Ethnic modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the aesthetics of dislocation

Ethnic Modernisms Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation Delia Caparoso Konz...

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Ethnic Modernisms Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation

Delia Caparoso Konzett

10.1057/9780230107533 - Ethnic Modernisms, Delia Caparoso Konzett

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-19

Ethnic Modernisms



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Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation

Delia Caparoso Konzett



Ethnic Modernisms

Copyright © Delia Caparoso Konzett, 2002. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

ISBN 0-312-29345-3 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Konzett, Delia Caparoso. Ethnic modernisms : Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the aesthetics of dislocation / by Delia Caparoso Konzett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-29345-3 1. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Emigration and immigration in literature. 3. Women and literature— United States—History—20th century. 4. Yezierska, Anzia, 1880?–1970—Criticism and interpretation. 5. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 6. Hurston, Zora Neale—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Rhys, Jean—Criticism and interpretation. 8. African Americans in literature. 9. Ethnic groups in literature. 10. Expatriation in literature. 11. Immigrants in literature. 12. Modernism (Literature) 13. Jews in literature. I. Title. PS228.E55 K66 2002 810.9’920691—dc21 2002069379 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: November 2002 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



ETHNIC MODERNISMS

For Matthias

&

For My Parents, Antonio and Magdalina



Dedications




Acknowledgments Permissions Abbreviations Introduction Ethnic Modernisms and Their Avant-Gardes Chapter I

Anzia Yezierska and the Experience of the Assimilated Jew

ix xi xiii 1

19

Introduction The New Immigration as Ethnic Catalyst The Experience of Immigrant English in Hungry Hearts The Conscious Pariah: Toward a Transnational Aesthetics From Hollywood to Hester Street: The Image of the Assimilated Jew in Hungry Hearts the Film Chapter II

Black Folk Culture and the Aesthetics of Dislocation in Zora Neale Hurston

69

Introduction Race, Nation and Art: The Harlem Renaissance The Folk in Harlem: Zora Neale Hurston’s Urban Folklore The Transnational Perspective: The Experience of the African Diaspora in Tell My Horse and Moses, Man of the Mountain “Getting in Touch with the True South”: Pet Negroes, White Crackers and Racial Staging in Seraph on the Suwanee Chapter III

White Mythologies: Jean Rhys’s Aesthetics of Posthumanism

Introduction Wide Sargasso Sea: White Masks and Their Creolization


127


Contents

Concluding Remarks on the Marketability of Ethnicity

167

Notes Works Cited Index

169 187 197



An Expatriate among Expatriates: The Banality of Exile Good Morning, Midnight: Commodity, Distraction, and the Displaced Masses

T

his study has benefited greatly from the help and commentary of Miriam Hansen, Katie Trumpener, Angel Medina, Mary Lou Emery, Donald Marshall, Charles Musser, and Matthias Konzett as well as the excellent anonymous readers supplied by Palgrave. I would also like to thank the editors of American Literature, Journal of Film and Video, and Journal of Caribbean Literature, in which early versions of chapters have appeared. At Palgrave, my appreciation goes to Kristi Long for her very generous help and support, as well as Roee Raz and Meg Weaver for their assistance in preparing this manuscript. This study was also made possible through a dissertation grant from the Mellon Foundation. And for their support and love, I am especially grateful to my family.



Acknowledgments




We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint from the following: Zora Neale Hurston, from Seraph on the Suwanee. Copyright 1948 by Zora Neale Hurston. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Zora Neale Hurston, from Tell My Horse. Copyright 1938 by Zora Neale Hurston. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in I Love Myself When I am Laughing, Ed. Alice Walker (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Zora Neale Hurston arranged by Victoria Sanders & Associates. Zora Neale Hurston, from the unpublished manuscript The Death of Sugar Foot in the James Welden Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Zora Neale Hurston arranged by Victoria Sanders & Associates. Zora Neale Hurston, from the unpublished manuscript The Funeral of Harlem’s Sheik in the James Welden Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Zora Neale Hurston arranged by Victoria Sanders & Associates. Jean Rhys, from Good Morning, Midnight (W. W. Norton, New York: 1986.) Copyright 1938 by Jean Rhys. Reprinted by permission of Jean Rhys Estate arranged by Sheil Land Associates. Jean Rhys, from Wide Sargasso Sea (W. W. Norton, New York: 1982). Copyright 1966 by Jean Rhys. Reprinted by permission of Jean Rhys Estate arranged by Sheil Land Associates. Cover Jacket: Wyndham Lewis, from portfolio Timon of Athens (1913–14). Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis.



Permissions




Chapter I AS RE AM FVH S AICNB

The American Scene (Henry James) “Reflections in Exile” (Edward Said) “Towards a Definition of American Modernism” (Daniel Joseph Singal) “The Free Vacation House” (Anzia Yezierska) Salome of the Tenements (Anzia Yezierska) All I Could Never Be (Anzia Yezierska) Chapter II

SBF CM PF M SF HS CS HS TMH MMM PNS SS

The Souls of Black Folk (W. E. B. DuBois) “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (Zora Neale Hurston) “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston” (Hazel V. Carby) “Muttsy” (Zora Neale Hurston) The Death of Sugar Foot (Zora Neale Hurston) The Funeral of Harlem’s Sheik (Zora Neale Hurston) Color Struck (Zora Neale Hurston) “Story in Harlem Slang” (Zora Neale Hurston) Tell My Horse (Zora Neale Hurston) Moses, Man of the Mountain (Zora Neale Hurston) “The ‘Pet’ Negro System” (Zora Neale Hurston) Seraph on the Suwanee (Zora Neale Hurston) Chapter III

WSS VID

Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys) Voyage in the Dark (Jean Rhys)



Author’s Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Texts

Ethnic Modernisms

Q ALMM SM GMM

Quartet (Jean Rhys) After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (Jean Rhys) The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany (Siegfried Kracauer) Good Morning, Midnight (Jean Rhys) Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-19

xiv


Ethnic Modernisms and Their Avant-Gardes Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. —Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia It seems proper that those who create art in a civilization of quasibarbarism which has made so many homeless, which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language. —George Steiner, Extraterritorial

A

fter an absence of more than two decades, Henry James returned in 1904 for a year’s visit to the United States, having in the meantime distinguished himself in Europe as one of the world’s foremost English writers. His homecoming was marked by a triumphal tour of the nation he had left behind, including various visits to the homes of eminent Americans, such as Mark Twain, President Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, as well as his equally well-known brother, William James. Stopovers occurred in cities and towns along the East Coast, including Cambridge, New York, Washington, D.C., Richmond, and Jacksonville. His provocative reflections on the young nation with its upstart material wealth and its unabashedly brazen culture are published in his travelogue, The American Scene (1907). James’s remarkable travelogue documents not merely the rediscovery of and shock in seeing his native land after 21 years of separation but a seminal moment in literary history. Written at the turn of the twentieth century,



Introduction

Ethnic Modernisms

The American Scene articulates James’s anxiety about his place in a new historical period concerned solely with the present, doing away with, for all intents and purposes, anything that smacks of history and tradition. This unease is seen clearly in James’s obsessions with the passing of time, “a tick or two of the mighty clock, the clock that never, never stops,” reflecting his own rapidly approaching obsolescence.1 Confronted with the raw materialism and emerging mass culture of the United States, James realizes that his refined era of high bourgeois culture is being rudely shoved out of the public. James singles out in particular New York’s recent buildings as representative of the new modern outlook. In the city’s “audacious” and “multitudinous” skyscrapers, he sees a new ahistorical outlook built on nothing but economic wealth: Crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost, they are simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself. They never begin to speak to you, in the manner of the builded majestics of the world as we have heretofore known such—towers or temples or fortresses or palaces— with the authority of things of permanence or even of things of long duration. One story is good only till another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written. (AS 75)

The cityscape, with its impressive architecture, has become subject to a radical economic logic in which the new product rules until its replacement by the latest item. Innovation, formerly understood in terms of originality, gives way to the concept of the new, the fad, the fashion tendency that comes and goes. While the skyscraper signifies this empty commercial aspect of American culture, it is in the hotel, represented by New York’s splendid Waldorf Astoria, that James recognizes its accompanying new aesthetics of impermanence, one that has become “a synonym for civilization.” James’s reflections on New York display an unusual predictive power stated with bold foresight and simultaneous hesitation by this somewhat reluctant modernist. It is as if James’s literary observations begin to subvert the author’s class, erudition, genteel background, and even the author himself, rendering them useless in the face of a dazzling modernity that announces itself in the “hotel-spirit”: The moral in question, the high interest of the tale, is that you are in presence of a revelation of the possibilities of the hotel—for which the American spirit has found so unprecedented a use and a value; leading it on to express so a social, indeed positively an aesthetic ideal and making it so, at this supreme pitch, a synonym for civilization, for the capture of conceived manner them-



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selves, that one is verily tempted to ask if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and finding itself. . . . It sat there, it walked and talked, and ate and drank, and listened and danced to music, and otherwise reveled and roamed, and bought and sold, and came and went there, all on its own splendid terms and with an encompassing material splendor, a wealth and variety of constituted picture and background, that might well feed it with the finest illusions about itself. . . . One was in the presence, as never before, of a realized ideal and of that childlike rush of surrender to it and clutch at it which one was so repeatedly to recognize, in America, as the note of the supremely gregarious state. . . . It has the admirable sign that it was, precisely so comprehensively collective—that made so vividly, in the old phrase, for the greatest happiness of the greatest number . . . that is how the place speaks, as great constructed and achieved harmonies mostly speak—as a temple builded, with clustering chapels and shrines, to an idea. The hundreds and hundreds of people in circulation, the innumerable huge-hatted ladies in especial, with their air of finding in the gilded and storied labyrinth the very firesides and pathways of home, became thus the serene faithful, whose rites one would no more have skeptically brushed off than one would doff one’s disguise in a Mohammedan mosque. (AS 99–102)

The hotel as a modern site of transitory dwelling becomes the paradigmatic location for the new century, in which migration and displacement will redefine the term “home” in a new variation of being at home in permanent homelessness. Repressing the reality of the migratory as represented in New York’s “alien masses,” the Waldorf Astoria presents this new homelessness in its gilded aesthetics of the hotel civilization as the national spirit of America—“the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” However, the luxurious illusion of the Waldorf ’s “Oriental opulence” and “richest rococo” quickly gives way, as James observes, when one confronts the migrating masses that flood New York at the turn-of-the-century (AS 102–03). The hotel as “synonym for civilization” is subsequently replaced by the “ubiquity of the alien,” that “babel of tongues” with which Manhattan imprints itself on this leisurely perambulator of the city (AS 115). The initial bond of the national spirit encompassing a migratory aesthetics quickly dissolves when real-life immigrants are confronted. As James tersely notes, “There is no claim to brotherhood with aliens in the first grossness of their alienism” (AS 117). Aware of the inauthentic aesthetic of the hotel, he likewise cannot accept the raw “grossness of alienism” as given in the reality of mass immigration. Americans, James observes, take a national pride in a sense of identity built on an open democracy and migration. They may even embrace “the ethnic outlook” of the melting-pot ideology, yet they are equally terrified of the masses of immigrants that embody uprootedness in its most concrete, visceral sense (AS 126).



Ethnic Modernisms and Their Avant-Gardes

Ethnic Modernisms

James not only confronts these anxieties of foreign contamination but also exposes the intimate link between ethnicity and dislocation. The hotel aesthetic with its artificial glamour and pseudo-historical architecture functions to conceal a condition of homelessness and migratory reality through the recourse of exotic Orientalism. The anxieties centered around dislocation and ethnic contamination, James notes, are tangible in almost every aspect of America’s modern culture, from its towering skyscrapers to its understanding of domestic and national affairs. This intimate connection between ethnicity and displacement is clearly described in his account of the Bowery Theatre where James becomes physically seasick and unsettled when moving through a Jewish crowd: It was like moving the length of an interminable cage, beyond the remoter of whose bars lighted shops, struggling dimly under other pent-house effects, offered their Hebrew faces and Hebrew names to a human movement that affected one even then as a breaking of waves that had rolled, for their welter on this very strand, from the other side of the globe. I was on my way to enjoy, no doubt, some peculiarly “American” form of the theatric mystery, but my way led me, apparently through depths of the Orient, and I should clearly take my place with an Oriental public. (AS 188)

Suffering from racial vertigo triggered by waves of immigrants flooding into the United States “from the other side of the globe,” the author loses his secure sense of identity and becomes part of the foreign mass, the “Oriental public.” Claustrophobic images of an “interminable cage” and “pent-house effects” turn the encounter with another culture temporarily into an uncanny experience of dislocation. In spite of James’s perceptive understanding in The American Scene of how these experiences function in tandem to express a fundamental crisis in modernism, we nevertheless continue to view them today as separate, if overlapping, occurrences. This study raises the combined question of dislocation and ethnicity as a key feature of modernism, one that is still too-often dealt with in discreet separation. Offering new interpretations of the writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys, I explore their shared poetics of displacement in their critical dramatization of their respective ethnic identities. In conventional modernist themes and topoi, the experiences of dislocation, migration, diaspora, and exile typically are rendered race-neutral, productive, and inspiring. This sense that exile is somehow in the end a beneficial experience is expressed in Hemingway’s well-known quote about Paris: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”2 However, as Edward Said writes, such accounts “banalize [the muti-



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lations of exile].”3 “On the twentieth century scale” with its “large, impersonal setting,” exile has become a “condition of terminal loss” that is absolute (RE 357). Once the organic bond between nationhood and citizenship is broken, it cannot be reconstituted. Instead, nationalism and exile become opposites that cannot be reconciled: “exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being” (RE 360). The great potential of exile lies not in its ability to sublimate or convert the hardships of exile into productive poetic inspiration but in its ability to transform the very foundation of ethical and humanistic belief. In this sense, writing or any intellectual productivity that grows out of displacement becomes for Said a moral obligation captured by Theodore Adorno’s imperative: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”4 Exile, argues Said, is not a “privilege, but . . . an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life” with its standardized and prefabricated values of ontology and belonging (RE 365). By disconnecting questions of race, ethnicity, and culture from that of dislocation and migration, we sustain the moral and humanistic myth of a sedentary “original” national culture seemingly encroached upon by other races or migrant groups. As Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys persuasively demonstrate, it is no longer possible to claim an original geographical territory or homogeneous peer group as the shelter and origin of their cultural identities. Instead, their fiction engages from within particular regional and collective contexts in a complex process of establishing elective affinities across sociocultural milieus and boundaries. Only as we come to view all ethnicity as linked to migration and, vice versa, all migration linked to forms of ethnicity, do we begin to understand that so-called native cultures are in fact always already construed and open to demographic regrouping and cultural reconstitution at any point in history. To paraphrase Adorno, we begin to realize that no one is rightfully at home.5 The evolving debates on the location of culture have also had a significant impact on the conception of modernism, which had heretofore been safely defined in territorial terms such as European modernism, AngloAmerican modernism or metropolitan modernism. Only in the latter decades of the twentieth century, did critics begin discussing modernism in the plural, referring to the many alternative and competing discourses of the period that were obscured by a canonical version of modernism with distinctly European traits. Doing away with the myth that modernism originated in the major metropolitan sites of Europe and influenced other areas outside of Europe later and then only indirectly, critics (feminists, postcolonialists, and Americanists in particular) began producing studies establishing the significance, range, and complexity of modernism. Americanists, for example, began refuting the longstanding and popular beliefs that modernism was imported solely from Europe through the New




Ethnic Modernisms

York Armory Show of 1913 and expatriate modernists like Eliot, Stein, Pound, and Hemingway, taking a fresh look at local landscapes and their homegrown versions of modernism reflected in various media, contexts, and movements of the period. Unlike earlier accounts of American modernism still largely patterned on European models of modernism, the renewed attention to American modernism now stressed the various indigenous contexts that were not derivative of European norms. American Quarterly’s spring issue of 1987, for example, addressed the topic of “Modernist Culture in America,” “assessing what we have learned to date about Modernism in the U.S.”6 “Modernism did happen here,” claims the editor Daniel Joseph Singal, and “its impact on American culture and society has been far greater than was previously understood” (AM 7). For Singal, modernism is neither to be equated with the experience of societal modernization à la Max Weber nor deemed the adversary culture of decadent modern bohemianism associated with the European avant-garde. Instead, he argues for a more central experience of modernism as an integrative mode of radical empiricism whereby one is “to experience experience” in the absence of any traditional epistemic certainty (AM 11). American thinkers like William James, John Dewey, and Franz Boas, claims Singal, led the way in promoting a new “pluralist integration” of culture, challenging the orthodox Victorian beliefs of religious, social, and racial uniformity (AM 19). Modernism, according to Singal, was “to integrate once more the human and the animal, the civilized and savage, and to heal the sharp divisions that the nineteenth century has established in areas such as class, race, and gender” (AM 12). In positing modernism as a central experience in American culture, restoring “a sense of order to human experience under often chaotic conditions of twentieth-century existence,” Singal may be overstressing its redemptive nature (AM 8). However, Singal also significantly notes that recent critics (Houston Baker, Carolyn Burke, Frederic Jameson, Richard Wolin) have attempted to point to internal contradictions within American modernism, thereby foregrounding its conflicting ideologies. The most compelling of these revisionist studies are especially concerned with what is excluded from high modernist discourses, such as questions of ethnicity, race, gender, class, nationality, and mass culture. This reorientation has led to new assessments of alternative modernist cultures such as the Harlem Renaissance, immigrant writers, working class literatures, and urban subcultures. In areas of feminism and postcolonialism new definitions of modernism likewise have been advanced as alternatives to male Eurocentric versions. Exploring “the Modernist as it is written in female experience,” Shari Benstock argues against a modernism that presents itself as a historical response to World War I and certain social practices, revealing its attempts to regulate



