of failure in their project of escape. They became moderns

in the sense that their deference to the workings of a traditional

society and to an all-disposing God receded before the ascension

of their identities as self-governing individuals.’8

Immigrant Puritans became Colonists and then Americans, softening the
harsh Dortian Calvinism they brought with them from Europe as their piety
turned into worldliness. The covenantal relationship between God and the
redeemed, important to Augustinian piety but even more so with the passage
of time, complicates this issue of increased self-mastery and its corresponding
limits on God’s sovereignty. The belief that man entered the covenant of grace
as God’s peer or partner imputes a contradictory measure of agency to man?9
God alone can make man receptive to grace, but man must partake of the
covenant willingly."0 And though man was utterly powerless before God, he
fell into depravity by his own choice and through his own actions; man was
thus solely responsible for his own corruption but utterly incapable of affecting
his own salvation. Under New England ecclesiastical polity, which, on the
congregational model, regarded an individual’s voluntary bond with God as a
more solid church foundation than any central corporate authority, the bounds
of human initiative were broadened. The self gained ascendancy even among
those holding opposing viewpoints on human efficacy. Thomas Hooker,
though not recanting his faith in unconditional and seemingly arbitrary
predestination, preached a doctrine of preparation by which the elect readied

themselves for salvation: through introspective meditation the chosen

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prepared for their predetermined justification, thus "turning toward God"3‘

before conversion actually occurred. Antinomians, perhaps best represented
by Anne Hutchinson, condemned this preparationist human agency as heresy.
Yet despite Hutchinson’s charge against the preparationist’s emphasis on a
renewed covenant of works—on pious behavior as evidence of justification—she
too elevated the role of the self in conversion. Stressing the elect’ 5 personal
and immediate communion with the Holy Spirit, she denied "that the ministry
was needed as an intervening ’means of grace’ between God and man."82 So
while Hutchinson refuted Hooker’s stress on the active role of the sinner over
the efficacy of God’s grace, she still empowered the self by eliminating the
mediating clergy from a saint’ 5 direct communication with God.

Although Jonathan Edwards later strove to reconfirm the tenets of
man’s innate depravity and complete impotence by insisting that a man’s
heart-based inclination toward God arose not from individual impetus or free
will but by God’s design, human agency, of course, won out. The voice of the
governed gained strength, eventually appealing for democracy guided by
man’s right reason. In his 1645 speech to the high court John Winthrop had
pressed for the subjection of inferiors to superiors, warning that natural liberty
turned man into a depraved brute”. John Wise later subverted that image in
"Vindication of the Government of New England Churches," contending
instead that by the "original liberty instamped upon his rational nature" he was
a "creature which God has made and furnished essentially with many

ennobling immunities which render him the most august animal in the

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world!“ Again stressing the covenantal terms, Wise explains that man
willingly resigns his natural liberty to a government which in turn respects
and guards that freedom, as it "cultivate[s] humanity and promotels] the
happiness of all, and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty,
estate, honor, etc."85 Though the purpose of immigrating was to safeguard
the true Church, Puritanism in America became the march toward the
empowered self, the antithesis of Calvin’s impotent man prostrate before a
righteous but unknowable God.

Just as the Puritan migration was a conservative but ultimately failed
effort to save the Church and stave off the emerging self, Jewish immigrants of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries looked to America as a refuge
where they could practice and preserve the religious and cultural customs that
were endangered in Europe. Before the founding of Israel, Judaism was more
compatible with life in America than in most other lands; Jews in the US.
found safety from pogroms and the opportunity to profess their faith openly,
though they have never been completely free from anti-Semitism. Yet in
America, freedom o_f religion often became freedom ESL“. religion. Many

novels, such as Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers recount a break both with

 

Judaism and the Jewish community as immigrants or their descendants pursue

individual, American identities. In the New York ghetto of Bread Givers

 

survival is a group effort. The Smolensky women—Sara along with her three
sisters and their mother—combine their labors to feed and shelter the family.

In the worst of times they fall back on the support of sympathetic neighbors.

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That their shared sacrifice frees Reb Moisheh Smolensky, Sara’s father, from

the workaday world so that he can devote himself completely to the Talmud is
meant to grant them vital religious sustenance as Jews. But Sara grows bitter
over the burdens placed on her by her family’s needs and her father’s strict
religious observance. Her plaintive, "I want to do something. I want some
day to make myself for a person and come among people,""‘5 becomes a

steady refrain until she finally rejects her faith and her home to mold an
independent future. She leaves the Jewish enclave to pursue her training as a
teacher, in part modelling herself after her gentile classmates.

Even those immigrants who fled oppression other than religious came to
America to preserve what was threatened in the old world, most often their
family unity and their continued means to a livelihood. Oscar Handlin,
though he praises the fortitude of the immigrant, has tacitly conceded to the
view of the foreigner as "backward men of beaten nations." He emphasizes
the extreme hardship and deprivation which nearly extinguished the peasant
classes in Ireland, Southern Italy, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe during the mid-

to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, he marvels at their
successful escape. Thomas Bodnar, however, revises Handlin’s thesis as he
describes the immigrants not as the "uprooted" but as the "transplanted." His
shift in metaphor softens the harsh conditions of the relocation ordeal.
Whereas Handlin contends that many Europeans would have perished if they
had not left, Bodnar argues that those who emigrated chose to from a position

of not insignificant strength. The truly indigent, he explains, were those

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unable to leave. Some immigrants were artisans or small-scale farmers, while
many others were marginal owners or landless workers saving to acquire
property or accumulate capital. Most left for the US. when European
capitalism intruded upon their household economies and threatened the small
but vital enterprises, such as raising crops or weaving cloth, that were a
family’s financial mainstay or their source for necessary supplemental income.
Urban industrialization undercut the independent artisan by flooding rural
markets with cheaper manufactured goods, just as the shift to large-scale
surplus agriculture jeopardized subsistence farming. The decision to emigrate
in response to this encroaching modern capitalist system was more pragmatic
than desperate, as Handlin wrongly maintains, for it supplied those who
departed with the opportunity to protect their status or to increase their
chances for bettering it. Emigrants often hoped to make enough money "to
return and increase their holdings...[and] to achieve a more respectable status
as self-sufficient owners or even craftsmen in their homeland)” When many
decided not to return, it was often because in the US. they could more
effectively recreate and improve on what small but nonetheless real success
they had known before emigrating. Bodnar argues that in the immigrant
mind, a sustained or improved standard of living was inextricably linked to
the preservation of the family household, that unit which many lived by in
Europe, Asia, and Central America”: "As long as individuals were concerned

about insuring familial and household survival they would continue to be

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realistic. They would do whatever had to be done to meet changing economic

realities, including a move to America!"9

Upon making that move, immigrants initially found, contrary to popular
notions of fragile families being ripped apart by the demands of the wage
economy, that industry in the US. was quite hospitable to the kinship
networks which had operated in the old world. Bodnar explains that the
collective enterprise of the family and neighborhood adapted to and thrived
under the marketplace economy.

Family members were continually instructed in the necessity of

sharing and notions of reciprocity were constantly reinforced.

Parents, children, boarders, and others who shared particular

households were all assigned a series of duties and obligations.

By working together, pooling limited resources, and muting

individual inclinations, families attempted to assemble the

resources sufficient for economic survival and, occasionally, for

an improvement in their standard of living.90
As immigrants responded collectively to the demands of industry, the factory
and marketplace, for the most part, supported and benefitted from the
worker’s cooperative ideals. At a time prior to government welfare aid, ethnic
fraternal organizations assisted the newcomer in matters of housing and credit,
filling the need for social communion as well. In the eyes of the American
capitalist, such associations bouyed up a robust workforce by effectively

initiating foreigners into their strange, new environment. And as management

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often looked to employees to recruit additional cheap labor, ethnic workers
could easily comply via their kinship attachments.91 Tightly-knit families and
strong ethnic ties further aided industry, for when siblings were accustomed to
contributing to the family’s income as they had done in the old country, wages
could be kept low. In fact the paycheck which the head of the household
brought home rarely covered a family’s living expenses, but the rest of the
family routinely made up the difference-children by quitting school to work in
factories or by doing piecework at home, married women and mothers, if
unable to hold outside employment, by taking in boarders.92

Pre-migration patterns of collective enterprise facilitated the foreigner’s
transition into the American workplace, but group goals would not
indefinetely supersede individual ones; the gains promised by bourgeois
capitalism made such values as sharing and reciprocity increasingly difficult to
live by. For instance, the ethnic community that had once provided the
immigrant entrepreneur with a vital economic base eventually proved
constrictive. To expand his clientele, the ambitious immigrant merchant often
dissociated himself from the community to strike out for larger markets, down-
playing the ethnicity that initially helped supply him with a solid foundation
for business."3 Many families continued to strive as a unit, satisfied by the
hope that future generations would reap the benefits of their labor; but Bodar
reports that as families became established and generations evolved, children
were often prone to see the home as an obstacle to individual success.

Parental measures intended to harness offspring to the group need-

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interrupting educations, cancelling career plans, arranging marriages, breaking
engagements, and garnisheeing wages”-drove many children away from
home and out of the ethnic enclave. The drive for self-definition, which
Delbanco explains destroyed the self-denying Calvinism that the Puritans had
hoped to safeguard in America, imperiled as well the family structure which
the foreigner had looked to immigration to preserve. Yezierska’s account of
Sara Smolensky fleeing the ghetto to gain self-liberty is a familiar theme in
ethnic literature, much as it is in mainstream fiction

The paradigm of American immigration yields further parallels that cut
across national origins, dates of entry, and sites of relocation Like other
transplanted people who would enter the US. over the next three centuries,
the Puritans were prone to doubt the wisdom of their having left home to start
new lives in America, despite their religious motive for relocating. These
misgivings contributed to a steady rate of return migration among New
Englanders, a phenomenon of American history from the seventeenth-century
onward. By 1660, some settlements saw as many as one-twelfth of their
citizens driven back to England by economic or environmental hardship, a
yearning for home, or by crises of faith.95 Such factors are not unlike those
which sent back one quarter of the sixteen million Europeans who had
emigrated to the US. between 1880 and 1930.“

Homesickness and disillusionment with America are frequent themes of
immigrant writing throughout the centuries. Beret in Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in

the Earth (1927) aches for the familiar landscape of her seaside village in

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Norway and for the family and routines that filled her days there; the isolation

and harsh conditions of the Dakota Territory in the 1870’s drive her mad.
Ralph Chang in Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991) is overwhelmed by the
strangeness of the US. and rendered helpless and despondent; he initially
despises his adopted home, which he deems inferior to China in every point of
comparison Ann Stanford’s study of Anne Bradstreet, daughter of Thomas
Dudley and wife of Simon Bradstreet, two prominent leaders in the 1630
removal to Massachusetts, reveals a similarly disaffected immigrant. Repelled
upon her arrival in the colony, Bradstreet writes "I...came into this Country
where I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose.”

The degree to which this English immigrant is bereft and disoriented by her
bleak new environment is commensurate with the strength of her ties to the
old world. The poetry she writes soon after arriving in Massachusetts is
modelled closely upon the English cavaliers; Stanford believes that such
imitation is Bradstreet’s attempt to preserve the European civilization she
regretfully left behind, the likes of which, she could presume, would never
flourish in the American wilderness. Stanford contends, however, that aided
by faith in the holy purpose of the Puritan mission, Bradstreet eventually
adjusts to these surroundings to become America’s first poet: she "celebrate[s]
America as a homeland... describ[ing] the land and her new home with
affection..no longer seem[ing] conscious of the mysterious wilderness and the
loss of her native country; her description makes the new world seem a

satisfactory home."98

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Just as Bradstreet’s resistance to her adopted home recurs as a theme in
immigrant writing, so too does her gradual acceptance of and allegiance to

America. In Peder Victorious (1929), the sequel to Rolvaag’s Giants in the

 

ELI}, Beret has recovered her senses and is the family matriarch. Her toil on
the American prairie has actually strengthened her, and she in turn raises a
strong family that prospers as it never could have in Norway. Likewise, Gish
Jen’s Ralph Chang not only adjusts to life in the US. but, as a successful
entrepreneur, strives to embrace every aspect of American culture, for good or
ill.

But as a transplant writing in her newly adopted homeland, Bradstreet’s
work raises questions about the American or otherwise ethnic (English, in this
case) character of her poetry, questions that complicate the seemingly authentic
ethnicity of much art that is hailed as multicultural. Like Ann Stanford, Albert
von Frank testifies that early immigrants were staunchly committed to
preserving English culture in the new world, a conservativism which
challenges Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis that settlers spontaneously severed
ties with Europe to produce a distinctive American culture. Von Frank argues
instead that the colonists, pained by the loss of home, held fast to British arts
and ideas, a dependence that only later would spur Washington Irving, James
Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, and Emerson, among others, to encourage
indigenous American artforms. What actually evolved as conspicuously
American culture, von Frank contends, came not from a conscious decision to

renounce Britain and embrace the frontier, but from this failed attempt to

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retain and replicate English culture 3,000 miles from England. Committed to

the impossible feat of preserving the arts and ideas that continued to evolve in
their absence, these "conservatives simply retrenched and made the forms
themselves, apart from any vital present context." The result was
provincialism, artificial versions of English art cultivated in an American
hothouse and "detached from the societies and environments that had given
them birth and nourishment."99

Despite dissimilarities between the particular immigration experiences of
English colonists and those foreigners who came later from beyond
northwestern Europe and are frequent subjects of ethnic studies, Puritans and
multiculturalists share a commitment to cultural conservatism, the seemingly
progressive pluralist agenda notwithstanding. 'Just as the Puritans hoped not
to adjust to the wilderness but to resist it by adhering to English culture,
ethnic pluralists aim to resist assimilation and preserve distinct ethnic
identities by concentrating on the native cultures of America’s immigrants.
They likewise share the provincialism that results from seeking to resist
external influences so as to preserve a "pure" culture.

Von Frank qualifies his use of the term "provincialism." He employs it
not to signal artistic inferiority or vulgarity, for provincialism, he attests, has
given rise to "works of art of lasting, worldwide significance"‘°°; it describes,
rather, the unavoidably altered product of a program to retain, replicate, or
recapture a culture in the absence of its original generative conditions. This

"cultural holding action" requires a fixation on the past, an eye to models

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which are out of reach and which continue to evolve in ways the would-be
protectionist, estranged from the homeland, does not participate in or even
observe. As preservationists become self-conscious and defensive about their
native culture, their relation to that tradition changes, as does the very culture
they labor to preserve.101

Von Frank takes as his subject the culture of the American frontier from
1630 to 1869, but the conditions that create provincialism, peoples with
ancestral ties to foreign lands who seek to retain or recover their distant
culture, recur throughout the ages in the U.S., and even more so now with the
current heightened interest in ethnic roots. All immigrants hoping to
transplant intact their old world ways and cultivate them in America-the
Puritan and those who followed over the next three centuries—are unwitting
architects of an indigenous American culture, a hybrid form, a provincial
imitation of a foreign original inexorably but fortuitously changed by
separation from its source and by the inescapable imprint of the new American
environment. The immigrant’s inevitable break with his or her native culture
is not a mortal wound so much as it is the dissemination upon which
creativity and renewal depend, a fortunate and fruitful rupturing that "pure

pluralism" would circumvent.102

America’s aboriginal art predates, of course, the Puritan landing; the
two-thousand-year-old glyphs etched and stained on rock at Barrier Canyon,
Utah, are remnants of prehistoric lore, and they mark the origins of American

culture.103 Yet besides ‘the Indian voice which sounded in myth and song

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prior to 1635, indeed centuries before 1492, and continued to do so thereafter

despite efforts by whites to annihilate that native culture, the by-product of the
Puritan’s untenable attachment to English arts and tradition is also an
indigenous American cultural expression, which is renewed as succeeding
waves of immigrants attempt a similar and inevitably faulty transmission.

As Sollors points out by noting the diverse cultural forces which
influenced Horace Kallen-ironically a strenuous advocate of "pure puralism"—
monoculturalism is impossible in America. What many ethnicists celebrate as
the unbroken ancestral character, rooted in the "historical...ethnic memory [as]
a set of instincts, feelings, intimacies, expectations, patterns of emotion and
behavior...for individuals-and for the people as a whole-to live out... [and
which] is passed on to us in ways we do not choose/'1‘" is largely wishful
thinking. John Higham, for instance, insists that the suburban Jewish writers
who tell the stories of their immigrant ancestors are drawing "on the softened
contours of memory"; for them "the ghetto [is] reborn in a shimmer of
nostalgia."“’5 The tendency to romanticize the past is strong, and can even
resist a forthright attempt to debunk ethnic mythology. In Mount Allegg
(1943), for instance, Jerre Mangione exposes his immigrant parents’ penchant
for clinging to their former lives in Sicily, which have been "prettified beyond
recognition by the tricks that memory can play."‘°" Gerlando Amoroso,
Mangione’s protagonist in this autobiographical novel, is brought up short by
the blighted, impoverished country he finds on his first trip to his ancestral
land; he realizes that the stories he has grown up on—happy tales about the

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island paradise from which his elders emigrateduwere more fantasy than
honest recollection. Yet the immigrant’s memory is not the only one blurred
by nostalgia. Mangione’s working-class Sicilian Americans are a contented lot
whose purposeful lives are shaped by large families of eccentric but loving and
lovable characters, plus abundant food, drink, and good humor. His book is
rife with the stereotypes which Mario Puzo, who likewise grew up in an
Italian ghetto, explodes. Puzo explains that

as a child...I never heard an Italian singing. None of the grown-

ups I knew were charming or loving or understanding. Rather

they seemed coarse, vulgar, and insulting. And so later in my

life when I was exposed to all the cliches of lovable Italians,

singing Italians, happy-go-lucky Italians, I wondered where the

hell the moviemakers and storywriters got all their ideas
from.my
Puzo’s bleak experience undermines the veracity of Mangione’s recollection yet
is so extreme that it too is probably not wholly accurate; memory as the basis
for historiography is an uncertain source.

The Puerto Rican writer Nicholasa Mohr is frank about the inescapably
hybrid nature of ethnic art, in her case that mix of ancestral island culture with
the present reality of life in New York, and she cites memory as the matrix in
which facts are retained and fantasy bred. Nostalgia is a powerful and

welcome muse, she explains, but writers must stay cognizant of their own

idealizations or creative renderings of the past: "The Puerto Rico that we were

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taught to believe in was largely based on the reminiscences of our parents and
grandparents...[who] had nostalgically presented to their displaced offspring a
’paradise’...a mythology [that] had little or nothing to do with...reality."108
Island art, if defined by its place of origin, is not extant on the mainland US.
in any unadulterated form; thus Mohr, unlike many Puerto Rican novelists,
chooses to write in English instead of Spanish, a decision which prompts many
of her peers to question her ethnicity. She draws criticism as well for setting
her fiction on the continent rather than on the island protectorate.”

Writers from virtually every ethnic group throughout American history
display this tendency to romanticize their forebears as they attempt to preserve
the past. Many are not as candid about their inclination toward such
idealization as Mohr is, but most reveal an emotional dependence on that first
generation of Americans. By conceiving of their ancestors in legendary
proportions, descendants of both early and later immigrants fashion a guide to
steer themselves through uncertain times, or they employ the forebears as a
standard against which to gauge their own performance. Nostalgia is the core
of Marcus Hansen’s thesis that "what the son wishes to forget, the grandson
wishes to remember," which he advanced in 1939 and which still holds
considerable sway."° His triangular, generational design, a dismissal and
subsequent affirmation-or at least conciliatory understanding—of the values
and traditions belonging to the immigrant American, is the crux of many
ethnic novels. In Hansen’s view and that of many historians and social

commentators, the "sons"“‘-the second generation-are "degenerate" and

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"treasonous," "traitors" or "dilutees" who "have deliberately [thrown] away
what had been preserved in the home." All hope is pinned on the
"grandsons"-the third generation—who redeem the ethnic traditions and values
which the second generation squandered and flouted.112

Hansen’s model of generational declension and renewal, though still
Operative, is not without its contemporary critics. Many oppose his
paradigm’s rigid successional form and rule it inaccurate, since Hansen himself
is a second-generation Swedish American dedicated to US. immigration
history and thus living defiance of his own "law.”"3 Yet in looser form
Hansen’s general thesis of rift and reconciliation across the generations does
recur in ethnic fiction Sometimes the familial break and return occur within
the second generation, as in Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), where Sara finally
reaches out to her authoritarian father after his strict observance of orthodox
Judaism has driven her away, or in Mario Puzo’s The Mather (1969), where
Michael Corleone renounces his mafiosi family yet becomes the heir to their
underworld business. In other instances the return to ancestral roots occurs
with the fourth generation. In Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1979), the U.S.-born
daughter and grand-daughter of the title character, an Italian immigrant, are
dissipated by the affluence made possible by first generation’s hard work and
sacrifice. It is Tina, presciently named for her great-grandmother, who invokes
the memory of that matriarch as her guide for a more purposeful life.
Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) in many ways is the tale

of the break from and return to the old world values within a single

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generation. David leaves his poverty, his mother, and his orthodox Judaism

behind in Antomir, Russia, to emigrate to the U.S., where he becomes a
successful American cloak-maker. Yet his "metamorphosis" is not complete
because his new identity does not fit him satisfactorily. David is plagued by
the empty materialism of his life in America and haunted by the rich tradition
and spirituality he left in Russia. The novel closes with his bitter realization
that "the poor lad swinging over a Talmud at the Preacher’s Synagogue, seems
to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the
well-known cloak-manufacturer."“‘

By historicizing Hansen’s rhythm of ethnic recovery, Sollors reveals the
triangular model of succession to be a cultural construction, a design spun out
of myth and fiction rather than grounded in reality. Yet despite Sollors’s
skepticism about the subjective memory’s purported veracity, as well as those
sound claims against Hansen’s deceptively neat pattern of declension and
renewal, the underlying premise of the generational paradigm is valid:
interest in ancestry, albeit interest that is often based on myth, grows over time
as succeeding generations attempt to recoup the old world heritage which
assimilationist forebears either rejected or diluted on their way to
Americanization. In part, the circumstances of immigration dictate this
generational pattern Many educated immigrants such as Jerzy Kozinski,
Vladimir Nabokov, and Abraham Cahan learned English quickly and became
novelists. Other immigrant intellectuals published in their native language,

Isaac Bashivas Singer in Yiddish, Ole Rolvaag in Norwegian, and so sizeable a

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number in German that mid-nineteenth-century Milwaukee was dubbed
"German Athens."115 But for the most part, foreigners who came ashore in

the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration waves were typically
absorbed by the sheer labor of survival, and they lacked the education and
time to create literature. Quite naturally then, a family might not produce a
writer until at least the second generation; when an ethnic American reflected
on the evolution of his or her lineage in U.S., the logical starting point was the
immigration ordeal.

The resulting story was usually an account of the American Dream with
a dark twist. The immigrant flees an economically, politically, or spiritually
repressive homeland for America— unknown and often inhospitable-so that
future generations might know the liberty, opportunity, and dignity
unattainable in the old country. By dint of new world values (hard work and
determination ea change the course of a life) that were balanced by old
country traditions (devotion to church and family produces meaning and
stability), the immigrants provide a secure life for their children The
offspring, through education, enterprise, better health, and, often, exogamy, in
turn supply their own children with greater security or even affluence.

An initial conflict in the stock story-line comes from the children’s
growing shame over their parents’ visible traces of the old country and their
own rising identification with mainstream America: the offsprings’ pull
toward assimilation divides the family. But even when Americanization is

successful, realizing the dream rarely matches dreaming it. The second conflict

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is often an internal one as, bereft of spiritual values or disillusioned by
material gain, the adult child seeks to recover the meaningful traditions of the
parent. Or, as Hansen posits, the conflict is between the second and third
generation: the grandchild observes that a parent’s social ascent is
accompanied by spiritual decline or emotional numbness and instead makes a
moral model out of the immigrant ancestor. Guilt over the parents’ extreme
sacrifices prompts other second-generation protagonists to reconsider the
immigrant’s life. In Dorothy Calvetti Bryant’s Miss Giordano (1978), for
example, the title character, a high-school English teacher who has watched her
immigrant father, a coal miner, succumb to black-lung disease, must reconcile
herself to the memory of her parents’ wretched existence if she is to live her
own life. Variously inspired by gratitude, guilt, or even anger, as is the case
with James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, who despises the comfortable, rniddle-
class berth his parents have attained, ethnic fiction is driven by the
descendants’ need to come to terms with the lives of their forebears.

Renewed attention to the first generation is so ubiquitous in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnic literature that Grace Paley
mocks the cliche in "The Immigrant Story" (1975) where her character Jack
explains as if by rote that his father decided "to go to America, to 1. stay out of
the army, 2. stay out of jail, 3. save his children from everyday wars and
ordinary pogroms.""‘ Yet this psychological dependence on the forebears’
fortitude is also rooted in the experience of early New England. The founders’

beliefs were crystallized in the old world under Anglican persecution; children

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born in the new world never developed the stalwartness which church
oppression and the early years in the Massachusetts wilderness had imparted
to their parents’ Calvinism. The half-way covenant, that compromise which
would keep the church rolls steady only by granting partial membership to the
growing number of unconverted among the founders’ children, attests to the

declension of the second-generation ministry.”

The immigrant generation
became the boon and scourge of the lax progeny: accounts of the elders’ lives
were the jeremiads which both chastened and encouraged the sinful offspring
in their holy struggle.

Doubting their own ability to continue the religious mission begun by
their immigrant parents or, perhaps more unnerving, questioning the mission
itself, second- and third-generation Puritans reassured themselves by
transforming the founders into powerful models of religious devotion and
probity. According to Robert Middlekauff, as the second- and third-generation
New Englanders venerated their ancestors, they enlarged the immigrants’
objective from preservation of the true Church polity to wide-scale
conversion118 And even when the American progeny speculated on the
human frailties of their forebears and sensed the uncertainty with which they
had left Europe, they exalted the founders, hoping to quell the fear that they
themselves were heirs to a grand mistake. As the forebears’ faith and fortitude
became legendary and their example difficult to follow, the children, even in

religious decline, found further use in mythologizing their parents: if the

founders’ religious devotion was exceptional, it was then literally

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inimitable.119 Among Puritan historiographers in nineteenth-century New
England, Lawrence Buell questions whether the belief in an heroic forebear
was not surpassed by the belief in the prep for such a grand figure.120

American immigrants, from the Puritans to those who continue to arrive
from third world countries, are not alone in lionizing their ancestors in times
of change, doubt, or danger; classical literature is replete with such hero
worship. Homer routinely introduced his soldiers by citing their royal or
divine genealogy—Agamemnon as the son of Atreus; Achilles, son of Peleus;
Pyrrhus, in turn, as the son of Achilles-as though to gird a warrior for battle
by invoking his lineage. Virgil’s Aeneas, that wandering immigrant who
would found the Roman empire, is shielded from harm by his goddess-
mother, Venus, and guided by the wisdom of his father, King Anchises, whose
counsel he seeks in a sojourn to the underworld.