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the movement of modernism itself and thereby sustain the patriarchal status quo.7 Women expatriates like Djuna Barnes, H. D., Mina Loy, and Rhys have been excluded by such traditional modernist definitions, Benstock argues, and their innovative forms of writing ignored or seen as derivative. Benstock points in particular to their discovery of “sexualized writing identities in expatriation” that “both mimed and undermined Modernist principles,” revealing “surprising alliances between expatriation, literary creativity, and gender—alliances that are denied by the old logic, excluded by the old definitions, and overlooked by the old reading strategies.”8 In similar manner, Kenneth Ramchand’s groundbreaking study The West Indian Novel and Its Background (1970) acknowledges not only the cultural expression of “local” West Indian writers as an alternative to that of Europe but that of white West Indian writers like Rhys, torn between England and the Caribbean, who “evolved a way of life that was not quite European.”9 Following Ramchand’s lead, Caribbean-centered, postcolonial, and Third World critics are now exploring new affinities between migration and race, models of resistance subverting European colonial dominance, and aspects of intracultural conflict due to antagonistic gender roles. This study follows in this revisionist vein and explores alternative understandings of modernism as expressed in the writings of Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys. I discuss in particular their unique articulation of ethnic identity in an unprecedented era of transformation, displacement, and mass consumer culture. I have selected these three writers mostly due to their complex, rather than reductive positions on ethnicity that have resulted in ambivalent and often contradictory stances both in the authors’ works and critical receptions. For example, Yezierska’s representation of herself as an “authentic” immigrant struggling to live the American Dream obscures her trenchant critique of the assimilationist and philanthropic ideologies of Progressive America. She has thus been contrarily received as an ethnic protest writer and ardent assimilationist. Likewise, Hurston’s early attempts to portray an autonomous African American folk culture have obscured her later goal in Tell My Horse; Moses, Man of the Mountain; and Seraph on the Suwanee of depicting cross-cultural influences. Her reception has been equally confusing, with critics perceiving her as a vital ethnic and feminist writer and as a conservative opportunist who pandered to white tastes. And, finally, Rhys’s life and fictional depiction of exile in Europe has been viewed by her critics at various times as that of an apolitical expatriate depicting the victimization of kept women and as a significant contributor to feminist and postcolonial writing. The complex positions of Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys, in which ambivalence and irresolvable contradictions prevail, reflect, I believe, more realistically the situation of minority writing that cannot be subsumed under




Ethnic Modernisms

mono-causal explanations. In fact, the overlapping and contradictory demands of race, gender, generation, education, urbanity, mass culture, and displacement that one traces in their writing give a more adequate approximation of the work of culture and identity formations. As I attempt to show, cross-dissemination, negotiation, and interaction with an equally hypothetical mainstream culture—the “phantom public sphere”—create the perceived polarities, oppositions, and commonalities between “ethnic” and “mainstream culture.”10 In this context, ethnic literatures, while challenging notions of mainstream culture, are not isolated discourses that occur marginally or outside the formation of mainstream cultural identities. In their attempt to define ethnic and cultural identities in this hybrid and complex manner, Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys can be called an unconventional ethnic avant-garde, breaking with or modifying traditional concepts of ethnicity that stress separatism, exoticism, and victimization. The avantgarde, as Peter Bürger’s study Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) argues, revolts against the institutional power of bourgeois art wielded under the guise of a seemingly value-neutral aesthetics of art and culture.11 It denounces in particular, says Bürger, the aesthetics of high modernism with its autonomous, self-referential representation of art as that which upholds bourgeois culture, thereby repressing the social origins of art and its potential as a tool for social activism. In his provocative and informative essay, “AvantGarde Ethnics,” Thomas Ferraro discusses how American ethnic writers of the 1910s and 1920s (Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Michael Gold) made a deliberate choice between the literary authority of high modernism and the social concerns of ethnic realism. “Writers coming out of America’s many ghettos chose, almost without exception,” he notes, “to write within the older realist tradition.”12 As ethnic avant-gardes, Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys also display the traditional avant-garde outrage of society’s bohemian elements against canonical modernism and its perceived exclusionary insiderism defended in the interest of pure aesthetics. Following avant-garde efforts to bridge social, political, and aesthetic concerns, the ethnic avant-garde seeks to change the perception of ethnic minorities as largely passive, victimized, and ghettoized groups, while not denying the traumatic experiences of oppression. However, while Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys may share this frustration with the distorted reception of culture in the institution of art, they did not so much turn against aesthetics, unlike the traditional avant-garde, as produce new forms of aesthetics more appropriate to their experience of dislocation and exclusion. They do not therefore abandon the constructive precepts of high modernism, as is the case with the iconoclastic avant-garde. Certainly, as Ferraro points out, Yezierska presented herself in opposition to the high modernism of the expatriates, often misrepresenting herself as a “mouth-



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piece of the ghetto.” However, because she chose to sacrifice “the literary authority” of modernism in favor of the “social power” of ethnic realism, does not mean we should also interpret her work in such a way. In fact, Ferraro is one of the first critics to view Yezierska’s work as serious literature. Instead, turning to mass culture as a potentially revolutionary space of constructed and reproduced rather than essential or inherited identities, our writers as ethnic avant-gardes actively joined in an emerging modernism of cultural transformation. As ethnic avant-garde writers, they experienced modernism in the form of mal- and re-adjustments to modernization, with its imposed migratory displacements. However, their appropriation of avant-garde techniques of shock and iconoclasm was not informed by nihilistic gestures as found, for example, in Dadaism, a movement responding to the intellectual betrayal of World War I. The experiences of profound dislocation and disbarment instead urged and motivated them to produce new forms of aesthetics, thus clearly exceeding the narrower parameters of the traditional iconoclastic avant-garde by symbolically imagining complex and highly ambivalent communities caught in the tension of nonsynchronous experience or dislocation. In the vein of a modernist ethnic avant-garde writer, Yezierska challenges philanthropic and assimilationist discourses that place the immigrant in the position of a lesser American, thereby unmasking the artificial inflation of a national Anglo-Americanism. Her novels and short stories refine the modernist precepts of John Dewey, depicting the transitional position of immigrants as a culturally productive rather than parasitic force. Employing the fresh and original style of Immigrant English, she rewrites clichéd immigrant scenarios and scenes of instruction in critical fashion. Similarly, Hurston defies the representation of African Americans as a socially problematic group without resources to shape American culture and history actively. Evoking the African American experience of migration via a vital folk culture in the process of becoming and influencing an emerging mass culture, Hurston shows how displacement and race in modern mass culture are not necessarily mutilating forces. Her creation of a critical minstrelsy captures not only the vitality of the black masses but also the subversive character of minstrelsy, with its conscious distortion of black folk culture. In addition, her transcultural and transnational ventures challenge commonplace notions of race and ethnic absolutism, demonstrating that identity is not a fixed cognitive or cultural fact. Finally, as an intriguing example of British and Caribbean modernisms, Rhys reminds us that concerns of race and ethnicity are relevant not simply to those belonging to disenfranchised racial groups but to society as a whole, including Caucasians. Translating her Caribbean and colonial socialization into the context of European modernism, Rhys “racializes” and “ethnicizes” this seemingly race-neutral




Ethnic Modernisms

tradition. In doing so, she creates a provocative counternarrative to mainstream modernism, exposing its status as a white European construct resting on the colonial binaries of race. All three writers share, then, in spite of their diversity, a critical ethnic perspective and avant-garde attitude toward standardized notions of cultural identity such as nationality, race, and majority consensus. Their common aim is to advance a literature and aesthetics commensurate with modernity and mass culture in order to break with the elitist and exclusionary rationality of bourgeois culture. In their various forms of modernism, Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys not only question modernism on a theoretical level but also redefine concrete social and political concerns regarding questions of civic participation, citizenship, national identity, and “marginal” social positions. Their works attempt to motivate from within a plebeian public sphere (one not marked by traditional cultural erudition) a profound and constructive transformation of culture. Indeed, these writers are very much aware of the division between a legitimate high modernism and the unofficial popular or folkloric cultures reflecting the sentiments of the “less cultured” masses. They stress the latter’s ability to produce modern cultures of their own, with their own selfreflexivity, their own aesthetics and public accountability, that function to shape culture from below as much as it was believed to be shaped from above. The most significant tool for asserting the countermodernist aesthetics in our three writers is language. The immigrant writing of Yezierska is no longer the realist prose of social documentation but a reflection upon the norms of linguistic and cultural assimilation. Yezierska’s Yinglish, a deliberately awkward mixture of Yiddish and English, is not a social idiolect like a modern-day “ebonics,” but a consciously constructed literary language that reimagines the experience of immigration in a new and unexpected manner of cultural cohesiveness amidst the experience of dislocation. Similarly, Hurston reconnotes the language of minstrelsy and black folklore to adjust their idioms to the urban experience of black migration, where these languages are in the process of transformation. Rhys’s fragmented and severely truncated prose style, reflective of the efficiency of modern mass and consumer culture, also attempts to articulate the drama of displacement and discontinuity within this narrowly confined linguistic space. All three writers operate within contracted languages that have been mutilated through experiences of migration and disruption. Yet, this contraction proves to be aesthetically productive in verbalizing dislocation and for imagining a new aesthetics of nonsynchronicity. The nonsynchronicity of different cultures existing in various historical temporalities becomes intensified in the modern era with its mass migrations and where a much more significant interaction between various cultures imports nonsynchronicity into the heart of modernity. Adolf Loos, for



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example, identifies this conflicting coexistence of different temporalities and traditions in the multicultural setting of turn-of-the century Vienna: “The speed of cultural developments is hampered by stragglers. I am living, say, in 1912, my neighbor around 1900, and that man over there in 1880.”13 The characters of our writers similarly inhabit conflicting temporalities, as seen in Yezierska’s immigrants who bring Old World feudal values into the setting of New York’s Lower East Side; or in Hurston’s modern folk tales with its rural folk transplanted into an urban lifestyle; and in Rhys’s cosmopolitan heroines from former colonies, who are at odds with modern national traditions. Whereas Loos views nonsynchronicity with impatience and as an obstacle toward modernization, Ernst Bloch, based on his experiences in the metropolitan Berlin of the 1920s, identifies nonsynchronicity in the more positive terms of a polyphonic history, a “multiverse”: “It allows all movements and forms of human culture location in the togetherness of different epochs.”14 “Not all people exist in the same Now,” writes Bloch. “They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others.”15 Revising Hegel’s linear and developmental concept of history, Bloch strives for a more flexible understanding of historical temporality that can incorporate the historical validity of non-European cultures: “For the sake of the human race, Africa and Asia join in the polyphonic chorus of a polyrhythmic advance of progress towards this unity.”16 Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys do not share the utopian optimism of Bloch or the progressive modernist fervor of Loos. Their notion of nonsynchronicity can be said to be both of an agonistic and productive kind, viewing the clash of disjunctive cultural temporalities as unsettled ground on which culture has to negotiate its provisional location and orientation. Nonsynchronicity articulates in the fullest sense their homelessness, their living somehow at once within and out-of-sync with modernity. The aesthetics of nonsynchronicity stands in contradiction to the classical paradigm of modernism as a synchronic reflection upon culture and its insistence on a culture’s total presence unto itself. While the performative present of modernist aesthetics still informs the writings of Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys, it does so with a shattered confidence in the total coincidence of articulation and experience. Their aesthetics of nonsynchronicity ultimately challenges the ideologies of belonging that can still be found in various modernisms (futurism, social avant-gardes, national modernisms) in which a modernist suspension of tradition often goes hand in hand with a with a renewed reinvention of traditions, of collective and subjective identities defined along the boundaries of nation, race, class, or gender. This type of renewed closure of a modern present in revision of the past is not possible with Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys, since it contradicts their profound




Ethnic Modernisms

experience of dislocation. Their transnationalism, informed by the aesthetics of nonsynchronicity, prohibits them from becoming affiliated with any distinct form of social identity (as ethnic or national writers, for example) since they no longer partake of culturally stabilized communities. While deeply sympathetic to the concerns of ethnicity, race, class, and gender, they cast their imaginary worlds outside the confines of clearly defined camps of identity that produce their own nebulous ontologies of belonging along with its accompanying forms of illusionary synchronicity. Instead of focusing on various national contexts of modernism, American or European, this study insists on the transnational significance of the modernism operative within particular regional inflections. International modernism, defined in this study as the canonical version of European modernism with an appeal to global universality posing as pluralistic and inclusive, is not to be confused with the transnationalism discussed here as being a significant ingredient of a variety of local modernisms. This sense of transnationalism, informed by the experiences of dislocation and ethnicity, is what especially links the modernisms in our three writers and impacts upon their cultural production. It informs their understanding of modernism as a provisional search for community and identity in a radically mobile and migratory reality. It is in the area of cross-cultural communication that the three authors make vital contributions to literature, inventing forms of speech that verbalize displacement and renew dialogue across national and cultural divides. As Said admits, the attempt to overcome displacement altogether is quite common among migrant individuals and communities: “Exiles feel . . . an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology of or a restored people” (RE 360). Nevertheless, the works of Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys display none of these reconstituted assertions of ethnic or national identity. As such, they also can be construed as a form of ethnic modernism that resists the readopting of organic paradigms of nationhood and blood-related collective definitions of ethnicity. Their ethnicity is instead marked by an irreparable mutilation: “Exiles are always eccentrics who feel their difference (even as they frequently exploit it) as a kind of orphanhood” (RE 363). Yezierska’s acculturation stories persistently end in disaster, typically at the point of assimilation; Hurston’s exuberant and uplifting race stories cannot cover up her own distance and difference from her community; and Rhys’s expatriate bohemianism usually ensnares its heroines in scenarios of dependence and imprisonment rather than liberating them from cultural, social, and national identities. In reading the works of these three modernists, we come across arrogant beggars, murderous spouses, drunks and thieves, mad women, and dubious chorus girls and mistresses of the demi-monde who have broken



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with the codes of middle-class civility and instead figure as eccentric, if not grotesque, representatives of their respective cultures. Their heroines are irremediably uprooted and orphaned, in the literal and figurative sense, from any sort of sanctuary or protective patronage. Affiliation with protective philanthropic institutions, communities, families, or chivalric male companions usually turns sour, leaving the heroines stranded and isolated, with no hope of redemption or prospective acceptance into any collective shelter. The fate of these modern uprooted heroines would seem to spell out an “essential sadness [that] can never be surmounted” that Said ultimately attributes to the condition of exile (RE 357). Surprisingly, though, our three writers attribute to their heroines no self-pity, but instead affirm the orphanage of their women in an exuberant manner. While not belittling the mutilations of exile, these writers derive equal pleasure from a condition in which no more lies are required to mask the situation of having fallen out of synchrony with culture and its organic myths of belonging. Once successfully acculturated to nonacculturation, their various heroines develop resources of irony and self-affirmation by which they defy the status quo. As beggars they turn arrogant; as disenfranchised citizens of a second order, they refuse to view themselves as tragically colored; and as drifting bohemians they greet midnight as their new good morning. As women, Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys were certainly seen as problematic representatives of their respective peer groups. Moreover, their unorthodox stances, informed by the ironies of multiple marginalizations and conflicting identities of class, gender, race, and nationality, made them unacceptable to those desiring easily mobile political entities. It comes as no surprise that all three writers met their most unsympathetic reception from within the groups to which they seemingly belonged and represented. Being unable to live up to collective stereotypes due to their “problematic” class and gender affiliations, they could not be seen as intellectual leaders of communities largely patterned on patriarchal, middle-class standards of success. And yet, despite their limited success, one that often distorted their own objectives, they did not become melancholy voices bemoaning oppression. For the most part they adhered to the concept of austerity advocated by Adorno for the situation of the exile: “There is no remedy but steadfast diagnosis of oneself and others.”17 This new aesthetics of nonsynchronicity developed in the tension of ethnicity and modernism allows us also to return to the established theoretical body of ethnic modernism and reassess its significance. A major corrective to the sociological treatment of ethnic literature can be found in Werner Sollors’ Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986). In this path-breaking study, Sollors sets out to challenge two common fallacies in the treatment of ethnic literatures, namely 1) biological insiderism, and




Ethnic Modernisms

2) disinterest in or condescending disregard of what is perceived as the marginal discourse of outsiders.18 In doing so, Sollors moves beyond the constraints of cultural descent that block access to the understanding of an ethnic community other than one’s own. Challenging the implicit biologism of such racial assumptions of insiderism, Sollors turns to a symbolic repertoire that is shared across divergent communities. The foundational myths of American identity, he claims, are mostly based on rituals of recasting descent in the form of consent, of reinventing a genealogy of cultural origin. By consequence, all American ethnicities display a strong constructive character as documented in their literary exponents. In fact, much of American literature, Sollors rightly asserts, draws its strength from reimagining the cultural roots that the various forced and voluntary migrant groups lost during their passage to America. Ethnicity is therefore not to be taken at face value but should be appreciated as a sophisticated narrative effort to establish a common symbolic repertoire of cultural consent. In increasingly polarized landscapes of entrenched and competing identities, Sollors defends the notion of a commonly shared language, which, while refracted through various ethnic treatments, displays at the core an unexpectedly stable symbolism of Biblical exodus and Puritan providence. Sollors’ account of ethnicity thus never suffers under the burden of having to prove the mainstream relevance of ethnic literatures, since its symbolism partakes of established traditions in American literature. The distance between mainstream writers such as Melville or Faulkner and ethnic writers is purely imaginary and is disproved empirically in their shared narrative structures and symbolisms. While Sollors generously extends cultural citizenship to all the participants in the cultural arena of America, he nevertheless risks belittling or obscuring entrenched modes of exclusion. The exclusion of various writers from a mainstream canon reveals the strength of institutional powers that regulate the status of art and commonly shared symbolic legacies. This openness of ethnic self-definition demanded by Sollors recalls in more subtle ways the democratic pluralism of John Dewey or Horace Kallen (equal but separate), with its seemingly unproblematic inclusiveness. In this polyethnic cultural landscape, everybody, it appears, is allowed to speak. The question remains, however, who, if anyone, is listening? And how do we settle questions about misinterpretations and misappropriations? In the permissive ambience of pluralist liberalism, ethnic writers may well borrow from Anglo-American and Christian-Judaic traditions to reinvent their identity but they are not obliged to question the very act of having to reconstitute a lost genealogy in the image of a new one. If America is founded on deracination, why is it necessary again and again to reinvent collective genealogies that mark off and reassert cultural boundaries between Irish, Ital-