The ‘Tnvention of New England" is Middlekauff’s name for the
progeny’s glorification of the founders, through which offspring attempted to
reconcile the fact of their new world nativity with their inherited mission
conceived in the old world.121 This myth-making, in which the "age of the
fathers...[is] the touchstone of all value,"122 is at work again in what Werner
Sollors terms the "Invention of Ethnicity,"123 the celebration of ancestral roots,
even when that history is more fabrication than fact. Because Puritans and
later immigrants had "left it to the next generation to make retrospective sense

of their act of migration,"124 the children who recount their parents’ lives are

more aptly described as "custodians and interpreters"125 than transcribers:

117

their accounts of history are subjective versions which often serve to make the
past more noble, the present more certain, and the future less formidable.
Despite enlarging the presence of the ancestors so as to create moral
guides, the second and third generations ultimately betrayed their forebears’
conservative cause: they transformed themselves into Americans, whether
through a Puritan’s capitulation to the emerging self or an ethnic offspring’ s
assimilation into mainstream society, changes often viewed ambivalently as
decline as well as progress. A qualified link to the past in the form of hero
worship mitigated this transformation, easing the children’s guilty conscience
without impeding their forward movement. By revering the elder, the
progeny paid their filial respect and remained connected to their ancestry; yet
by elevating their predecessors to the level of icon, the children gained
distance from them since icons are remote and ultimately unknowable.
Attempting more a feat of taxidermy than of resurrection, as Lawrence Buell
claims was the goal of some Puritan memorialists,“s filiopietists could honor
their immigrant parents and also part company with them. Their paeans
glorified the past and in so doing neutralized its real power, thus settling the
conflict between the desire for renewal and the fear of change inherent in new
beginnings. Hawthorne’s "Main-Street" (1849) reveals the efficacy of praise as
both a bond with history and a boundary against it when the narrator,
watching a pageant of his Puritan forefathers, proclaims, "Let us thank God for

having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him,

118
not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of
a ges."‘”

This theme of reconciling the present with the past to blend an
American identity with a foreign one is central to ethnic literature in the US.
By narrating the immigrant experience of the founding generations, ethnic-
American writers square the impulse for change with the desire for constancy.
The writers and their protagonists, for ethnic novels are usually
autobiographical, journey back to their families’ old world ties and American
origins: by writing the book, the author acknowledges the past, even when
embellishing it with fiction; their characters often make literal journeys to the
homeland. Amy Tan’s The ley Luck Club culminates in second-generation
Jing-Mei (June) Woo’s first trip to China, a conciliatory mission; having
spurned the traditional customs that her mother, now deceased, had held dear,
June travels to the ancestral land, where she meets the Chinese half-sisters she
has never seen and tells them of their mother, whom they have never known.
Of course the journey to the old world is often more metaphoric than actual.
In her autobiographical novel The Woman Wm’or: Memeirs of a Qirlheg
Among Ghosts (1975), American-born Maxine Hong Kingston does not travel
to China, though she frequently returns to her parents’ home in the enclave of
Chinese immigrants in Stockton, California. The book itself, rather, is the
return to the past through which Kingston validates her own life as a liberated

American woman of Chinese descent. As a girl growing up in California,

Kingston watches her mother conform to the traditional submissive role for

119
Chinese women; in America Brave Orchid is merely a "ghost," having lived her

"real" life back in China where she was independent and successful as a
midwife who had the respect of her village and the comforts due one of her
station. Kingston is ambivalent about her own feminism: she defies the
strictures her patriarchal culture places on women, but she is keenly aware of
the disappointment such nonconformity causes her parents, particularly her
mother. By delving into her mother’s past and articulating Brave Orchid’s
story of cultural defiance, professional success, and high esteem in China,
Kingston finds ancestral sanction for her own rebelliousness in America. She
challenges tradition yet remains consistent with the past.‘”

The ethnic novel bridges generations and worlds, yet its conciliatory
properties extend beyond the circumstances of a particular author’s life.
Immigrant fiction conciliates not in that the marginalized author propitiates the
literary mainstream to gain admission into the canon, but in that, despite
claims from cultural conservatives and liberals alike, it plays out and
improvises on many themes long regarded as central to the American
experience. That claim is neither revolutionary nor reactionary, since in a
nation whose history is largely dominated by immigration, the literature of the
American ethnic would naturally yield significant parallels to the writing of
the mainstream, which itself is rooted in rupture, relocation, and renewal. In
fact it is ironic that the current and often hostile debate over the place of

multicultural and Anglo-centric writing in the American canon features the

two literatures as binary opposites. In many ways, ethnic writing updates and

120

extends the American literary experience as it narrows the gap between
popular notions of the outsider and the insider.

America’s many literary figures have always been in transit, from the
Puritan colonists, to the seemingly unattached adventurers of the American
Renaissance, to the newcomers who arrived in the US. at the end of the
nineteenth century and thereafter. Though significant differences set ethnic
protagonists apart from each other and from those of the mainstream, they
fully share the traditional hero’s wanderlust, since America is the "territory" for
which the immigrant "lights out. " Regardless of route or destination-from the
old country to the new world or from the village to the city and then out to
the frontier-all American heroes grapple with the competing demands of self
and society when the promise of mobility beckons. The ethnic, however,
proves most adept at resolving the tension between the impulse to ramble and
the need to put down roots. Like his American counterpart who follows the
sun or withdraws into the wilderness, the immigrant maverick also heads
west, forsaking the old world for the new. The immigrant’s quest further
evokes that of the traditional lone hero, for the ethnic American often
disengages once again—from the family and community-so as to pursue
personal autonomy, flights which critics who are intent on finding unwavering
group commitment in non-mainstream writing frequently ignore. Yet the
ethnic American’s travels are more sojourn than escape, as many take a
circuitious route that returns them to family and community. But even in

coming full circle, the ethnic explorer continues to evoke those canonical

121

figures whose hard-won self-awareness deepened their sense of social
responsibility. Thoreau and Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbit, for example, are
better citizens for having become individuals, as is Huck Finn when his
excursion with Jim is seen as an extended irnbroglio in sticky social problems
rather than as an escape from life’s worries and his final flight is read as an
option which Huck considers on the last page of the novel rather than as the

book’s central action, as it is often misread. Like these Anglo-counterparts,

 

many ethnic heroes are better prepared to contribute to society for having
chosen to cultivate the self, as American liberty allows.

Ethnic renegades, whether foresaking the homeland or the immigrant
enclave to forge a new, American identity or, conversely, hyphenating their
US. citizenship with a foreign allegiance, share much common ground with
the canonical hero. Rupture and renewal, those joint themes of much
immigrant writing, situate the literary ethnic among those other iconoclasts
who defy tradition while unwittingly observing that American tradition of

such dissent.

122

Notes

1. See Columbia Litegy Histery of the United States, gen. ed. Emory
Elliott, (New York: Columbia UP, 1988). Also, Sacvan Bercovitch, as general

editor of the most recent Cambridge History of American Literature, finds the
strength of this multi-volume work in its tentative tone and ability to rest with
contradiction and discontinuity rather than to impart a false sense of uniformity,
certainty, and closure, as pre-l980’s literary histories have done. See Annette
Kolodny’s "The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the
United States," American Literature 57 (1985): 301.

2. Eric Cheyfitz, "Matthiessen’s Amerieep Renaisgce: Circumscribing
the Revolution," American marterly 41 (1989): 344, 345.

3. George McMichael, ed., Anthology of American Literature: Volume
II Realism to the Present Fourth Ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1989) 183-184,
191-192, 228.

 

4. Cheyfitz 350.

5. Michael Colacurcio, "The American-Renaissance Renaissance," _The

New England Quarterly 64 (1991): 445-493.

6. R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and
Tradition in the Nineteenth Cenm (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955) 1, 8-9.

7. Lewis 5.
8. Lewis 128.

9. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Between Individualism and Fragmentation:
American Culture and the New Literary Studies of Race and Gender,"

American Qearterly 42.1 (1990): 11.

10. Robert W. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literag; Biography
(Urbana: U of IL P, 1977) 97; for Virginia Woolf’s influence on Toni Morrison

see Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York:

123

Oxford UP, 1992) xvii; for Ralph Ellison’s formative interest in Marx, Freud,
Eliot, and Hemingway, see Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism
and the Politics of Race in New York (New York: Norton, 1990) 234; see
Werner Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Puralism," Reconstructing American
Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986) 256
for information on Farrell’s literary background; Paule Marshall cites her early
interest in Thackeray, Hardy, and Dickens in Daryl Cumber Dance’s, "An
Interview with Paule Marshall," The Southern Review 28.1 (1992): 18; Gates
observes the Negro spiritual’s reliance on the King James Bible in Loose
Canons xvii.

11. Fox-Genovese offers this example of "two-ness" from Henry Roth’s

Call It Sleep (1934) in Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of
Individualism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991) 205-206.

12. Dexter Fisher, Minoriry Langpage and Literature: Retrosgctive and
Persmctive (New York: MLA, 1977). Fisher is just one critic among many

calling for new and revised ways of reading ethnic writing.

13. Paul Lauter, "The Literatures of America: A Comparative
Discipline," Redefining American Literery History, eds. A. LaVonne Brown
Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (New York: MLA, 1990) 16.

14. This is the thrust of Joyce Warren’s The Amerieg Narcisses:

Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Cent_u_ry American Fiction (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1984). See especially 1-19.

15. Gates, Loose Canons 151, 175.

16. Dorothy Skardal, The Divided Hearr: findinavian Immigant
Exmrience through Literary Sources (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1974) 47.

17. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethniciry: Consent and Descent in American
Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) 12, 13.

18. Fox-Genovese goes on to advocate for an eclectic canon that is
weighted both by classics and multi-cultural texts, but she nonetheless makes
this claim in "Between Individualism and Fragmentation" 19, 20.

19. Werner Sollors challenges this "isolationist, group-by-group approach
that emphasizes ’authenticity’ and cultural heritage within the individual,
somewhat idealized group—at the expense of more widely shared historical
conditions and cultural features, of dynamic interaction and syncretism." He
posits instead "trans-ethnic" literary inquiry by which "ideas entertained by
Anglo-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American, and Afro-American writers
can be discussed TOGETHER [instead of]...separat[ing] men and women,
immigrants and American-born authors." See Adam Meyer, "The Need For

124

Cross-Ethnic Studies," MELUS 16.4 (1989-1990): 26. Fox-Genovese echoes
Sollors’s lament of the dualistic bent of pluralism studies: "The cultures of
women, African-Americans, working people, and ethnic groups are normally
considered for their specific dynamics and in relation to the canon or dominant
groups that excluded, oppressed, or ignored them, but rarely in relation to
other previously ignored groups. Identity in this perspective becomes
primarily identity in relation to other members of the group, and community
becomes primarily the community of the group itself." See Feminism Without
Illusions 203.

 

20. Carolyn Heilbrun, "A Response to ’Writing and Sexual Difference,”
Critical Inguig 8 (1982): 808, 809.

21. Heilbrun 809.

22. Ellen McCracken, "Sandra Cisneros’ Heuse on Mango Street.
Community-Oriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal

Violence" in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, ed.
Asuncion Horno-Delgado, et al. (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989) 69, 70.

23. Thomas Paine, "Common Sense," The Norton Anthology of
American Literature Volume One Second Edition ed. Nina Baym, et al. (New
York: Norton, 1985) 585-592.

 

24. Lauter, "Literatures of America" 15, 16.

25. Helen Barolini, The Dream Book: An Antholegy of Writings By
Italian American Women (New York: Schocken Books, 1985) 20.

26. Herman Melville, Moby Dick: A Norton Critical Edition, ed.
Harrison Hayford (New York: Norton, 1967) 374. Many critics cite this

passage to prove Melville’s sense for the terror of abandonment, as does
Delbanco in Puritan Ordeal 238.

27. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Ceurage and Selected Prose and
Poeg, ed. William M. Gibson, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, 1968). See Maggie: A Girl of the Stree§ 136-200; 'The Blue Hotel"
377-407; "The Open Boat" 269-294; The Red Badge of Courege 411-538.

28. Jane Tompkins, gnsational Desigg: The Cgtural Work of
American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 14.

 

29. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Ethan Brand," in The entena Edition of
the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne vol 11 (Ohio State UP, 1974) 90 and 99.

 

125

30. Richard Millington, Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and
Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992)

62, 136.

31. David Marr, American Worlds Since Emerson (U of Massachusetts
P, Amherst, 1988) 214.

32. Warren 23-53, especially 26.

33. Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Sgle and Vision in the
American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973) 105.

 

34. Merton Sealts, Jr., Emerson on the Scholar (Columbia: U of Missouri
P, 1992). Sealts argues that Emerson’s transition from social inactivity to
engagement was complete, yet not without misgivings along the way. See
especially "'The Scholar and Reform," 175-187.

35. Leslie Fiedler credits Washington Irving with introducing flight and
escape as the American’s method of choice for dealing with life, and Twain for

having popularized it in Huck Finn See Love ang Deag in E American
Novel (New York: Dell, 1969) 171, 338, 339.

36. Annette Kolodny, "The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New
Literary History of the United States," American Literature 57 (1985): 296.

37. Kolodny, 'Tntegrity of Memory" 302.
38. Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions 223.
39. Kolodny, "Integrity of Memory" 291-307.

40. Warner Berthoff, "Continuity in Discontinuity: Literature in the
American Situation," New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 9 (New
York: Penguin Books, 1988) 662.

41. Lewis 5.
42. Fiedler 62, 63.

43. Robert Con Davis, The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of me
Text (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1981).

44. Berthoff 652.
45. Sollors, Beyond Ethniciry 37, 38.

46. Leonard Dinnerstein, Natives and Strangers: Blacks, Indians, and
Immigrants in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1990) 238.

126
47. Dinnerstein 233.

48. Dorothy Weatherford, Foreigp and Female: Immigrant Women in
America 1840-1930 (New York: Schocken Books, 1986) 208.

 

49. Harry Mark Petrakis, Lion at My Heart (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959)
9, 148.

50. Berthoff 656.

51. Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1989) 7, 217, 259.

52. Francis Fukuyama, "Making It," rev. of Tribes: How Race, Religr'on

and Identig Determine Success in the New Global Economy, by Joel Kotkin,
The New Republic 19 April 1993: 43.

53. Oscar Handlin, The Upmted: The Epic Story of the Great

Migrations that Made the American People (Boston: Little. Brown and Co.,
1951, 1973) 3.

54. Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven ene m Cmgeg Places (New
York: Doubleday, 1989).

55. Delbanco 74.
56. Delbanco 74.

57. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1956) 61, 62.

58. Delbanco 54-57.

59. Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment
in American Life (New York: Harper 8: Row, 1985) 82, 83.

60. Delbanco 257, 258, n 4.

61. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicig 12, 13.
62. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 27.
63. Delbanco 15, 16.

64. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicig 25-36.
65. Delbanco 7 and 258, n. 4.

127
66. Sollors, Beyond Ethniciry 40-45.

67. See for example Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961; New York:
Carol Publishing Group, 1993) and Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman

Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage Books,
1976)

68. See Fukuyama 43 or consider Delbanco’s remark that the Puritans
came to a place "free of obstructive and competing cultures" 15, 16.

69. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: A History of a Puritan Idea
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1963) 3.

70. Annette Kolodny cites several fictional and historical instances of

willing rniscegenation in The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Emrience of the
American Frontiers 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984) 69,
70, and 76, as does Richard Slotkin in Regeneration through Violence: The
Mfih_ology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan

UP, 1971). Note the numerous citations in his index but see especially 217-218.

71. Perry Miller, The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poerg, (New
York: Columbia UP, 1956) 1-5.

 

72. Miller, Errand 15.
73. Delbanco 13.
74. Delbanco 14, 15.

75. Other Armenian-American novels which strongly urge cultural
persistence include Richard Hagopian’s Faraway the Spring (New York:
Scribner’s, 1952); Peter Najorian’s Daughters of Memory (Berkeley: City Miner,
1986) and Voyages (New York: Pantheon, 1971); William Saroyan’s Rock
Wagram (New York: Doubleday, 1951); and Peter Sourian’s The Gate (New
York: Harcourt, 1965).

76. Delbanco 96.
77. Miller, Errand 16-47, especially 47.
78. Delbanco 222, 224.

79. Perry Miller explains that "man has not only been in relation to God
as creature to creator, subject to lord, but more definitely through a succession
of explicit agreements or contracts, as between two partners in a business
enterprise....In the covenant of grace, God, observing the form, contracts with
man as with a peer." Errand 60, 61.

 

128

80. Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in
Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven: Yale UP, 1966) 105. Though Pettit

disputes Perry Miller’s reading of the covenant as a contract into which man

entered as a bargaining partner, contending that such negotiating rights would

challenge the Puritans’ belief in divine sovereignty, he faces the contradictory ,
bind of man’s complete dependence of God for grace and his need to enter the
covenant voluntarily. See 105 and 220.

 

81. Pettit 93.

82. David Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A
Documentag History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1968) 18.

83. John Winthrop, "Speech to the General Court," in The American
Puritans: Their Prose and Poem, Perry Miller, ed. 90-93, 122.

84. John Wise, "Vindication of the Government of New England
Churches," in The American Puritans Miller, ed. 127.

 

85. John Wise, "Vindication," American Purim 136.

86. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York: Doubleday, 1925; Persea
Books, 1975) 66.

87. Thomas Bodnar, "The Homeland and Capitalism," in fie
Transplanted (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987) especially 54-57.

88. Bodnar focuses mainly on European Americans, but he includes
immigrants from Japan and Mexico in his discussion of the household as a
model of cooperative group management both before and after immigration
See 74.

89. Bodnar 56.
90. Bodnar 72.

91. Bodnar 137. But the same attachments which supported industry-
family ties and ethnic connections—also proved troublesome, to a degee, when
labor organizers pressed for workers to form unions. Bodnar maintains,
however, that few immigrant workers who came out of family economies were
union supporters. More were interested in preserving the family and
community than in radical ideology. See Bodnar, "Work, Unions, and
Radicals," 85-116.

92. Bodnar reports that among the Irish working in the Massachusetts
mills in the 1860’s, most men could only provide 54% of a family’s minimum
subsistence level. Between 1910 and 1920, a Chicago packinghouse worker

129

earned only 38% of what a family of four needed; by 1922, his income had
risen to only 48% of the subsistence level. See 76.

93. Bodnar 131, 138.
94. Bodnar 73, 74.
95. Delbanco 188.

96. Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to
Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). Wyman acknowledges that

many immigrants intended to return even as they first departed from their
homelands. Over four million of the thirteen million immigrants who entered
the US. between 1880 and 1930 went back to their native countries. See 7-14.

97. Ann Stanford, "Anne Bradstreet," Major Writers of Early American
Literature ed. Everett Emerson (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1972) 35.

98. Stanford, "Anne Bradstreet," Major Writers 41.

99. Albert J. von Frank, The Sacred Game: Provincialism and Frontier
Consciousness in American Literature 1630-1860 (New York: Cambridge UP,
1985) 9.

 

100. Von Frank 4.
101. Von Frank 7.

102. Werner Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Puralism," Reconstructing
American Literery History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1986) 250-279.

103. N. Scott Momaday, 'The Native Voice," Columbia Literary Histogr
of the United States ed. Emery Elliot (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 5-15.

 

104. Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York:
Macmillan, 1972). My quotation conflates his essentialist definition of ethnicity
cited on xvi, 47, and 48.

105. John Higham, 2nd These to Me: lews ang Other Immigrants in
Urban America (New Yorlc Atheneum, 1975) 100-101.

106. Jerre Mangione, Mount Allegro (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co,
1942) 143.

107. Mario Puzo, "Italians in Hell’s Kitchen" in The Immigrant
Exmrience: The Anggish of Becoming American ed. Thomas Wheeler (New
York: Dial Press, 1971) 35.

 

130

108. Nicholasa Mohr, "Puerto Rican Writers in the US, Puerto Rican
Writers in Puerto Rico: A Separation beyond Language," Breaking Boundaries
115, 116.

109. Mohr, "Puerto Rican Writers in the US," Breaking Boundaries, ed.
Homo-Delgado 111-116.

110. Marcus Lee Hansen, "The Third Generation in America"
Commentagr, 14 (Nov. 1952): 494. Quoted as well by Sollors in Beyond

Ethnicig, 214.

111. Hansen’s disturbingly sexist language matches that of his
contemporary and friend, Oscar Handlin Both men wrote their most lasting
work in the 1950’s before the advent of the women’s movement, which,
presumably, might have raised their consciousness. Like Hansen, whose
generational paradigm is exclusively male ("What the son wishes to forget the
grandson wishes to remember"), Handlin suggests that immigration and the
subsequent identity crisis were hardships borne only by men Women are
consistently lesser—even silent-beings in Handlin’s Uprooted: he consistently
refers to the immigrant with the third person, masculine pronoun and reserves
the feminine pronoun for trouble and set-backs, such as "calamity" who often
found "her entree to the peasant household" 20.

112. Sollors Beyond Ethniciry 214-218.

113. Victor Greene, "Old-time Folk Dancing and Music, 1920-50" in

American Immigrants and Their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on
the Hansen Thesis after Fm Years ed. Peter Kivisto and Dag Blanck (Urbana:
U of IL P, 1990) 148-163. Greene uses the career of musician Frankie Yankovic,

a member of the second generation, to dispute further the rigidity of Hansen’s
generational paradigm, particularly that the American-born are uninterested in
or embarrassed by the old country. He reports that Yankovic, better known as
The Polka King, drew huge crowds throughout the 1960’s with his Polish
dance music. As a third-generation Polish American who grew up in an
ethnic community, I know firsthand of Yankovic’s popularity. His songs, many
sung in Polish, played regularly at the social gatherings that followed noon
Mass on Sundays in my Catholic parish He was popular among my parents’
generation, the very group that Hansen contends wanted "to forget everything:
the foreign language that left an unmistakable trace in [their] English speech,
the religion that continually recalled childhood struggles, the family customs
that should have been the happiest of all memories." See Hansen, "The Third
Generation in America," Commentary 14: 5 (Nov 1952) 494.

114. Abraham Cahan The Rise of David Levinsg (Harper 8: Brothers,
1917; rep. New York: Penguin, 1993) 530.

131

115. Robert Bishoff, "German-American Literature," in Ethnic
Persgctives in American Literature (New York: MLA, 1983) 60.

116. Grace Paley, "The Immigrant Story" in Enormous Changes at the
Last Minute (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975) 174. Sollors quotes this

story too in Beyond Ethnicigr 255.

117. Sacvan Bercovitch sums up the consensus among scholars on the
half-way covenant as the "locus classicus of the theocracy's decline." fie
Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 94.

118. Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan
Intellectuals 1596-1728 (New York: Oxford UP, 1971) 96-99.

 

119. Delbanco 224.

120. Lawrence Buell, New England Litera_ry Culture from Revolution
Through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 201.

121. Middlekauff, "The Invention of New England," Chapter Six in 113
Mathers 96-112.

 

122. Delbanco 226.

123. The Invention of Ethniciry (New York: Oxford UP, 1989) is a
collection of essays edited by Werner Sollors which, for the most part, criticize
the popular trend to present ethnicity as a "natural" and timeless category.
The thrust of his argument is that ethnicity is wrongly presumed to be eternal
and essential, rooted in past generations and ever-blooming in the present; it
should rightly be recognized as a social construction, an outgrowth of
modernism. See his introduction, ix-xx.

124. Delbanco 225.

125. Buell New England Litera_ry Culture 196.

126. Buell New England Litergy Culture 208.

127. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Main-Street" in The Centenary Edition of
the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne vol. 11, (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1974)
68. Sollors cites this story as well in Beyond Ethnicig 221.

 

128. Roberta Rubenstein explores harmonious bridging more fully in
Boundaries of the Self: Gender Culture Fiction (U rbana: U of Illinois P,
1987), where she applies the concept in women’s relationships beyond inter-
generation conflict. See particularly 172-180.

 

CHAPTER THREE
John Winthrop, Le Ly Hayslip, and the Emigrant’s Goodbye:
You Cen Go Home Again

To look for mutually corroborating evidence of a shared experience
among immigrants in such extreme examples as John Winthrop’s "A Modell of
Christian Charity" (1630) and Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth
Changed Places (1989) seems, initially, an exercise in creative interpretation
Winthrop delivered his lay sermon aboard the Arbelg, as his fleet of eleven
ships sailed from England to America, where the travellers would found the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. Hayslip’s memoir recounts her flight from her
native Vietnam to the United States in 1970 when she was twenty years old.
Along with the centuries separating these works are, of course, vastly different
circumstances which led each of them to emigrate and which, in turn, shaped
their experiences and their writing.

John Winthrop, born into the English aristocracy in 1588, was educated
at Cambridge and spent his early adulthood presiding over the family manor
at Groton. He later served as a Court attorney until, deciding to sail to New
England, he was elected Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a post he
held with only brief interruption for the rest of his life.‘ Le Ly Hayslip, or
Phung Thi Le Ly, her name before marrying, was born to a family of Buddhist

peasants in Ky La, a small farming village near Danang in central Vietnam.

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The England of Winthrop’s youth was beginning to assert a global presence

through imperialism and its powerful navy. Hayslip’s country was torn apart
by civil war and centuries of foreign colonial aggression As it is generally
interpreted, Winthrop’s exodus was a grand scheme to accomplish a higher
goal: his holy charge was to implement a religious and civic program that
would purify and preserve the Church of England and its true adherents.2
Hayslip’s departure from Vietnam is one woman’s escape from a war-ravaged
land.

Despite the many historical, cultural, religious, and social differences
between these writers, however, other elements point to their works as a
logical pair for a study of immigrant literature. Whereas many texts about
relocating to America are written by descendants who recount a forbear’s
experience, "A Modell of Christian Charity" and When Heaven and Earth
Changed Places were written by immigrants themselves, and neither one
addresses the actual resettlement in the new land. Both are "emigrant" texts,
focusing more on the place departed from than on the site in which they
arrive.

In Winthrop’s piece, the reason for the lack of specificity concerning
America is obvious: he delivered his oration mid-journey before reaching his
destination; he could not write about a land he had not yet encountered. But
forward-looking though he is, as he anticipates the church polity he would
erect in Massachusetts, his plans are shaped by the world he has left behind.

In his estimation, English Protestantism had fallen into decline through

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emergent capitalism and a creeping preparationism that was too rooted in
Roman Catholic practice. His agenda, therefore, was one of reform, a move to
restore and preserve the true church. His sermon is thus a bitter valediction,
for it outlines what Christians must avoid and achieve in the new world
against the past poor ecclesiastic record.3 Correspondingly, although Hayslip
lived nineteen years in the United States before writing her memoir, she barely
mentions her life as an American and omits entirely her orientation upon
arrival, an experience which must have been harrowing because of the social
and political turbulence of the early 1970’s and the racism she most likely
faced.‘ Instead, the main concern of her autobiography is Vietnam—the events
that led her to leave it and her reception upon returning there to visit her
family.

Given the "extra-American" settings of both writings, they might seem
merely tangential to a study of literature about becoming American. But
Winthrop’s sermon, its off-shore origins notwithstanding, has been "enshrined
as a kind of Ur-text of American literature."5 Because the removal from
England was fraught with as much fear as hope, Winthrop delivered "A
Modell of Christian Charity" to inspire optimism and quell anxiety by stressing
the migrants’ holy purpose. The sermon, with its professed faith in destiny, is
regarded as the prototype from which other American millennialist writing
followed. And Hayslip’s memoir, despite the humble scale of her lone
departure, is squarely situated in this grand rhetorical tradition: throughout

the course of her autobiography, as Hayslip comes to terms with her own

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status as a Vietnamese expatriate, she increasingly imbues her emigration with
a sense of mission and fate. Winthrop’s sermon, the test case of immigrant
writing which established a divine calling as the apology for leaving home and
venturing to America, can be seen as a literary precedent for When Heaven
and Earth Changed Places, Hayslip’s justification for her flight from her native
land.

Perry Miller posits the Puritan fast-day or political sermon-the New
England jeremiad—as America’s first distinctive literary genre.‘
Exceptionalism resonates throughout colonial writing, which features the
settlers as God’s chosen migrants running His errand into the new world
wilderness. Yet even more distinctly American, according to Miller, is the
sermon’s self-rebuke, the colonists’ lament over faltering in their special
mission and thus failing to elevate the New England church-state into a moral
beacon for all the world.’

Miller dates New England’s first jeremiad a few generations after the
Great Migration of 1630, making it contingent upon the time it took for the
descendants of the immigrants to become prodigals and, subsequently, to
mourn their eroded ideals and exalt their stalwart American progenitors (a
development which became a convention of immigrant literature). Sacvan
Bercovitch, however, places the conception of that American genre earlier, at
Winthrop’s delivery of "A Modell of Christian Charity." As their offspring
would do over time, first generation colonists-including Winthrop-became

filiopietists. The Massachusetts founders invoked not the Anglican church

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fathers whom they had left behind, but revered such figures of biblical history

as Moses or John the Baptist, whose religious quests, they believed, paralleled
their own journey.

But what in Bercovitch’s appraisal most distinguishes the American
sermon from the English jeremiad which the Puritans brought with them is the
"unshakable optimism" that eluded Miller, who was more attuned to the
sermons’ castigation and lament.8 In Bercovitch’s reading, the rhetoric of
chastisement carried a counter-strain of hope and exultation, for New
Englanders construed divine retribution as a reaffirmation of their holy
purpose and their progress toward its fulfillment:

They...turned threat into celebration In their case, they believed,

God’s punishments were corrective, not destructive. Here, as

nowhere else, His vengeance was a sign of love, a father’s rod

used to improve the errant child. In short, their punishments

confirmed their promise."

Bercovitch does not suggest that the Puritans dismissed their own
failings, nor does he dispute that they were deeply anguished by the threat of
God’s wrath. But he insists that their typological epistemology and their faith
in covenant theology lent their enterprise a sure sense of direction Because
Puritans interpreted the Bible figurally, finding the New Testament encoded in
the Old, they believed that their prophecies would be fulfilled through a series

of unfolding parallels. Thus, their future was evident: if the colonists could

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manage to keep their end of the covenant with God, their own redemption and
the success of their plantation were certain.10

The typology underpinning Puritan thought and informing the New
England jeremiad was conciliatory in nature: it made the future comport with
the past. Accordingly, Jewish history foreshadowed the course of Christianity;
Puritans were the new chosen people on an exodus out of degenerate England.
Such reasoning supplied a conciliatory bonus: backsliding-a precedent set by
the failure of the Jews to accept Christ as the Messiah—became proof of
chosenness and ultimate deliverance. Believing the conversion of the Jews and
Christ’s ultimate forgiveness of their apostasy would portend his second
coming, they, as new world Israelites, perceived both a mandate and pardon
for the transgressions by which they mirrored their Old Testament
precursors."

These apparent contradictions, such as that failure foretold success, were
foundational to the Massachusetts theocracy. New Englanders proclaimed
their objective to be purifying the Anglican rite of its Romish embellishments
so as to recover pristine Biblical dictates as the basis for their
congregationalism, yet they committed themselves to the modernization which
the new world permitted.12 Though church members professed the absolute
power of God, they increasingly exercised their own will and agency.
Founders transplanted England’s stratified class structure (which they

regarded as God-ordained), yet they created widespread entrepreneurial

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opportunities for personal advancement. Furthermore, Puritans gauged the
state of their sacred mission by their civic and social success.

In Miller’s view, these contradictory impulses locked the Puritan
theocracy into a death grip. He contends, moreover, that the colonists’
outpouring of self-rebuke was mere lip-service to repentance and actually
allowed their decline to continue unchecked.13 But in Bercovitch’s reading,
those same contradictions between principle and practice sustained the Puritan
ideal. He maintains that the founders’ vision survived

through a mode of ambiguity that denied the contradiction

between history and rhetoric—or rather translated this into a

discrepancy between appearance and promise that nourished the

imagination, inspired ever grander flights of self-justification, and

so continued to provide a source of social cohesion and

continuity.“

The obvious "wish fulfillment" that pervaded New England thought,
Bercovitch asserts, was much more than a means to rationalize laxity or to
smooth over conflicts. Their seeming reconciliation of opposites—or their
penchant for overlooking what was at odds in their theocracy—was "a realistic
way to deal with crisis and change,...a source not only of revitalization but of
rededication as well."‘5 Much like positive and negative charges which
produce an electrical current when crossed, the polarized tension within New
England Puritan theology was a power supply. While conceding the obvious,

that the actual theocracy collapsed, Bercovitch insists that the ideal of the

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orthodoxy lived on: "the fact is that the vision survived—from colony to
province, and from province to nation."16

The capacity to absorb opposites rendered Puritan thought resilient.
Bercovitch traces early New England’s tradition of simultaneous exultation and
lament into the nineteenth century and beyond. Even those giants of the
American Renaissance who criticize the status quo—Emerson, Melville, and
Thoreau, among others—affirm the nation’s millennialism, for they object not to
America’s premise, but to its slow progress.” The legacy of Puritan rhetoric,
the ability to turn contradiction into complement, remains particularly viable in
immigrant writing throughout American literary history, as newcomers often
settle the conflicts between cultural codes by simultaneously adapting the old
and adopting the new. Le Ly Hayslip, though a recent arrival in the United
States and a new "new" immigrant, one of non-European origins entirely, fully
utilizes the rhetorical mode bequeathed to her by the Puritan founders of her
adopted home. Like the Bay Planters, she chooses to operate under terms
which are "not either/or but both/and."18 In When Heaven and Earth Changed
_l’larees Hayslip recounts or, more accurately, reworks her flight from Vietnam
and her return there after sixteen years in the United States to reconcile the
fact of her willful departure with her self-irnage as a loyal daughter of
Vietnam.

Bercovitch calls the Jeremiah of New England Christian theology a
Janus-faced prophet, a seer who looked back over what the settlers had

wrought and then forecast, on the basis of their accomplishments, or the lack

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thereof, what lay ahead. Irnbued by the New Englanders with the bi-

directional vision of that mythological god, Jeremiah came to obviate the
troublesome divisions between the past and the future, the secular and the
sacred, or self-interest and communal welfare.19 This "two-faced" facility for
sustaining the mission by making contradictions correspond suggests an
inherent hypocrisy in Puritan rhetoric: Miller comments wryly on the
founders’ "genius...for finding ways to reconcile irreconcilables,"20 Andrew
Delbanco on the long history of "Puritan dexterity" and their "intellectual
flexibility."21

Hayslip employs a similar casuistry to achieve a reconciliation of her
own The transmogrification implicit in her memoir’s title, When Heaven and
Earth Changed Places, is just one in a series of inversions by which the
passage described in her subtitle, A Vietnamese Woman’s lourney from War to
,P_ea_ee, is made complete. The journey to which she refers is both her escape to
an American safe haven and the resolution she finally achieves for having
made that remove. By retrospectively renegotiating the terms of her flight to
' the United States, Hayslip makes her emigrant status compatible with her
native identity. As an expatriate in America who returns to Vietnam, Le Ly
wonders if she will be met with envy for the many material assets she has
acquired in the United States or with "pity for the spiritual things—a life with
[her] family in the land of [her] ancestors—[she] gave up to obtain them."22

By writing her memoir, she resolves this painful dichotomy, maintaining her

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adopted American identity and recovering the spiritual meaning that her life

as an exile has lost.

Paramount in both Winthrop’s sermon and Hayslip’s autobiography
(indeed, in much immigrant writing) is the need to reconcile a voluntary
uprooting with a sense of unflagging family fealty. The Massachusetts Bay
Colonists, though non-conformists, were emphatic about their status as non-
separating members of the Church of England. They sought through their
rhetoric to distinguish themselves from the dissenters who, ten years before
their own migration, had openly avowed separatism when founding the
Plymouth Colony. Likewise, they ostracized the separatist Roger Williams as a
radical. Winthrop’s "Humble Request of His Majesty’s Loyal Subjects," which
he composed before leaving Southampton port, passionately reiterates the
emigrants’ bond to what they were leaving. The document features the
Church of England as "our dear Mother" and beseeches those left at home to
pray for the colonists as though for their absent brothers.23

But the fact that the Bay colonists chose to put three thousand miles
between themselves and England remains uncontrovertible. All the more
ironic, therefore, is Winthrop’s insistence in "A Modell of Christian Charity" on
unriven unity. Certainly, every level of the Puritan undertaking—their
dangerous sea voyage and survival in the very real New England
wilderness," their program to set up a Christian commonwealth, and, much
more ambitious, their mission to erect the site of the millennium—seemed to

hinge on the strength of the immigrants’ commitment. But Winthrop’s

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insistence on unity in the face of what appears to be an act of schism suggests
equivocation. Perhaps as much as to forge cohesion among his small and
shaky band of migrants for the work that lay ahead as to reassure themselves
and England of their oneness with the Anglican church, Winthrop’s sermon
celebrates love as the virtue which binds together all Christians by overriding
dissent and nullifying apparent disparities.

The sermon is a masterpiece of rhetorical reconciliation, at once
underscoring and erasing a host of differences. Winthrop reminds the
immigrants who were leaving the restraints of the English legal system behind
to venture into the untamed colony that social stratification was set by God
and as such was meant to be preserved: "Some must be rich, some poore,
some...highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in
subjeccion" (76). One who practiced Christian love did not seek to raise his
status nor did he covet another’s possessions, for envy and acquisitiveness
would upset God’s holy order. Likewise, it was incumbent upon the wealthy
to provide for the needs of the less fortunate by extending loans when
repayment seemed manageable or bestowing gifts outright when another’s
burden was too great to assume a debt. Humanity thus hierarchically
differentiated attests to the glorious variety of God’s creation But while
counselling an acceptance of the disparity that is represented in the status quo,
Winthrop acknowledges the instinctive desire to seek out what is similar and
to reject that which is unfamiliar, and, hence, the threat of antagonism which

an overly rigid class structure could breed. Thus, while preaching the

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preservation of these vast social inequities, Winthrop urges an over-arching
inclusiveness, a recognition and appreciation of a "sympathie of affeccions" (86)
in all church members. He reasons that just as God loves a human being, "soe
farre as it hath any of his Image in it," when a Christian "discernes by the
worke of the spirit, his owne Image and resemblance in another, [he] therefore
cannot but love him as he loves himselfe" (87). By design, humanity is both
differentiated and similar in kind; at times it is judicious to note the
distinctions and then again to ignore them.

Winthrop glosses over another paradox when he turns his attention to
the emerging individualism which was endangering communitarianism in
England. In the new world, he maintains, "perticular estates cannott subsist in
the mine of the publique" (90). Yet while positing self-initiative as a sin
against the omnipotent Creator and the collective good of mankind, his sermon
is a hymn to human agency. The very terms of the covenant, while professing
abject powerlessness before God, arise from a strong act of will. The Puritans
themselves, as Winthrop explains, skillfully negotiate their contract with God: ’
"wee are entered into Covenant with him for this worke, wee have taken out a
Commission, the Lord hath given us leave to drawe our owne Articles wee
have professed to enterprise these Accions upon these and these ends, wee
have hereupon besought him of favour and blessings" (91-92).25 Human will
is exercised under the cover of obedience.

The rhetoric Le Ly grew up on echoes Winthrop’s call for extended
family unity. The metaphors of family bonding are equally as ambiguous and

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versatile for her, as they are employed by both sides in the war. The

nationalist Viet Minh, who fought French imperialism throughout the 1940’s
until the mid-1950’s, and the Viet Cong communists, who, after the French
withdrawal, opposed the South Vietnamese Republic and its American allies,
demanded the same solidarity that the Massachusetts founders strove to
achieve. Because the Viet Cong, supported by Le Ly’s family and most other
peasants, were outnumbered and undersupplied in comparison with the
government troops of the South, they were utterly dependent upon the
organized resistance of a people united in common cause. The Vietnamese
saying, "by sticking together the tiny ants can carry the elephant," pointed to
their most precious resource and effective weapon—their own cohesiveness.
"The American elephant," Le Ly remarks, "could rage and stomp on the
Vietnamese anthill, but time and the weight of numbers guaranteed that it
would eventually be the ants, not the elephant, who danced on the bones of
the victims" (222). The metaphor also points to the undifferentiated status of
the Viet Cong supporters. Winthrop explains that early Christians "served not
for wages or by Constrainte but out of love...the sweete Sympathie of
affeccions which was in the members of this body one towardes another" (86).
Similarly, the Viet Cong drove home the point that like ants in a colony, the
Communists worked together not for individual profit or honor but for the
cause by which, as a whole, they would survive or, should the South win,

perish

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To achieve the solidarity which Winthrop described as everyone’s "need

of other, and...all knit more nearly together in the Bond of brotherly affeccion"
(77), the Viet Cong also cast their countrymen as members of one Vietnamese
family united against the Southern traitors and the American invaders who
blocked the nation’s reunification. By framing the civil war as a question of
family loyalty and genealogical purity, the Communists employed a metaphor
that was meaningful for the villagers, most of whom, as Buddhists, revered
their ancestors and the land which held their bones. Scorning the notion of the
French imperialists that "one nation could have two fathers," the Viet Cong
hailed Ho Chi Minh, or "Uncle Ho," as they taught the villagers to call him, as
a trusted relative who would reunite the divided nation and preserve its
sacred traditions. They featured Ngo Dinh Diem, the Republican President of
South Vietnam, in contrastingly negative terms: he was an absentee landlord,
a Catholic traitor whose Western allegiances would destroy Vietnam’s ancient
way of life, a warmonger who presided over an army of foreign mercenaries.

Like the social compact among New England’s Congregationalists,
which demanded that "...allbe marshaled into one united array...functioning for
a definite purpose, with all parts subordinate to the whole!“ the effort to
preserve the larger Vietnamese family required that every member contribute.
Sons were expected to escape government conscription by fleeing to the North
for military training, after which they were to fight alongside the Viet Cong, as
Le Ly’s two brothers and an older brother-in-law do. Under the guise of

performing farm labor, parents, including Le Ly’ s father Trong and her mother

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Huyen, dig trenches and build bunkers for the Northern-backed communist

soldiers, and they devise clever systems to gather and relay intelligence to the
cadre leaders. Vietnamese youth are prized for their agility, their nimble
fingers useful for wrapping bandages or rigging coconuts with explosives.
Children also conduct espionage. When at age twelve, Le Ly helps thwart a
Republican attack by informing the Viet Cong of the troop movement she has
observed, she is honored in poetry and song as "Sister Ly," the daughter of the
cause.

In the _Arbelle sermon Winthrop features the desired synergy of the
New England Puritans as a single human being, a conceit which describes the
linked life system whereby organs sustain the body and are in turn sustained.

The mouth is at all the paines to receive, and mince the foode

which serves for the nourishment of all the other partes of the

body, yet it hath noe cause to complaine; for the first, the other

partes send backe by secret passages a due proporcion of the

same nourishment in a better forme for the strengthening and

comforteing the mouthe. (88-89)
The Viet Cong press for a similar reciprocity between themselves and the
villagers. The survival of one-soldier or civilian-depends on the other.
Resistance fighters are literally an underground army. Living a shadow
existence by day beneath the villagers’ houses, they sleep in the tunnels
farmers have dug for them under their own beds and eat the food which
families funnel to them along passages beneath their cookstoves. Their close

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proximity reinforces the sense of blood relations. "Even though they were
mysterious," Le Ly remarks of the resistance fighters, "I did not fear
them....Unseen, they protected us like our ancestors" (18).

The Viet Cong equated their ability to defeat the Southern traitors and
to expel the Western invaders with the degree of suffering which the villagers
were willing to endure for the cause. Winthrop’s example for the similar
sacrifice he demanded is Christ, who "out of his good will in obedience to his
father, becomeing a parte of this body...willingly yielded himselfe to deathe to
ease the infirmities of the rest of his body and soe heale their sorrowes" (85).
Le Ly explains that same willingness among her neighbors in Ky La to give
their lives to communism. During bombing raids, villagers readily offer their
bodies as human shields to protect the youngest infant or the womb of a
pregnant woman, in the hope of preserving a line of resistance well into the
future. Villagers remain stoical when the Viet Cong execute a civilian
suspected of treason, for they "all were convinced...that it was necessary to
bring ’Communist happiness’" (xii). When Le Ly is repeatedly arrested by the
government police, who suspect her collaboration with the North, she submits
to torture rather than reveal the locations of resistance hideouts or munitions
stores; she attests that she is prepared to commit suicide, the act which the
Viet Cong teach is the valiant response to being captured.

What is significant in juxtaposing the cant from both texts is not simply
that Winthrop and Hayslip were well versed in metaphors of family unity and

the loyalty which that language could inspire, because history proves such

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rhetoric to be enormously effective as a rallying call. More interesting is the
schism that each effects, despite, or under cover of, their professed esprit de
corps. Winthrop’s plea for his fellow migrants to remain one in the Church is a
double-entendre of sorts; his meaning is ambiguous, as he commands fidelity
either to the Church of England or to the "true church" within that larger body,
which his contingent of the elect will comprise if they remain godly. Likewise,
Hayslip, despite shifting her allegiance from the North to the South and then
voluntarily removing herself from her home and family, casts herself as ever
faithful to her native land, the cultural essence of which she claims to extract
and, by seeking shelter in America, preserve.

Le Ly’s break with the Communists is slow in coming, but her memoir
documents the traumatic events which cause her loyalties to shift. Her
beatings by government interrogators who suspect her allegiance to the Viet
Cong are severe but brief, for Huyen bribes Republican officials to get her
daughter released. The short duration of Le Ly’s detentions arouse the
suspicion of the Viet Cong, who, after one of their raids on a unit of South
Vietnamese infantry is ambushed, condemn her as a traitor. Raped rather than
murdered by the soldiers ordered to shoot her, she and her mother flee from
Ky La to Danang and eventually to Saigon There the two women are bumped
from one menial job to another, their situation made worse by the birth of Le
Ly’s son Hung, the child of a rich Vietnamese industrialist in whose house she

and her mother briefly worked as servants.

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The atrocities which the Communists perpetrated against her and others

eventually convince Le Ly that the resistance has betrayed its own ideals. Acts
of kindness and fairness which she observes among the Republican troops
direct her sympathy from the North to the South, and more particularly to the
Americans. After several dangerous years of managing to survive and to
support her family through a combination of black marketeering, prostitution,
and money from a series of American GI lovers, Le Ly marries Ed Munro, a
civilian contractor from the United States, who is forty years her senior.
Shortly after Munro’s return to America, Le Ly leaves Vietnam to join him in
San Diego, taking along her son Hung, whom her new husband has adopted,
and their infant son Thomas.

Though in the United States Le Ly finds security and presumably
fulfillment, she continues to yearn for home. At age thirty-six, after she has
twice married, been twice widowed, and is financially independent as a Los
Angeles restauranteur and real estate owner, she returns to Vietnam for a brief
visit. Her trip is fraught with danger and anxiety, since her earlier death
warrant for suspected treason against the Viet Cong puts her at risk of
imprisonment or execution. Yet she most anticipates and fears the reception
she will receive from her surviving relatives back home. For, despite the rest
of the Phung family’s outrage over Viet Cong cruelty, their allegiance has
remained with the Commmts. Le Ly’s favorite brother, Sau Ban, gave his
life as a resistance soldier, a loss his parents found more acceptable than if he

had served in Diem’s Republican army. Her eldest brother, Bon Nghe, after

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his own tour of duty with the Viet Cong, has become a functionary in Ho Chi

Minh’s government. Regardless of the ambivalence her family feels about
communist rule, they have accepted the reality of the new government. To
fraternize with the Viet Kieu, those Vietnamese expatriates who moved to the
United States and who are widely, though most often groundlessly, suspected
of fomenting a counter-revolution, is to risk internment in a communist re-
education camp or even death

Thus, Le Ly’s transformation from communist to capitalist and
Vietnamese national to American citizen is much more than a social or political
breach It is a defection that severs her bond to her family, their land, and
their shared history. As a child, Le Ly was deeply influenced by her father’ s
devotion to his home as the land of his forebears. Even when warned of an
impending raid on Ky La, Trong would remain behind to guard the Phung
ancestral shrine while others fled to safety in the woods. Moved by the
example of his filiopiety, Le Ly makes a "solemn oath to be a dutiful, perfect
daughter[:] I would stay close at hand when I grew up and help them when
they were old. I would let nothing prevent me from repaying their love" (5).
Later, when Le Ly is the last child living with her parents, Trong entrusts to
her the care of the family’s home, their past, and their future. As father and
daughter work the fields together, Trong recounts the canon of his brave
ancestors and the series of attackers—Chinese, Japanese, and French—me

they fended off. He concludes with the story of Phung Thi Chinh, a distant

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relative, who, though pregnant, protected her land against an incursion of the
Han. Le Ly, he instructs, must emulate that woman warrior.

Your job is to stay alive-to keep an eye on things and keep the

village safe. To find a husband and have babies and tell the story

of what you’ve seen to your children and anyone else who’ll

listen Most of all, it is to live in peace and tend the shrine of our

ancestors. (32-33)

The genre of memoir affords Hayslip the advantage of time and
distance as she reconsiders and records this interchange some twenty years
after it occurs. From her mature standpoint as she reflects on her father’ s
earlier words, she comments that "only later would I learn what he truly
meant" (29). While age guarantees neither perspicacity nor objectivity, the
thrust of her autobiography is the certainty that, through her informed
perceptions, she has fathomed and fulfilled her father’ s wishes. Le Ly’ s
actions, however, belie her claim to fealty for, despite her strong sense of
identity as a Phung family member and a citizen of Vietnam, the land for
which her ancestors died, she forsakes her home, remarking as she leaves, "I
avert my eyes—look away and look out for number one. Isn’t that how people
survive?" (125).27 Such self-interest is unforgivable among a people to whom
the family unit is not simply one organizing principle but "the foundation of
social structure[;]....aid from blood relatives is mandatory, and reciprocity
within the family is standard."28 The defensiveness in Le Ly’s musing about

looking out for herself is, therefore, all the more pointed. But in the tradition

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of the American jeremiad, Hayslip the autobiographer "transform[s] self-doubt

into consolation!” inverting Trong’s hope that Le Ly "stay alive...to keep the
village safe" in order to "tend the shrine of our ancestors" into his sanction for
her flight from her family and her homeland.

Ostensibly, the title of Hayslip’s memoir refers to the horrendous
upheavals her nation underwent during the long and bloody war. But the
transformation she effects in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is of
equally cosmic proportions, for she must turn defection into devotion. The
divided sequence through which she narrates her story helps her bring about
that change: passages. that relate her later trip back to Vietnam are interposed
between scenes which move Le Ly forward to her emigration Tension mounts
as she moves alternately in both directions, toward leaving and coming back to
Vietnam, for exit and re-entry alike involve much anguish, as well as stealth
and bribery. The two time frames converge near the end of the book when
her departure and homecoming are complete. The effect of this narrative
coupling is as though in returning she has never left, or in leaving she has
remained. The differences between these two acts—staying and going-lose
their significance. But in blurring the distinction between renegade and
patriot, Hayslip does much more than assuage a guilty conscience. For
just as the Puritans, in Bercovitch’s reading, successfully rededicated
themselves to their ideals by divorcing fact from rhetoric, Hayslip’s
rationalization ultimately allows her to recommit herself to safeguarding her

heritage. The key to accomplishing this cultural mission is her ability to

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present her departure from home as an act of love for her family and her
country.