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ian, German, and Eastern European immigrants and, more important, between white and nonwhite Americans? The passage to American identity is, as Sollors admits, a blatant construction that is consequently passed off as a naturally inherited identity. Why is there a persistent need to reconstitute descent in a culture of apparent consent? Sollors suggests the answer in his brief discussion of the question of race as it relates to ethnicity.19 Here the author reminds the reader of a persistent anachronism in American culture that refuses to overlook the descent of African Americans while doing so in the case of other, more assimilated, ethnic groups who are seemingly free to reinvent their descent. Sollors’ attempts to rehabilitate ethnic writing may have forced him to imagine a mainstream phenomenon that is ultimately too broad and not bound by any cultural contingencies. Sollors, as Michael Rogin observes, “minimizes nativist and commodity pressures toward homogenization.”20 Rogin’s own work Blackface, White Noise compellingly suggests that ethnic groups did not enjoy unlimited freedom in reimagining their ethnicity beyond ethnicity.21 In his example of The Jazz Singer, he argues that Jewish immigrants, perceived as “other,” had a strong need to distance themselves from the ultimate “other” of American culture, the African American, so as to achieve assimilation. The blackface routine is viewed in this context as demonstration that one is not marked by black skin pigment in any inherited manner and can randomly don and drop the mask of racial legacy. Similarly, David Roediger, following DuBois’s notion of white compensation, stresses that the “pleasures of whiteness could function as a ‘wage’ for white workers” in their threatened existence as a blue-collar labor force, enabling them to retain a distance to African Americans and preventing thereby further social decline.22 It is this burden of inassimilable ethnicity that is not properly addressed in Sollors’ study of ethnicity. His wide and undifferentiated concept of ethnicity further obscures, as Thomas Ferraro points out, the “dilemmas of specific groups and of immigration in general.”23 Ferraro’s study Ethnic Passages (1993) sets out to correct some of the shortcomings in Sollors by addressing the different contexts within which various immigration groups define their identity rather than subsume them under a single cultural symbolic repertoire. Like Sollors, Ferraro wishes to take ethnic literature seriously as literature and refrain from quick judgments that relegate it to secondary status. In the case of Yezierska, for example, he duly acknowledges her complexity as a writer: “In portraying her ‘own people,’ she saw her duty as going beyond immigrant protest; she needed to investigate the reciprocal reshaping taking place between Eastern European folk Judaism and twentieth-century American structures of opportunity.”24 Ferraro’s close analysis of the cultural conflicts within the works of various immigrant writers (Mario Puzo, Henry Roth, Henry Miller, Maxine Hong




Ethnic Modernisms

Kingston) is not unlike that of Sollors’ readings that view ethnic literature as staging the tension between descent or tradition and innovation or reinvented tradition. Modernism, in particular, becomes a more tangible context in Ferraro’s work, with its focus on the impact of mass culture and consumerism upon immigrant identities. Temporal displacement due to migration from premodern to modern cultural settings is also given some consideration as a salient feature of modern ethnic writings. Ferraro closely follows Sollors, though with more historical restrictions, in rehabilitating the forgotten genre of ethnic writing and by linking immigrant writings more with constructive literary devices and symbolization than with sociological accounts of acculturation. While critics like Sollors and Ferraro have contributed significantly to the rehabilitation of ethnic literatures and helped to make them standard readings in the academic curriculum, larger cultural trends of ethnic typification have fragmented English and American studies into subfields such as African American studies, Asian American studies, Caribbean literatures, Latino literatures, and postcolonial literatures and their variety of national contexts. This welcome diversification has unfortunately led to a greater need to identify proper representatives for each ethnic group or camp and has led to the growing assumption that the various ethnic literatures have little in common and speak for distinctly different cultural and linguistic contexts. Although Sollors and Ferraro have stressed common narrative and constructive aspects of all ethnic literatures, they have not yet fully addressed the danger whereby ethnic literature tends to revert to a reconstitution of cultural descent, thus providing new forms of symbolic closure for a community in search of its transplanted identity. Their readings assume that ethnic literatures, in abandoning old symbolic frameworks of descent, eventually end up replacing them with new frameworks, allowing for a renewed cultural consent in a radically altered cultural setting. While this assumption may generally apply to conventional ethnic literatures, it may not be the case in many instances in which ethnic writers are beginning to break with the vicious cycle of questioning and reconstituting identity. As I would like to illustrate in the case of Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys, this reconfiguration of identity no longer occurs in any solid sense and is haunted by a more compelling irony about the need to form identities in societies built on convenient cognitive prejudices. Their writings, as my readings suggest, resist this instrumentalization of identity and reflect a profound nonsynchronicity of geographic and cultural displacement. As such, they are writers who make it their conscious morality to show that the time of “the house is past,” “the possibility of residence annihilated.”25 This cultivated homelessness and inner exile from within ethnicity becomes their modernist version of an imagined expatriatism, a breaking with national and imposed profiles of identity.



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The fiction of dwelling or its impossibility, as Walter Benn Michaels provocatively suggests in his Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, also informs a mainstream strand within American modernism ranging from Cather to Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway to Sinclair Lewis, and many others, centering their fiction around tightly-knit scenarios of family, kinship, and blood relations. “The rewriting of both race and nation as family,” notes Michaels, “correspond to two important shifts in racial logic, one that emphasized not the inferiority of ‘alien’ races but their ‘difference,’ and a second that began to represent difference in cultural instead of political terms (and in addition) to racial terms.”26 American modernist writers, Michaels notes, no longer resort to outdated nineteenth century paradigms of race or class descent but instead construct narrower scenarios around the impenetrability of the classic American family. Outsiders are no longer held explicitly responsible for their race or class but for their inability to become properly American in the imagined mainstream sense: “Racial identity is disconnected from political citizenship and connected instead to ‘culture,’ and racial hierarchy is transformed into racial pluralism.”27 American nativism thus seemingly expands the tolerance for other cultures as long as they do not seek to contaminate the assumed purity of the dominant WASP culture. The seeming tolerance of pluralism, as Michaels notes, masks deep-seated racial practices of exclusion bent on preserving the status quo of American culture in the 1920s. Fictive scenarios of incest, latent homosexuality and male bonding, of incomprehensible or silent speech mostly understood by insiders, and above all, of family rituals become stock topoi of modernist fiction and parallel the country’s xenophobic retraction of immigration and naturalization rights in 1924. Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism revises Walter Benn Michaels’s account of modernism as a retreat into the white mainstream family melodrama without any explicit mention of race. Not denying that a variety of modernist writers may downplay the issue of race, North nevertheless claims that a majority of canonical modernists such as Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Conrad invoke the issue of race linguistically. All these writers engage seriously in dialect mimicry of black speech in a strategic manner to question Standard English along with its cultural imperatives: For the play among rival languages that dialect mimicry made possible led to a breakdown of both the privilege that the standard enjoyed and the myth that there could be a “natural” alternative. Dialect thus became the prototype for the most radical representational strategies of English-language modernism.28 In this sense, black English figures as a tool for ethnic cross-dressing, allowing white artists, like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, to play blackface minstrelsy and thereby undermine cultural orthodoxies that preserve racial and social hierarchies in the United States and England. In North’s provocative




Ethnic Modernisms

study, modernism proper begins with the issue of race not yet apparent in early modernists like Henry James or Ford Maddox Ford. The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance provide new alternatives of cultural comprehension beyond traditional racial divides and inform the changing perspectives of a larger American mainstream reading public. Through Eliot, Pound, and Stein, black-American idiolect and ragtime rhythms are exported to an Anglo-American modernism that had already seized upon African culture in its proximity to French modernism and Picasso’s primitivism. In a curious reversal of transatlantic accounts of modernism that place Europe at the origin, modernist art originates in the culture and art of African Americans and Africans. Michaels, North, and Rogin have provided radical readings of mainstream modernists often presumed to remain neutral to the issue of race. In Michaels’s case, this racial perspective is repressed in mainstream writers but symptomatically present in an excessive focus on pathological and frequently incestuous domestic dramas. North highlights the impersonation of other races through their idiosyncratic dialects and thereby points to a burdened attempt at cross-ethnic communication. Critics such as Sollors, Ferraro, Michaels, North, and Rogin thus seek a nexus between ethnicity and mainstream modernism, establishing the centrality of ethnicity in modernism, while avoiding at the same time ethnic insiderism. This radical revisionism of modernism is also reflected in the altogether novel readings of canonical writers with the works of Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and William Faulkner being explored in unexpected ways. Following in this vein of revisionism, this study explores a new understanding of modernism in Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys and gives attention to their plurivocal aesthetics of literature as a significant force in locating, negotiating, and traversing cultural and national boundaries. In traversing cultural territories, all three authors suspend stable categories of ethnicity and nationality and instead explore the more fluid fields of identity and their ambiguous, conflicting, and contradictory demands that migration and modernism place upon their protean identities. Rejecting easy identification with victimization often associated with minority and displaced groups, they show ingenious ironic resources in narrating their various diasporas as instructive tales of modern culture. As this study illustrates, modern ethnic writing, though restricted by severe contingencies of exclusion, remains boldly open to reimagining new and unforeseen avenues of communication across cultures, producing a stubborn vision of negativity and nonsynchronicity across cultural divides.



18

Anzia Yezierska and the Experience of the Assimilated Jew This is a story with an unhappy ending. And I too have become Americanized enough to be terrified of unhappy endings. —Anzia Yezierska, “Wild Winter Love”

Introduction

A

nzia Yezierska first received national attention when her short story, “The Fat of the Land,” won the prestigious Edward O’Brien Best Short Story award in 1919, which led to the publication of her first collection of short stories, Hungry Hearts. The Hollywood studio Goldwyn immediately noticed her potential, paying generously for the film rights to her work and also hiring her as a scriptwriter. Goldwyn’s tremendous publicity campaign made Yezierska an overnight star, hailed in newspapers around the country as the “Sweatshop Cinderella” who had managed to move “From Hester Street to Hollywood.”1 Articles in popular magazines and journals repeated this glamorous fairy tale, describing how a poor immigrant from the Lower East Side ghetto, who had at various times been a scrub-woman, servant, and factory worker, had been instantly transformed into a great novelist and Hollywood success.2 She soon became “the recognized mouthpiece of New York’s Jewish East Side”3 and quickly gained a reputation as an assimilationist in the vein of Mary Antin, who used a crude immigrant idiom to protest the poor social conditions of the ghetto and to articulate the immigrant’s desire to live the American Dream. Yezierska’s second work, the novel Salome of the Tenements (1923), was also made into a



Chapter I

Ethnic Modernisms

film, but by this time she had left Hollywood disgruntled, turning down a lucrative contract with William Fox. She returned to New York to be near her muse, the Lower East Side ghetto, and continued writing. Her work continued to draw praise from pro-assimilationists and disdain from ethnic Jews who called her Americanization themes “weary”4 and even accused her of employing Yiddish to elicit cheap laughs.5 With the onset of the Depression, her stories and novels depicting immigrant life were no longer in demand, and Yezierska and her work were soon forgotten. In 1950 she published her autobiography recounting the story of her success and subsequent failure and was once again briefly rescued from obscurity. She died in 1970, a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and a forgotten author. Over the last two decades there has been renewed interest in Yezierska by sociologists and literary critics, due to her documentation of women’s experience of immigration6 and her relationship with John Dewey, whose recently published book of rediscovered poems has made their affair public and spurred speculation about ethnic cross-fertilization in their work.7 While bringing much-needed attention to Yezierska and her feminist and ethnic concerns, however, critics continued to regard her as a patriotic assimilationist who wrote sincere but technically deficient short stories and novels in a poor and broken English. Joyce Carol Oates, for example, claims: Yezierska writes without irony, however; she is never critical of the lure of “Americanization” itself. And unlike fellow contemporaries (unlike Henry Roth, for instance, whose Call It Sleep is of course a work of far greater psychological subtlety than Yezierska’s), she did not appear to take an interest in the craft of fiction itself, and one must read her with expectations appropriate to her intention.8

According to sociologist Alice Kessler Harris, Yezierska’s “tales paved the way to success and adulation: She became the American dream come true. And her fiction illuminates the meaning of the dream.”9 In the late 1980s Mary Dearborn writes, “By and large, however, the immigrant endorsed the agenda of Americanization. . . . Yezierska wished fervently to make herself over as an American.”10 Certainly Dearborn’s biography on Yezierska and Dewey, as well as that by Louise Levitas Henriksen, Yezierska’s daughter, give us crucial information about this rediscovered author, but her fiction is still seen as somehow inferior to her own colorful life as an American immigrant. Indeed, her fiction is most often presented as subordinate to her biography and seen as significant only as a sociological description of the immigrant milieu. Her employment of crude Immigrant English is understood primarily as a descriptive device to capture the unique idiom and lifestyle of the



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Lower East Side or as an attempt to exploit her ethnicity commercially, rather than as a deliberate literary and aesthetic strategy. More recently, however, critics have finally begun to understand the complexity and irony inherent in Yezierska’s rhetoric, seeing the author more appropriately as a keen and perceptive writer who, in form and content, thoroughly questioned the cultural and national narratives surrounding the making of Americans. Critics such as Thomas Ferraro, Magdalena Zaborowska, Gay Wilentz, and Katherine Stubbs are now challenging the traditional view of Yezierska as an untutored writer documenting the life of her immigrant community, and exploring instead her stylistic innovations in the novel and short story genres as well as her contributions to modernist realism. Her criticism of both orthodox and assimilative ideologies is now more readily appreciated, and her work, no longer out of print, consistently appears on college course lists. It appears that Anzia Yezierska is at last being recognized as a unique contributor to American letters. The question remains, however, why has it taken so long? Why has Yezierska’s work been persistently misread, even up to the present day? The answer to this question lies in the overpowering narratives of Americanization and Anglo-conformity that have reduced the reception of Yezierska’s work entirely to a biography illustrating successful assimilation. The infatuation of readers and critics with her Cinderella story and their inability to absorb her work as legitimate literature attests to the power and dominance of such established narratives. It was not so much Yezierska’s work as Yezierska herself, the immigrant writer, which was the focus of attention. More precisely, it was the image of an “authentic” ethnicity projecting American ideals of self-determination, hard work, and success that captured the hearts of the public, an image that Yezierska herself promoted and that Hollywood would refine and exploit to its fullest. As Thomas Ferraro explains: The reception . . . of Yezierska’s prose has been almost entirely a function of the cult of Lower East Side authenticity that enveloped her in the 1920s and continues to frame our portrait of her. Proclaimed as a rags-to-literary-riches heroine, “the Cinderella of the Tenements,” Yezierska took center stage at press banquets in her honor, spun fantastic accounts of herself for the Sunday color supplements of East Coast tabloids and national magazines, and even played the role of screenwriter-starlet for the publicity machinery of Goldwyn’s Hollywood. It was not the immigrant fiction that commanded attention, then, but the immigrant writer herself: Yezierska as the unassimilated “Russian Jewess,” fairy-godmothered into professional authorship as if she had not left the Lower East Side at all . . . the most crucial contribution to the mythology of Yezierska was her pretense, tirelessly reiterated, that the transition from the Lower East Side to Washington Square involved nothing more than a short afternoon stroll.11




Ethnic Modernisms

As Ferraro notes, the achievement for which Yezierska was generously lauded was not her difficult attempt to write from an altogether new perspective but her “pretense, tirelessly reiterated,” that it is a natural and very easy thing for an immigrant to become assimilated, an activity comparable to “a short afternoon stroll.” Ironically, Yezierska’s Jewish ethnicity was used to render cultural and ethnic differences harmless, projecting a benign, universal image of assimilation. Yezierska’s depiction of a hybrid Lower East Side, one that was neither Yiddish nor American, neither premodern nor modern, but a nonsynchronic mix of mismatched cultures, placed her in a compromising position and led to her being misunderstood on both sides of the assimilation debate. As we will see, however, the inarticulateness and ambivalence that are often attributed to Yezierska’s work reveal in profound ways the untranslatable experience of cultural difference and dislocation. Homi Bhabha speaks in this context of “the migrant culture of the in-between” as both a transitional and “translational” phenomenon, one that “dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability,” a term Bhabha borrows from Walter Benjamin.12 Following in the revisionist strain of recent Yezierska criticism, this chapter will explore in detail the author’s modernist aesthetics as articulated in her short stories, novels, and autobiography, as well as in Goldwyn Studios’ film adaptation of Hungry Hearts. Though not innovative in high cultural and aesthetic concerns traditionally associated with modernism, Yezierska’s work must be seen from within the modernist context of an emerging ethnic avant-garde exploring the question of cultural identity in a new and provocative manner. This modernist context becomes clearer when seen in relation to the modernism of John Dewey, which Daniel Joseph Singal has identified as one of the “two predominant streams of American Modernist culture.”13 According to Singal, the Deweyan strain of modernism emphasizes social activism (education, reform, philanthropy) to do away with cultural barriers, bringing together all parts of society into a democratic whole. While critics have acknowledged the impact of Dewey’s thinking on Yezierska’s work, which began with their brief romantic affair, a thorough exploration of her unique appropriation and refinement of his modernist thought and concerns has not yet been done. As this study will show, Yezierska used Dewey’s pragmatic social and philosophical concepts to articulate a modernist aesthetics concerned with the redefinition of democracy and its essential relation to the experience of immigration and ethnicity. In critical dialogue with Dewey’s work, she articulates the experience of the immigrant not in the form of traditional literary realism or sociological documentary, but in an invented plebeian idiom. Alongside her unique prose, she develops a sophisticated modernist aesthetics that, akin to the avant-garde, reveals the public role of art and its ability to criticize, challenge, and transform the