Both Winthrop and Hayslip cite Providence as inspiring, and thus
justifying, their removals. Early in life, Winthrop had sealed his holy covenant
when he vowed to "live where God appoints me."30 That sense of destiny

drove the Great Migration and was built into the Arbella sermon as proof of

 

God’s sanction: 'Tf the Lord shall please to heare us, and bring us in peace to
the place wee desire, then hath he ratified this Covenant and sealed our
commission"31 In other words, getting to New England proved that the
colonists were meant to go to New England. Throughout the early history of
the New England theocracy, Puritans continued to read the events of their
days providentially as affirmation of their mission and their progress. Even
happenstance was imbued with gravity: for instance, Winthrop construed
God’s guidance in his wife’s discovering a spider in the porridge she was
about to serve her family. That she found it was testament that God had
blessed their enterprise.32 Similarly, God verified that the Anglican Church
must be reformed when mice ate through the pages of Winthrop’s Book of
Common Prayer but left his Bible untouched.”

Le Ly too looks to Providence, which she terms "fate, or luck, or g "
(158, passirn) to guide her through life and to verify the wisdom of the choices
she makes. Her mother’s story of her difficult birth and precarious infancy
provides Le Ly with early evidence of her exceptionalism. She was a sickly

baby whom the villagers and many of her siblings neither wanted nor

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expected to live. By gender alone, Le Ly, the fourth daughter born to the

Phungs, was a burden to her family, a strain exacerbated by her ill health,
which drew Huyen, her middle-aged mother, away from her many
responsibilities to her other children and to her community. Though the
midwife who assisted at the delivery directed Huyen to suffocate her baby, Le
Ly lived and grew strong.

Le Ly’s sense of having been spared for a special purpose was
reinforced throughout her childhood when, after routinely sheltering herself
against the strafe of gunfire, she would often rise to find that many beside her
had been killed. Over time she refined her capacity for determining the
reasons behind the events of her life, and they consistently pointed to her
departure from Vietnam and then to her return visit. When she first meets Ed
Munro, the American she eventually marries, she is repelled by the thought of
a man of sixty seeking the company of a teenager. She tries to elude him in
the busy streets of Saigon but because he finds his way to her apartment
anyway, she believes she is "up against something more formidable than the
law of averages" (329). Likewise, she makes love to him because "it would
have been disrespectful of fate-maybe even sacrilegious—to further resist the
forces that pulled [them] together" (332). Years later at the Vietnamese
embassy in Bangkok, where Le Ly considers halting her complicated journey
back into her native land, she awaits her cue from Providence: "1 know from
experience that such a sign can take many forms...I must be vigilant to

recognize these signs....I must let the hand of fate or luck or god guide me as it

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will" (56). Affirmation comes in the shape of a Caucasian woman entering the
embassy: somehow, she is a signal that the trip was meant to be.

Though both Winthrop and Hayslip felt that a higher power propelled
them away from home and drew them to America, there were also numerous
pragmatic but compelling reasons behind their emigrations. Primogeniture
loomed if not as poverty for Winthrop’s younger sons who were coming of
age in England then as diminished means. Furthermore, offspring faced
reduced inheritances and a shrinking base of influence as the Puritan gentry
remained resistant to the legalism of financial exchange: e.g. as landlords
many were reluctant—or unable—to raise the rents that were due them, though
their tenants’ resources often increased under England’s growing wage
economy.“ Settlement in New England beckoned as a way to retain status
for their children

Le Ly too is genuinely motivated by maternal concern for Hung when
she vows, "[I will] put my son’s and my own interests first" through "buying
my way out of the country" at the expense of "conscience, honor, and money"
(256). Though the particulars of her escape plan remain vague, she begins to
work toward emigrating to the United States by saving a larger portion of her
black market earnings and supplementing her income with a brief but
lucrative stint as a prostitute. She also begins courting the affections of US.
servicemen While, as an adolescent, Le Ly commonly used the expressions
"round eyes" and "long nose" as insults to deride the Westerners who passed

through her village, those same facial features become attractive to her when

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she is bent on becoming a war bride. She comments specifically on the "big
blue eyes and...handsome American nose of a nice-looking American" whom
she hopes is interested in her (262). When Huyen objects to her daughter’ 5
dating American GIs, Le Ly assures her that her "eyes are not getting roun "
(277); in fact, she buys false eye lashes to make her "narrow Vietnamese eyes
look bigger, rounder, and more American" (282).

But Le Ly knows that her status as an unwed mother, black marketeer,
and Viet Cong fugitive makes her undesirable to the young GIs she hopes will
propose marriage. Indeed, she lives with a series of American lovers, but each
leaves her when his tour of duty ends. Though marriage to Ed Munro, whom
she perceives as elderly, will be all no (debt or gratitude) without any duyen

(physical attraction or affection), she cannot pass up the "golden opportunity to

flee the war, or at least to enjoy the easy life of an American housewife" (344).

The personal aspirations and financial worries of Winthrop and Hayslip,
though understandable as realistic human concerns, are nevertheless mundane
if not, to a degree, crass. Yet both of these immigrants are endangered within
the power structures of their native lands for acting on selfless, deeply-held
convictions. The decade prior to Winthrop’s migration saw rnilitantly anti-
Puritan churchmen climb to power; Charles I, who succeeded to the throne in
1625, supported their "catholicizing," Arminianist platform. Puritan pietists

who refused to adopt Laudian liturgical requirements, which they regarded as

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sacrilegious deviations from the dictates of the New Testament, were
increasingly fined, silenced, and imprisoned.35

Hayslip was accused of treason by the Communists and Republicans
alike. When the Viet Cong learn that she has evaded execution, they revoke
her death sentence on the condition that she give herself up and resume her
espionage in Ky La. But her allegiance has shifted to the Republican cause,
because the Viet Cong, who had won the support of Buddhists by alleging to
preserve their sacred traditions, have forbidden the practice of religious rites as
counterproductive to the war effort. Though the proffered stay of execution
would allow her to return to her village as she longs to do, she refuses to
betray the cause of the South. Her death warrant, issued by the side which
seems ever more likely to win the war and thus with whom she will have to
reckon if she stays in Vietnam, remains in effect.

Fear for one’s life under creeping tyranny and oppression is a
reasonable motive for flight, but such an explanation opens the emigrant to
charges of desertion Winthrop, well before setting sail and at the prodding of
fellow reformers as well as his own conscience, was forced to consider the
adverse effects of his departure. A friend hoping to dissuade him from
leaving England argued that the "church and common welthe heere at home
hathe more neede of your beste abyllytie in these dangerous tymes, than any
remote plantation"36 Attempting to allay such misgivings (as well as the
suspicions of the throne and the Anglican Church), Winthrop published

"Arguments for the Plantation of New England," a document promoting the

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Bay Colony as an enterprise that would benefit his country and his church by

extending the reach of Christendom.37

But the skepticism of many English Puritans continued, and some
charged the Bay Planters with "inflicting damage on their cause"38 by
diminishing Puritan effectiveness at home and spurring harsher measures
against other non-conformists. Even worse, it was feared that by forsaking
degenerate England for some distant asylum and thus reducing the numbers of
the elect back home, the colonists increased the chances that "God [would]
bringe some heavye Affliction upon [the] land, and that speedilye."39 English
Puritans entreated those who were set to emigrate: would it

not be ’a great wronge to our owne country and church to take

away the godly people’ and thus increase the likelihood of

covenantal judgment? Should not Christians ’stay and suffer for
Christ’ in the teeth of worsening conditions?"‘°

Le Ly grapples with, and at times tries to evade, similar charges of
desertion. Realizing that her family will view her marriage to Ed Munro and
her immigration to the United States as "’defection’ to the land of invaders"
(255), she conducts most of her emigration plans in secret. Though she invites
her family to her wedding, none attends. Her father has died by the time Le
Ly marries, but her elder sister Ba Xuan conveys the pain and outrage her
parents feel:

You betray your ancestors!....Do you see now what you’re

doing?...Americans are thu oo thuy vo Chung—they have no

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beginning and no end. They don’t care about their ancestors.

Because they don’t know what reincarnation is, they think they’re

free to do any cruel thing they want in this life—no matter how

much it hurts others....[Mother] calls you a spoiled rotten child!

She says you’re acting ungrateful toward your parents and

soiling the family name. She says that even though our father’ 5

dead, you have made him sad with your decision (348).

Le Ly leaves Vietnam without saying goodbye to her mother, allowing Huyen
to learn of her daughter’s departure only after she is gone.

Le Ly’s homecoming sixteen years later does not immediately abate the
Phungs’ sense of betrayal. Bon Nghe, Le Ly’ s only living brother and a
government official, is cold and guarded at their reunion in Danang. He is
mainly concerned that Le Ly follow the protocol for tourists during her stay,
and he refuses the American gifts she lavishes on the family. He will not even
accept the candy she offers, as he recalls that American and South Vietnamese
soldiers had often booby-trapped candy during the war. Le Ly knows the
reason for his remoteness, and she articulates it as though to a confessor: "I
married one of your enemies-an American civilian worker—and left the
country while you were still fighting" (230).

Her eldest sister Hai, a bent and wizened snail seller, reacts much more
dramatically to her sister’ 5 return When Le Ly surprises her in the
marketplace, Hai reels in terror: "Please-for the love of god-go home! Go

back to Tinh’s [the home of the niece who is hosting the reunion] and wait.

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But for god’s sake—get out of here! Take pity on us please. Let us live a little

longer!" (218). Other family members share Hai’s fears. Though Le Ly has
gone through the proper channels to arrange her visit, her siblings do not want
to alert communist informers to their sister’s presence; if the alleged war
crimes in Le Ly’s past are revealed, they all will be punished for harboring an
enemy of the state. Her Westernized look-not just her stylish, expensive
clothing, her cosmetics, or her groomed hair, but her erect posture and bold
stride-is hard to disguise. Back at Tinh’s house, they close the shutters against
onlookers and burn the wrapping from Le Ly’s gifts.

Huyen postpones her trip from Ky La to the reunion in Danang for
several days, a delay which Le Ly reads as her mother’s unwillingness to
forgive her. When the two finally meet, Huyen’s reluctance to welcome her
daughter home is clear. Her greeting is formal, and she holds herself rigid to
fend off Le Ly’s embrace. Besides this cold reception, she expresses little
interest in Le Ly’s life in California and the welfare of her grandchildren, using
the opportunity instead to extol Bon Nghe’s virtues. Le Ly’s brother’s life is a
direct inversion of her own, and she feels her mother’s censure in her praise
for Bon N ghe’s stalwart allegiance to the Viet Cong, his contributions to the
communist party, and his strict adherence to Vietnamese custom. The
exception for Huyen is her son’s choice of wives, but again Le Ly feels the
intended rebuke: Bon Nghe disappointed his mother by marrying a woman

from Hanoi rather than someone from their village in central Vietnam; Le Ly’s

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marriage to a man of a different race, religion, nationality, political ideology,
and even age group is contemptible beyond words.

Her mother continues the indirect but painful attack by rebuking Ian,
Le Ly’s sister, whose life more closely parallels her own. 50 little regard did
Huyen have for her daughter, a "tea girl" who was paid by nightclub owners
to dance with servicemen, many of whom she spent the night with, that she
gave away or carelessly lost the jewelry Lan sent her. "I didn’t want the stuff,"
Huyen explained.
"It was lam cuc kho—bad luck with the sweat of someone else’s labor all over it"
(246). In response to charges of disloyalty and abandonment and to
nourish the bond to their native lands, both Winthrop and Hayslip defend
their departures similarly—to themselves as well as to their accusers-as
necessary to preserve the values and institutions that are jeopardized back
home. Whereas Winthrop and Hayslip both worried about the immediate
safety and economic security of their own children, each went beyond self-
interest to express a larger concern for the future welfare of their people.
Emerging capitalism in England, the decline of Protestant Church, and the
foiled efforts of the Puritans to save it produced a land which, according to
Winthrop, had "’grow [n] weary of her Inhabitants’....human beings were
considered vile and burdensome in England. "‘1 Moral laxity and the rapacity
of a growing market economy caused parents to fear for "a child’s sense of his
Englishness....They were strangers at home....England was become permanently

monstrous!“2 The Bay Colonists, then, would rescue England. By describing

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the New England theocracy as a "model" in his Arbella sermon, Winthrop

presents not just a design for a church-state, but an example for "men...of
succeeding plantacions" to imitate (93). The Puritan exodus was a crusade to
save the souls of English posterity.

But the future was not to be secured through a breach with history, for
Puritans cast their exodus as a means of recouping the past, of preserving the
essence of "Englishness" that was being dissipated by the ethics of exchange in
England.

Though in the new world colonists were pulled inexorably forward, despite
Winthrop’s conception of the migration as "a holding action against the
evident future,“3 the restorationist agenda was a bulwark against that
inevitable progression When American Revolutionaries one hundred and fifty
years later invoked the Bay founders as visionaries who had waged the first
round in the fight for independence from Britain, they misrepresented Puritan
intentions. To the first colonists, "liberty" denoted the freedom to bind
themselves to the dictates of the Bible so as to live and worship as the early
Christians had done. Their goal, as Theodore Bozeman’s study of Puritan
prirnitivism reveals, was "to live ancient lives!“

Selective genealogy informed Puritan ancestor worship and made it
easier to effect change while simultaneously maintaining constancy. By
renouncing filial ties to George 111 during the Revolution and invoking instead
the New England founders as the fathers whose traditions they would

continue, American patriots could feature themselves as committing an act not

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5 First-generation Puritans exercised this

of "patricide but...filiopietism."‘
same choice in heredity (their "official" line of non-separation notwithstanding)
by regarding themselves not as sons of the Anglican ministry but as heirs of
the apostles and prophets they hailed in their sermons. They did not discard
the past in breaking with the English prelates but rather shifted their devotion
to different figures of veneration in their shared Christian history.

Le Ly’s emigration takes on a similar tone of filial duty as she features
herself to have been commissioned by her father and even by the collective but
unspoken will of her nation to win the war against modernization that

Vietnam was losing. Echoing the primitive cultural preservation which is the

subject of Theodore Bozeman’s To Live Ancient Lives Hayslip explains that

 

the peasants of her homeland had hoped that by supporting the Communists
against the American-backed South Vietnamese government, they would gain
"the ability...to live [their] lives in accordance with [their] ancient ways" (xii).
But just as Puritans had begun to feel like foreigners in England, Le Ly
laments well before she emigrated, "I was a stranger in my own homelan "
(195). The decline her nation suffers is most painfully observable in her
village. Leaving her refuge in Saigon, Le Ly risks Viet Cong arrest to visit her
father in Ky La, where, refusing to vacate the family home, he lives alone. She
is more appalled by the desecration she finds there than by the devastation

Houses could be rebuilt and damaged dikes repaired—but the loss

of our temples and shrines meant the death of our culture itself.

It meant that a generation of children would grow up without

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fathers to teach them about their ancestors or the rituals of

worship. Families would lose records of their lineage and with

them the umbilicals to the very root of our society—not just old
buildings and books, but people who once lived and loved like
them. Our ties to our past were being severed, setting us adrift
on a sea of borrowed Western materialism, disrespect for the
elderly, and selfishness. The war...had become a fight to see just
how much and how far the Vietnam of my ancestors would be

transformed. (195-196)

Ironically, to locate a rudder amid this "sea of borrowed Western
materialism" and to bind herself to her heritage, she moves ahead in her
decision to flee to America. Although she never tells her father of her desire
to emigrate, she extrapolates his approval for her flight from their
conversations. "When you see all those young Americans out there being
killed and wounded in our war," he tells her, "you must thank them...for

helping to put us back on our life’s course. * Don’t worry about right and

 

”Trong’s directive for Le Ly to be grateful to American soldiers is the
impetus for her own "selective paternity." His advice gives her permission to
shift allegiance from Vietnam to the United States and to adopt new father
figures there. Her memoir reads as though, posthumously, Trong has passed
his mantle of paternity to the American men in Le Ly’s life. Most of those
with whom she becomes sexually involved are not really her lovers, at least
not in the sense that they could threaten her father’s hold by turning Le Ly
into anything other than a daughter. They become more like guardians,
surrogates who assume Trong’s responsibilities when he can no longer fulfill
them. One boyfriend is her "America knight" (274), while her first husband is
her "American savior" whom she likens to a "grandfather" and a "village elder"
(365, 311, 327). Her second husband, Dennis Hayslip, is the man "who took
responsibility" for her and her children (vi).

165
wrong. Those are weapons as deadly as bombs and bullets. Right is the

goodness you carry in your heart-love for your ancestors and your baby and
your family and for everything that lives" (200-201).

Trong’s actions belie his advice to preserve life at all costs. Harassed by
both North and South Vietnamese soldiers and afraid of being forced off his
land, Trong takes his life by drinking acid. On an unacknowledged level, his
suicide seems to release Le Ly from Vietnam, as though the reality of
emigrating is closer when she no longer need confront her father about her
desire to leave. But Le Ly interprets his death as much more than a
dispensation; her escape becomes the duty she owes him, a means to resurrect
his spirit.

Our country’s past, like the Republican cause, was on the verge of being

lost forever. But with a two-year-old son on my knee...and. a Phung Thi

woman’s heart in my chest, I concluded that such idle mourning must
be left to other people. If baby Hung and I and my father’ s spirit were
to survive the death of Vietnam, we would have to turn our eyes
elsewhere—to the West—to the direction of the rising, not setting, sun;

and pray that the sun would one day shine again on our country (239).

New England Puritans rebutted charges of desertion with the reasoning
that the Church was universal, or, in the words of Thomas Hooker, "that God
is generally present, as once with the Ark, whenever and wherever his
ordinances are rightly observed!“ Le Ly makes a similar case as she argues

that the Vietnamese ethos is an intrinsic and eternal part of her being,

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regardless of where she makes her home. When her sister Ba Xuan denounces
her as a traitor for planning to marry an American and to emigrate to the
United States, Le Ly counters that geographical location has no bearing on
cultural and religious observance. "Can’t I be married to Ed without becoming
an American myself?" she asks her sister as much as herself. "Can’t I keep an
altar in my house and pray to our father and to Sau Ban and to Grandma and
Grandpa Phung, even if Ed doesn’t believe in it himself?" (348). Whether she
turns her desire for religious constancy into a reality is never known, for in
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places Hayslip alludes to the American
tastes and habits she has acquired in California but includes no evidence of her
continued devotion to Buddhism. But while she maintains that culture is
portable, defining home as "a place you find in your heart, not on a map.
People are raised to think their native country is their home, but that’s not
always true" (64), she also admits to a deep loss. The United States has
become for Le Ly a limbo of sorts. She is proud that her sons are "well-fed,
healthy, stereo-playing American boys" (193) but grieves that she is "something
else: not quite Vietnamese anymore, but not so American as they" (307).
Hayslip’s liminal existence is further impetus for her to reconnect to her
cultural heritage, yet the Phungs’ own familial instability in post-war Vietnam
threatens any real reunion. The bond among her family members has grown
so slack that her nephew cannot understand the reason for her return visit.
"Everyone knows you have a good life in America and Vietnam has pitifully

little to show its visitors," Bon Nghe’s son remarks. "Why would a rich Viet

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Kieu like you ever want to come back?" (306). Le Ly is disheartened that her

nephew does not understand her need to reunite with her mother and siblings:
"Has Vietnam gone so far down the road toward materialism—the very thing
Bon Nghe and everyone else fought against for twenty years—that the magnet
of simple family love has lost its power to attract even the most opposite of
relatives?" (306).

In relating further evidence of the discord into which the Phungs have
fallen in communist Vietnam, Le Ly presents herself as the one who, having
escaped the full brunt of the war and its horrific aftermath, can restore family
harmony. But the incidents she provides also undermine the premise behind
her vindication for leaving Vietnam-that she undérstOod and was following
her father’s wishes. For Le Ly is not the only Phung who professes to know
Trong’s mind: her siblings and her mother often presume to speak for him.
For instance, during the sixteen years that Le Ly has been in the United States,
she regularly sent gifts to her sister Ba in Danang, whom she assumed would
‘ distribute the goods to the rest of the family. Ba, however, kept most of the
presents for herself, convinced that her need was the greatest since her
husband, an official in N go Dinh Diem’s government, had been interned by
the Communists after the war. (Her first husband had gone to Hanoi to be
trained by the Northern army, just as Le Ly’ 5 brothers had.) Angered by such
greed, the rest of the Phung family has shunned Ba; Le Ly’s mother defends
that ostracism as something that "your father would’ve understood" (247). The

Phungs claim Trong’s endorsement even as they argue with one another.

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Huyen, eventually urging Bon Nghe to accept Le Ly’s proffered gifts, contends

that "your father would have wanted you to do your duty to your sister!"
(251). Adamantly refusing, Bon Nghe uses that same phrase, which becomes a
mantra in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: 'That’s what Father
would have wanted" (251). When Le Ly senses that her family is leery about
the wealth and possessions she has accumulated as a capitalist, she exonerates
herself with Trong’s sanction: "He taught me that material things are just a
vehicle to help me get through life. Lots of Americans feel that way" (242).
The ease with which the Phungs cite Trong’s endorsement to justify a myriad
of moral positions and behaviors renders his supposed benediction
meaningless.

In her autobiography’s acknowledgements, Hayslip declares her book,
and the reconciliation it is meant to achieve, to be "the mission of my life" (v).
Her memoir shows her becoming increasingly confident of that duty, as in her
proud response to an embassy attache’s question about any reason she might
fear arrest upon returning to Vietnam. "The best reason of all," she answers.
"I have promised my father’s spirit that I will tell everything I have learned to
my family, my people, and the world....[by] writing a book" (60). But by
including the Phungs’ varying interpretations of Trong’s will, Le Lynwittingly
or inadvertently-relates that she can understand her father only subjectively.
In acknowledging other perspectives on her family history, Hayslip seems to
accede that her memoir is just one version of their life story. She offers further

proof of the idiosyncratic grounding of her narrative when she relates that Bon

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N ghe has a literary mission of his own. 'T want to write a booknlike you-to
tell our family’s story," her brother announces. "I want to learn how he [their
father] felt about the war" (253). As a former Viet Cong and an official in
Vietnam’s new communist government, Bon Nghe would produce a memoir
that is strikingly different from that which his sister writes. Moreover, he
promises to ask the hard questions about Trong’s suicide that Le Ly avoids,
possibly because, choosing to die rather than be forced off his land, her father
contradicted what she perceived as his imperative to survive at all costs and,
hence, as his permission for her escape to the United States.

But what must be regarded as truth, Hayslip seems to say, is the
meaning that transcends facts and which a mere reportage of events belies.
She opens the "Prologue" to When Heaven ane Earth Changeg Places with a
tribute to her father as well as to herself as the daughter in whom he
vouchsafed his values.

My father taught me to love god, my family, our traditions and

the people we could not see: our ancestors. He taught me that

to sacrifice one’s self ‘for freedom—like our ancient kings who

fought bravely against invaders; or in the manner of our women

warriors, including Miss Trung Nhi Trung Trac who drowned

herself rather than give in to foreign conquerors-was a very high

honor. From my love of my ancestors and my native soil, he

said, I must never retreat. (ix)

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On the surface, Hayslip may be seen to have failed every lesson that her father

tried to teach her. She has not sacrificed herself in the noble tradition of the
women warriors, as her father instructed by the example of his own suicide.
Rather than eluding the "foreign conquerors" through death, she marries one of
them in order to live. Told to cherish her country, the land of her ancestors,
Hayslip flees to America. But in the tradition of the American jeremiad,
Hayslip’s autobiography "denie[s] the contradiction between history and
rhetoric. "‘7 In her mind she has not shirked the duties her father set before
her, but has fulfilled them differently, more valiantly than she could have if
she had remained behind. Rather than merely deluding her family or herself,
Hayslip effects a transformation that achieves her conciliatory cause. Just as
the New England Puritan sermon employed an ambiguity which was
"progressive because it denield] divisiveness-and [was]...therefore impervious
to the reversals of history,“8 Hayslip’s rhetoric is similarly dynamic and
forward-moving, for it ultimately allows her to accept herself and to be
accepted by her family.

In the spirit of Winthrop’s AM; sermon, Le Ly counsels charity
among her severed family, their war-scarred nation, and between the eastern
and western worlds. “ In pleading for love, she prompts their forgiveness
of her. Through numerous examples, the memoir proves that she is indeed a

"model of charity." She holds no grudge against Lien, the former employer

 

“Hayslip’s epilogue is a plea for American aid for the East Meets West
Foundation, the charitable trust she runs which funds, builds, and staffs health
clinics in Vietnam.

171

who had thrown the teenaged Le Ly into the streets of Saigon for conceiving a
child with her husband. In the United States Le Ly has helped Lien’s refugee
sons; understanding Lien’s maternal anguish, Le Ly seeks her out with good
news of her children’s welfare. Though Lien’s husband Anh never took
responsibility for Hung, the illegitimate child whom Le Ly’s husband Ed
Munro adopted, Le Ly forgives her former lover and addresses him as her
son’s father, as he has come to regard himself.

More importantly, Le Ly’s return to Vietnam occasions the Phungs’
reconciliation with Ba, the family outcast. They settle their feud with her on
the example of Hayslip’s own generous spirit, which they find to be
reminiscent of Trong’s good-heartedness. Moved by Le Ly's capacity to
forgive, her mother exclaims, "you got that from your father. You’ve done
your homework, Bay Ly. *“ The rest of us-well-our whole world turned
upside down because we didn’t learn our lessons about getting along. And
we’re still in trouble for it, aren’t we? We need to listen to our higher selves,
Bay Ly—as you have clone" (358). Le Ly’s transformation is complete: the
child who had forsaken her family is the one who restores them to harmony;
the daughter who seemed to defy her father’s lessons is the heir who succeeds
him as teacher. When at the end of her memoir she again leaves her family—
this time with their full blessing—she harks back to the day when her father

first charged her with protecting the Phung land. The closing passage

 

“*"Bay" is the ordinal number six, "Bay Ly" the pet name which denotes
Le Ly as the sixth child born into the Phung family.

172

resounds with a clarity of purpose and pride in its accomplishment: "To the
east, there is a small, bald hill overlooking the rest, where an older, wiser
entity--almost finished with its quest for perfection—bestowed on a younger
spirit the object of her journey" (362).