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social sphere. Her remarkably fresh literary style, with its exaggerated use of broken Immigrant English and Yiddish intensifiers, is designed to question a national consensus on successful linguistic assimilation. In literary form, then, Yezierska rearticulates and reshapes Dewey’s pragmatic concerns and foregrounds the cultural contributions of America’s fringe elements, namely the cultures of unassimilated immigrants. At the same time, she also gives innovative aesthetic consideration to the immigrant’s idiom as a language to be explored artistically. Articulating a modernist aesthetics of dislocation, Yezierska depicts the cultural significance of immigration and ethnicity on which American identity and lifestyle are fundamentally based. The roots of America, she claims, paradoxically lie in the alienating experience of uprootedness and not in an invented tradition of Anglo-American nationalism. In this latter framework, immigration narratives assume an emancipatory teleology in which the immigrant seemingly moves from a debased and lesser cultural origin into that of a civilized, superior social order. The experience of dislocation and ethnic difference is sanitized or forgotten in these traditional narratives that foreground the rewards of successful acculturation. Yezierska’s intentionally clumsy and untutored prose rebels against such forgetfulness, inserting disruptions into the linear movement of assimilation. Her work also reveals the role that art and language play in sustaining national mythologies, as well as their potential in imagining radically new national identities and lifeworlds. An analysis of Hollywood’s film adaptation of Hungry Hearts, a work that met with Yezierska’s disapproval, will further show how strongly her artistic influence shaped this film, despite her disavowals of it. (She, in fact, helped write the script). It serves as an example of Yezierska’s radical treatment of the question of immigration and acculturation, even in the conservative context of Ghetto film. Produced in the framework of Hollywood melodrama with its box-office appeal to mainstream America and formulaic use of the up-from-the-ghetto narrative, the film nevertheless slips into frequent ironies closer to Yezierska’s aesthetics than Hollywood’s commercial demands. In fact, the defiant heroine of the film ultimately overpowers its conventional message of assimilation and asserts the stance of “the conscious pariah,” the Jew reluctant to bow to pressures of assimilation. This persona of the conscious pariah is indeed a stock character of Yezierska’s fiction and appears in various guises in her work, running like a thread through her novels Salome of the Tenements (1923), Bread Givers (1925), Arrogant Beggar (1927), and All I Could Never Be (1932). Ironically, Yezierska’s attempt to imagine new forms of national life is strongly indebted to the American tradition of self-reliance and independence as established by Emerson and Whitman, and revived by Dewey.




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Ethnic Modernisms

Both Dewey and Yezierska saw the new immigration as the primary and most challenging aspect of American modernization. During the peak years of the mass migration (1881–1914), approximately 23 million non-AngloSaxon immigrants entered the country, of which almost 3 million were Eastern European Jews. Unlike a number of other immigrant groups who came into the country temporarily to improve their economic situation, Jewish immigrants were fleeing discrimination and persecution and thus tended to settle in America permanently. The majority remained in New York City, their port of entry, creating what Moses Rischin aptly calls an “immigrant Jewish cosmopolis”: By the first decade of the 20th century, the Lower East Side had become an immigrant Jewish cosmopolis. Five major varieties of Jews lived there, “a seething human sea, fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centers of Europe.” Clustered in their separate Jewries, they were set side by side in a pattern suggesting the cultural, if not the physical, geography of the Old World.14

The overwhelming number, the “foreignness,” and the poverty of the new immigrants drew immediate responses from Americans. Nativist groups, such as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Eugenics Society, voiced concerns that the new immigrants, as non-Anglo-Saxons, were inassimilable and a threat to American culture. Backed by the so-called scientific claims of the eugenics movement, which decried the genetic inferiority of the new immigrants, these groups lobbied for social policies (immigration restriction, deportation of the biologically unfit) that would limit the impact of new immigrants. In opposition to such groups, Dewey and other progressive liberals such as Lillian Wald and Jane Addams focused upon the image of America as a country of immigrants and promoted institutions (settlement homes, vocational and night schools) that would help immigrants adjust to modern urban culture. Based on variations of melting-pot ideology, cultural pluralism, and cosmopolitan nationalism, these liberal institutions viewed America as a harmonious whole comprised of diverse immigrant cultures and thereby encouraged a limited amount of ethnic pride and cultural crossfertilization. Nevertheless, like the eugenicists, liberal progressives ultimately viewed the new immigrants as unfit, albeit socially rather than biologically, and similarly insisted upon the necessity of reform and intervention.15 Indeed, these two opposing movements shared a common base in that their members tended to be middle-class WASPs who believed in the unques-



The New Immigration as Ethnic Catalyst

25

tioned superiority of mainstream American culture. Even progressive thinkers ultimately placed the burden of acculturation primarily on the immigrants, who were expected not simply to adjust to the America’s sociocultural landscape but to acknowledge and uphold its authority. Joining forces with America’s Progressive Movement, the elite and established American German Jews of New York took upon themselves the role of benefactor of the immigrants of the Lower East Side, thereby asserting and legitimating their leadership of American Jewry.16 Indeed, philanthropy not only brought the Jewish community together but the American and Jewish traditions of charity as well, allowing for “the simultaneous search for community and social control.”17 These Jewish leaders focused especially on the reformation of the immigrant through vocational preparation and education in American mores and customs. Thus “to be a respectable American Jew, required not only Americanization but acculturation to German Jewish standards.”18 Fearful of America’s growing xenophobic and anti-Semitic reactions and that their own hard-earned status as “respectable Jews” was endangered, German Jewish leaders initially adopted a severe policy of Americanization. Institutions of Americanization such as settlement houses, charity organizations, and vocational schools were quickly set up at the very beginning of the mass immigration “to remodel [the new immigrants] in the uptown image” of the assimilated German Jew, thereby enforcing social, cultural, and linguistic acculturation and purging the Eastern European Jew of perceived ethnic traits.19 From the start, the new immigrants protested vigorously against the philanthropic institutions of the German Jews, claiming that such organizations hurt as much as they claimed to help the immigrants. In fact, the new immigrants’ resistance to Americanization could already be seen in their migration and settlement patterns, which were informed by Old World communal structures. Rischin describes how the settlement pattern “[suggested] the cultural, if not the physical, geography of the Old World”: Hungarians were settled in the northernmost portion above Houston Street. . . . Galicians lived to the south. . . . To the west lay the most congested Rumanian quarter. . . . After 1907 Levantines, last on the scene and even stranger than the rest, for they were alien to Yiddish, settled between Allen and Chrystie Streets among the Rumanians with whom they seemed to have the closest affinity. The remainder of the great Jewish quarter, from Grant Street reaching south to Monroe, was the preserve of the Russians—those from Russian Poland, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine—the most numerous and heterogeneous of the Jewries of Eastern Europe.20

The Lower East Side functioned not simply as a transitional space, allowing the immigrant to become gradually acquainted with America, but as a




Ethnic Modernisms

cultural vortex in which the habits of the Old World could be recast to suit the cultural topography of contemporary America. And even as they became acculturated, leaving the ghettos for more prosperous neighborhoods, the new immigrants did not entirely leave behind the communal structures they had cultivated there. It is thus more appropriate to view the Lower East Side as a nonsynchronic space, a shifting field of tension between adjustment the New World and the simultaneous recovery of ethnic awareness. Similarly, the dynamics between Eastern European and German Jews should not be construed simply as a cultural or ethnic conflict but as a productive force that brought the question of Jewish ethnicity into sharper focus. Indeed, as Naomi Cohen argues, the Eastern European immigration served as an “ethnic catalyst” in the American Jewish establishment, heightening the cultural and ethnic sensibilities of both the Eastern and Western European Jews. The philanthropy of the Jewish bourgeoisie worked not only to legitimate American German Jewish culture but, simultaneously, to preserve the ethnic and cultural identities of the Jewish community: In all its aspects the focus on philanthropy automatically reinforced the bonds of ethnicity. A more conscious grappling with ethnicity surfaced with the question of Jewish content in those philanthropic institutions servicing the immigrants . . . [The philanthropists] could hardly hope to persuade the immigrants of German-Jewish empathy if their institutions studiedly ignored religious practices and Jewish cultural interests.21

German Jews as a consequence began to reconsider their antipathy towards Yiddish culture as well as their own commitment to their Jewish heritage. This change is reflected in the policies of the Educational Alliance, America’s largest social settlement founded and sponsored by German Jews. Whereas its initial goal had been “the complete de-orientalization of the Russian Jew, the ironing out of all those characteristics which stamped him as a foreigner,”22 the Alliance began to install Eastern Europeans as directors in the late 1890s and in the early 1900s even held a few classes in Yiddish.23 While, however, the relations between the Eastern and Western Jews began to improve slightly, America as a whole became increasingly antiforeign as the number of migrants entering the country became greater. Under the stress of the new immigration, the liberal notions of the melting-pot theory became increasingly rigid, replacing the popular nineteenth-century image of the United States as an immigrant-welcoming nation. Though America, unlike Europe and Russia, had never officially sanctioned antiSemitism, nativism and xenophobia began to grow in the late nineteenth century, reaching a peak during World War I and the Red Scare and culmi-



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nating in the legislation of 1921 and 1924 that severely restricted immigration. Associated with foreign dangers, in particular communism and socialism, and seen as socially and/or biologically unfit, new immigrants were often cited as the main source of the country’s social and political ills. German Jewish leaders consequently found themselves in the difficult and contradictory position of at once defending and reforming their co-religionists, many of whom were turning to Zionism and other proethnic or antiAmerican movements in retaliation.24 Fearful of a division in the country along language and ethnic lines, the government and other public institutions turned increasingly to the Americanization movement, with its fervent nationalism and patriotism. In particular, new immigrants (as well as Native American Indians and the recently colonized Puerto Ricans) were strongly encouraged, if not forced, to learn English, since foreign languages were now viewed as a national threat. In a wartime speech, Theodore Roosevelt warned Americans of “our most dangerous foe . . . the foreign-language press . . . which holds the alien to his former associations and through them to his former allegiance.”25 English language instruction took on a new importance in public schools and some states passed laws and statutes decreeing English as the sole language of instruction and/or requiring non-English speakers to attend Americanization classes.26 As the belief grew that a monolingual America created a stronger nation, English became the prime symbol of cultural and national unity and caused Americans to forget or deny their rich and varied polyglot history.27 As linguists Edward Sagarin and Robert J. Kelly argue: One can cast grave doubt about the melting pot, note that it was white, that anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-Irish, general anti-immigrant feelings ran high, and that there was little interfaith marriage. But at the least, there was a linguistic melting pot. If a new American person did not emerge, as the ideologues of melting-pot theory hoped and predicted, at least an American language did, and the fact that the latter differed only slightly from speech in Britain strengthened the assimilationist movement, which was directed toward Anglo-American conformity.28

Linguistic homogeneity became the ultimate goal of the reform and Americanization movements, developing into the single most important aspect of assimilationist ideology and, in the case of white minorities, displacing the question of race and ethnicity.29 Properly spoken English became the touchstone of modern American identity, creating a rift between the inassimilable or un-American immigrants and assimilated immigrants. The strength of Yezierska’s work lies in her ability to discern and depict the consequences of this linguistic turn in the reform era and in her own




Ethnic Modernisms

effort to promote the deassimilative potential of the immigrant’s idiolect. Unlike other contemporary Jewish American writers such as Abraham Cahan, Michael Gold, and Samuel Ornitz, who viewed the problem of immigration mainly in socioeconomic terms that divided a community from within, Yezierska did not approach the immigrant solely in terms of the ironies and betrayals that arise from social ambition and mobility. Instead, her unique contribution to modern American literature lies with the critical presentation and dramatization of the hidden infringement on ethnic speech and identity through national linguistic standardization. This depiction of the experience of mass immigration and assimilation through the medium of the immigrant’s language makes up the core of Yezierska’s modernist aesthetics. Language and immigration, she believed, are co-original phenomena of modernism, marked by dislocation and the ensuing burden of articulating this experience of a migrant life. The Experience of Immigrant English in Hungry Hearts During the years that Yezierska wrote the short stories that make up Hungry Hearts, 1914–18, the Lower East Side community was coming into its own, having gained a voice in the economic, political, and social affairs of New York. Many of the first generation of new immigrants, like Yezierska, had already moved in the double sense: geographically, from the Lower East Side to nearby neighborhoods, and socially, from the proletarian class into the middle classes. Yezierska herself, as Mary Dearborn points out, was at this time “leading a comfortable life on East 101st Street, teaching night classes and still attending classes at Columbia.”30 Like many immigrants who left behind the Lower East Side, Yezierska wanted to recover her Jewish heritage, one from which she had become estranged in the course of her Americanization. A product of the Educational Alliance and the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, Yezierska experienced firsthand the severe policies and politics of Americanization and assimilation as practiced in the late nineteenth century. She had even worked for the reform institution Hebrew Charities as an investigator, which she described as “the dirtiest, most dehumanizing work that a human being can do.” “I see how the people are crushed and bled and spat upon the in process of getting charity,” she wrote to her friend, the radical activist Rose Pastor Stokes.31 According to Dearborn, Yezierska first met John Dewey in November of 1917 when she enlisted his help to secure a better teaching position.32 They began an intimate relationship and upon his advice she enrolled in his seminar at Columbia University and in the following May became part of a research group for his Philadelphia study of Polish immigrants, the data of which Dewey used in his assessment of that community. Yezierska would



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also use this information in her final novel All I Could Never Be (1932), describing the study and critically reflecting on its assumptions and conclusions. At the time of their brief affair, Dewey was America’s most prominent intellectual and public figure, in the process of establishing himself as the most articulate and comprehensive thinker in the tradition of American Pragmatism. In pragmatic spirit, Dewey was not simply a philosopher but a vital thinker actively involved with public affairs as an educator, philanthropist, psychologist, and social reformer. It was precisely Dewey’s role as a modern public intellectual and activist, as someone who had the ability to bridge the gap between thought and social experience that captured Yezierska’s attention. As an action-oriented philosophy, Dewey’s pragmatism was especially concerned with the transformation of abstract philosophical thought, particularly epistemology, into an effective social tool. Yezierska, as we will see, was drawn to this dynamic mode of thinking and would begin incorporating and refining its precepts into a unique literary style that articulated at once the social and the aesthetic. Written and published nearly 20 years after she had left the Lower East Side, Hungry Hearts (1920) offers not so much a sociopsychological portrayal as given, for instance, in the classic story of immigrant social mobility The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), by fellow writer and countryman Abraham Cahan, but a revision of her experience in the ghetto. Recasting crucial conflicts of cultural adaptation and thereby evoking the birth of her own ethnicity under the impact of administered Americanization, Yezierska’s collection of short stories explores less the contradictory psychological dynamics of social ascent than the cultural markers that work to construct the complex experience and identity of the immigrant. The often-overlooked sophistication of Yezierska’s depiction of immigrant experience, particularly that of the daily ghetto life of women, becomes discernible when we consider Dewey’s pragmatic understanding of “experience” as her context. As our discussion of Yezierska’s literary work will show, Dewey’s pragmatism is critically reimagined into an avant-garde aesthetics of ethnicity, one no longer defined by racial and national lineage but by the experience of social and individual action in a milieu of migratory and transitory identities negotiating the boundaries of old and new worlds. Her stories exemplify the immigrant’s need to recast her genealogy and identity not in order to achieve the status of assimilation, as readers and critics have so often asserted, but to become fully modern and contemporary with the experience of uprootedness typical of the immigrant. Yezierska’s heroines come to the slow realization that their loss of origins and nationhood is final and that its ontology of belonging was a myth all along. The immigrant instead must become selfreliant, resisting in Emersonian fashion the traditional institutional support systems of assimilation and reform that weaken the individual and turn her




Ethnic Modernisms

into a passive citizen. The experience of the immigrant becomes the quintessential American experience of a revolutionary modernity and its purest expression of democracy. Unlike Mary Antin, a fellow immigrant writer who shared a similar experience of Americanization in her definitive autobiographical work The Promised Land (1912), Yezierska maintained that many immigrants did not blindly buy into the American Dream. Instead they consciously selected and discarded elements from both their new and old cultures, practicing a form of cultural interchange. Yezierska’s stories and novels depict this seemingly insignificant form of everyday resistance practiced by the wives, mothers and children of the ghetto, offering a vision of an alternative America beyond the limitations of assimilationist narratives. American democracy is intensified and forced to open its doors to foreign influences and, at the same time, traditional Yiddish culture must realize that Old-World values cannot simply be transplanted in the New. “There’s no going back to the Old World for any one who has breathed the invigorating air of America,” she writes in her essay “Mostly About Myself.”33 Yezierska, then, was not interested in the preservation of traditional Yiddish culture but was concerned with her hybrid cultural identity as an American Jew, one marked by contradictory and ambivalent appropriations and internalizations of America’s cultural norms. With her keen understanding of the role that language plays in expressing cultural experience, Yezierska appropriately articulated this new perspective in Immigrant English, a bastard idiolect that not only resists and critically reflects upon the exclusive claims of both English and Yiddish but also envisions a new, radically democratic America. From the start of her writing career, Yezierska consciously employed the immigrant idiom as seen in “The Free Vacation House” (1915), her first work to be published and which would later appear in Hungry Hearts. Though she struggled to make it appear natural and would afterward even misrepresent herself as an undisciplined writer who had never left the ghetto, Yezierska had great difficulty writing in the idiom that years of schooling and close contact with philanthropic institutions had erased. According to her daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen, “The Free Vacation House” grew out of an actual incident experienced by Yezierska’s older sister, Annie, who later recounted it to Yezierska. Annie “had a vivid way of talking about her life . . . giving details of . . . conversation and gestures that captured the whole experience.”34 Yezierska, claims Henriksen, urged Annie to write about this experience but the latter found writing too difficult. A sweatshop worker since the age of 14, Annie had sacrificed her education for muchneeded family income that enabled Yezierska to continue her schooling—a not uncommon situation in impoverished immigrant families. Yezierska decided to write the story herself, consulting her sister and attempting to



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Hattie [Yezierska] carried her handwritten manuscript back to Annie’s repeatedly. They worked on the phrasing while Annie was ironing, cleaning or cooking. Hattie would coax Annie to remember how her neighbors spoke, the Yiddish expressions they used, and then they would rework it into a strange but picturesque English.35

Yezierska’s difficulty in writing in Immigrant English attests not only to the severe assimilationist practices of the period but to the fact that writing in Immigrant English is itself a complicated literary task. It is not a natural or authentic language that writes itself, as critics seem to imply, but a literary convention. The manuscript was rejected several times and Yezierska reworked it until it was finally accepted by Forum in 1915. Though “The Free Vacation House” is not a mature work, lacking the skill and confidence of Yezierska’s later stories and novels, it nevertheless sets the tone for Hungry Hearts as well as her entire oeuvre, and a close analysis of this story explains Yezierska’s literary agenda and linguistic strategies. In it one finds her already-developed sense of a rhetoric of resistance put forth in Immigrant English. This rhetoric is used in particular to affirm and challenge Dewey’s well-known dialectic of education and democracy, in which the public school system represents the democratic ideals of society. It is interesting to note that at the time Yezierska was working on this story (1914–15), Dewey’s most comprehensive study on this subject, Democracy and Education (1916), was not yet in print. He had early on published several significant works on education (My Pedagogic Creed, 1897; The School and Society, 1900; The Child and the Curriculum, 1902) and, more recently, had written and delivered numerous articles and lectures (which Yezierska may well have attended), but his acclaimed work on the subject was still in the making. In analyzing Yezierska’s work, we can see how she foregrounds the concept of educational reform along with the many overlapping concerns of immigration, assimilation, democracy, and in particular, their challenges to national life and modernity. Written in the idiosyncratic English of its immigrant narrator, “The Free Vacation House” recounts the story of a bedraggled mother of six whose name is submitted to the charities by her children’s teacher so that she can have a much-needed and free vacation in the country. In the process of applying for the vacation and during the vacation itself, the mother is repeatedly subjected to bureaucratic inquiries and administrative regulations that humiliate her as a recipient of charity. In the end, she realizes that the goal of educational and philanthropic institutions is not



depict her colorful idiom. In spite of her being a first-generation immigrant, she had difficulty translating the spoken language into a written text:

Ethnic Modernisms

motivated by an altruistic desire to help immigrants but by the intent to impose upon the immigrant community a specific social order. As I will show in this close analysis, Yezierska’s short story reveals that the relationship between education and philanthropy lies in its attempt to exert social control over inassimilable immigrants. More importantly, it also portrays the significant role that Standard English plays as an ideological tool of cultural assimilation. Through a skillful juxtaposition of the language of the mother and that of educators and reform agents, Yezierska’s story intensifies the linguistic situation that defines the role of the immigrant as a migrant between two languages and cultures. The opening passages of the story, particularly the exchange between the mother and teacher, establish the importance of language as an indicator that marks social position in relation to a cultural standard represented by properly spoken English. Similar linguistic depictions of idiolect can be found in Getrude Stein’s “Melanctha” (1909), which also defines itself against a silent norm of Standard English, or in Sherwood Anderson’s interior monologues in Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which capture the grotesque distortions of the everyday. In keeping with the spirit of modernism, these accounts dwell on the sobriety of the banal, thereby deflating the metaphysical aspects of Romantic and post-Romantic accounts. In a further strategic move, the narratives, while resembling the genre of social realism (Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser), are structured so as to concentrate on a specific set of problems, making them constructed speeches of the everyday rather than realistic ones. Upon closer analysis “The Free Vacation House,” though appearing as a factual account of ghetto melodrama, proves to be an experimental story written in the vein of modernist expansion of the possibilities of prose writing. The story, which opens in a simple and deceptive manner depicting a common welfare problem of parental supervision, is framed boldly as the account of the mother who recalls her confrontation with the welfare apparatus: “How came it that I went to the free vacation house is like this.”36 This clumsy introduction of the story’s speaker establishes at once the subjectivity of the account but also casts an ironic light through a form of verbal and linguistic contamination on the schoolteacher inquiring about the children’s study conditions in their immigrant home. Visiting the mother to find out why her children are always late, the teacher notes her inability to control her household and suggests a vacation: “My dear woman,” the teacher says, “you are about to have a nervous breakdown. You need to get away to the country for a rest and vacation.” “Gott im Himmel!” says I. “Don’t I know I need a rest? But how? On what money can I go to the country?” “I know of a nice country place for mothers and chil-



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The language dynamics that occur here between the teacher and mother shape the one-sided exchange. From the start the teacher sets the tone and direction of the conversation. Her declarative sentences are spoken in a grammatically correct Standard English, establishing her enunciatory power to explain and assert her views as a spokesperson for an elite WASP culture and the Americanization movement. In fact, public school teachers were at the front ranks of the movement and often called “professional Americanizers.”37 In Yezierska’s work, as in that of Dewey, educators and reformers are often interchangeable in their social roles. “Society [exists] in transmission,” writes Dewey, particularly in that between student and pupil.38 Unlike that of the teacher, the mother’s language is grammatically incorrect, employing Yiddish expletives and solecisms. Initially, she speaks neither as an independent agent able to make her own decisions nor as a spokesperson voicing the ideas of a community, but simply responds passively to the teacher’s questions. The string of social humiliations that the mother is eventually forced to undergo in order to receive her free vacation from “kind people [who] have made arrangements” is ironically foreshadowed in this initial linguistic exchange. The subordinate position of the mother is further demonstrated by her emotional and irrational responses, giving her the overall appearance of a demanding and willful child incapable of caring for herself, much less her six unruly children. When an agent from the “Social Betterment Society” pulls the rubber nipple out of the baby’s mouth, claiming it is unsanitary, the mother responds: “Gott im Himmel!” “Please don’t begin with that child, or she’ll holler my head off. She must have that nipple. I’m too nervous to hear her scream like that (FVH 98).” Elizabeth Ewen has pointed out how this patronizing perception of immigrant mothers greatly informed the outlook of reform workers and institutions: [These mothers] were also criticized for being too intensely involved with [their children.] “The fact is,” one social worker complained, “that the Italian mother is as much a child as her children and plays with them, quarrels with them, and loves them as another child would.” Immigrant women were considered incapable of transmitting the social and cultural values of American middle-class family life. Consequently, they were seen as children, “infantilized” in relation to their own kin, incapable of rational judgment and proper adult behavior.39

This infantilizing is implicitly depicted in the mother’s use of language, which appears as crude and inarticulate as that of an untutored child.



dren that will not cost you anything. It is free.” “Free! I never heard from it.” “Some kind people have made arrangements so no one need pay,” she explains. (FVH 97–98)

Ethnic Modernisms

Linguist David Gold has pointed out how Yiddish in the United States, a flourishing culture and language at the height of the new immigration, began to be perceived under the pressure of linguistic assimilation as a ludic language suitable only for the language play of children or low comedy and vulgar humor.40 Yezierska implicitly acknowledges this low linguistic position assigned to Yiddish in the mother’s amusing repetitive rendering of the rules and regulations of the vacation house: Just as I was beginning to like it and let myself feel good, in comes a fat lady all in white, with a teacher’s look on her face. I could tell already, right away by the way she looked on us, that she was the boss from this place. “I want to read you the rules from this house, before you leave this room,” says she to us. Then she began like this: We dassen’t stand on the front grass where the flowers are. We dassen’t stay on the front porch. We dassen’t sit on the chairs under the shady trees. . . . We dassn’t lay down on the beds in the daytime, the beds must always be made up perfect for the show for visitors. “Gott im Himmel!” thinks I to myself; “ain’t there going to be no end to the things we dassen’t do in this place?” But still she went on. The children over two years dassen’t stay around by the mothers. They must stay the nurse in the play-room. . . . The children dassen’t run around the house or tear up flowers or do anything. . . . They must always behave and obey the nurse. We must always listen to the bells. Bell one was for getting up. Bell two, for getting babies’ bottles. Bell three, for coming to breakfast. Bell four, for bathing the babies. (FVH 108–09)

The mocking tone is here deliberately infantile, as the mother mouths back the house rules with exaggerated accent and pronunciation. The unvoiced “s” in “dassen’t” gives the phrase a foreign ring, mocking at once the persistence of foreign accents in English and Germanic rules of discipline. The repeated emphasis on the bell further recalls Pavlov’s behavioral conditioning experiments with dogs. Contemporary Yiddish critics often criticized Yezierska for this type of comical presentation. Alter Brody, for example, accused Yezierska of using Yiddish to add local color and to make Jews looks comical for an American audience. “We do not think it comical that a Frenchman should speak French, but we have yet to learn there is nothing comic in Jews because they happen to be expressing themselves in Yiddish.”41 While Brody correctly points to the inferior linguistic status of Yiddish, he is incorrect in his assessment of Yezierska. It is not the mother’s peculiar use of English at which the reader laughs, but the reform agents and their attempts to regulate and clean up ghetto life. In fact, the mother’s comical rendering of the vacation house rules works to critique the patronizing discourse of philanthropy and expose its claims of altruism. Similarly, the disjunctive clash of languages and



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cultures that occurs between the mother and teacher points to the ghetto as a hybrid and nonsynchronic site in which conflicting values and mores are to be negotiated. Yezierska also reveals the important role of Standard English in the assimilation process as that which legitimates reform imperatives and simultaneously discredits the immigrant’s language. Recollecting his childhood school years, the writer Alfred Kazin describes the importance of correct English and how it influenced the psychology of immigrant families: Our families and teachers seemed tacitly agreed that we were somehow to be a little ashamed of what we were. Yet it was always hard to say why this would be so. It was certainly not—in Brownsville—because we were Jews, or simply because we spoke another language at home, or were absent on holy days. It was rather that a “refined,” “correct,” “nice” English was required of us at school that we did not naturally speak, and that our teachers could never be quite sure we would keep.42

The ability to speak correctly takes precedence over the immigrant’s religious and ethnic background, becoming the prominent mark of an American identity. The immigrant is suspect not simply because she is a Jew or Catholic but because she does not speak English “naturally” in the manner of the native-born. The shame that Kazin describes reveals the extent to which immigrants internalized Americanization norms, leading to the cultural phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred. The allure and power of correct English, with its promises of social mobility and financial success, are seen in Kazin’s description of the language capable of making even communists and socialists compromise their ideals. “This English,” writes Kazin, “was peculiarly the ladder of advancement”: Every future young lawyer was known by it. Even the Communists and Socialists on Pitkin Avenue spoke it. It was bright and clean and polished. We were expected to show it off like a new pair of shoes. When the teacher sharply called a question out, then your name, you were expected to leap up, face the class, and eject those new words fluently off the tongue.43

At the same time, however, the distinction between a “correct” and “natural” English is blurred. The immigrant’s ability to maintain these speaking habits outside of the school and thus outside the gaze of reformers is strongly placed into doubt since she does not speak English “naturally.” This doubt, however, paradoxically reveals the limits of Americanization and reform movements in general. The immigrant home under maternal authority represented a powerful threat to the assimilation process. Unlike immigrant children and fathers, explains Elizabeth Ewen, who “received a daily




Ethnic Modernisms

dose of new American values at school and in the factory,” mothers had little contact with reform agents and institutions, since most worked at home or in illegal sweatshops run by immigrants.44 Realizing that maternal influence had the potential to undo the work of teachers and other reformers, special efforts were made to infiltrate the private space of the home and weaken this influence. Cultural stereotypes, particularly those of the immigrant mother as child and inefficient household keeper, played an essential role in sustaining and perpetuating the ideals of the reformers. Yezierska’s story does not merely depict these cultural stereotypes as part of a protest or local color literature but intensifies them in order to explode their underlying discourse of Anglo-American cultural superiority that produces immigrant inferiority and self-hatred. Her story is told entirely from the mother’s point of view, recollected for the benefit of the reader: “How came it that I went to the free vacation house was like this” (FVH 97). In making the mother the narrator of the story, Yezierska demonstrates her peculiar ability to see through and expose the double agenda of educational and philanthropic institutions. The dismantling of the discourse of philanthropy is performed comically through a discourse of partial illiteracy—one, however, not lacking in clever insight and critical penetration: On the way riding back, I kept thinking to myself: “This is such a beautiful vacation house. For why do they make it so hard for us? When a mother needs a vacation, why must they tear the insides out from her first by making her come down to the charity office? Why drag us from the charity office through the streets? And when we live through the shame of the charities and when we come already to the vacation house, for why do they boss the life out of us with so many rules and bells? For why don’t they let us lay down our heads on the bed when we are tired? For why must we always stick in the back, like dogs what have got to be chained in one spot? . . . If the best part of the house what is comfortable is made up for a show for visitors, why ain’t they keeping the whole business for a show for visitors? For why do they have to fool in worn-out mothers, to make them think they’ll give them a rest? Do they need the worn-out mothers as part of the show? I guess that is it, already.” (FVH 112–13)

In the above passage, Yezierska is careful not simply to replace the teacher’s language and its formal structure with that of the mother and thereby reinstate Immigrant English as “correct” or “natural.” The mother’s awkward, repetitive syntax—depicted here especially in her repeated use of the clumsy phrase “For why?”—works to deplete, not to convey, sense and meaning. The illiterate account of the mother thus performs a comic mirroring or carnivalization. Repetition of the rules and regulations depicts the quantifiable and absurd aspects of philanthropy, which in the end reduce recipients to in-



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human statistics, or as the mother more violently notes, to dogs “chained in one spot.” The mother’s final answer “I guess that is it, already” mimics the teacher’s rationality by means of deflation, indicating a predetermined answer that does not take into consideration the lifeworld of the immigrant. The mother’s deflation ironically underscores her insistent questioning “For Why? . . . For why?,” revealing that the power of the immigrant lies in questioning, the ability to transform language and oneself into an irritating and subversive question mark. The mother doesn’t simply repeat the rules but linguistically converts them into critical questions. The story ends shortly after the mother’s questioning—she leaves the orderly vacation house and happily returns home to her dirty and small ghetto apartment. The unorthodox “happy ending,” in which the protagonist returns to rather than leaves the ghetto, thus subverts the logical narrative of assimilation and reform. Also, the story’s comparison of dogs and welfare recipients foreshadows Yezierska’s later character of the “arrogant beggar” who eventually bites the hand that feeds her. Significantly, the mother’s thought remains at all times on the level of a child and stereotypical of the reform agent’s view of the inarticulate and socially unfit immigrant. Yezierska insists upon using an unsophisticated discourse that is deliberately clumsy, emotive, and non-metaphorical, drawing from the notion of mama-loshen: Yiddish as the mother tongue. In distinction from Hebrew, which is the “holy tongue” spoken traditionally only by the father or sons in their study of the scripture, Yiddish was the mother tongue, or the language of the home.45 It also means to speak plainly, “to cut out the double talk. Lay it on the line.”46 The mother’s literal and plain language stands in stark contrast to the overwrought, overdetermined discourse of the teacher, with its multiple levels and agendas. Her story lays it on the line, telling the reader simply that there is no such thing as a “free” vacation; everything comes at a cost. At the same time, the poverty of Immigrant English is an accurate reflection of Standard English, a language that functions not to encourage communication between people but to uphold a certain belief system. The lack so often attributed to the ghetto and the immigrant is revealed finally as the negative, empty image of WASP culture, one that stands in complete opposition to desire. As the most important emotive characteristic of many of Yezierska’s heroines, desire is not defined by the author as lack or absence but in the active terms of intensity, vitality, and transformation. In “The Fat of the Land,” another short story from Hungry Hearts, Hanneh Breineh greedily but carefully sops up the fish gravy “drop by drop” with a piece of bread and is compared to “a connoisseur sipping wine.”47 Similarly, the desire of another heroine, Shenah Pessah, to marry an American is described as “the hunger to make from myself a person that can’t be crushed by nothing nor nobody—the life higher.”48




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In a unique and fascinating review of Dewey’s Democracy and Education that appeared in The Bookman (1921), Yezierska presents herself as a simple factory worker excited about this “new Bible of America,” with its criticism of Americanization and vision of a new democracy for working-class immigrants. Like the simple, uneducated mother who nevertheless delivers a trenchant critique of the charities, Yezierska’s factory reviewer performs a similar critical act with Dewey’s writing style, exposing its lack of desire and hunger: It [Dewey’s style] lacks that warm personal touch that would enable his readers to get close to him. He thinks so high up in the head that only the intellectual few can follow the spiraling point of his vision. . . . One wonders why a man so imbued with the spirit of democracy must use such undemocratic language, and wonders if the reason lies in the man himself. For style is the unconscious breadth of personality. Can it be that this giant of the intellect— this pioneer in the realms of philosophy—has so suppressed the personal life in himself that his book is devoid of the intimate, self-revealing touches that make writing human?49