Like the New England jeremiad, the rationalization at work in Hayslip’s
narrative betrays the doubt, guilt, and ethical confusion it seeks to resolve.
But, also consistent with Puritan rhetoric, Hayslip’s "flights of self-justification"
through which she overlooks the "discrepancy between appearance and
promise" supply the Phung family with a needed "source of social cohesion
and continuity!“9 Many scholars of American Puritanism contend that the
rnillennialism of the New England migration was an ex post facto motive. They
maintain that the remove which Winthrop described to his wife as an escape
"to a shelter and a hiding place for us and ours"50 was only later cast as a
heroic pilgrimage to bolster or defend what was increasingly seen as desertion
or a wasted effort.51 Cotton Mather, a third-generation New Englander,
boosted the flagging reputations of the founders when, writing his grandfather
Richard’s biography, he praised the elder’s wisdom and valor in leaving
degenerate England. In Magglia Christi Americana (1702), Mather describes
his grandfather as a "noble exile, banished to the wilderness of America for his
devotion to the true Church order."52 Le Ly Hayslip, as three separate
characters in her memoir-the girl who leaves home, the woman who returns,
and the author who writes about it—undertakes the transformatory work

which the offspring of Puritan immigrants performed for their founding

173

generation. In terms that are too harsh yet still apt, she performs her own
damage control as she turns her flight from Vietnam into a campaign to save
it.

Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch diverge in their appraisals of the
effect and range of the Puritan experiment. For Miller, the dubious process of
divorcing fact from rhetoric, by which Puritanism was sustained, taints the
overall product; he pronounces the grand New England errand a failure that
was salvaged as an effort toward "Americanization" when England lost interest
in Massachusetts.53 Bercovitch, looking beyond the means to the end, or,
rather, perceiving that the means, as a ritual, can eternally defer an outcome
and thus postpone defeat, declares the Puritan mission a success.“ ““
Likewise, when the actual manner of Hayslip’s accomplishment does not
overshadow what she has wrought, her emigration becomes the brave
American errand to which she was dispatched by her father. Writing three
hundred and fifty years earlier, Winthrop demonstrated the way to leave home
and yet remain attached, for the Puritan founders of the Bay Colony effect
what is tantamount to schism while avoiding the label of Separatist. Hayslip’s
resignation to the moniker of apostate or renegade would have precluded her
return to Vietnam and, presumably, the production of her memoir. But by
reworking her emigration so that her decision to "look out for number one"

(125) becomes a bold and magnanimous measure to protect her cultural

 

w“ Bercovitch testifies to the efficacy of Puritan consensus-building
without affirming its effect, which, as a Marxist-leaning theorist, he indicts as
culminating in American middle-class, capitalist society.

174

heritage, she actually can return home and perform that duty. For film
Heaven and Earth Changed Places is the paean which Hayslip owes to the
past. Her autobiography is the vehicle by which she reconciles herself to her
nativity and thus enhances her life in the United States. By reconnecting with
her homeland, Hayslip both settles her cultural debt and regains the spiritual,

cultural, and familial ties that will sustain her in America.

175

Notes

1. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Stog of |ohn
Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958) 1-53.

2. Perry Miller’s thesis of Puritan millennialism, most succinctly argued
in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1956) but
pervasive throughout the corpus of his scholarship and reiterated, to a large
extent, by Edmund Morgan in such of his works as Visible Saints: The History
of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1963), among others, continues to hold
sway in the debate of the early New England mind. But there have been
reconsiderations of note. For diverging theories on Puritan thought and
responses to Miller, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American |eremiad (Madison:
U of Wisconsin P, 1978); Theodore Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The
Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P,
1988); or Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1989).

3. Delbanco contends that England’s nonconforming Puritans who
elected to migrate did so not to fulfill a glorious mission but to escape their
own imminent depravity and God’s ensuing wrathful judgement upon their
Anglican homeland. Their jeremiads reminded them of what they had escaped
and what they needed to be vigilant about resisting. See "Errand out of the
Wilderness," in Puritan Ordeal 41-80.

 

4. Hayslip wrote a second book, Child of War Woman of Peace (New
York: Doubleday, 1993), which overlaps chronologically with When Heaven
and Earth Changed Places, filling in the narrative gap in her life story between
her arrival in the United States in 1970 and her visit to Vietnam in 1986. While
this second memoir covers her orientation to the United States, it remains
significant that the time frame of the first book she elected to write included
nearly two decades of her life in America yet omitted references to those
intervening years, concentrating instead on the world she had left behind.

 

5. Delbanco 72.

176

6. Perry Miller, "The Jererniad," The New England Mind: From Colony
to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1953) 27-39, especially 29.

7. Miller, The New England Mind 27-39, especially 28, 29.
8. Bercovitch 7.

9. Bercovitch 8.

10. Bercovitch 8,

11. Bercovitch 75-80.

12. Bercovitch explains the American Puritan jeremiad as "the ritual of a
culture on an errand—which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process.
Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old World ideal of stasis
for a New World vision of the future. Its function was to create a climate of
anxiety that helped release the restless ’progressivist’ energies required for the
success of the venture" (23). See also Darrett Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston:
Portrait of a Puritan Town 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P,
1965) 2-22.

 

13. Miller explains that the castigating fast-day sermons were "not a
blood-letting and a cure, but an increase of appetite that grew by what it fed

upon." See The New England Mind, 28.
14. Bercovitch 17.

15. Bercovitch 18.
16. Bercovitch 17.
17. Bercovitch 11.
18. Bercovitch 12.
19. Bercovitch 33, 78, and 86.

20. Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650 (1933; New
York: Harper, 1970) 84; cited in Delbanco 67.

21. Delbanco 66.

22. Le Ly Hayslip with Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed

Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s lourney from War to Peace (New York:
Doubleday, 1989) 193. All other references to this source with be cited

parenthetically in the text.

177

23. Lee Schweninger explains that while Winthrop might not have
actually written the "Humble Request," he did in fact read and sign that
document. See |ohn Winthrop (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990) 40, 41.

24. Edmund S. Morgan, "John Winthrop’s ’Modell of Christian Charity’
in a Wider Context," The Huntington Library Quarterly 50.1 (87) 145-151.
Despite his title, Morgan examines the sermon in a narrower context.
Assuming that Winthrop was aware of the threat of mutiny on the dangerous
sea crossing, he speculates that the Governor delivered his sermon while the
Arbella passengers were receiving Communion The message of the sermon,
coupled with the taking of the sacrament, it was presumably hoped, would
achieve the "concord and amity" (146) necessary to complete the first leg of the
Puritan errand—the Atlantic voyage.

25. For a discussion of the unprecedented assertion of human will in
Winthrop’s sermon see Scott Michaelsen, "John Winthrop’s ’Modell’ Covenant
and the Company Way," Early American Literature 27 (1992): 85-100.

26. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness 5, 6, 143.

27. Hayslip actually makes this remark later in her autobiography, but
when she utters it, she says it describes the same emotions she felt upon
leaving Vietnam in 1970.

28. The preeminent role that family plays in shaping individual identity
is clear from the order in which Vietnamese names are written, with the family
name placed first to emphasize a person’s heritage. See Paul James Rutledge,
The Vietnamese Exmrience in America (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992) 139,
153. Moreover, Le Ly and her siblings place further weight on family
membership as they frequently call one another by names which mark their
order of birth Le Ly, the sixth-born, is often called Bay Ly, "Bay" meaning
"six ."

29. Bercovitch 16.
30. Schweninger 19.

31. John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity," in Puritan Political
Ideas 1158-1794 ed. Edmund S. Morgan (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) 92.
Other references to the sermon are from this source and will be cited
parenthetically in the text.

 

32. Schweninger 22.

33. John Winthrop, "Journal," in The American Puritans: Their Prose
and Poep'y, Perry Miller, ed (New York: Columbia, 1956) 41.

178
34. Delbanco 12, 47, 60-62.
35. Bozeman 101-107.
36. Schweninger 38.
37. Schweninger 36-39.
38. Delbanco 100.
39. Schweninger 37.
40. Bozeman 95.
41. Schweninger 37.

42. Referring specifically to William Bradford’s fear that his family,
while living in Holland, would lose their attachment to the mother tongue,
Delbanco maintains that the Puritans felt this same estrangement without
leaving England. See Delbanco, 70.

43. Delbanco 76.

44. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist
Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988).

45. Bercovitch 123.
46. Delbanco 91.

47. Bercovitch 17.
48. Bercovitch 16,17.
49. Bercovitch 17.
50. Schweninger 30.

51. For instance, Bozeman maintains that the migration was initially
intended to recover the first forms of Christian worship. The Puritans’
crusading exemplarity, he contends, was a revisionist construct by which the
offspring exalted the founders. See 116-119. Consider as well Delbanco’s
explanation that as the offspring faced their own decline they magnified the
objectives of the immigrant generation, whom, he believes, had simply sought
to escape degenerate England. The grand design, imputed to the founders by
their children, was intended to make their own failings more understandable
in light of such exceptionalism. See 226-230.

179

52. Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan
Intellectuals 1596-1728 (New York: Oxford UP, 1971) 195.

 

53. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness 10-15.

54. See Bercovitch 10—19 for his discussion of Miller’s views on the
failure of Puritanism and his own case for the effectiveness of Puritan self-
justification.

CHAPTER FOUR
Flight from the Ethnic Enclave:
Escape or Sojourn?

The divide between canonical and ethnic writing in American literary
study is maintained in part through semantics. "Ethnic" as a designation of
minority status in the United States is a coveted and contested signifier.
Slovakian-American Michael Novak vigorously defends that descriptor for
Americans of Eastern European descent, those he describes as "unmeltable
ethnics" who are unwilling and, indeed, unable to assimilate into the WASP

American mainstream.1 Definable difference is the premise of such recent

scholarship as Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicig in
American Literature (1992) or The Republic of Armenia and the Rethinking of
the North-American Diasmra in Literature (1992):: attributes of descent and
circumstances of emigration are found to shape and distinguish American
fiction by authors of Eastern European origin, in these examples, and place it
outside the WASP mainstream.

Other scholars of multicultural American literature, however, dispute
any European-American claim to ethnic status. Bonnie TuSmith echoes
popular sentiment in pronouncing Americans of Southern or Eastern European
descent would-be minorities. Her primary basis for distinguishing ethnicity is

physical appearance. She maintains that to label Jews, Italians, or the Irish, for

180

181

example, as "ethnic" is a misnomer, since these Americans easily blend into
white America.’ Members of these groups who regard themselves as cultural
minorities, she contends, practice an "effortless ethnicity" through voluntary
involvement in religious rites or personal choice in dietary habits. TuSmith
would reserve "ethnic" for those who, by visible characteristics of race, are
easily identifiable as "other": Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians.
Proposing that "ethnic" be used to denote only people of color, she declares
"WASP," "Anglo," "European American," and "white" as interchangeable terms
to describe all white Americans of European origin.3

But beyond tagging physical characteristics as evidence of ethnicity,
TuSmith, as a custodian of the cultural divide, undertakes to
"distinguish..Eurocentric culture or literary tradition [which she defines as
homogeneously European—Western or Eastern, Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish]
from ethnic traditions in this country.“ Foundational to such cultural
categorization is what has become an accepted watershed in classifying
American literatures: self-interest is the presumed rule for Eurocentric fiction,
while communitarianism is thought predominant in ethnic writing.5 The title

of TuSmith’s book reflects this division All My Relatives posits a kinship

 

’ TuSmith’s claim, of course, overlooks bigotry based on physical (quite
aside from cultural) differences among European immigrant groups. Consider,
for example, Alexander Portnoy’s anguish over his appearance—"you have got
J-E-W written right across the middle of that face-look at the shnoz on him."
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1967) 168, or
the cruel judgement of steelmill management in Thomas Bell’s Out of This
Furnace that the Slovaks’ prominent brow and heavy jaw befit them for
nothing other than brute labor. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1941).

182

between and among Asian-American, African-American, Native American, and
Chicano writers with respect to their affinity for community. Because
members of each group prize their own relatives-their community-«hey in
turn are related to one another by virtue of such neighborliness, and they
sharply contrast the European emphasis on privacy, competition, and personal
achievement.

To highlight conununal affirmation within minority literature, TuSmith
reiterates as contrast Richard Chase’s thesis that the hallmark of classic
American literature is the hero’s romantic escape from society into a solitary
existence where "human virtues are personal, alien, and renunciatory." Yet
while TuSmith disparages as naively and unnaturally dualistic the literary
traits which Chase identifies as classically American-such as the Manichaean
melodrama of good and evil—she and many other multiculturalists fall back on
similarly flawed absolutes.7 To acclaim the collectivist ethos of ethnic writing
and reserve radical individualism for Euro-American literature is to rest
unwisely on a false dichotomy.

A bi-directional domino effect results from TuSmith’s reliance on Chase,
who in turn cites Hawthorne to prove his thesis of American individualism.
Like Chase, R.W.B. Lewis also counts Hawthorne’s heroes—specifically Hester
Prynne—among his American Adams who step out of history to make
themselves anew.8 But, ironically, The Scarlet Letter defies the binary logic
that would oppose ethnic and Anglo-American writing, for in many ways that

novel joins rather than divides majority and minority literature of the US.

183

As a nineteenth-century romancer, Hawthorne displays a fondness for
the past which is usually deemed central to etlmic writing. As many scholars
of multiculturalism propound, minority writers are keenly interested in the art
of storytelling, for the narrative is their link to an endangered history.9
According to Dexter Fisher, narration and tradition are indivisible.

Storytelling is the art of making connections, of establishing

relationships with people and the creative process, with nature,

feelings, and the self with one’s heritage and progeny.

Storytelling generates continuity, linking the past to the future

and ’contextualizing’ individual histories within the framework

of tradition10
In contrast, Euro-centric literature is often thought heretical in its irreverence
for the past and desire for originality}1 as indicated by the modernist dictum
to "make it new" or, earlier, Emerson’s oft-repeated "American Scholar" charge
that "we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe." Hawthorne,
however, is loath to part with the past. In his preface to The House of the
Seven Gables (1851), he describes his authorial intention as "the attempt to
connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us." He
presents himself as a scribe who helps "a legend prolong...from an epoch now
gray in the distance, down into our broad daylight."12 He considers this debt
and duty to history at greater length in ’The Custom House" and undertakes

to fulfill it in The Scarlet Letter (1850).

184

Like many ethnic-Americans whose fiction reveals that in confusion,
despair, or even anger they turn to their forebears for guidance, Hawthorne, in
his time of need, delves into New England’s past, which is his personal and
national history. "The Custom-House" explains that the Whig victory of 1848
meant the end of his government position, a loss of income that would further
destabilize a precarious writing career. Aid comes in the legacy of his "official
ancestor," Mr. Jonathan Pue, the customs surveyor of the previous century who
purportedly first recorded the
saga of Hester Prynne. Hawthorne gives his imagination free rein in Ih_e
Scarlet Letter (indeed, "The Custom-House" clarifies that the story is both
fiction and fact), but he nonetheless casts himself as the vehicle for his
forebear’s story: "With his own ghostly voice, [Surveyor Pue] exhorted me, on
the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him...who
might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor,-to bring his mouldy
and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. "‘3 As narrator, Hawthorne
presents himself as the channel through which lore is passed and preserved.
By re-telling the tale, he is promised to derive profit if he gives the
"predecessor’s memory the credit which will be rightquy its due" (43).

Hawthorne’s tale of an adulterer’s punishment in the Boston Colony,
moreover, is the story of his own ancestry. Old Salem is his "native place" (19)
where his family’s "deep and aged roots...[have] struck into the soil" (20). The
description of his first immigrant ancestor, a "grave, bearded, sable-cloaked,

and steeple-crowned progenitor...[who] had all the Puritanic traits, both good

185

and evil" (20), suggests the stern elders who stand in judgment of Hester
Prynne. The tone of that description also suggests the ambivalence that later
ethnic writers would feel for their forebears and which the act of writing was
hoped to settle. Hawthorne does not gloss over his progenitors’ faults, for
"The Custom House" recounts their zealous persecution of suspected sinners
and witches. But the tale that follows, though it conveys the characteristic
severity of historical and invented Puritan characters alike, also exonerates
Hawthorne’s kinsmen Despite their cold-bloodedness, New England figures
of authority prevail as the able voice for the common good. While much
scholarship celebrates Hawthorne as a writer ahead of his time, a feminist
precursor who boldly articulates social parity for women,“ The Scarlet Letter
is ultimately conservative in reaffirming the status quo. In Jonathan Arac’s
new historicist reading, the novel is propaganda against change.15 Likewise,
Sacvan Bercovitch speaks to the novel’s reactionary bent as Hawthorne
squelches Hester’s radicalism, which represents dangerous political upheavals
at home and abroad.“ In exploring his national history and personal past-
even as he augments the patina of age with imagination—Hawthorne
prefigures later American immigrant fiction which focuses on familial roots.
His narrative pose as a storyteller who retells a factual yet fanciful tale
disproves (or at least problematizes) the multiculturalist claim that Eurocentric
literature discounts cultural continuity and ignores the storytelling process."
But the bridge between Anglo- and ethnic-American literature which

The Scarlet Letter provides is buttressed by more than shared interest in

186
cultural continuity through storytelling. The alignment with tradition which

Hawthorne achieves through his narrative method repeats in the story itself,
for the plot of The Scarlet Letter largely affirms the New England way. Such
easy absolutes as "leaving is...the permanent solution..in Eurocentric
literature"18 neither capture the complexity of Hawthorne nor prove the
presumed gulf between ethnic and mainstream writing. Flight is not the final
or foregone conclusion it is taken to be in much American literature, nor is it
absent in ethnic literature. Protagonists in ethnic and mainstream American
literature alike leave home and family behind, often with the same results. In
a sequence of events quite like the mythic hero’s three-part journey of
separation, initiation, and return, protagonists are often tried and strengthened
by their remove, and they go back to bestow their wisdom on those whom
they have left behind. Flight from the immigrant enclave—whether a Puritan
colony or an ethnic ghetto-is often a sojourn; the renegade returns empowered
by travel beyond the home boundaries to revitalize the community and thus
keep an endangered culture viable.

Hester Prynne is a deceptively easy mark for critics who would level
charges of romantic nihilism against Eurocentric literature.” Her social and
moral offenses are too glaring. At the outset, she is linked to Ann Hutchinson,
the antinomian who challenged Calvinist doctrine to impute redemptory
powers of faith to the individual. Like the heretical Hutchinson, Hester’s
thoughts and actions are "against the law." Her illicit union with Dirnmesdale

is both a sin and a crime against the Puritan theocracy, and the act is made

187

more egregious by her sacrilegious defense that it "had a consecration of its
own" (186). Moreover, she flouts the patriarchy by refusing to name her
child’s father, not only by willfully withholding information which the elders
seek but by implying through her silence that paternity is of small
consequence. Having spurned Puritan convention, Hester breaks the social
compact. Her moral restiveness is as dangerous to the precarious colony’s
welfare as the dark wilderness that threatens to reclaim their settlement.
Despite enduring images of Hester Prynne as statuesque and irnpassive
before her accusers or as an observer frozen on the fringe of activity, she is a
dynamic character who is often in motion In many ways, The Scarlet Letter is
Hester’s story of restless outward mobility: as a Massachusetts Bay colonist
she is an English immigrant whose wanderlust remains seemingly unabated by
removal and resettlement. To the woeful Dirnmesdale, whom she meets in the
forest seven years after their first tryst, she counsels flight and forgetfulness.
Exclaiming that the wide world beckons them, she urges that they follow the
forest-track, not "backwards to the settlement...but deeper...into the
wilderness...from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where
thou mayest still be happy" (187). She is giddy with the possibilities of re-
invention that await them in the woods or across the sea in Europe, and she
exhorts her lover to "begin all anew....Give up this name of Arthur
Dirnmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst
wear without fear or shame" (188). She instructs that the break with society is

to be abrupt and complete: "let us not look back...The past is gone" (192).

188

Although her escape with Dirnmesdale never comes to pass, Hester
makes an internal migration through her radical self-direction. As a free-
thinker, she poses a threat to the social order, for she muses over a
transformation that would strike at the very base of the community-its gender
roles. To her way of thinking, "the whole system of society is to be torn down,
and built up anew....the very nature of the opposite sex...is to be essentially
modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and
suitable position" (160). But Hawthorne does not hail the changes Hester
would affect; he denounces them, for he presents her as a sick soul who is
devoid of a moral touchstone. Her heart has "lost its regular and healthy
throb;" she wanders "without a clew in the dark labyrinth of min " (160).

Hawthorne follows up this image of Hester meandering a moral abyss
with the terse but cryptic statement that "the scarlet letter had not done its
office" (160). To Bercovitch, this line proves Hawthorne’s conservatism in that
Hester has not been reformed as she duly should be.20 But the syntax shifts
the emphasis of the sentence away from her, for the subject is not Hester but
the letter, to which an ambiguous injuriousness is imputed. On one level, the
"A" has simply not accomplished what is intended by its application: it has
not tamed Hester’s rebellious impulses. But by failing "its office," it has
actually worked against the desired rehabilitation The scarlet letter has
stigmatized Hester, further separating her from the community in such a way
as to heighten her radical nature. Hawthorne criticizes the emblem as a

vehicle of further transgression, which literally denotes a journey, an exceeding

189

of due bounds: "the scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other
women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her
teachers,-stern and wild ones,-and they had made her strong, but taught her
much amiss" (190).

Hester and the Bay colonists are unwitting conspirators in her
revolution As they stigmatize her with the scarlet letter, she brightly
embroiders it, intensifying its capacity to set her apart from the community.
She is wrong to exempt herself from social regulation, but the settlers err as
well by participating in her ostracism. Her sequestration then is both self-
imposed and community-reinforced. Townspeople warm to her as she
conforms—albeit outwardly—to social expectations, for they regard her as "our
Hester-the town’s Hester" (157). Yet their fondness reinforces her marginality:
she is a character, quaint but peculiar, who is decidedly different from "them."

A headstrong individual and an unyielding community form a
potentially hazardous combination in their mutual repulsion The colony
continues to be at risk when a "mind of native courage and activity,...[is]
outlawed, from society" for Hester has become "habituated...to such latitude of
speculation...[that] she had looked from this estranged point of view at human
institutions...criticizing all" (189, 190). Society is implicated in Hester’s
radicalism, for seclusion breeds errant thought. Both shunned and self-
sequestered, Hester imbibes the spirit of revolution that had caused political
upheaval in the world of the Puritan seventeenth-century and in Hawthorne’s

mid-nineteenth.21 The effect of her detachment is ominous: "she assumed a

190
freedom of speculation...which our forefathers, had they known of it, would

have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter"
(159).

The narrator settles much import upon the general collective in '_I'_he
Scarlet Letter. There is heavy emphasis on the state of public welfare, the sting
of public shame, and the relief of public forgiveness. Dimmesdale reaches out
to Pearl several times during the course of the novel, but only when he
publicly acknowledges her as his daughter does he feel forgiven, even though
he makes his disclosure before an uncomprehending crowd. Likewise, the
gesture has a healing effect on the child only when it is made openly: Pearl is
unmoved by Dimmesdale’s previous fatherly overtures toward her, but his
public admission of paternity is strong enough to pull her into the ranks of
humankind where she can "develop all her sympathies... [for] human joy and
sorrow" (238).

Hawthorne affirms the weightiness of public opinion and the priority of
the common good. When Hester and Dirmnesdale plan to flee the colony
together, Hawthorne concedes to the allure of their reckless flight but does not
condone it. He describes the realm the fugitive lovers would construct as an
"unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region" (191). Dimmesdale’s reason for
forgoing flight and remaining in the colony is compelling. admitting
culpability will resolve the painful contrast between seeming and being,22 but
evading responsibility will perpetuate that grievous contradiction The

minister wrongly assumes that Hester has "made a clean breast" of her

191

transgression when he exclaims, "happy are you...that wear the scarlet letter
openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret!" (183). Yet even as he over-
estimates Hester’s contrition he articulates the virtue of confession and
reconciliation When Hester suggests to her partner that the mental anguish
he suffers has fully absolved him of sin, he sharply refutes her logic: "Of
penance I have had enough! Of penitence there has been none!" (183).
According to the Oxford English Dictiom, the critical difference between
these two related terms is the behavior they produce: "penance" denotes regret
for an offense, an inner sense of remorse; "penitence," in contrast, is an
outward expression of repentance, contrition for an offense coupled with an
act of expiation23 Dirnmesdale is deeply sorry for his adultery, his tacit
repudiation of Pearl, and his false show of purity, but inner torment provides
no measure of atonement and, thus, no reconciliation. But by amending his
misdeeds by openly embracing Pearl, he restores himself and his child to the
human fold, which is where Hawthorne maintains they belong.

Hester proves more recalcitrant. Despite her years of quiet servitude,
she has only mimed penitence. But long after her departure for England
following Dimmesdale’s death, a wiser Hester returns to Boston where she
makes retribution in earnest. The narrator describes Hester’ s sin and shame as
"the roots which she had struck into the so' " (83); the self-indulgent act which
divides the sinner from the community is the very flaw that binds one to
another and, in fact, improves them all as social constituents. Her

transgression-her boundary-crossing—has taught her a greater understanding

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of the human heart and mind; upon her voluntary return, she imparts that
knowledge to her community. Hester’s sin—the illicit union and the mental
and literal retreat that follow—proves to be her felix culpa, the fortunate fault
that could "deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of
sympathy" (176)” and produce the same effect in others. A younger Hester
regarded her "knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts" (89) as a curse that
forced an ugly and unwanted awareness upon her. In contrast, a mature
Hester sees sin as the basis of kinship from which to reach out and,
significantly, be received as "one who had herself gone through a mighty
trouble" (244). She has learned that "love requires, more than a consecration of
its own, the consecration of history and community."25

Hester gives up the vision of herself as a prophetess chosen to reorder
gender relations, yet she remains an agent of change nonetheless. As the
radical who spurned society is at last one with the people, the community that
had shunned her as a reprobate is likewise moved to find itself in her. Those
whom Hester counsels also commiserate with her: they recognize that they are
joined by virtue of the "wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and
sinful passion" (245) that makes them human

By effecting change which strengthens and improves her community,
Hester assures its durability. For notwithstanding the historical decline of
Puritanism, the balance of these competing impulses—change and continuity-

keeps New England viable. In a scene near the novel’s end, Hester, snug in

her cottage on the Massachusetts shore, connects to her posterity by knitting

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baby-garments for her grandchild in England and receiving Pearl’s gifts, which

are "tokens of a continual remembrance" (244). Rootedness and stability, the
domestic idyll suggests, ensure the near inverse of that static condition-«he
extension across time and space. Such is Hester’s final enduring feat. The
tombstone which marks her deep and still grave continues to pique the
"curious investigator" who keeps her legend alive.