Yezierska’s criticism of Dewey’s abstract style not only points to her own linguistic agenda, her aesthetic vision of a new democratic language that articulates human desire, but to Dewey’s shortcomings as a pragmatic philosopher and his inability to “experience” actively his own visions or desire. Here Yezierska foregrounds the objective distance of the science of sociology with which the scientist investigates the immigrant and turns her into an object of study and pity, or an “arrogant beggar.” The cultural integration of the immigrant thus merely poses a question of management and social design. This methodical and theoretical attitude conflicts with Yezierska’s modernism, which locates experience at the center of art and cultural expression. To this extent, the immigrant poses not simply a numerical or logistical problem but the challenge of yet-unacknowledged forms or ways of life. Late in her life, Yezierska would remember Dewey as “[having made her] realize that art is the climax of human experience.”50 Her review of Democracy and Education thus takes Dewey to task on his own pragmatic precepts, pointing out that his scientific method of inquiry and investigation in actuality prohibits the experience his work claims to promote. The concept of experience lies at the center of Dewey’s thought. He spent his entire life revising the traditional philosophic idea of experience and developing a new understanding that would transform it from the passive acquisition of objective knowledge into a critical intellectual activity marked by the passionate pursuit of learning. Dewey’s redefinition of experience into a vital



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affective force would form the foundation of his pragmatic thinking, with philosophy and experience becoming virtually indistinguishable. In a 1918 address to the Philosophical Union of the University of California, he claimed that “Philosophy is a form of desire of effort at action—a love, namely of wisdom; but . . . wisdom, whatever it is, is not a mode of science or knowledge”: Experience is primarily a process of undergoing; a process of standing something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense of these words. The organism has to endure, to undergo, the consequence of its own actions. Experience, in other words, is a matter of simultaneous doings and sufferings.51

Like Yezierska, Dewey equates desire and philosophy, firmly situating both in the existential lifeworld of human experience. However, Yezierska’s criticism of Dewey’s inability to practice or actually experience this vital principle in Democracy and Education points to a contradiction in pragmatism, with its strong emphasis on purpose-oriented action. This sort of predetermined action runs counter to experience, with its non-purposive aesthetic component of autonomous and spontaneous action. Instrumental and goal-oriented actions constitute modes of control and domination and have little to do with the realm of affection characterized by vulnerability, suffering, and submission to experience. In Yezierska’s view, the “undemocratic language” of Democracy and Education reflects regulation and social design and does not facilitate a democratic empathy and identification with the immigrant experience. As a writer who wanted to create open lines of communication between her immigrant culture and mainstream America, Yezierska understood that Standard English (as well as Dewey’s hermetic sociological/philosophical rhetoric), with its rigid rules and task of maintaining an elite culture, was incapable of allowing for any expression other than its own. The hybrid culture of the Lower East Side, she realized, had to be articulated in a language that reflected the immigrant experience: “I knew now the American language,” she writes in “America and I.” “And I knew now, if I talked to Americans from morning till night, they could not understand what the Russian soul of me wanted. They could not understand me any more than if I talked to them in Chinese.”52 Likewise, Yiddish, with its established Old-World conventions, was also an unacceptable medium. Immigrant English, Yezierska realized, was also a deassimilative force that revealed its speaker’s difference in relation to English and Yiddish. Language thereby figures in Yezierska’s work as the boundary of the immigrant’s self-understanding. Cut off from both a new and former culture, the immigrant represents a radical form of dislocation. This deracination is




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similarly reflected in the transitional and nonsynchronic space of the ghetto. Immigrant English inserts the disjunctive time of the ghetto into Standard English, creating, as Homi Bhabha would say, the double-writing or counter-narrative of the nation with its “metonymic, iterative temporality.”53 “My hands rush out to seize a word from the end, a phrase from the middle, or a sentence from the beginning,” says Yezierska, describing her activity of writing: “I jot down any fragment of a thought that I can get hold of. And then I gather these fragments, words, phrases sentences, and I paste them together with my own blood. . . . Sometimes, the vivisection I must commit on myself to create one little living sentence leaves me spent for days.”54 Language thus performs for Yezierska what Bhabha, reformulating Benjamin’s notion of translation, calls an “act of cultural translation,” in which language articulates “the heterogeneity of [a nation’s] population.” A prime example of cultural translation, claims Bhabha, occurs in the “relatively unspoken tradition of . . . wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse.” Instead, such peoples are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation. . . . They articulate the death-in-life of the idea of the “imagined community” of the nation; the worn-out metaphors of the resplendent national life now circulate in another narrative of entry-permits and passports and work-permits that at once preserve and proliferate, bind and breach the human rights of the nation.55

To this administrative world demarcating the immigrant, one includes the reform and philanthropic organizations responsible for her correct acculturation and education. Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts in this sense articulates the worn-out or dead metaphors of a standard linguistic and cultural norm that restricts the immigrant’s probing into new experiences.

The Conscious Pariah: Toward a Transnational Aesthetics In her work, Yezierska would return again and again to this inherent contradiction of experience in Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy, while exploring viable alternatives. Her second book and first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923), addresses this contradiction in the theme of an interethnic and interclass marriage, using as models the much-talked-about, real-life marriage of social-activist immigrant Rose Pastor and millionaire-WASP philanthropist Graham Stokes, as well as her own brief romance with Dewey. The young heroine, a resourceful but poor Jewish journalist from



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the Lower East Side, becomes enraptured with the Dewey-like character when she interviews the great philanthropist. Like Salome, who deceitfully manages to get her wish (the head of John the Baptist) through feminine wiles, Sonya Vrunsky sets out to marry her millionaire, John Manning, and leave behind her impoverished ghetto life. In both theme and form, Yezierska’s novel radically challenges traditional social institutions and the ideas that inform them. Sonya lures Manning by appealing to his naïve and unfounded ideas of poverty, democracy, and marriage. Foolishly equating poverty with simplicity and beauty, Manning cannot distinguish between a Fifth Avenue designer dress and hand-made immigrant fashion. Thus Sonya is able to pass off a “simple” dress costing thousands of dollars and made exclusively for her by the celebrated designer Jacque Hollins as the everyday dress of the Lower East Side immigrant. As she confides to the designer Hollins: “Talk about democracy. All I want is to be able to wear silk stockings and Paris hats the same as Mrs. Astorbilt, and then it wouldn’t bother me if we have Bolshevism or Capitalism, or if the democrats or republicans win. Give me only the democracy of beauty and I’ll leave the fight for government democracy to politicians and educated old maids.”56 However, Sonya’s preposterous ideas about the democracy of beauty find their equivalent in those of John Manning, who not only views the artfully constructed Sonya as a natural ghetto beauty but also designs settlement houses based on such ideas. “Why, it’s the glory of poverty that it enforces simplicity. . . . The service I feel myself called upon to render the East Side is to teach the gospel of the Simple Life,” remarks Manning to Sonya (S 73–74). In the end, their marriage, intended “to show the world that all social chasms can be bridged with human love and democratic understanding,” is exposed as a travesty, as is Manning’s philanthropy (S 119–20). Like Bernhard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Major Barbara, Yezierska’s Salome exposes the maintenance of the status quo that underlies philanthropy and selfless efforts of the education of the nation’s so-called poor. Unequal partners, Salome suggests, cannot forge a democracy. Yezierska’s novel, far from creating a politically correct and appreciative immigrant, portrays her heroine in realistic fashion, possessing the “street smarts” to survive in a hostile economic environment. What is at stake in Yezierska’s irreverent depiction of philanthropy and immigrant life is the proper recognition of citizenship, one not yet attained from within the asymmetrical power relations of welfare money and welfare dependents. Sonya curiously disrupts this relationship by resorting to blackmail and deception, refusing to become a gracious welfare recipient. Ironically, by artificially transforming herself into a natural ghetto beauty and embracing the philanthropic ideology of the rich as caretakers of the poor, Sonya becomes the wife of a WASP millionaire. This




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demystified depiction of interethnic love foregrounds factual economic and social forces at work, calling into question sentimental clichés surrounding immigrant life, especially that of sudden riches by way of fairy tale marriages. In her aggressive attitude, Sonya anticipates Yezierska’s later persona of the arrogant beggar, who consciously defies the patronizing system that keeps her in a position of dependence. At the level of form, the novel further questions the social function of language and art. Like Sonya’s designer dress with its calculated and minimal use of color, texture, and lines, so as to create the illusion of spontaneous and simple beauty, Yezierska’s rhetoric renders the vitality and raw emotion of the ghetto in the manner of local color or protest fiction. However, to view Yezierska’s work as ghetto reportage ignores her imaginative use of ethnic melodrama, with its expressive and farce-like narratives as well as her unorthodox depictions of the ghetto. Yezierska’s settings do not depict the ghetto realistically, giving descriptive images of its impoverished living conditions, its daily hustle and bustle, and its Babylonian foreignness. Instead, Yezierska sketches the ghetto rather abstractly with a few fragments of idiomatic language and stereotypical characters that remind the reader of its constructive nature. Much of the quality of the ghetto is derived from a disjunctive temporality that articulates its modern spirit of dislocation. Characters find themselves simultaneously in premodern and modern temporalities. This nonsynchronic perspective in which the Old and New Worlds coexist in uneasy proximity points to an overall fragmentary sense of identity that is expressed through the setting. This setting frequently takes on the qualities of personification, thus evoking expressionist paintings, with their living metropolitan cityscapes: she went to the window, looking out on a fire-escape where she kept her can of milk and groceries for her breakfast. The roaring tumult of the noises from the street below woke her from her dreams. Wedged in, jumbled shops and dwellings, pawnshops and herring stalls, strained together begging for elbow room. Across the alley a second-hand store protruded its rubbish. Broken stoves, beds, three-legged chairs sprawled upon the sidewalk. The unspeakable cheapness of a dry goods shop flared in her face—limp calico dresses of scarlet and purple, gaudy blankets of pink and green checks. From the crowded windows hung dirty mattresses and bedding—flaunting banners of poverty. (S 5)

What may at first sight appear to be a fairly realistic depiction of poverty, turns upon closer analysis into an intensified setting with houses and buildings muscling for space, extending their protruding body parts, sprawling



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along streets and flaunting their colors along with their poverty. Taking on human characteristics, the setting attests to a vitality that must be acknowledged. As Louis Wirth points out in his study of the ghetto: “It has taken the artists and poets to rediscover this life of the ghetto. The life in the ghetto was probably always more active and teeming than life outside. The ghetto made the Jews self-conscious. They lived on the fringe of two worlds: the ghetto world and the strange world beyond the ghetto gates.”57 Yezierska’s rediscovery of the ghetto as a vital agonistic space stresses not only the disjunctive aspects of these two worlds but also the irresolvable friction between her characters and the space in which they live. Yezierska’s heroines initially refuse to accept the disrupted dynamics of the ghetto and attempt to escape through assimilation. In fact, her heroines must first leave the ghetto in order to recognize their complete dislocation and thereby attain the expressive quality and intensity that derive from the unsettled space of the ghetto. In her novels and short stories, Yezierska’s heroines consistently return to the ghetto, in actuality or metaphorically, once they have achieved the unsettling intensity it prefigures, one that is, significantly, at first only remembered and then gradually rediscovered in the lifeless spaces of AngloSaxon America. The temporal trajectory of the characters is thus marked by an ironic reversal. As they achieve economic and cultural assimilation, they become oddly dissatisfied with this achievement and deliberately reverse themselves to take the defiant path of deassimilation. Alongside her expressive settings, Yezierska also injects black humor and irony into her rhetoric, which ultimately calls any character’s point of view into question. In Salome, this biting wit manifests itself not only in the mocking treatment of the Dewey character but also in that of her heroine as she attempts to escape the ghetto. Note, for example, Sonya’s many irrational outbursts about her need for beauty, put forth in the high-flown pathos of Immigrant English: “Poets when they’re in love they can write poems to win their beloved. But a dumb thing like me—I got no language—only the aching desire to make myself beautiful” (S 30) or her pathetic cries to Hollins, the designer, “You doctor of beauty! Why shouldn’t you save a poor girl’s life? . . . I too am sick—dying from the blood poison of ugliness!” (S 23). Sonya’s melodramatic pronouncements about her need for beauty contrast starkly with Manning’s self-important philanthropic declarations that are repeated ad nauseam throughout the novel: “I came to teach and I am learning. I came to give and find myself receiving from those who I thought had nothing. Right here in these crowded tenements is the spirit that is beauty and power!” (S 9). In juxtaposing the two languages of Sonya and John, the novel captures the inability of the couple to find a common democratic language and shows instead how each character is consumed by respective desires and




Ethnic Modernisms

narcissisms. Whereas Immigrant English as the articulation of the immigrant’s desire had been used in Hungry Hearts to project a sense of difference and displacement onto Standard English, in Salome, both Sonya’s language and voracious desire are harshly condemned and she is revealed to be as self-serving as Manning. Unlike “The Free Vacation House,” in which the reader identifies with the mother completely, Salome is narrated in the third person; the reader therefore critically observes its heroine at a distance. This device elicits an approach less prone to sentimentality and asks the reader to scrutinize not only Manning’s philanthropy but also the heroine’s own dubious morality. Whereas the insistent clumsiness of the mother’s language in the short story exposes the teacher and reformers’ ethical motives, Sonya’s clumsy language reveals her equally clumsy grasp for power and social mobility. Here Yezierska explicitly acknowledges that Immigrant English is not immune from positions of power and domination that transform a language of resistance into a standardized norm. In its depiction of ruthless social mobility, Salome accurately represents and critically reflects upon the acculturation status of American Jews in the 1920s, namely their rapid social ascent into the middle classes. In Shaw’s Pygmalion, language is shown to be the most significant social marker— Eliza Doolittle is able to move into the middle classes only after she has mastered Standard English and the manners to match. Conversely, Salome uses language to expose Sonya’s social mobility as a sham. She marries her millionaire and immediately moves into his Madison Avenue townhouse, but her Lower East Side language reveals her now repressed immigrant self whenever she speaks. In the wedding reception scene, Yezierska comically presents the Lower East Side mingling with the wealthy Uptown society. Mrs. Peltz, Sonya’s former landlady, arrives “decked in the gaudiest finery of Essex Street” and proceeds to “paw” the heavy draperies and drink her tea from “a saucer in the regular East Side fashion.” Meanwhile, she loudly exclaims in front of the guests “God from the world! The price of this one carpet would be enough to feed the whole block for a year. Only a little from that silver on her side-board would free me from the worries for rent for the rest of my days. If she’d have a heart, she’d divide with us a little of her good luck” (S 123–24). Reminiscent of Pygmalion when Eliza meets Higgins’ mother and is introduced to society, this scene parodies immigrant Jews as clumsy social parvenus unable to hide their humble origins. Accordingly, the plot reverses Sonya’s quick climb to wealth, breaking with the linear flow of assimilation and establishing a disruptive temporality of success that is repeatedly followed by failure. Like Yezierska’s later heroines who return to the ghetto to work their way up yet again, Sonya leaves Manning and takes a job first as a waitress, then as a machine hand in a dress shop, and works her way up to the position of clothes designer.



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Yezierska’s subsequent novels Bread Givers (1925), Arrogant Beggar (1927), and All I Could Never Be (1932), also reflect the status of secondgeneration immigrants by stressing less an idiolect of difference, which she had so ingeniously exploited in Hungry Hearts. Her later use of English thus contains fewer Yiddishisms and her heroines speak a fluent, if colloquial, English. Language no longer serves as the external mark of difference but instead has become internalized as a “maladjusted acculturation,” revealing itself in her heroines’ provocative behavior and defiant positions. Consequently, her work begins to shift its attention from the linguistic to that of persona, namely the ungrateful, belligerent immigrant. Yezierska’s arrogant beggar or “conscious pariah,” as it is better known, has long been a part of the European migrant Jewish tradition, along with its foil, the “social parvenu,” or upstart. This new perspective, which Hannah Arendt associates with the rebel and independent thinker, complicates Yezierska’s fiction and stance, illustrating clearly that more than economic questions are at stake in her treatment of immigrant experience. In fact, the denial of bi-cultural and hybrid roots of cultural origins appear to carry the crux of her newly invigorated argument for the democratic acceptance and inclusion of cultural difference. America’s myth of economic success, a disguised nationalism bought at the cost of homogeneity, represents for Yezierska a contradiction of its fundamental democratic principles. Yezierska herself increasingly came to represent the persona of the pariah. Misunderstood by fellow Jews as well as mainstream Americans, her work would have to await rediscovery until the present day, when much greater emphasis is placed on cultural recognition of difference. According to Hannah Arendt, who extensively used the two opposing roles of pariah and parvenu in her work, the pariah knowingly challenges not only the host community whose assimilative pressures she rejects but also her own community of social parvenus or opportunists ready to assimilate for economic gain. The pariah fights on two fronts and is a vulnerable and isolated figure of difference, making a last stand against the ever-leveling forces of sameness that spell out successful acculturation. To make matters even more difficult, the individual Jew is often ambivalent, moving herself between the conflicting roles of the pariah and parvenu. For Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, an important figure in the nineteenth century German literary salon, embodied this persona. Varnhagen defiantly and successfully embraced the role of intellectual outsider while being paradoxically ashamed of her Jewish status.58 In Yezierska’s Salome, we see the same ambivalence at work in the figure of Sonya Vrunsky, a stereotypical Jewess of the ghetto who desires to become a WASP. Yezierska’s later works refine this stance, transforming the self-destructive qualities of Sonya into those of a hardened and independent thinker who consciously defies social norms that threaten her




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freedom and status as an active citizen. Thus while awkward linguistic inflections and “ethnic” behavior emphasize Sonya’s difference and separateness from Americans, Yezierska’s later heroines, as second-generation immigrants, operate from within American culture and interpose themselves with a greater sense of self-awareness and irony into the American Dream. Having in some sense already acculturated, they consciously reverse and subvert their narratives of assimilation so as to reclaim the difference essential to their identity. For Yezierska it is this recognition of difference that grounds the experience of immigration and not the difference-effacing melting-pot humanism of liberal progressives like Dewey. In Yezierska’s novels Bread Givers (1925) and Arrogant Beggar (1927), her heroines confront not only the values of the host country but also old orthodoxies that have been successfully transplanted into the New World, namely the Jewish patriarchal tradition and the readily assumed superiority of German Jewish culture over that of Eastern European Jews. Sara Smolinksy’s up-from-the-ghetto struggle in Bread Givers, for example, involves overcoming not only economic and social obstacles but also the domestic tyranny of her father, a Talmudic scholar, who uses his orthodox religious beliefs to assert paternal authority and justify his ruthless exploitation of his wife and daughters.59 Similarly, Adele Lindner in Arrogant Beggar challenges the authority of the Hellman Home for Working Girls, a German Jewish reform institution that turns Eastern European immigrant girls into domestic servants. The novel is a stinging critique of the Jewish charity tradition, demonstrating how it maintains the social status of its wealthier classes. The necessary deassimilation, so frequently depicted in Yezierska’s early novel as a critique of Americanization, is now more strongly directed towards her own community. This double-cutting critique of her traditional and her destined identity, what Werner Sollors has termed “descent and consent,” gives Yezierska’s work a sharper sense of irony, regarding the way in which her immigrant heroines stand as isolated figures in a quasi-Emersonian self-reliance against any form of standardization, old or new. Her later heroines are now conscious pariahs in the complete and constructive sense of Arendt, representing idiosyncratic question marks within too-readily assumed views on tradition and acculturation. Such radical questioning of the false binaries of descent and consent places these heroines altogether outside the institutional grammar of narratives of Americanization and traditional notions of identity. Denationalization and deracination situate Yezierska’s work in an emerging transnational literature, one that denies allegiance to established myths of peoples and nations and instead puts forth the unstable experience of migration. In her final novel, All I Could Never Be (1932), Yezierska returns once again to the figure of Dewey, recasting not only their real-life affair—



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complete with actual poems and love letters he had written to her—but more importantly examines his well known, if controversial study, done in 1918, of Polish immigrants living in Philadelphia. Conducted at the height of their romantic affair, the study was carried out by Dewey and student members of his graduate seminar from Columbia University, including Yezierska, who was brought in as a translator of Polish and, as Dewey himself notes, to report on “conditions affecting family life and women.”60 However, unlike her earlier book review on Dewey’s Democracy and Education and its accusations of social engineering, the novel does not so much critically reflect upon reform and Dewey’s methods of study as on the inability of its heroine, Fanya Ivanowa, and the Dewey character, Henry Scott, to understand and communicate with one another as individuals. As in Salome, these characters are types, with Fanya representing the overly emotional and headstrong immigrant who continually protests the injustices she has suffered. “I can’t laugh. I won’t laugh,” she tells the Dewey character, “I’m the product of abused generations that had laughter squeezed out of them.”61 Similarly, Henry Scott spouts predictable statements about America’s melting-pot tradition. “Our history,” he explains to Fanya, “is one of assimilation. We began as Anglo-Saxons. And look at our country now! Jews, Italians, Poles—all of the nations of the world are weaving themselves into this interracial symphony” (AICNB 37–38). Unlike Salome, however, All I Could Never Be exposes the profound displacement of its heroine. Whereas Sonya learns her lesson and returns to the ghetto and successfully works her way out again, Fanya realizes that she will never really leave the ghetto. Even in the simple, quintessential New England town to which she flees at the novel’s end, Fanya is thoroughly dispossessed and unable to find a home. While Sonya is rewarded for the atonement of her greed and eventually marries the celebrated designer Hollins—a happy ending!—Fanya takes a homeless foreign itinerant who is shunned by the community into her bed. Curiously, this severe dislocation is now held up as a form of resistance, more literary than real, striking a grotesque symbolic stance toward an overwhelming reality. The pathological symptom of dislocation is incorporated into literary expression rather than overcome through happy endings and other idealistic conventions. Yezierska’s mature work extends her notion of resistance not only to external and internal pressures upon the immigrant community but also to the liberal and idealistic view of cultural integration. It is here where the true difference resides between her own and Dewey’s understandings of immigrant experience. Yezierska no longer adheres to a model of peaceful cultural coexistence based upon education and emancipation. Instead, cultural encounter is now more skeptically viewed in terms of contestation and struggle. As such it also points to a different modernist perspective, with




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Yezierska questioning Dewey’s underlying Anglo-American ethnic and cultural bias that influences all aspects of his thinking but that have not until recently been questioned. The novel’s love story, in which Henry Scott is overwhelmed by the irrational emotions of his lover/protégée, mirrors, in many ways the social perspective of Dewey and his attempt to sanitize socalled threatening and physically invasive forms of culture so as to make them fit into the Puritan-Protestant mainstream of America. Dewey’s pragmatic pluralism grants immigrants a space in American society to the extent that they accept the seemingly neutral, though strongly biased body of social and cultural rules that define democracy and education. The ideal democratic community, writes Dewey, solves its conflicts in “cooperative undertakings in which both parties learn.”62 Dewey certainly calls for democratic inclusion and allows for social conflict, but the rules and institutions that preside over national life are already in place, having established a social hierarchy that posits latecomers and outsiders as second-class citizens. Social change is often painstakingly slow—the abolition of slavery and Civil Rights are two examples—and does not come about easily, requiring revolt and even bloodshed. Yezierska’s modernism, indebted to a model of action that brackets tradition and descent, conversely makes room for different expressions of ethnic and immigrant life, reaching beyond a homogeneously defined consent that underlies modern American identity. Her skepticism about the institutional management of acculturation brings her work into the proximity of the avant-garde, which questions the practices of these institutions as inimical to art and life. In similar fashion, Yezierska’s art ceases to represent immigrant life but instead performs its vital narratives and cultural practices in a mode of writing that does away with the writer’s privileged or objective perspective. Perhaps this stance, in which the writer implicates herself and her own community, helps to explain the common mistake of viewing Yezierska’s fiction solely as autobiographical stories that document her struggles as an immigrant, rather than as literary works of art. As this discussion of her fiction has tried to show, however, Yezierska’s ethnic positioning is intimately linked to a complex aesthetics of displacement, a form of literary and symbolic discovery expressing the new condition of migration and transnational patterns of culture as well as their impact on modern collective and individual identities. In her novels and stories, the heroines eventually abandon the path of assimilation represented by a WASP philanthropist/educator and instead form intimate relationships with displaced and transnational individuals who more properly mirror their own dislocation. This closing device, with its privileging of the transnational over the national, opens up a utopian horizon in which the foreigner and the native are no longer pitted against one another—the nation itself is reimagined as migratory and transnational.



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Once marked by confinement, the space of the ghetto stands reconfigured in its ethnic and cultural diversity, linking people of different national origins into the shared imaginative territory of the transnational. Late in his life, Dewey wrote Art as Experience (1934), a sustained work on aesthetics that puzzled most of his readers, as he was mainly known as a pragmatic thinker and educator. One critic noted: “I regard it as one of the curiosities of philosophy that when John Dewey, late in life, came to the subject of aesthetics, he nowhere, in the course of [his] imposing treatise, established a connection between aesthetics and education.”63 In Art as Experience, Dewey attacks abstract theories and categories that wrongly place art outside the realm of human experience. According to Dewey, aesthetic theory isolates fine art from the everyday world that produces it, placing itself like an obstacle before the artwork that now calls for admiration but prevents insight.64 This isolation from the real world happens to a classic work of art, says Dewey, which is removed to a place outside history where it becomes an ideal and sets its own conventions in the form of theory. Dewey’s attempt to bring art and the aesthetic back to its origins in the everyday world of experience and thereby do away with standardized conventions, is akin to Yezierska’s appeal to art’s vitality as derived from human experience and practice. Not only does Dewey posit art as the most “refined and intensified” form of experience but he now claims it to be the most consummate expression of human achievement: “Esthetic experience is a manifestation, a record and celebration of the life of a civilization, a means of promoting its development, and is also the judgment upon the quality of a civilization.”65 It is interesting to speculate why Dewey, at this late age, would write a sustained treatise on art as the foundation of experience without discussing its relation to education, social reform, and democracy. Philip Jackson argues that this omission is perhaps due to the size of such a work, with Dewey intending to write another work on art, showing its specific application in education.66 However, in discussing the experience of art apart from his usual topics of social science and philosophy, Dewey indirectly questions his own principles of scientific inquiry and pragmatism, giving the aesthetic experience predominance over all other forms. Objective theories, he now claims, hinder spontaneous and vital interaction. Could the absence of application and his complete immersion into the aesthetic as the decisive experience have been a belated understanding of his incomplete dialogue with Yezierska? It was, after all, Dewey who made her “realize that art is the climax of human experience” even if, as she believed, he also objectified this experience in his work and approach.67 We can only speculate about Dewey’s intentions; however, it cannot be denied that in Art as Experience Dewey shares Yezierska’s view that cultural encounter cannot ultimately be regulated in normative terms but requires symbolic mediation.




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This need for a symbolic clarification of what it means to be and to become American also surfaces in the symbolic medium of mass culture. In going to Hollywood, Yezierska hoped to insert herself into its apparatus of mass dissemination and thereby gain access to mainstream America. Whereas Dewey’s debates remained largely institutional, film, with its direct contact to a mass audience not only in the United States, but also globally, had great potential in spreading Yezierska’s view of dislocation and transnationalism, not least since Jewish talent was largely responsible for establishing Hollywood. By considering Yezierska’s encounter with Hollywood, we can see how institutional and cultural forces intersect and conflict in the struggle for shaping American understanding and identity. From Hollywood to Hester Street: The Image of the Assimilated Jew in Hungry Hearts, the Film In her autobiography Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), Yezierska recounts the momentous event that led to her becoming a national Hollywood celebrity in the 1920s. According to Yezierska, she was renting a room in the Lower East Side ghetto (one she was shortly to be evicted from) when a telegram arrived informing her that Hollywood was interested in purchasing the film rights to her collection of short stories, Hungry Hearts (1920). Unable to afford the nickel required to telephone her agent and the 15 cents for carfare, she was forced to sell her dead mother’s antique shawl from Poland to a miserly pawnbroker for a quarter. Zaretzky, the Jewish pawnbroker, is depicted in stereotypical terms, “a bald-headed dwarf, grown gray with the years in the dark basement—tightskinned and crooked from squeezing pennies out of despairing people.”68 In similar hackneyed terms, the ghetto is described by Yezierska as cramped and dirty, reeking with “the smell of fish and overripe fruit”; her landlady as the “angel of death,” waiting for the moment to evict her; and she, herself, as an overworked, underfed writer, living in dire circumstances.69 The generous contract that she signs with Goldwyn also made her a Hollywood scriptwriter, lifting her out of this miserable, if conventional, ghetto existence. With the aid of the studio’s slick publicity campaign, Yezierska became an overnight star. Newspapers around the country happily recounted the fabulous rags-to-riches rise of the “Sweatshop Cinderella” who made it “From Hester Street to Hollywood,” describing how a poor immigrant, who had once been a cleaning lady and sweatshop worker, was magically transformed into a successful writer.70 Yezierska’s sentimental and cliché-ridden account of this event deliberately exploits the rags-to-riches narrative, with its requisite happy ending, only to dismantle it.71 Recast in the melodramatic mode of ethnic kitsch, the myth of assimilation is questioned from within its own context, revealing



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the persistence and pervasiveness of mass-produced cultural stereotypes. Like her fiction, Yezierska’s autobiography uses the myths and icons of assimilation to explore beneath the surface of national homogeneity that which is being suppressed, namely the inassimilable and foreign elements that constitute the making of Americans. Red Ribbon on a White Horse begins as an all-American fairy tale but then goes on to say that she did not live happily ever after, describing her inability to live and work in Hollywood and adjust to its ideology of the “cash register.” She discusses her attempt to recapture her immigrant lifestyle through writing and leaving Hollywood for New York, eventually finding herself during the Depression without money, a livelihood, or a reading audience. In the end, she exposes the fairy tale of the assimilated Jew as an illusion manufactured by Hollywood for profit, revealing the centrality of the immigrant experience as a national narrative that reproduces and in turn is reproduced by the American Dream. Yezierska, it can be said, does not so much avoid a mass-fabricated and overdetermined construction of her immigrant identity as subject herself to it so as to unravel it and reveal its liberating aspects. In the wake of America’s thorough linguistic standardization, its emerging film industry provided still more avenues of directing and shaping the iconic and visual markers of American culture and national life. Representing America’s popular language of the masses, Hollywood films, not unlike Standard English, allowed for the projection of uniform cultural patterns and universal standards. At once reflecting and resisting this tendency of standardization, the film Hungry Hearts (Goldwyn, 1922) draws our attention to Hollywood’s use of ethnic stereotypes, particularly the image of the assimilated Jew. Like Yezierska’s work, the film exploits popular conceptions surrounding immigrant culture, using critical melodrama to call attention to Hollywood’s use of these stereotypes and visual symbols. The film also shares a similar reception history. Its deassimilationist aspects have been contrarily received as traditionally following in the Ghetto film genre, with its requisite assimilationist ideology.72 In fact, Yezierska herself denounced the film, calling its Americanized happy ending “slapstick” and claiming that the studio’s greed had ruined the intent of her work.73 While the film did not fulfill Yezierska’s critical expectations—she objected to the reduction of her political concerns to crass commercialism and parody—it nevertheless offers a unique example among the various products of its genre. Patterned to share in the enormous financial success of the Ghetto film Humoresque (Cosmopolitan, 1920), Hungry Hearts curiously endorses and undercuts its own logic as a Ghetto film. Produced in the context of the popular and revitalized Ghetto genre of the 1920s, mainly for box-office profit, it nevertheless challenges the pretensions and illusions of Americanization that form the foundation of its genre. The film offers a special example of a Hollywood




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product whereby its entrenched mythmaking is momentarily suspended in its depiction of the untranslatability of immigrant experience. Ultimately, the film foregrounds and heightens the contradictions of assimilation and the immigrant experience, exposing along the way the function of filmic conventions that work to fulfill audience fantasies of a classless, unified, and democratic America. In doing so, Hungry Hearts provides a unique model for the problematic visual representation of ethnic and collective identities, pointing to the inherent contradictions and ambivalence in the genre of Ghetto film predicated upon an “authentic” or “realistic” representation of ethnic culture. As discussed by Miriam Hansen in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, the Ghetto genre, like the Jewish immigrant experience, offers a significant instance of “the dialectic of ethnic image-making and image-consumption.”74 According to Patricia Erens, Ghetto films developed as a popular subgenre of melodrama around 1910 and reached maturity in the 1920s, with films such as Humoresque and The Jazz Singer (Warner Brothers, 1927).75 Concerned mainly with depicting the urban immigrant experience in the New World, early Ghetto films focused on the realistic representation of the unhealthy and severe living conditions of the ghetto as well as cultural and generational conflicts. D. W. Griffith’s A Child of the Ghetto (Biograph, 1910) features realistic shots of sweatshops and the ghetto, as its poor orphaned heroine wanders the streets looking for work. The Jew’s Christmas (Rex, 1913) depicts the conflict between tradition and the new, between the older and younger generation, wherein a Rabbi, after disowning his daughter for marrying a Gentile, sells his Bible to purchase his granddaughter a Christmas tree. As part of melodrama, Ghetto films did not rely on the blatant anti-Semitism often found in comedy, which exploited Jewish stereotypes with its caricature and exaggeration.76 Melodrama, Hansen explains, “tended to dissolve anti-Semitic clichés more didactically (the pawnbroker with a family sense, money as an object of need rather than greed) or through plot strategies that rewarded the characters’ striving for assimilation.”77 This pattern of assimilation and reward was to become the hallmark of Ghetto films. With their initial emphasis on documenting the specific sociocultural plight of immigrants and their adjustment from Old World to New World values, Ghetto films evolved over the years into a more formulaic genre, reproducing the immigrant’s assimilation into mainstream American society. Around 1913, intermarriage surfaced as a popular topic and in postwar films, it “virtually [became],” notes Hansen, “an Oedipal trope for the difficulties of assimilation, conflating romance with melting-pot ideology.”78 Films of the 1920s continued in this vein, focusing sharply on the concerns of the younger generation, particularly social mobility and the flight from ghetto culture. Many of the films from this later period began to