Hester Prynne’s second journey, a mental and physical retreat from the
new world community after the initial remove to America, stands as a modern
archetypal quest in ethnic literature of the US. Young immigrants like Hester,
met with previously unimagined social freedoms, often bristle under the
weight of old world authority in their new environment. Caught between the
claim of heredity and the competing lure of self-invention, they often abandon
the ethnic enclave to seek personal liberty. This restlessness parallels Hester’s
behavior not only in departure but also in return, for the route from the
immigrant ghetto often doubles back to deliver the renegade back home. As a
cross-sampling of immigrant literature reveals, the sojourn into the world
beyond the home boundaries often prepares the dissenter to appreciate, adapt
and, thus, preserve the way of life he or she has renounced.

The subtitle of Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), "A Struggle
between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New," sums up the
inter-generational conflict that often drives ethnic young from home. Sara
Smolensky, the youngest of four daughters in a family of poor immigrants on

New York’s lower east side, refuses to live by her father’ s harsh dictates,

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which are backed by centuries of Jewish tradition. Pious Reb Smolensky

practices the Old Testament dictum which he routinely preaches: "It says in
the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence. Only through a
man can a woman enter heaven."26 The wife and daughters of the Talmudic
scholar labor for meager wages on which to run the household so that he can
spend his days in study, either at the synagogue or in the private quarters he
has cordoned off in the crowed family tenement. Sara’s future is mapped out
in her older sisters’ miserable marriages: each is forced to abandon the mate
of her choosing to make a marriage which Reb thinks will be more lucrative.
An unwise matchmaker, he turns his daughters into veritable servants in
penniless, loveless marriages.

Sara, however, refuses to bend to her father’ s will. She defies Jewish
tradition, foreswearing subservience to anyone and vowing instead to "make
herself a person" (21) by attaining an education and entering a profession. Her
stubborn drive for autonomy seems compelling support for TuSmith’s
contention that even non-WASP European immigrants join the Anglo-
American in disengaging from the community to pursue self-interest. Indeed,
Sara’s road to success leads her beyond the limits of her home. She walks out
on the family’s fledgling grocery business to earn and save her own pay as a
laundress, which is one step on her way to college degree. A prized aspect of
the dreary accommodations she rents for herself is the private entrance to her
room. The door represents for Sara a means of control, over herself and the

world beyond.

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A separate door to myselfua door to shut out all the noises of the

world....My hands clutched at the knob. This door was life. It

was air. The bottom starting-point of becoming a person. I

simply must have this room with the shut door (159).

Sara will brook no compromise in her campaign for self-development.
Her regimen of work and study is her new religion; time spent relaxing or
visiting her family is a sinful waste. When Shenah makes the difficult errand
to deliver a feather bed to her daughter at her new quarters, Sara is grateful
but adamant in her refusal to repay her mother’s kindness with a trip home.
Her justification is simple: "I can’t take time....Every little minute must go to
my studies...my minutes are like diamonds to me....I could see you later. But I
can’t go to college later....I have so much to learn before I can enter college"
(171, 2).

Six years later, upon finishing night school and graduating college, her
transformation is complete. She exclaims to her reflection in a mirror that she
has been "changed into a person!" (237). "My Honeymoon with Myself" is a
telling title for the chapter in which she attains her teaching credentials. In a
clean, spacious hotel room, she celebrates the momentous occasion with her
"precious privacy" and "beautiful aloneness" (241). Even when she tries to
reunite with her family, at the sad occasion of her mother’s funeral, her
development seems to divide her from her family. Although Sara is back on
familiar ground, she is out of place. For instance, in accord with Biblical law

and Jewish custom, the undertaker moves to tear the clothing of Shenah’s

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husband and daughters. Ruled by Yankee common sense, however, Sara
refuses to participate in the rite of mourning: her funeral outfit is her only
good suit; she needs it for work and will not ruin it through a symbolic
gesture. Her community interprets her attitude as betrayal, and they unite
against her. She explains that "a hundred eyes burned on me their
condemnation: ’Look at her, the Americanerin!” (255).

Although Bread Givers reads as a veritable allegory peopled with stock
types—Reb Smolensky as the tyrant, his wife Shenah the martyr, and Sara the
hero”-Yezierska’s tale of generational conflict is complex and nuanced, and
Sara’s sentiments are not easily graphed or catalogued. This deceptively
simplistic novel explodes the binary logic which supports oppositional
assessments of ethnic and Euro-centric literature as it works through a
conflicted sense of personal and public responsibility. Sara’s disengagement
from family and larger community Seems consistent with classic American
tales of dissociation, yet as with them, the protagonist’ 5 flight from home
provides a social dividend. Like Hester Prynne, whose isolation ultimately
strengthens her communal orientation, Sara becomes more committed to her
culture for having ventured away from it. Seclusion permits Sara to develop
her own resources; distance grants her an objective appreciation for her home
life. With these endowments, Sara ultimately preserves rather than parts with
Jewish tradition.

That Sara would reap success individually and then make her family

and larger community the beneficiaries of her accomplishments is

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foreshadowed early in the novel. In the first chapter, Sara, a mere child of ten,

doubles her small investment in herring as a fish peddler. She is thrilled with
the profits which make her feel "richer than Rockefeller" (22), but her real
pleasure is altruistic rather than selfish, as she remarks

I was always saying to myself, if I ever had a quarter or a half

dollar in my hand, I’d run away from home and never look on

our dirty house again But now I was so happy with my money,

I didn’t think of running away, I only wanted to show them what

I could do and give it away to them (22).
Her desires are dual but not duelling: she wants to apply herself without
restraint so as to help others through her talents. In short, she wants to be
both breadwinner and breadgiver.

Sara’s earning power makes her feel "independent, like a real person"
(28). And while the residual effect of her first success is a separation of sorts
within her family, the individuation actually strengthens their sense of
togetherness. The extra income she brings in grants her family members the
dignity of eating with implements of his or her own. Shenah is able to buy
"enough plates and spoons and forks and knives" for them to "all sit down by
the table at the same time and eat like people...instead of from the pot to the
hand as [they] once did" (29). Sara’s strong desire for privacy is less defensible
as indirect altruism, yet Yezierska presents solitude as a basic need. Because
the family tenement teems with life-not all of which is human—Sara naturally

longs for a bright, clean space that is free of noise and vermin And though

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she longs to be alone, she never intends to sequester herself completely. She
opposes Reb Smolensky’s venture into the grocery business not because she
knows him to be a poor businessman but because relocating to New Jersey
removes her from her neighborhood. She misses the activity of the ghetto, "the
crowds sweeping you on, like waves of a beating sea." But even more, she
fears that the loss of community will strip her of her humanity.

What would become of me if I remained out here, day in and

day out, without friends...I’d forget how to shake hands. My

tongue would grow dumb in my mouth. And all my longing for

people would shrink in my frozen heart (129).

In fact throughout Sara’s odyssey toward selfhood, Yezierska presents
isolation as anathema. Sara wants independent control over the routine of her
days, but she remains a social creature who longs for human interaction It is
her strong sense of purpose that continually divides her from others. The shop
girls at the laundry come together to gossip about boyfriends and their
evenings out, aspects of life which Sara has forgone in order to study.
Additionally, her eagerness at night school indirectly exposes the other
students as dullards, and they openly resent her. The resulting ostracism is
painful. Sara admits an urge to "throw myself at the feet of the girls and cry
out to them, ’Say anything you like. Do anything you like. All right—hurt me.
But don’t leave me out. I don’t want to be left out!’" (180).

Moreover, Sara’s departure from New York to attend college is neither a

rejection of her ethnic community nor an attempt to enter the ranks of the

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WASP co-eds. It is, rather, a continued quest for the camaraderie and
intellectual interaction she has always sought. At school Sara hopes to find
"the inspired companionship of teachers who are friends! The high places
above the earth, where minds are fired by minds....[by] the flash from eye to
eye, from heart to heart" (224). But these gratifying connections never form.
Over-worked teachers are too busy to cultivate an outside interest in Sara. The
middle-class students—"real Americans" in Sara’s perceptions—stick to
themselves. Their lack of their concern for her is the veritable nullification of
her existence. She alternately describes herself as "nothing and nobody" and a
"ghost" (219). In a world which threatens to cancel out her presence, her vow
to "make myself into a person" stands as brave survival.

Yet despite Sara’s resolve to break with tradition in order to make
herself anew, she actually holds tightly to models from the past. The animus
in her relationship with Reb stems from the strong affinity between them;
indeed, Sara is a daughter formed in her father’ 5 image. Like him, she
demands the right to assert her will and develop her mind, an impulse
deemed unnatural and dangerous in a female. Sara, however, continues to
hope that her father will recognize her as a kindred spirit. Proud of her strong
convictions as she declines the marriage proposal of a rich man who would
deny a woman an education, Sara believes her father will affirm her decision
She reasons that Reb too "had given up worldly success to drink the wisdom
of the Torah. He would tell me that, after all, I was the only daughter of his

fai " (202).

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Reb vehemently denounces Sara’s refusal of the wealthy suitor, as is
consistent with his character. More interesting is Sara’s Old Testament defense
for bucking Jewish tradition. She breaks with her heritage and crosses her
father yet presents herself as an exemplar of orthodoxy: "I had lived the old,
old story which he had drilled into our childhood ears—the story of Jacob and
Esau. I had it from Father, this ingrained something in me that would not let
me take the mess of pottage" (202). Her models are Biblical figures, learned at
the knee of her father. Like other revolutionaries throughout history, she looks
into the past for precedents which make resistance and departure a continuing
program of change rather than an instance of patricide or rebellion”

Reb Smolensky, however, will not grant his daughter this religious
parallel for her behavior. He rebuts her position with his own Biblical
evidence: "It says in the Torah, breed and multiply. A woman’s highest
happiness is to be a man’s wife, the mother of a man’s children. You’re not a
person at all" (206). Stripped of Judaic support, she sums up her state in
characteristically dramatic terms: "This is what it cost, daring to follow the
urge in me. No father. No lover. ' No family. No friend. I must go on and
on And I must go on—alone" (208). But Sara is not alone, for she casts about
for other historical precedents to justify her quest and finds them in American
culture. As she sets out alone for college, she likens herself to "Columbus
starting out for the other end of the earth" She feels "like the pilgrim fathers
who had left their homeland and all their kin behind them and trailed out in

search of the New World" (209). Sara’s reliance on early American founders

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proves her need to remained connected historically. After Sara parts with her
father in what is actually a mutual repudiation, for he disowns her as she
breaks from him, she is not so bold as to sally forth as an orphan. She adopts
an American heritage, a kinship born of shared love for adventure, exploration,
and discovery.”

Besides turning to Judaism and American history for validation, Sara
also draws support from her personal past. She excels in a psychology course
in part because she recognizes the value of her formative years. Memories of
hawking fish on Hester Street, arguing with her father, and even protesting a
cafeteria’s scanty portions present themselves as meaningful lessons in self-
assertion, when earlier they had seemed examples of "privations and loss"
(22). Newly grateful for her upbringing, she cherishes her past and wonders
what other "countless riches lay buried under the ground of those early
years...thought so black, so barren, so thwarted with want!" (222). Yezierska
reveals that Sara actually adapts and modifies the cultural values she thought
she had jettisoned, such as the sharply defined gender roles which seemingly
turn women into servants. For as Sara realizes her likeness to her headstrong
father, she accepts her affinity with her mother, the self-sacrificing nurturer.
From her deathbed, Shenah pleads with her daughter to care for Reb in his old
age, in response to which Sara explains, "I felt literally Mother's soul enter my
soul like a miracle" (252). Indeed, seemingly self-interested Sara comes to

evince the maternal attributes of Shenah.

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Although Sara revels in her accomplishments, she is not absorbed by

her own happiness. She explains that her "joy hurt[s] like guilt" (281) when
she can not share her success with others. She becomes intensely aware of the
less fortunate around her, in whom she sees herself. The "lines upon lines of
pushcart peddlers...crouching in the rain...like animals helpless against the
cold, pitiless weather" (281) recall for her her earlier, desperate existence.
Though she would like to step lightly through the city, she notes "my winged
walk [is] dulled by the thick, shuffling tread of those who walk beside me."
Her shoulders, "always held so straight, sag...because of the bowed backs that
hem [her] in" (282). Having attained her goal of professional status and
economic security, she wants only to reach out to others: "I felt as if all the
beauty of the world that ever was ached in me to pour itself out on the people
around. I felt like the sun so afire with life that it can’t help but shine on the
whole world" (282). The nurturing qualities she inherits from her mother
develop and blossom in her role as teacher. She refers to her poor young
students as "my children" and sees herself in them as they "murder the
language as [she] did...as a child of Hester Street" (271). Her personal
investment in the progress of a little Aby Zuker or Rosy Stein reflects her
wider identification with the ghetto poor who surround her.

Part of Sara’s homeward turn is her attraction to her future husband,
Hugo Seelig. She is initially impressed by his position as a grammar school
principal and his facility for English, a reaction that seemingly speaks to her

assimilationist drive. Yet it is their shared foreign roots that draw them

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together. Immigrants from neighboring villages in Poland, they rejoice that

they are "’Landsleute-countrymen! We talked one language. We had sprung
from one soil" (277-8). When Sara confesses to only dim memories of the old
country, Hugo puts her in closer contact with her heritage. The ostensible
reason for their first few dates is to "try to remember more about Poland"
(279).

As an agent of cultural renewal, Hugo also helps Sara reconnect with
her father. Although he has worked hard to learn English and holds a good
position in the American school system, he asks Reb Smolensky to teach him
Hebrew, an interest that attests to his high esteem for his native Judaism. Her
awareness broadened by Hugo’s values, Sara reassesses her troubled
relationship with Reb and recognizes him not just as one who has blocked her
ambition but who has inspired her as well. She asks herself

How could I have hated him and tried to blot him out of my life?

Can a tree hate the roots from which it sprang? Deeper than

love, deeper than pity, is that oneness of the flesh that’s in him

and in me. Who gave me the fire, the passion, to push myself up

from the dirt? If I grow, if 1 rise, if I ever amount to something,

is in not his spirit burning in me? (286).

Some scholars criticize Sara’s acceptance of the tyrannical Reb at the end
of the novel as a feat of super-human kindness,30 but the foundation for her
forgiveness is laid at the outset in the other-directedness of Sara’s hard-won

rewards. Moreover, Yezierska imbues the reconciliation with realistic

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ambivalence. Sara assumes her filial duty with some regret, for she fears that
by including her father in her new life with Hugo she will surrender the home
they plan to make together. Hugo counsels, however, that "our home will [be]
the richer if your father comes with us" (296), and Sara ultimately concurs.
Upon forsaking her family home, a younger, impetuous Sara had cried out to
her father, "I’m going to live my own life. Nobody can stop me. I’m not from
the old country. I’m American!" (138). A more experienced Sara knows that
she is also a Jew. Reconciled with her father, she feels a sense of heaviness
descend upon her which, she explains, is not "just my father, but the
generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me" (296). As
Yezierska’s aforementioned metaphor for Sara as a thriving tree reveals,
heritage is the weight that keeps her firmly rooted so that she can branch out
and flourish.

Bread Givers ends in union and reunion: Sara comes to accept herself
and be recognized as daughter and wife, woman and professional. The final
reconciliation refutes TuSmith’s claim that division is a permanent solution in
European-American fiction31 Indeed, Yezierska is adamant that such parting
is a dreadful loss. Her more overtly autobiographical writing speaks wistfufly
of the revitalizing return she wishes she had actually made. In an essay called
"This Is What $10,000 Did To Me," the author laments her success as a
Hollywood scriptwriter, for upward mobility divides her from her own:

As I sit alone in my room, watching the wonder of the sunset, I

look back and see how happy I ought to have been when I was

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starving poor, but one of my own people. Now I am out off by

my own for acquiring the few things I have. And those new

people with whom I dine and to whom I talk, I do not belong to

them. I am alone because I left my own world.32
Her autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950),“ written at age
sixty, resounds a similarly plaintive note, for she blames her flight from the
ghetto for her loss of concentration and creativity: "without a country, without
a people....I could not write any more. I had gone too far away from life, and
I did not know how to get back."33 But her protagonist Sara Smolensky does
get back. The novel leaves her at the threshold of a new life, prepared to reap
the rewards of her labor and to share them as well.

In contrast to Sara’s realization that old world attributes give her the -
stamina to rise in America and that her position in the new world enables her
to adapt and preserve her ancestral heritage, another Jewish immigrant,
Abraham Cahan’s Yekl, finds it impossible that the past might comport with
the future he desires. Although a comic romance, Y_ekl (1896) tells a poignant
tale of assimilation as complete renunciation of family and heritage, and,

additionally, as personal decline. Cahan reveals that sustained efforts to blot

 

" The title for her autobiography appears twenty-five years earlier as a
phrase in Bread Givers. Sara, trying to persuade Reb to allow her sister to
marry the destitute poet she loves, reminds him of his own praise for penury
as a force that binds a family. He describes poverty as "an ornament on a
good Jew, like a red ribbon on a white horse" (70), a mark of honor and
solidarity.

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out the past sap psychic energy and render impotent any attempts at lasting

gratification.

The title character, after leaving Russia to earn a better living in
America’s sweatshops, vaguely reassures his wife Gitl that he will send for her
and their son Yossele once he is established in the US. But Yekl’s real interest
lies in his own reinvention. Life, he feels, began only upon emigrating, after
which he has "lived so much more...than in all the twenty-two years of his
previous life!“ Family attachments cease to exist for this new man: Gitl has
been "transmuted into a fancy" and his past is nothing more than "a dream"
(26). As though to erase his heritage, he drops his surname, Podkovnik, and
changes "Yekl" to "Jake.” Well-groomed and beardless, he fashions himself a
"’reger [regular] Yankee’" (8) who spends the Sabbath either at work behind
his sewing machine or engrossed in his favorite American pastimes-following
baseball and boxing or dancing at Professor Peltner’s Dance Academy, where
he passes for a bachelor.

When his father dies back in Russia, Yekl is forced to prepare for Gitl
and Yossele’s passage to the US. He is loathe to give up his carefree lifestyle,
although the death prompts him to recollect fondly of the old world. But
memories of his devout father only aggravate his conscience: so divorced from
the old ways is Yekl that he no longer knows how to pray for the dead. As
shame for his sins against the past washes over him, Yekl imagines he is being
strangled by the ghost of his father. Even the ticking of the clock which marks

the impending arrival of his wife and son suggests strangulation to him with

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its resounding "’Cho-king! Cho-king! Cho-kingl’" (33). For him, history is a
malign force that must be obliterated.

When Yekl fetches his newly-arrived wife and son from Ellis Island, it is
portentous that immigration officials do not believe the unlikely pair to be
married. Indeed, even in reunion the couple is hopelessly estranged. To Yekl,
Gitl is "uncouth and un-American" (34) in her rustic dress and matron’s wig by
which she observes her faith. Gitl, stunned by what she perceives as her
husband’s regal transformation, "mentally scan[s] the Yekl of three years
before...and [feels] like crying to the image to come back to her and let her be
his wife" (36). That the arranged marriage which had functioned in the old
country is doomed in America becomes increasingly clear when Yekl compares
Gitl with Mamie Fein, the flashy Americanized Jew who has been his steady
partner at the dance academy. With her large savings account and proficiency
in English, the independent Mamie completes Yekl’s picture of himself as an
"American feller. ” His old-fashioned wife, whom he sees as an incorrigible
greenhorn, seems to mock that coveted image. But in the perceptions of the
unassirnilated Bernstein, the Podkovnics’ orthodox boarder and countryman,
Gitl is an ideal wife. He shares her piety, appreciates her domestic skills, and
yearns for a son like her Yossele.

Yekl’s ambitions, fed by a narrow and rigid notion of what an American
is, force an end to his marriage as he further distances himself from his
heritage. The couples realign themselves more suitably—Yekl with Mamie and

Gitl with Bernstein. Ironically, while Yekl operates with an eye toward his

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personal progress, he restricts his future by renouncing his past, for in divorce
he also parts with his son as Gitl explains to the boy, "you have no papa any
more....he is dead" (87). Children are conspicuously absent from Yekl and
Mamie’s future plans; their legacy instead will be a dance academy, an
enterprise of further Americanization much like the one where they met in
which "English was the official language" (17). Rather than make the
traditional wedding wish for a long and happy life to be graced with many
children, Mamie blesses their marriage thus: "may the two of us have...many
thousands of dollars-and [be] business people, too" (82).

Cahan reveals that Yekl the cad is ultimately a fool. When, after
finalizing his divorce, he approaches city hall, the cite of his impending civil
wedding to Maurie, Yekl feels "a great burden to have rolled off his heart" (89).
His sense of lightness is a sharp counterpoint to the weight of generations
which Sara Smolensky feels pressing down upon her at the conclusion of
Bread Givers. Yet the heft of her cultural inheritance, Yezierska reveals, is
Sara’s ballast, the stabilizing force that enables her to soar. In contrast, Yekl,
unbound, founders. He has lost control of his life, as his reluctant ride in the
lurching streetcar which delivers him to a hastily-planned second wedding
indicates. Recognizing himself as "the victim of an ignominious defeat" (89),
he can only fantasize about reclaiming the wife and son he has relinquished.
His future "loom[s] dark and impenetrable" (89), for he navigates without the
purpose and direction which the past provides. But while Yekl rejects

tradition as he attempts to make himself anew, Gitl adapts it to her present

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reality. This former country rustic becomes a savvy American entrepreneur,
her acculturation, in fact, supporting her Jewish traditions. On the resources of
her divorce settlement, Gitl plans to purchase and run a grocery store while
her new husband studies the Torah Bernstein’s future is similar to that which
Yezierska suggests for Hugo Seelig: he will provide the community with
language instruction—in English and Hebrew.

Like the foregoing immigrant tales, Louis Chu’s comic Eat a Bowl of
Tea: A Novel of New York’s Chinatown (1961) features the clash between the
old world and the new as a young immigrant struggles against a patriarchal
community to exercise his individual prerogatives. But unlike Yekl, who
forfeits his familial and cultural affiliation, Chu’s protagonist Ben Loy
eventually reaffirms the cultural traditions he renounces. Yet unlike Hester
and Sara, whose escape routes are circular as they re-enter the communities
they have fled, Ben Loy’ 8 exit is linear. Emphasizing the imperative of
individuation, Chu proves that immigrant youth must challenge their dogmatic
elders if they are to become adults themselves. But he insists as well that the
ethnic young must retain their native tradition as a guide to navigate the new
world. The acculturation which Chu asserts is mutually supportive of the
individual and the group: when the immigrant offspring are free to strike out
beyond the insular ghetto, they hybridize their ancestral traditions, effecting a
crossbreeding which allows the transplanted culture to take hold and thrive
rather than wither and die.

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Ben Loy, instead of making his solitary way in America as Yekl does,

ernigrates at the behest of his father, Wah Gay. He joins the patriarch, who
left China forty years earlier, in New York’s "bachelor" society of Chinese men
whose wives were barred from the US. by exclusionary legislation.35 Thus,
Ben Loy’s connection to his native culture remains immediate, for Chinatown
elders look to him as their hope for the future: he and his potential offspring
will be their means for immortality. Ben Loy serves in the US. army shortly
after immigrating, but he primarily remains his father’s dutiful son. He lives
and works where Wah Gay decides he should, and he marries the bride his
father chooses for him. Although some American women of Chinese descent
are available for marriage, Wah Gay scorns them. "Girls born in China are
better," he explains. "They are courteous and modest. Not like these jook sings
born in New York They can tell good from bad" (18)."5 As instructed, Ben
Loy marries Mei Oi during a return visit to China and, since immigration laws
have been relaxed, he settles his new wife in New York, where he undertakes
to provide the community with the heir they expect.

But Ben Loy, though sexually active as a bachelor, is impotent as a
married man. Mei Oi politely describes his problem as a "lack of manliness"
(77) and a "decline of masculinity" (242), but her euphemisms are more apt
than evasive. As "impotent" denotes, Ben Loy is "not strong" enough to be a
father or husband, for he has never grown up. Mei Oi, interpreting her
husband’s sexual failing as her own lack of feminine appeal, is vulnerable to

the attentions of a local philanderer, Ah Song. When she becomes pregnant by

' 211
him and word of her infidelity leaks out, Ben Loy bears a heavy burden:

heartache, derision, and responsibility for his father’s shame which the old
man explains will be legendary even back in China.

Ironically, Ben Loy’s impotence, as a failure to comply with his father’s
demands for an heir, is his first step toward manhood, a necessary rebellion
against the dictates of the oppressive patriarchy. He begins to assert his
independence from the older generation by disrupting their rigid plans for his
future; he takes another step toward maturity when he chooses to forgive his
wife despite community pressure to divorce and deport her.

The conflict between Ben Loy and his father over the troubled marriage
is really the clash of ancient and modern views on love and family. Wah Gay
and his Chinatown cronies have lived their adult lives a world away from
their wives. Even though the immigration ban has been lifted, Chu’s women
decline their husbands’ invitations to join them in America. The elders are

comfortable with—even relieved by—gender separation, for as a character

"I I"

quoting a Chinese seer explains, male and female are not to mix socially
(133).

In contrast, Ben Loy’ 5 marriage, though arranged by his father according
to Chinese custom, has become a modern marriage based on love. His
relationship with Mei Oi is patterned more on the romantic American movies
he loves to watch than on the polite, formal arrangement his elders share. The
father’s advice that "your wife is no good, go get yourself another" (200) is

anathema to the son. Rather than seek a divorce, Ben Loy forgives his wife’s

212

adultery and holds himself partly responsible for her extra-marital affair, since
he believes his earlier promiscuity and bouts of venereal disease have rendered
him impotent. Their reconciliation further shames Wah Gay, who has taken it
upon himself to avenge the family honor by physically attacking Ah Song. He
interprets the couple’s reunion as proof that his son is "a slave to that female"
(201).

Because saving their marriage means violating the traditions and wishes
of the elders, Ben Loy and Mei Oi leave New York to resettle in San Francisco.
Their departure seems to suggest that self-interest and group allegiance are
contradictory commitments, and that to assert their American prerogatives
immigrant children must sever their ancestral ties. Indeed, upon relocating
with his wife and the newborn son he claims as his own, Ben Loy muses that

New York represented parental supervision and the reckless

mistakes of youth....[but now] the proverbial parental shackle had

been cut. For the first time Ben Loy knew and enjoyed

emancipation. New frontiers, new people, new times, new ideas

unfolded. He had come to a new golden mountain. (245, 246)

But in fleeing the stultifying environment in which the future was constrained
the past, Ben Loy does not reject tradition as much as he resituates himself
within it. In moving to San Francisco, which he invokes as "golden mountain,"
the name his immigrant forebears bestowed upon that city where they sought

their fortune, he "returns to the city where Chinese-America first began!”

He leaves his father but is drawn to the place of his fathers to start over.

213

The ancient cure for Ben Loy’s impotence reveals that lessons of the old
world must guide life in the new. The medicine a Western-trained physician
prescribes for Ben Loy produces no results, but a Chinese herbalist’s advice for
him to "eat a bowl of tea," together with the changed surroundings, restores
his virility. One critic rules Chu’s unusual wording of that imperative-which
is the novel’s title—to be a "liability of direct translation"“"3 Li Shu-Yan insists
that the author errs by not glossing the literal translation of the Chinese
expression in a footnote. But it seems more likely that the odd formation is
intentional, for it is rich with meaning. Because characters routinely describe
the frequent act of tea-drinking as to "sip a cup of tea" (236, passim), the
unusual phrasing of the herbalist’ s directive is noteworthy: "eat a bowl" in
lieu of the customary "sip a cup" raises the act to a higher power; in fact, the
words function as superlatives. Used in this single, special instance, the
phrase emphasizes the high degree to which Ben Loy, the new American, must
re-engage native custom.

Est a Bowl of Tea underscores the merits of acculturation, which both
broadens and maintains boundaries of identity. Chinatown’s cultural purity,
which Wah Gay pursues by controlling his son, body and soul, would result in
sterility, a veritable extinction of the "bachelor" society he hopes to save. But
Ben Loy, ignoring patriarchal dictates and accepting instead another man’s
child as his own, reveals that "illegitimate beginnings lend strength and
continuity to a new generation of Chinese-Americans!“ He fights for the

rights of his American citizenship-privacy, autonomy, and consensual love-

214
but joins them with the legacy of his past. Happy in their new home, the

defiant couple looks ahead to their yet-to-be-conceived second child’s haircut
party, a customary Chinese celebration, on which they plan to reunite with
their estranged elders.

A somber yet lyrical tone distinguishes Sandra Cisneros’ Eel-gm
Mange Street from the latter two light-hearted romances, but it also features
heretical attitudes on sexual intimacy and procreation as the ironic means to
preserve an endangered culture. Life is brutal in Chicago’s Hispanic quarter,
but the barrio fights back with its own unrelenting life force, a steady birth-
rate which perpetuates the overcrowding. Esperanza Cordero, the eldest child
in a family of six, is as forward-looking as her name suggests. Desiring
autonomy and solitude, she pledges to break this cycle of oppressiOn by
avoiding the trap which snares many women in her neighborhood—early
marriage and motherhood.

Esperanza and her young friends both welcome and fear their nascent
sexuality which seems to determine lives in the barrio. The girls are excited by
the male attention they draw as they strut about in a neighbor’s cast-off high
heels, but as stares turn to leers and then to propositions, they learn that to be
attractive is to be vulnerable. Feeling threatened, they become "tired of being
beautiful“0 and hide the shoes. Sexuality gives them power, but it is a
volatile force that can either spring them from the mean world of their parents
or doom them to that same existence. Those who seek freedom in sexual

activity, Esperanza learns, do not rebel as much as they surrender. Her friend

215

Sally marries before she finishes the eighth grade in order to flee from father,
who becomes abusive when she enters puberty. But Sally’s husband is just as
cruel and suspicious, for he forbids her from leaving their apartment or even
looking out the window. Esperanza recognizes this escape route’s dead-end in
the fortunes of another friend who "left her mother’s house by having a baby"
(88). Foreswearing sexual relationships, she perceives a husband and children
as "the ball and chain" (88).

Esperanza’s flinty resolve for self-survival seems to harden her against
intimacy and stifle her own vitality. A fan of the cinema like Ben Loy, she
finds a role model there in a character with "red lips who is beautiful and
cruel...who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her
own. She will not give it away" (89). As many young girls do, Esperanza
nurtures an image of unrealistic domestic bliss, but her idyll is devoid of
romantic or interpersonal connections. A vignette titled "A House of My Own"
underscores her wish to separate from others as she enumerates items on her
wish-list. She wants

a house all my own With my porch and my pillow, my pretty

purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes

waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s

garbage to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for

myself to go, clean as paper before the poem (108).‘1

Her covetousness suggests selfishness, the uncluttered space a barrenness. The

novel’s biographical information about the author echoes this notion of victory

216

in the lack of personal attachments, for Cisneros is described as "nobody’s
mother and nobody’s wife."42

Although Esperanza wants autonomy and the opportunity to develop as
a poet and storyteller, she is aware that escape from the barrio can mean the
betrayal of her community. Many who sense her ambitions remind her that
she "will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know" (105).
Their reproach causes Esperanza to feel "ashamed for having made such a
selfish wish" (105). Those who encourage her to break away from Mango
Street-predominantly women-are, significantly, neither wives nor mothers.
Most forceful in counselling her departure are three elderly Chicana sisters,
otherworldly women who are beholden to none but themselves. But far from
stripping Esperanza of her culture or indoctrinating her into a cult of sterility,
these midwives deliver Esperanza to her own creative powers, which, they
reveal, are centered in her community. While they urge her to "go very far,"
they caution as well that "when you leave you must remember always to come
back....You can’t forget who you are" (104, 105).

These sisters echo the "four skinny trees" that grow outside Esperanza’s
bedroom window, which, she claims, "understand me" (74). That she in turn
understands the trees is no small feat, for their message to her—"keep, keep,
keep, trees say when I sleep" (75) is vague and inherently ambiguous. The
Oxford English Dictionary lists fifty-eight variations of definitions for "to
keep!“3 Yet it is precisely because the trees’ directive has such a broad range

of interpretations that Esperanza comes to recognize the vast possibilities of

217

her future. And because some of the meanings of "keep" are almost antonyms,
she can resolve the tension between seemingly contradictory impulses to leave
home and stay put.

A principal meaning which the CE cites for "keep" is "to maintain,
retain, or cause to continue," a usage that fits Esperanza’s charge to preserve
her urban, Hispanic culture. But such an imperative is tantamount to a life
sentence if it requires her to stay in the barrio and forfeit her plans, for "keep"
also means "to retain in place by moral constraint; to cause or induce to
remain" This nuance is further conveyed in the idioms "keep back" and "keep
down," expressions of restraint or subjection But if Esperanza pursues her
goal to move away from Mango Street by becoming a writer, she can yet
"keep" her culture, for the verb also denotes "to observe or solemnize" and "to
tend or have watch of." This use transmutes her position of subjugation into
one of mastery, for she, as the creator of sketches about her Hispanic
community, is a celebrant and guardian of her culture. The trees are thus
more likely to encourage her to continue her pursuits with such idioms as
"keep at" or "keep on"

By word and example the trees teach Esperanza that her seemingly
competing desires are all of a piece. With the metaphor of deep roots and
broad branches similar to that by which Yezierska solves Sara’s dilemma of
family loyalty and personal ambition, Cisneros reveals that Esperanza’s origins
actually outfit her for flight and fealty: the trees can stretch towards the sky

precisely because "they send ferocious roots beneath the ground" (74). Far

218

from rejecting the hallmark of her home environment—the fecundity with
which the crowded barrio pushes back at life’s demands-Esperanza decides to
channel her creative energy into vignettes of family and neighborhood. She
heeds the warning not to "erase" Mango Street (105) and instead "put[s] it
down on paper" (110) to give it lasting life. Although her talk of change and
escape likens her to the assimilationist Yekl, she is a cultural hybrid, for she
maneuvers to inhabit the space where Chicana sentiment and American social
liberality overlap and support each other. She, like the author of the novel,
leaves home but remains centered there by telling its story in prose and verse.
The four trees, which "grow up and...grow down" (74), instruct her that with
roots intact she can reach beyond the barrio. Mango Street cannot keep
Esperanza, but she will keep Mango Street.

Multiculturalist scholarship routinely celebrates the spirit of
connectedness within ethnic literature: Houston Baker has observed the
collectivist ethos of African-American writing; Elaine Kim, the community
orientation of Asian-American fiction; and Tomas Rivera, the intensity of
Chicano solidarity.“ But self-interest, ambition, and wanderlust, often
dubiously judged the defining attributes of WASP literature and the antitheses
of ethnic sensibilities, are the very traits which trigger a homing instinct in a
broad representation of American literary protagonists. In fact, immigrant
renegades from a variety of groups—WASP, Jewish, Chinese, and Chicano-

often cross and recross the divide between the home community and the

219

unfamiliar world beyond. In their wide-spread sojourning, we can read across

the cultural divide to locate the common ground in between.

220

Notes

1. Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and
Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

2. Thomas Gladsky, Princes Peasants and Other Polish Selves:
Ethniciry in American Literature (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992); Lorne

Shirinian, The Republic of Armenia and the Rethinking of the North-American
Diaspera in Literature (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen P, 1992)

 

3. Bonnie TuSmith, All M Relatives: Communi in Contem
Ethnic American Literatures (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994) 2, 8.

4. Tusmith 21.

5. See for example Joyce Warren’ 5 The American N_______a_r___cissus:
Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Cm?— American Fiction (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1984), which indicts the writers of the American
Renaissance for pathological self-interest, or 'The Literatures of America: A
Comparative Discipline," in Redefining American Literature History, eds. A.
LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (NY: MLA, 1990), in which Paul
Lauter affixes the theme of "defining an isolated, heroic self against the forces
of nature" to the "American white males [who] have constituted the received
canon" and proclaims that "social issues...the difficulties of sustaining
conununity," while of little concern to these writers, were more the main
subjects of minority writers" (16).

6. TuSmith 183.
7. TuSmith 19,20.

8. R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and
Tradition in the Nineteenth Centr_rry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955) 110-114.

9. TuSmith 25

10. Dexter Fisher, The Third Woman: Minoriry Women Writers of the
United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980) 577.

221
11. TuSmith 186.

12. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New
York: Macmillan, 1962) 15.

13. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; New York: NAL-
Signet Books, 1959) 42, 43. All other references to the book in this chapter will
be cited parenthetically in the text.

14. See for example Warren 187-230 and Kristin Herzog, Women,

Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Centr_r_ry American
Fiction (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1983) 7-16.

15. Jonathan Arac, "The Politics of The Scarlet Letter" Ideology and
Classic American Literature eds. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986) 247-266.

 

 

16. Sacvan Bercovitch, "Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise,"
Representations 24 (1988) 1-27.

17. TuSmith 186.
18. TuSmith 182
19. TuSmith 183.
20. Bercovitch, "Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise" 1.

21. In "Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise," Bercovitch cites the
seminal work of Larry Reynolds which shaped for his own insights into
Hawthorne’s reactions to political revolution See Larry Reynolds, "The Scarlet
Letter and Revolutions Abroad," American Literature 57 (1985): 44-67.

22. Dirnmesdale describes "his bitterness and agony of heart, at the
contrast between what I seem and what I am," The garlet Letter 182.

23. "penance" and "penitence," The Oxford English Dictionary, 1971 ed.

24. These words are in reference to Pearl, but by extension they are fully
applicable to Hester.

25. Bercovitch, 'T-Iawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise" 1.

26. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (1925; New York: Persea, 1970) 137.
All other references to the novel in this chapter will be cited parenthetically in
the text.

222

27. See Elizabeth Ammons’ discussion of Bread Givers as folk lore and
fairy tale. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the
Twentieth Centrrry (New York: Oxford UP, 1992) 167, 168.

28. Bercovitch takes up this ironic American phenomenon of looking to
history for sanction for upheaval and, thus, of casting change as continuity in
The American |eremiad (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978). See in particular
132-150.

29. I interpret Sara’s identification with legendary American figures as a
conservative strategy, a means to retain some sense of historical belonging
after her father withholds the Judaic endorsement. Mary Dearborn, however,
interprets Sara’s fondness for American patriots as testament to the far extent
of her rebellion and evidence of a vigorous and violent renunciation See

Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicihr in American Culture (New
Yorlc Oxford UP, 1986) 74-77, 88, 89.

30. Ammons calls it an unrealistic, "happily-ever-after fastforward wrap-
up" 168.

31. TuSmith 182.

32. Anzia Yezierska, "This Is What $10,000 Did To Me," Hunggr Hearts
and Other Stories (1925; New York: Persea Books, 1985) 315.

33. Alice Kessler Harris, "Introduction," Bread Givers x.

34. Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896; New
York: Dover Publications, 1970) 25. All other references to the novel in this
chapter will be cited parenthetically in the text.

35. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 accounted for a disproportionate
sex ratio in Chinese American enclaves through the 1940’s. See Vincent N.

Parrillo, Strangers to These Shores: Race and Ethnic Relations in the United
States 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1994) 271.

36. Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961; New York: Carol Publishing
Group, 1993) 18. All other references to the novel in this chapter will be cited
parenthetically in the text.

37. Jeffery Chan, 'Tntroduction to the 1979 Edition," Eat a Bowl of Tea 5.

38. Li Shu-Yan, "Otherness and Transformation in Eat A Bowl of Tea

and Crossings," MELUS: The lournal of the Sociehg for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States 18.4 (1993-1994): 103.

223
39. Chan, "Introduction," Eat a Bowl of Tea 5.

40. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984; New York:
Random House, 1989) 42. All other references to the novel in this chapter will
be cited parenthetically in the text.

41. TuSmith attempts to square this example of Esperanza’s acquisitive
selfishness with her thesis of ethnic communalism. She flatly insists that it is
wrong to "draw the conclusion that the implied author advocates
individualistic values (by rejecting her insider status) since the protagonist
intends to leave her barrio (by going outside)" (167). It is a hard sell. It seems
more reasonable (indeed, the ending points to the reasoning) that precisely by
becoming an individual and distinguishing herself from the group, Esperanza
will be better equipped to serve them. Individualism can support rather than
destroy an ethnic culture.

42. Cisneros, Mange Street, "About the Author."

43. "keep," The Oxford English Dictionag, 1971 ed.

44. Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984); Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An

Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple
UP, 1982); Tomas Rivera, "Chicano Literature: The Establishment of
Community," in A Decade of Chicano Literature ed. Luis Leal (Santa Barbara:
Editorial La Causa, 1982); see TuSmith, 21.

 

Epilogue
Difference, Dialectics, and Dialogicity:
The Example of Rudolfo Anaya and Moby-Dick

As a fact of America’s history and a fixture in its letters, immigration
provides a solid thematic foundation for comparative study of the diverse
literatures of the United States. In such subject matters as flight from home,
re-establishment of community, inter-generational conflict, and acculturation,
marginal and dominant cultures meet. Sermons and journals of early
seventeenth-century Puritans, novels of the American Renaissance, and fiction
by late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers of Asian, Hispanic,
and Southern and Eastern European descent reveal that willful uprooting,
relocation, and attendant though often reluctant identity transformation
intersect a broad range of American ethnicities. The abundant writing on this
theme reveals that throughout the centuries and quite irrespective of national
origin, newcomers have employed common strategies to resolve their shared
ambivalence about leave-taking and resettlement. Literary production in
general-the articulation of the saga of rupture and renewal—stands as an
homage to an old world past, a means of fulfilling a cultural debt or
connecting with a distant heritage in such a way as to maintain yet attenuate

the ancestral bond with the abandoned homeland.

224

225

As a focal point, the immigrant ordeal allows one to query sameness
and difference across the spectrum of literature that concerns itself with the
process of becoming American. When juxtaposed in relation to this common
theme, classic and noncanonical texts, often regarded as ethnocentric
monologues, respond to each other as though in dialogue. In such correlation,
Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin contends, the meaning of a literary work is
formed, for language, as a plural construct, is used and understood
interactively. The word, in Bakhtin’s view, can only be shared but never
owned: it "lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in
language is half someone else’s."1

Side-by-side readings of seemingly dissimilar American literatures create
the interchanges that reveal the fluid, polyvocal nature of authority, yet such
juxtapositioning is not without pitfalls. To oppose readings of mainstream and
minority texts in paired sets can unduly heighten their contrastive qualities,
throwing into perhaps unnaturally sharp relief the extremes between "us" and
"them," "WASP" and "ethnic," or folk art and haute culture.2 And while such
Manichaean allegory can sensationalize difference, Hegelian synthesis errs in
the reverse through forced homogenization As Barbara Johnson warns, a
multiculturalist agenda often masks imperialist motives under the reasoning
that "difference is a misreading of sameness....[which] must be represented in
order to be erased."3 Such a platform, she contends, ultimately seeks to

colonize, convert, and, hence, "prove" the univerasality of Western humanism.

26

Perhaps the soundest foundation for comparative study of American
literatures takes shape in Arnold Krupat’s reasoning. In his view, the proper
thrust of curricular multiculturalism is to engage otherness in order to provoke
an interrogation of what is ordinarily thought familiar‘ and to uncover an
affinity in what is normally regarded as unrelated. In such dialogicity,
otherness is neither rigidified through contrast nor muted through coerced
conformity. Instead, as diverse texts "converse," in a sense, they "tell" an
optimally full story of the American experience.

To capture the intellectual depth and breadth of "etlmocriticism" of
literature of the United States, Krupat replaces the conception of dualistic
categories in American literary study with the trope oxymoron. Comparative
pluralism, he explains, should survey that which is "apparently oppositional,
paradoxical, or incompatible...in a manner that nonetheless allows for

"5 As a controlling conceit for

decidable, if polysemous and complex, meaning.
multicultural inquiry, oxymoron signifies the comprehensible complementarity
achieved through the dialogic paradigm. The image opens up an ever wider
range of mutually interrogative readings among and between American
literatures. Notwithstanding very real, practical problems of space and time
limits regarding course syllabi and reading lists,‘ there is room for traditional
and multicultural writing when the two categories are rightly viewed as all of
a piece. The wealth of material which multicultural publishing furnishes does

not loom as the extinction of American classics, for ethnic fiction is not

necessarily poised to replace them.’ Rather, the study of American letters is

227

revitalized by the consideration of the full range of national writing when
diverse texts are read in relation to one another. The following example,
"Literary Eclecticism: The Golden Carp and the White Whale," illustrates this
expanded and fertile paradigm for dialogic readings of mainstream and
marginal fiction beyond the thematic constant of immigration Unlikely
subjects for pairing, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is often hailed as the
brightest star in the canonical firmament; Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Cltima
(1971) a Chicano novel, has earned acclaim for its "cultural uniqueness."8 Yet
beyond the expected differences and a less obvious Melvillian influence on the
later work, the juxtapositioning of these texts produces a call-and-response
exegesis on the antithetical yet composite self as represented across two
centuries in the American experience. Only in such fruitful pairing of like and
unlike, as Tzvetan Todorov explains, is the full story heard: "We are not only
separated by cultural differences; we are also united by a common human
identity, and it is this which renders possible communication, dialogue, and in

the final analysis, the comprehension of Otherness."9

Literary Eclecticism: The Golden Carp and the White Whale

In Bless Me Ultima Rudolfo Anaya presents a world of opposites in the

 

New Mexican village of Guadalupe. The parents of the young protagonist
Antonio are a quarrelsome couple, as different from each other as the terrains
from which they hail. Maria Luna Marez, the pious daughter of Catholic

farmers from the fertile El Puerto valley, steers her son toward the priesthood

228

and a ministry in an agrarian settlement. Gabriel Marez, Antonio’s
adventurous father, is descended from a long line of nomadic horsemen; he
expects his son to share his wanderlust, and he hopes that as compadres they
will explore the vanishing llano (plains). The thrust of Anaya’s bildungsroman,
however, is not that maturation necessitates exclusionary choices between
competing options, but that wisdom and experience allow one to look beyond
difference to behold unity.

Historic continuity and spiritual harmony are recurrent strains in much
of Anaya’s work as he often laments man’s weakened connection to the earth,
to the past, and to the myths that reveal the proper balance of the cosmos.
Anaya is critical of the heavy toll which economic and political realities exact
from the fragile landscape of the Southwest and its ancient cultures, but, a
conciliator, he also cites some merit in change. Rather than condemning or
shunning innovation, as do many who like Anaya want to protect an
endangered heritage, he advocates a measured application of modernization.
"Technology may serve people," he reminds those whom he claims are wont to
retrench in the old ways, but "it need not be the new god. "‘° Likewise,
informed engagement in the legislative process, a political reality of the here-
and-now, can serve the cause of preserving the landscape and the cultures it
sustains. Anaya urges that just as the present can safeguard the past, historical
awareness can "shed light on our contemporary problems."11 He reaches back
through the centuries to the Toltec civilization of Tula to bring instructive

parallels to bear on current rapacious materialism in the United States.12

229

As a writer, Anaya practices the rich admixing across time and space

that he preaches, for his novels of the American Southwest blend diverse

 

cultural strains. In Bless Me Ultima he draws deeply on Native American
mythology and Mexican Catholicism,13 and, though the novel is written in
conventional English that the protagonist deems a "foreign tongue,"M the

prose is to be read as a translation of the Spanish which most characters speak.
When his characters use English, they typically engage in code-switching.15

Bless Me Ultima is lauded for such distinctive Chicano features as its

 

use of Aztec myth and symbol, its thematic emphasis on family structures, and
its linguistic survivals.“ Furthermore, Anaya is renowned as one of the "Big
Three" of the Chicano canon, alongside Tomas Rivera and Rolando

I-Iinojosa.l7 Set in a sacred place imbued with a spiritual presence and long
inhabited by indigenous peoples, his book presents a world where the Anglo is
of little consequence to its strong Chicano characters.“

Yet this highly celebrated ethnic novel also reveals the strong imprint of
Anglo-American belles-lettres. Many critics observe Anaya’s reliance upon
James Joyce’s Portrait of the, Artist as a Young Man to relate the anguished
rites of passage of his own protagonist.” Both Antonio Marez and Stephen
Dedalus ask bold questions about the nature of good and evil as they examine
their roles within the families and Church that circumscribe their lives.
William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Katherine Anne Porter, among others,
have also been cited as literary influences on Anaya.20 But in a novel that

uncovers shared tenets among seemingly discordant worldviews by an author

230
who prizes cultural eclecticism, Anaya goes even further afield in choosing his

literary models. Though lauded as a masterpiece of the margins, Bless Me,
_Lmrrhe bears a strong relationship to that text which is perhaps most often
cited as the epitome of the white, northeastern literary paradigm—Herman
Melville’s Moby- Dick

Anaya’s graduate work in the 1960’s emphasized the traditional canon,
and he cites an abiding interest in American Romanticism.” It is not

altogether surprising, therefore, that the parallels between Bless Me Ultima

 

and Moby-Dick are stark and foundational. Both novels tap into biblical and
mythological archetypes as their main characters plumb the mysteries of the
creation. In their quests for experience, knowledge, and mastery, the
protagonists in each book break religious taboos and push the limits of human
awareness as they try to fathom the unknowable mind of God. In fact, both
novels have drawn similar criticism for their weighty, abstract subject matter
and for their individualist rather than social focus.”

But to detect a Melvillian influence in Bless Me, Ultima is not to charge
Anaya with being derivative, nor is it a back-handed attempt to "prove" the
universality of the traditional canon by asserting that it presciently
accommodates the Chicano experience. For in many ways, Anaya’s book
testifies to the triumph of the Chicano cosmology. As presented by Melville,
the negative romantic and "sick soul!” the world is a place of horror and
despair; Anaya, revealing his Jungian bent as he taps into the collective

unconscious, finds vigor, beauty, and order there.” Indeed, Anaya’s text

231
reads as though he, along with Ishmael, has survived the wreck of the Peguod

but that he has lived to articulate the harmonies of the universe which

Melville’s sailors could not recognize. In Bless Me Ultima Anaya reconciles

 

into a unified whole the dichotomies which rend the cosmos and loom chaotic
in Moby-Dick.

Both Melville’s Ishmael and Antonio Marez, the schoolboy protagonist
of Bless Me, Ultima, are novices. Generally untrained in the ways of whaling,
Ishmael proves to be a quick study after signing on as a deckhand aboard the
Lem. He is ostensibly in pursuit of whales and then more specifically the
whale, after Ahab commandeers the crew to his own vengeful mission But
more significantly Ishmael pursues experience and wisdom, goals which make
him a milder version of the blasphemous Ahab, who lashes out at the
Godhead to avenge his own human limitations. Antonio, also seeking to
understand the complexity of life, tracks a fish of his own, the legendary
golden carp, the avatar of an Aztec nature-god.25 By sighting the river-god
which swims the waters that surround Antonio’s village and by hearing its
history of sacrifice for the salvation of others, Antonio hopes to learn the
secrets of the universe. His journey into paganism is an exhilarating quest but
one which induces guilt and anxiety as he breaks the first commandment of
his Christian faith.

Guadalupe, an isolated village that is set apart from the greater New
Mexican landmass by a river which encircles it, is at once as insular and

internally diverse as the Peguod, the island-ship which sails the world’s

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oceans. Melville’s sailors represent widely differing nationalities and religious
beliefs: Ahab is a Quaker-turned-atheist, and Ishmael a Presbyterian; the
harpooners are described as heathens, Queequeg as a Polynesian idolater and
cannibal, Daggoo as a "gigantic, coal-black negro-savage," and Tashtego an
"unmixed Indian."26 Of Ahab’s secret East Indian crew, Fedallah, a Parsee, is
a fire-worshiper. A varied constituency also comprises Antonio’s world.
Besides the stark differences in the mores and temperaments of the peaceful
farmers who are his maternal relatives and his raucous, rootless paternal
uncles who ride the llano, Antonio finds sharp contrasts among his friends.
Catholic and Protestant classmates taunt each in the schoolyard about their
conflicting beliefs of heaven and hell, while those secretly faithful to the cult of
the golden carp, such as Cico, Samuel, and Jason, are contemptuous of these
arcane concerns. Children of no particular religious persuasion, some of
whom are eerily animal-like in appearance and endowed with preternatural
strength and speed, watch the squabbles in amusement. All are terrified by
the three Trementina sisters, who are legendary for practicing black magic.
Both Melville and Anaya ascribe a mystical, seductive beauty to the
natural world-or more specifically to bodies of water-for, as Ishmael explains,
"meditation and water are wedded for ever" (Melville 13). In "Loomings," the
first chapter of Moby-Dick, Ishmael describes the magnetic pull of the ocean
Seeking a spiritual sustenance not found in the commerce that occupies them
during the workweek, "crowds of water-gazers" gather at the wharfs during

their leisure. Ishmael pronounces these "thousands upon thousands of mortal

233

men fixed in ocean reveries" (12) to be narcissists, for they seek in their
reflections thrown back by the mirror-like "rivers and oceans...the ungraspable
phantom of life...the key to it all" (Melville 14). Ishmael, of course, is no
exception to these questers. Hoping to learn the secrets of the "wonder-world,"
he says he is drawn to the whaling voyage by "a portentous and mysterious
monster [that] raised all my curiosity" (Melville 16).

Later in "The Mast-Head" when Ishmael is assigned watch high above
the ship’s deck, he experiences the dangerous allure of pantheism. As a
meditative man surrounded by the glory of the universe, he fears he could lose
himself both literally and figuratively in the beauty of nature.

Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious

reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of

waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the

mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue

bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and

every...undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those

elusive droughts that only people the soul by continually flitting

through it. In this enchanted mood, the spirit ebbs away to

whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space...

(Melville 140)
To yield rationality to revery, Ishmael cautions, is to lose one’s footing and
plummet to the sea; to merge with the natural world is to surrender one’s

distinct identity. He concludes his warning with the stern note, "heed it well,

234
ye Pantheists" (140), and Melville proves that it is advice best followed. In

"The Life-Buoy," a subsequent chapter, a crew member who passes into a
"transitional state" while posting lookout from the crow’s nest falls to his death
in the sea.

Pantheism is an equally strong contender for the religious affections of

the soul-searchers in Bless Me Ultima. Anaya handily debunks the merits of

 

dogmatic Catholicism in the cold and ineffectual Irish priest whose sole
method of reaching his first communicants is a meaningless catechism. The
children respond by rote but have no deeper understanding of the faith to
which they are being indoctrinated; Father Byrnes neither encourages nor
facilitates any fuller awareness. Antonio’s pathologically devout mother,
though honest and loving, is further testament to the Church’s ineffectuality
and harm. A fearful, superstitious woman for whom religious devotion means
passivity, she is the epitome of weakness that Melville derides in Roman
Catholicism as "feminine...submission and endurance" (Melville 315).
Worship of nature—wild, free, and also benevolent—is an attractive
alternative to the Catholicism which many in Antonio’s world find stifling.
('The parish church, in fact, is described as dark, dank, and musty). But
Anaya, like Melville, also conveys the danger of pantheism. When the cult
member Cico seeks to convert Antonio to his pagan beliefs, he is careful to
caution the initiate about the possible hazards that loom in a mystical merger
with nature. Like Ishmael, Cico is a "water-gazer," one who is drawn to the

river by its "strange power [and] presence" (Anaya, Ultima 108; his emphasis).

235
He recounts to Antonio that he became spellbound while perched on an

overhanging cliff high above the hidden lake, and that he only narrowly
resisted the strange music that beckoned him to the depths below: "It wasn’t
that the singing was evil," Cico explains. "It was just that it called for me to
join it. One more step and I’da stepped over the ledge and drowned in the
waters of the lake" (Anaya, _Ul_tim_a 109).

Actual fatalities follow Cico’s close call. Narciso, a pantheist (whose
name echoes the narcissists who gaze into the water to find their bearings at
the outset of Moby-Dick) is, like the drowning victim of Melville’s "Life-Buoy,"
trapped in his own "transitional state." Pegged as the pathetic but good-
hearted town drunk who has lost control over his faculties, Narciso is
eventually murdered by the villainous Tenorio Trementina. Another casualty
of nature-worship is Florence, Antonio’s friend, whose tortured boyhood has
destroyed his faith in God. Though scornful of the limitations and cruel
paradoxes of Catholicism, Florence is no simple heretic. He searches for "a
god of beauty, a god of here and now...a god who does not punis " (Anaya,
grim 228). He is drawn to the lake, much as Antonio and Cico are, but,
unable to resist the beckoning water, he drowns. Florence’s death dive is
described as an underwater exploration that lasts too long.

In seeking to resurrect the spirit of the land and the power of ancient
myth, Anaya is certainly sympathetic to Cico, the believer in "many gods...of
beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards" (Anaya,

Ultima 227). Yet when Cico counsels Antonio to renounce Christ, whom he

236
calls a jealous deity that would instruct his priests to kill the golden carp,

Anaya does not endorse the pantheist’s bifurcated vision For though Cico
observes the link between the natural and the divine, he does not recognize
the affinity between Christianity and pantheism. The kinship of Christ with
the nature-god, who transformed himself into a carp so as to live among and
protect his people who were likewise transformed into fish as punishment for
their sins, is lost on Cico.

With his blindered vision, Cico is reminiscent of those Melville
characters who also reduce the complex unity of the world to polarities.
Richard Slotkin has named "consummation" as the main thrust of Moby-Dick,
a merger conveyed through such metaphors as the Eucharist, marriage, and,
more literally, the hunt. But he explains that, finally, Melville delivers no such
consolidation since his characters achieve no lasting spiritual balance or cosmic
bonding.” Ishmael, for example, heeds too well his own warning to
pantheists. While he warns that mysticism can leach away individuality, he
also bemoans social interdependence as one of life’s "dangerous liabilities"
(Melville 271).” ‘

Ahab, like Cico, is unable to reconcile seeming opposites; like Ishmael,
he perverts the notion of unity. If Ahab sees a "common creaturehood" with
Moby Dick, his own self-loathing forces him to destroy what he perceives as
an extension of himself (Melville 545). And if Moby Dick is an avatar of God
and the wound it inflicts is a punishment, the whale represents the power

which Ahab covets and can attain only by subduing. For the monomaniacal

237

sea captain, there is no co-existing with the white whale, no possibility that
Moby Dick is a mediator between the human and the divine. Ahab believes
he must either kill the whale, or be killed by it. His binary vision makes him
hopelessly paranoid: what he cannot fully understand he construes as malign
and warranting pre-emptive destruction.”

It is Ultima, an ironic counterpart to Ahab in their shared capacity as
mentors, who teaches Antonio to look beyond difference to recognize
transcendent parallels. Though their worldviews clash, the curandera (medicine
woman) of the New Mexican llano and the captain of the m are similarly
enigmatic and powerful figures. Their marred outward appearances attest to
their intense engagement with life—Ahab with his ivory leg and the scar that
runs the length of his body and Ultima with her shrunken frame and wizened
face. Both are cut off from family. Ahab was orphaned before his first
birthday, and as an adult he chooses Moby Dick and the sea over the wife and
infant son he leaves in New England. Ultima, aged and apparently childless,
is homeless until Antonio’s father Gabriel moves her from the unsheltered llano
into his home in Guadalupe.

The most significant parallel the two share is their own hybridity from
which they draw their awe-inspiring strength Captains Bildad and Pelag, the
I_’e_q_rr9_d’s owners, aptly sum up Ahab’s contradictory nature: "He’s a grand,
ungodly, god-like man...Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the
cannibals" (Melville 76). "Old Thunder" vows to lash out at the sun should it

insult him, a threat he later carries out by smashing the quadrant that requires

238

him to rely on the heavens to determine his bearings in the sea. Yet he clearly
"has his humanities," as when he consoles the crazed Pip or recalls the warm
home he has left behind. He is vulnerable too, dwarfed and deformed as he is
by his uncontrollable obsession. Such dualities within Ahab do not comport
well; they are in constant conflict and drive him to war with the universe. His
internal chaos manifests itself in his fractious nature, which causes him to
perceive a fragmented outer world. He will brook no compromise nor accede
to any mediation: Moby Dick is pure evil and Ahab must destroy him, or lose
his life trying.

Ultima is not without her own dark side, since she too encompasses
dualities. "La Grande," as she is called, is part saint but also part witch. Her
ability to cast out demons and to remove curses derives from her own
acquaintance with evil. Yet her dualities do not taint or confound her; they
complement her. In fact, her understanding of evil enhances her capacity for
goodness. Recognizing that the disparate elements of creation work in concert,
she instructs Antonio to respect rather than to fear difference, for "we fear evil

only because we do not understand it" (Anaya, Ultima 236). Her universe, in

 

all its splendid diversity, is coherent, not chaotic.

In the broad sweep of Ultima’s vision, cooperation rather than
competition is the driving force of the cosmos. For her, pagan and Christian
precepts are not mutually exclusive. Whereas Cico counsels Antonio to
renounce the Christian trinity as impostors so that he might pledge his faith to

the golden carp, Ultima, who also worships the golden carp, integrates her

239

heterogenous beliefs. Her spirit, embodied in the owl which always hovers
near her, suggests at once Christ as dove and Quetzalcoatl as eagle.30 There

is no hypocrisy or sacrilege as she joins Maria in praying to the Virgin of
Guadalupe, nor in her attendance at Sunday mass with the Marez family. Yet
as much as she is a companion to the devout Maria, she is the compatriot of
Gabriel, the begrudging Catholic and restive villager. He is unfulfilled by the
Church and reluctant to join Maria in praying the rosary. Instead he draws
spiritual sustenance fiom the llano, where he finds "a power that can fill a man
with satisfaction" Ultima, who participates in Catholic rituals but whose faith
is never dictated by dogma, shares Gabriel’s reverence for the untamed plains
and responds in kind to his praise for the land: "and there is faith here...a
faith in the reason for nature being, evolving, growing" (Anaya, grime 220).
The merger of her pagan and Christian beliefs is complete in her answer to
Antonio’s plea, which is the title of the novel. As she offers her blessing, she
adopts the cadence of the Catholic benediction and invokes her own secular,
benevolent triune: 'T bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and
beautiful" (Anaya, film 247).

As Ultima’s apprentice, Antonio learns that Christianity and pantheism
are compatible. Initiated into the awareness that the whole is comprised of its
many parts, he resolves as well the conflicting agendum his parents set for
him. When Antonio dreams that he is being riven by his parents as each
issues a self-interested plan for his future, Ultima intercedes on his behalf.

Maria claims that her son is a true Luna, a child of the moon who was

240
baptized by the holy water of the Church and thus destined for a vocation as a

priest; Gabriel counters that the boy, like all Marez men, is a product of the
restless salt-water sea, and that he is therefore meant to ride the plains.
Ultima refutes his parents’ false and limiting dichotomies to reveal an
underlying mystical holism:

You both know...that the sweet water of the moon which falls as

rain is the same water that gathers into rivers and flows to fill the

seas. Without the waters of the moon to replenish the oceans

there would be no oceans. And the same salt waters of the

oceans are drawn by the sun to the heavens, and in turn become

again the waters of the moon. (Anaya, Qh‘rhe 113)

Ultima’s insight into the harmony of the universe is the understanding
which Ahab lacks. Her cosmology features no aspect of creation as foreign,
superfluous, or malign, for each has a contributing and complementary role.
"The waters are one," she tells the relieved Antonio. "You have been seeing
only parts...and not looking beyond into the great cycle that binds us all"
(Anaya, grime 113). Just as Antonio comes to comprehend the kinship of the
golden carp and Christ,31 he realizes the obvious—that as the offspring of his
mismatched parents he is living proof that opposites can integrate. As
Ultima’s eventual successor, he will grant his mother's wish for a priest by
ministering to the needs of others and by mediating between the natural and

the supernatural; and, blending his Christianity with pantheism, he will fulfill

241

his father’s desire for an heir who is in touch with the spiritual forces of the

earth.

In writing Bless Me Ultima Anaya borrows a page from Melville’s

 

book, but it is a page that he revises, for the union strived for in Moby-Dick
but always thwarted is achieved in Antonio Marez. Aboard the m co-
mingling is misconstrued as a blurring of identity that threatens the extinction
of the self, or as a dominion over another. Queequeg’s taste for human flesh
and Stubb’s relish for freshly killed whale meat further perverts the Eucharist
into cannibalism. Suggestions of fertility and fruition merely tease, as in the
crew members’ coming together to manipulate the spermaceti in "A Squeeze of
the Hand," a pleasurable and erotic bonding but one that is ultimately
frustrating and unproductive.

That Ahab works against rather than with nature is clear in his uneasy
alliance with the instruments by which he navigates the seas, such as the
quadrant that he destroys and the compass which reverses itself. The
interchange over the ship’s log and line, tools for gauging speed and direction,
further reveals that he is out of sync with the dynamism of the universe.
When the rotten line snaps and the log is lost, Ahab announces that he "can
mend all" (Melville 427). The claim is self-delusory, since Ahab, having denied
the synergism in the complex world around him, cannot forge the vital nexus
he desires. In proposing to "mend the line" as he reaches out to Pip, who then
urges that they "rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white"

(Melville 428), Ahab suggests that he will continue and fortify his lineage

242

through crossbreeding. But the union will not hold: the partners are not of
sound mind as they take their vows. One is "daft with strength, the other daft
with weakness." Reeling in the broken line as Ahab departs with his young
black "mate," the Manxman prophetically observes, "here’s the end of the
rotten line...Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether"
(Melville 428). The prognosis for any new hybrid "line" is grim, since Ahab
persists in seeing the world as inexorably oppositional: He dies pursuing the
whale that he maintains is wholly evil, the ship and crew go down, and
Ishmael, the lone survivor, is left afloat on a coffin until the Raghel, on its own
death watch, picks him up.

When in Bless Me, Ultima the townspeople of Guadalupe object to the
sacrilegious over-reaching of science as manifest in the atomic bomb tests that
are conducted south of their town, they could easily be describing Ahab’s
quest for omniscience. "Man was not made to know so much," they contend.
"[T'Jhey compete with God, they disturb the seasons, they seek to know more
than God Himself. In the end, that knowledge they seek will destroy us all"

 

(Anaya, Ultima 183). Ahab, dissatisfied with what he deems his lowly place in
the universe, seeks mastery through destruction In contrast, Antonio, who,
like Ahab, pursues and attains wisdom, is not antagonistic in his search for
knowledge. He comes to luxuriate in the synchronized workings of the world,
for Ultima has taught him to "listen to the mystery of the groaning earth and
to feel complete in the fulfillment of its time....through her I learned that my

spirit shared in the spirit of all things" (Anaya, Ultima 14).

 

243

Communion in Moby-Dick is perverted by a murderous urge; man’s
relationship to nature and to God is adversarial, and his goal is destruction or
the absorption of another. True "marriage," Richard Slotkin asserts, occurs
only when there is a mutual acceptance of each by the other, in which neither

is destroyed.” Bless Me Ultima achieves this beneficent reciprocity. In tune

 

with the cosmic harmonies, Antonio joins together diverse and discordant
beliefs, temperaments, and values, for he realizes that he can "take the llano
and the river valley, the moon and the sea, God and the golden carp—and
make something new" (Anaya, Ulri_m_a_ 236). His communion is neither
conquest, as it is for Ahab, nor the cancellation of the self, which Ishmael fears;
it is true consummation

In Bless Me Ultima Anaya’s method is his message. The worldview

 

which Antonio achieves by reconciling a host of opposites is repeated in
Anaya’s own literary eclecticism. Drawing on the Bible and Indian mythology,
Mexican and Spanish lore, and, as evidenced by the echoes of Moby-Dick, the
traditional canon, Anaya reveals his pluralistic cultural consciousness. He
attains the "integrity of memory" which coheres across boundaries of time,
ethnicity, and ideology.33 Such mutually respectful and beneficial co-

existence is the mode of being that Anaya advocates for Chicano literature in
the United States, even as he seeks a broad readership for his work.“

Chicano writing need not be self-sequestered nor shunted aside by others
under a dubious celebration of "difference" to be legitimated, nor should it be

stripped of distinguishing characteristics so as to gain entry into the traditional

244

canon. "I believe that Chicano literature is ultimately a part of US. literature,"
Anaya maintains, continuing to see the whole as comprised of its elements. "I
do not believe that we have to be swallowed up by models or values or
experimentation within contemporary U.S. literature. We can present our own
perspective....But ultimately it will be incorporated into the literature of this

country."35 The thematic and tonal link between Moby-Dick and Bless Me

 

Ultima—as well as the divergent outlooks and resolutions of the two—attest to

cross-cultural interconnections amid rich heterogeneity.

245

Notes

1. This line from Mikhail Bakhtin’s "Discourse in the Novel" is
ubiquitous in multicultural criticism. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. "Race,"
Writing, and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 1; Arnold Krupat
Ethnocriticism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) 19; or Jules Chametzky’s
paraphrasing Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected
lewish and Southern Writers (Amherst. U of Massachusetts P, 1986) 4. M.H.
Abrams provides a useful gloss on Bakhtin under "Dialogic Criticism" in A
Glossa_ry of Literery Terms 6th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1993) 230-232.

2. Krupat’s Ethnocriticism undertakes to mediate such distinctions in
mainstream and Native American literature. His sound logic is useful in
traversing the middle ground between ethnic and canonical literature in
general. See 25 and 29 specifically.

3. Barbara Johnson, 'Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in

Zora Neal Hurston," "Race,’ Writing, and Difference 323.
4. Krupat 236, 237.
S. Krupat 28, 29.

6. See Richard Ohmann, "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-
1975" Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 199-223 and ED. Hirsch, Jr. Cultural Literary:
Whet Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton, 1987) for opposite

opinions regarding canon formation and reading lists of works of literature.

7. These fears and objectives, misguided though many of them are, are
articulated in the popular press. The title of Arthur Schlesinger’s extended
essay on cultural pluralism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a
Multi-Cultural Society (New York: Norton, 1992) aptly conveys his sense of
foreboding over widespread recognition of the multicultural character of the
United States, as the chapter "E Pluribus Unum?," pp. 119-138, does more
specifically regarding curricular expansion in history and literature courses.
Ishmael Reed voices the opposite of such dread. In 'The Ocean of American

246

Literature" he triumphantly indicts white proponents of multiculturalism
("Omniscient Boomers") who horn in where they do not belong and are not
wanted. Those who classify themselves as "white" are veritable non-entities in
the pluralist camp, which is poised, he explains, to lure readers away from the

mainstream. The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections
from the American Book Awards 1980-1990 eds. Ishmael Reed, Kathryn

Trueblood, and Shawn Wong (New York: Norton) xxi-xxvii, especially xxiv.

8. Joseph Sommers, "Critical Approaches to ChiCano Literature," _T_'_h_e_

Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature, ed. Francisco Jimenez (New
York: Bilingual Press/ Editorial Bilingue, 1979) 143-152, especially 146-147.

9. Tzvetan Todorov, "’Race,’ Writing, and Culture," "Race ," Writing, and
Difference 374.

10. Rudolfo A. Anaya, "The Myth of Quetzalcoatl in a Contemporary
Setting: Mythical Dimensions / Political Reality," Western American Literature
23 (1988): 198.

11. Anaya, "Quetzalcoatl" 198.
12. Anaya, "Quetzalcoatl" 195-200, especially 199.

13. More specifically, the Indian lore reflects Nahuatl thought, that of
the Mexican and Central American tribes. See Carmen Salazar Parr, "Current
Trends in Chicano Literary Criticism," The Identification and Analysis of
Chieano Literature, ed. Francisco Jimenez (New York: Bilingual Press/ Editorial
Bilingue, 1979) 139.

14. Rudolfo A. Anaya, Bless Me Ultima (Berkeley, CA: TQS
Publications, 1975) 53. All other references to the novel in this chapter will be
cited parenthetically in the text.

 

15. Translating and discussing "Degradacion y Regeneracion en Bless
Me Ultima " by Roberto Cantu, Cordelia Candelaria notes Cantu’s more grim
observation about language use in the novel. Claiming that Antonio
undergoes a loss of spirituality, Cantu cites a progressive absence of Spanish
after Antonio enrolls in school as evidence of this decline. See "Anaya,
Rudolfo Alfonso," Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide eds. Julio A.
Martinez and Francisco A. Lomeli (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1985) 47.

 

 

16. Sommers, "Critical Approaches to Chicano Literature," _The
Identifieation and Analysis of Chigo Literatr_rre 146-147.

17. Juan Bruce-Novoa, "Canonical and Noncanonical Texts: A Chicano

Case Study," Redefining American Literary History, eds. A. LaVonne Brown
Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (New York: MLA, 1990) 196-209.

247

18. The setting of Bless Me Ultima is often regarded as a world apart, a
separate and protected enclave. The German critic Horst Tonn, however,
detects the encroaching Anglo presence-4n the highway that runs near the
idyllic town of Guadalupe, in the tours of military duty which Antonio’s three
older brothers must serve during World War II, and in the atomic bomb tests
run close to the Marez’ New Mexican village. See "Bless Me Ultima: A
Fictional Response to Times of Transition," Aztlan: A lournal of Chicano
Studies 18.1 (1987): 59-67.

 

 

19. See Raymund Paredes, "The Evolution of Chicano Literature,"
MELUS 5.2 (1978): 101. See also Robert M. Adams, "Natives and Others," rev.
of Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya, New York Review of Books 26 Mar.
1987: 33-34.

 

20. Candelaria notes the influence of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories
in the way characters from Bless Me Ultima return in Heart of Aztlan (1976).
In Anaya’s third novel, Tortuga (1979), Candelaria finds echoes of the
persistent turtle from The Grags of Wrath and of Katherine Anne Porter’s use
of a hospital as a microcosm of humanity in Ship of Fools. See "Anaya,
Rudolfo Alfonso, Chicano Literature 34-51.

 

21. Juan Bruce-Novoa, "Rudolfo A. Anaya," Chicano Authors: Inguigr
by Interview (Austin: U of Texas P, 1980) 188.

22. See Paul Lauter, "The Literatures of America: A Comparative
Discipline," Redefining American Literary History 9-34. Lauter maintains that
literature of the American Renaissance is tantamount to escapist fiction in its
portrayals of single (white) males striking out for a frontier of some sort-the
sea, the woods, the prairie. Many minorities, he reminds us, faced the other
side of the adventure, invasion Lauter contends that for them, "individual
confrontations with whales or wars were never central, for the issue was
neither metaphysics nor nature but the social constructions called ’prejudice,’
and the problem was not soluble by or for individuals...but only through a
process of social change" (his emphasis, 16). See also Hector Calderon, "The
Novel and the Community of Readers: Rereading Tomas Rivera’s Y no se lo
trago la tierra," Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature
Culture, and Ideology, eds. Hector Calderon and Jose David Saldivar (Durham:
Duke UP, 1991) 112-113. Calderon uses Anaya and Bless Me Ultima as
examples of a too—heavy emphasis on meditative abstractions and
individualistic introspection Antonio’s egocentrism comes at the expense of a
collective vision

 

23. See William James’ discussion of the opposing temperaments, sick
souls and healthy minds in Writin 1902-1910 William ames (NY: Viking,
1987).

248

24. Candelaria discusses Anaya’s use of Jungian themes in "Anaya,
Rudolfo Alfonso," Chicano Literature 36-39. Elsewhere she is critical of
Anaya’s penchant for happy endings, which she charges gloss over unpleasant
or grim realities. Anaya’s search, Candelaria contends, "always finds its
uplifting grail of enlightenment and happiness. Alienation, irony, ambiguity,
and the myriad uncertainties of a dynamic cosmos, whether ancient or
modern, seem to lie beyond the boundaries of his fictive universe." See
Cordelia Candelaria, "Rudolfo A. Anaya," Dictionagr of Literary Biography:
Chicano Writers First Series vol. 82, eds. Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R.
Shirley (Detroit, Mich: Gale Research, 1989) 34.

 

25. Herminio Rios and Octavio Ignacio Romano, foreword, Bless Me
Ultima, by Rudolfo A. Anaya (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972) ix.
They connect the myth of the golden carp to Atonatiuh, the first cosmic
catastrophe in Nahuatl cosmology.

 

26. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel
Parker (New York: Norton, 1967) 107. All other references to the novel in this
chapter are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

27. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mytholegy of
the American Frontier 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1973) 538-

565.

 

28. On numerous occasions Queequeg and Ishmael are happily in sync
and mutually served by each other, as in 'The Monkey Rope" for example. Yet
Ishmael remains ambivalent at best about their interdependence. Consider
D.H. Lawrence’s reading of Ishmael’s casual regard for Queequeg after
bunking with him at the Spouter-Inn in "A Bosom Friend": "You would think
this relation with Queequeg meant something to Ishmael. But no. Queequeg
is forgotten like yesterday’s newspaper. Human things are only momentary
excitements or amusements to the American Ishmael." Studies in Classie
American Literature (Harnmondsworth, NY: Penguin Books, 1977) 156.

29. Richard Slotkin discusses Ahab’s Puritanical response to the spirit of
nature, which allows only two lines of action: he can either be nature’s captive
or its destroyer. See 547-548.

30. "Anaya, Rudolfo Alfonso," Chicano Literature 39.

31. Vernon Lattin, rather than seeing Antonio’s accommodation of
Christianity and pantheism, contends that Antonio rejects the Church to
embrace the pagan gods. See "The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary
Native American and Chicano Fiction," American Literature 50 (1979): 625-40.
Likewise, Raymund Paredes sees Antonio affecting no reconciliation of his
parents’ conflicting ambitions for him. He maintains that "at the end of the

249

novel, Antonio rejects the confining traditionalism of the Lunas in favor of the
Marez’ doctrine of personal freedom." See Paredes 101.

32. Slotkin 554.

33. See Annette Kolodny, "The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New
Literary History of the United States," American Literature 57 (1985): 291-307.
In service of canon revision, Kolodny urges Americanists to dissociate
themselves temporarily from reassuringly well-known texts to become
immersed in the unfamiliar. The result she foresees is an awareness made full
by interconnections and new decipherings previously unrecognized.

 

34. See William Clark, "The Mainstream Discovers Rudolfo Anaya,"
Publishers Weekly 21 Mar. 1994: 24. Anaya, "wanting to reach a wider
audience," has recently completed a six-title contract with Warner Books. The
mass marketing deal includes paperback and color-illustrated hardcover
editions of Bless Me Ultima.

 

35. Bruce-Novoa 190.

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