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take on characteristics of the fairy tale, in which conflicts are suddenly resolved and obstacles overcome through the magic of assimilation. In the context of the Ghetto genre, assimilation becomes a process of conversion in which immigrants move smoothly from the status of nonAmerican or illegitimate residents—“greenhorns”—into that of productive American citizens molded on established Anglo-American values. In his study Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Michael Rogin discusses how Hollywood films “by joining structural domination to cultural desire, turned Europeans into Americans.”79 As Rogin notes, at the turn of the century Anglo-Americans considered new immigration ethnics such as Jews, Irish, Italians, and Slavs to be racially suspect. As one of the most significant vehicles for the Hollywood melting pot, Ghetto films functioned to visually transform white ethnics into Americans.80 Similarly, the space of the ghetto likewise became an illegitimate, or at best, transitional space that allowed immigrants to acculturate, preparing them for their final destination of middle-class America. Upward mobility and its accompanying privileges were viewed as rewards for successful assimilation. In his classic in-depth study on assimilation in American life, Milton Gordon analyzes the vague and rhetorically charged term of assimilation and notes three distinct types of American assimilationist ideology: Anglo-conformity, melting pot, and cultural pluralism.81 Ghetto films make use of all three, particularly melting-pot ideology, but typically conflate it and cultural pluralism under the category of Anglo-conformity. In the Americanization crusade of World War I, notes Gordon, Anglo-conformity reached heights of “semi-hysteria” with “pressure-cooking” assimilation and “its demand for a rapid personal transformation.”82 In the end, assimilation in Ghetto films is most often equated with Anglo-conformity, the acculturation and absorption of immigrant culture into traditional American culture (often through intermarriage or interethnic adoption), and not with the forging of a new type of American as in melting-pot ideology proper or with the establishment of separate but equal ethnic enclaves, as in cultural pluralism. We can then speak of Ghetto films’ visual assimilation, in which Jewish representation occurs mainly in the context of public conformity to a specific pre-established Anglo-American tradition. The visual assimilation projected by Ghetto films, however, represents not so much the reality of assimilation, with its social, cultural, and political platforms, but the ideology that supports the culture industry of American cinema, furthering its underlying economic agenda couched in the rhetoric of democracy and patriotic nationalism. As Miriam Hansen explains: The social function of Ghetto films is found not so much in their content and dramatization of ghetto life as in their “modes of representation and address—the ways in




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The Ghetto films mark a juncture in this dual strategy, encapsulating the conflict between short-term market interests (catering to the nickelodeon clientele) and long-term objectives (wooing the middle class, blurring class distinctions). The increase of films dealing with intermarriage after 1913 did not reflect an actual increase in Jewish-Gentile marriages. . . . But as Erens points out, intermarriage plots enabled the producers to have it both ways, to cater to Jewish audiences and also to practice melting-pot ideology in the service of market expansion.84

In its projection and fulfillment of visual fantasies centered on social mobility and cultural integration, the visual assimilation of early Ghetto films works mainly to expand the film market and “[transform] a more local, ethnically conscious public sphere into the more comprehensive, all-American public sphere of mass and consumer culture.”85 As the most conspicuous form of visual assimilation, the image of the assimilated Jew embodies in particular the shift from cultural orthodoxy to a secular and modern mass consumerism, from the localized Old-World feudal and religious culture of Eastern European Jews to the metropolitan New-World capitalist culture of America. Viewed as the prototypical Diaspora people, Jews also personified an inassimilable and unsettlingly rootless identity that through American acculturation could finally find a home. This nomadic identity also gave Jews the status of the ultimate immigrant, allowing them to stand in for other white ethnic immigrant groups (especially Italian and Irish) as the prototype of the immigrant’s experience. Transformed throughout film history to meet the demands of a larger and more cosmopolitan public sphere, Hollywood’s image of the assimilated Jew had become by the end of World War I what Thomas Cripps calls “a living allegory for the American dream of success” as well as the “nostalgic, benign icon of the ritual of Americanization.”86 This image, however, cannot be reduced, as Cripps claims, to a sentimentalized reproduction of the “assimilationist experience of the Jewish studio bosses,” in which they appeared as “the most dramatic example of the ethnic success story.”87 Nor can it be solely viewed, as Lester Friedman believes, as an attempt on the part of Hollywood “to make Americans less nervous about Jews and Jews more conscious of themselves as Americans.”88 Certainly, images of assimilated Jews worked to calm the fears of Americans about mass immigration and the foreign dangers of communism and socialism often associated with Jews, particularly during World War I and the Red Scare.



which films solicited their viewers.”83 It is therefore important to note, Hansen pointedly argues, the use of assimilationist ideology by early Ghetto films both to retain its traditional target audience and increase its appeal to a larger middle-class and multiethnic audience:

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More important, however, the image of the assimilated Jew functioned as a complex metonymic icon of democratic consumerism, projecting an America bound by its democratic values and the affluent lifestyle of its consuming masses. It functioned to create a powerful and popular myth of a nation united not only culturally and politically but economically as well. This representation of the immigrant Jew in universal terms is part and parcel of what Miriam Hansen calls Hollywood’s “myth of film as a new universal and visual language” that could “[overcome] divisions of nationality, culture, and class.”89 Casting itself as the producer of a popular “democratic art,” the film industry similarly mythologized its heterogeneous audience into a homogenous mass of American consumers in which all differences were submerged.90 Ultimately, these symbols of universalism, democracy, and consumption, explains Hansen, provided the industry with an effective marketing strategy, legitimating its exploitative economic practices. Expressed particularly in the rhetoric of assimilation, such practices were presented and perceived as being essentially American and democratic.91 An example of late Ghetto film (1920–1929), Hungry Hearts depicts what Erens says is the main concern of its genre in this period, the potential of the younger generation to move itself out of the ghetto and into mainstream American life.92 It also shows a strongly formulaic and conventional treatment of assimilation, conflating it with concerns of love, marriage, social mobility, and economic consumption under the collective concept of the American Dream. According to Erens, Hungry Hearts was a response to Humoresque and its astounding economic success that single-handedly revitalized the ebbing Ghetto genre, culminating in The Jazz Singer.93 A screen adaptation of a Fanny Hurst story, Humoresque established the dominant pattern for late Ghetto films and introduced the new theme of the younger generation’s ability to succeed in America and new stock characters, such as the “Long-suffering Mother” who, befitting the era of the New Woman, has more courage and independence than her earlier prototype, “Rose of the ghetto.”94 Hungry Hearts makes use of these new themes and types as well as Humoresque’s controversial emotionally exaggerated style.95 Based loosely on Yezierska’s critically acclaimed collection of short stories of the same title, Hungry Hearts was part of Goldwyn’s “Eminent Authors” program. A promotional and publicity-minded campaign in which well-known authors were offered positions as scriptwriters, Eminent Authors was designed to place film on par with the high cultural status of literature and thereby cater to America’s significant middle-class clientele. Other characteristics that the film shares with late Ghetto films include the use of the stock character the “Pathetic Patriarch” (which replaces the earlier “Stern Patriarch”), the continued “realistic” representation of the Lower East Side ghetto, and the




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theme of sudden financial success and other fairy-tale dramas that depict the rich rewards of assimilation.96 Unlike the majority of other late Ghetto films, however, the subtext of Hungry Hearts reflects not only a deep-seated ambivalence about the empty promises of Americanization and democracy in general but resents its own complicity with the propagation of these false ideals. Whereas well-known late Ghetto films such as Humoresque, His People (Universal, 1925) and The Jazz Singer use melodrama in order to promote assimilationist ideology, Hungry Hearts chooses to expose the underlying codes of visual assimilation and its intimate relation to Hollywood economics through the intensification of melodrama. Humoresque, for example, deploys the sentimental and lachrymose style of melodrama in order to reveal the patriotic sensibilities of its gifted musical hero, who temporarily suspends what promises to be a wildly successful musical career to fight for his country during World War I. He is wounded and believes his career is over when suddenly, through the power of love, he discovers he can still play the violin. Similarly, popular films like His People and The Jazz Singer embrace assimilationist ideology, melodramatically depicting the clash between the traditional and the modern and highlighting non-Jewish career choices and intermarriage as positive, natural results of acculturation. In Hungry Hearts, the melodrama of assimilation is likewise deployed; however, the film’s mode of address relies on a cinematic self-reflexivity in which viewers are also solicited to engage in the ambivalence of a critical melodrama and its subversive use of cliché. Because Hungry Hearts is relatively unknown to contemporary audiences, having only recently been rediscovered and restored, I will preface my discussion of the film’s use of melodrama with an in-depth plot summary.97 The film, which portrays the rags-to-riches story of the Levin family’s immigration to and assimilation into America in the short space of a year, is presented in three basic parts. The first section takes place in a shtetl in Russia and describes the reasons for leaving and for establishing America as the promised land; the second section depicts the Lower East Side ghetto as the transitional and economically deprived space that must be traversed and transcended on one’s way to American affluence; the third section, the happy ending, portrays the family successfully and comfortably ensconced in middle-class American society, reaping the rich rewards of its earlier travail. The film opens with an extreme long shot of an idyllic view of Russian shtetl life in 1910. In a setting of abundant natural beauty, we see the daily affairs of the community, including people working and children playing in a lake alongside their mothers, who are laundering clothes. Moving into the hut of the Levin family, we are introduced to the protagonists: Abraham Levin, the father, described in the film’s intertitles as “gentle, pious, un-



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practical and, who in 1910, solved all problems according to a book written in 1200”; Hanneh, his practical, hard-working wife and head of the household; their wistful teenage daughter, Sara; and the other, younger Levin children. In their home, Abraham Levin, a melamed (Hebrew teacher) conducts classes while Hanneh and Sara perform household chores. Hanneh takes on the hefty chores of shoveling coal into the stove and fetching water, while Sara, who is supposed to be sweeping and keeping watch for the authorities, daydreams and stares out the window. A Cossack abruptly interrupts this peaceful routine of shtetl life when he charges into the Levin home to enforce the anti-Semitic rule prohibiting Hebrew teaching. The Cossack threatens Abraham, steps on the family’s Sabbath bread, attempts to bullwhip the children, and engages with Hanneh in a physical struggle as she protects them. After the Cossack’s departure, another disruption of a happier sort occurs in the form of a letter from America. As one of the shtetl’s few literate people, Abraham is requested to read it to the community. It describes in a humorously inflated rhetoric the success of the village’s former water carrier, now a self-described businessman (fruit vendor) in America. The writer proudly boasts of his two-dollar daily profit, his private room, and the democratic practices of America where he “has as much to say as Rockefeller, the greatest millionaire.” He also describes the American social practice of “ladies first,” which relegates women to a high standing and forces their husbands to wait upon them and even wash the dishes. Considering these advantages as well as freedom from religious persecution, Hanneh and Sara decide it will be best for the family to emigrate and assume the task of raising the necessary travel funds by pawning their valuables. In the second part of the film, the Levin Family is shown landing at Ellis Island, greeted by the comical Gedalyeh Mindel, who is dressed to the nines and fastidiously adjusting his accessories. The Levins stare in admiration at him, astonished at his dress and miraculous transformation from their former shtetl water carrier to a now-respected American citizen and supervisor in a sweatshop. As Mindel leads them to their tenement apartment, realistic shots of the Lower East Side depict the poverty, dirt, and overcrowding. However, the vitality and vibrancy of the ghetto are captured as well. Shocked with the impoverished condition of the family’s new apartment and the overall bleak urban setting of the ghetto, Hanneh immediately complains to Mindel: “Gotteniu! Like in a grave so dark! A fine President you picked out! A nice care he takes of America!” Mindel immediately reproves her, reminding Hanneh of her place as a newly arrived immigrant: “You think the President got time to bother with every greenhorn that steps down from the ship?” Sara asks, “But ain’t even a greenhorn also a somebody in America?” to which Mindel curtly responds, “Nobody’s a somebody before




Ethnic Modernisms

he can earn money in America!” This remark is punctuated by a point-ofview shot motivated by Mindel that takes in Sara’s peasant-like and unAmerican clothes, moving down to her striped old-fashioned stockings and clumsy shoes. “But can’t I work and earn money—and make myself a somebody?” she asks. “Sure,” he replies, “but not in those greenhorn clothes.” Only one day off the boat and Sara quickly realizes what she needs to become a somebody in America. “Quick papa,” she cries, “make money for American clothes. I’m burning to work and make myself a somebody!” Abraham endeavors to earn money in America but is unsuccessful due to his scholarly bent and impracticality; instead it is the women who must earn the family keep. Hanneh takes in laundry and Sara becomes the janitor of the tenement building to earn money for clothes so that she can later take on the more important job of factory garment or sweatshop worker. Sara falls in love with David, the landlord’s American-born nephew who has just graduated from law school and now collects rent for his uncle. After he sees Sara in her new American clothes, David has reciprocal feelings. Meanwhile, Hanneh is impressed by her wealthy employer’s pristine white kitchen and saves up her hard-earned money to renovate and paint her own tenement kitchen. Upon renovation, Rosenblatt, the grasping Jewish landlord, raises the rent above the Levins’ means in order to evict them and rent out the now more-valuable apartment for more money. He also desires to break up the romance between Sara and David, referring to the Levins as “low-down greenhorns—schnorrers!” In a crazed fit of despair that is the most dramatic scene of the film, Hanneh destroys her white kitchen, hacking at the newly painted walls and cupboards with a large meat cleaver. As the police, informed by Rosenblatt, physically subdue and haul her to jail, Hanneh yells “The Cossack, the Cossack!” and falls into a faint. In the third and final section, Hanneh is on trial for the destruction of property, represented by David. The judge dismisses the case, scolds the landlord for his ruthless exploitation of fellow immigrants, and eventually fines and threatens him with arrest when upon leaving the courtroom he gets into a scuffle with the taunting Mindel. The Levin family, after “their second summer in a new land,” is now shown living happily in a grand white house with a more-than-ample yard. The film abruptly ends when Mindel describes David as a very successful defense lawyer, earning “fat fees” by freeing murderers.98 Kevin Brownlow describes Hungry Hearts as “a quiet film” with little sentimentality and melodrama, “made so simply it might have passed as a poverty row production were it not for the obvious commitment of those on both sides of the camera.”99 Certainly, there is an unmistakable directness and clarity in the film, seen especially in its realistic settings and transparent and logical external plot, which carefully follow the conventions of the



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Ghetto genre. The tripartite plot structure provides a definitive detailed assimilative map, depicting not only the geographical spaces—Russia, Lower East Side, suburban America—that are traversed in the process of Americanization but its temporal and linear flow. The Americanization of the Levins, within the short span of two summers or one year, follows logically and easily as the natural result of immigration. However, in its consciously mechanical adherence to the conventions of the Ghetto film with its simple, or more precisely, simplistic representations of ghetto life and America, Hungry Hearts parodies its own genre and its underlying ideology as the classic American story of success. Indeed, the film employs nothing but clichés and popular conventions—the letter from America, the culture shock experienced by arriving immigrants, the significance of American dress, the avaricious Jewish landlord, modern American romance, the emancipation of American women—to explain and represent the immigration experience. These clichés, in particular those concerning culture shock and money-greedy Jews, were in fact already outmoded by the 1920s, dating back to early Ghetto film. This stereotypical representation, along with its temporal condensation, is not a serious social treatment, as Brownlow claims, but an ironic parody of the Americanization ritual and its expectations. This parody functions not only to reflect the urbanity and skepticism of an audience conscious of the failure of Americanization and its formulaic representation in film, but also to emphasize the unbridgeable gap between visual assimilation and the actual reality of Americanization. This coexisting tension, in which desirable images of assimilation contradict the audience’s own experiences and perceptions of Americanization, constitutes the film’s immigrant melodrama. Since Americanization was no longer seen as a credible answer and immigration had come virtually to a halt in 1914 due to the war and ensuing restrictions (in 1921 and 1924), the film’s subject matter was in many ways a part of the past.100 The parody in the film foregrounds the fairy tale and mythmaking elements of visual assimilation, exposing the historic process in which Americanization was becoming romanticized and sentimentalized in Ghetto film. The immigrant melodrama of Americanization and its accompanying myths of democracy, Hungry Hearts indirectly acknowledges, have become tiresome topoi that serve as a mere pretext for entertainment purposes as well as the legitimating of the industry’s capitalist practices. With the revival of the films of Douglas Sirk and the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s, melodrama began to receive serious critical attention. Once belittled as a genre devoted to “women’s films” and “weepies,” melodrama, with its excessive and emotional representations, is now properly explored as a potentially subversive sociopolitical force. Thomas Elsaesser was among the first to point out the genre’s intimate relations to the




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political and ideological.101 Peter Brooks has subsequently placed its literary birth in the context of the French Revolution and Stanley Cavell sees its “gesture of excess, of the histrionic, of the hysterical” as a sign of our “inability to mean,” hyperbolically depicting “the poverty and pathos of all expression.”102 In his recent analysis of the films of Douglas Sirk, Paul Willeman discusses the use of both Brechtian irony (distanciation) and the conventions of melodrama to reveal social contradictions. The result is the stylized Sirkian system of social representation in which “the world the audience wants to see (an exotic world of crime, wealth, corruption, passion) is a distorted projection of the audience’s fantasies to which Sirk applies a corrective device, mirroring these very distortions.”103 Works like those by Elsaesser, Brooks, Cavell, and Willemen have helped to legitimize this formerly ignored genre, pointing to its staging of modernization and its disruptive impact on traditional cultural identities. The deceptive appearance of melodrama, however, lies in its use of the cliché, which may not always be perceived as subversive on the part of an audience looking for entertainment nor represented as such by its producers. Whether the subversive quality of melodrama is inherent in the genre, spectator or intentional on the part of the director, however, is ultimately a misleading question. Melodrama functions historically and achieves its effect in the negotiable space between the screen, the spectator, and the historical context that frames the interaction. Hungry Hearts, it can be said, offers an intensification of melodramatic conventions that raises it to the level of critical melodrama (e.g., Sirkean system) not through the conscious manipulation of the genre but rather through the historical context framing the production and reception of its visual representations. Hungry Hearts was produced in the Ghetto genre at a time when the Americanization narrative no longer held any credibility and thus invited parody, cynicism, and disenchantment. The film critically reflects upon the theme of assimilation through the overlapping horizons of the spectator, producer, and history. It would be wrong to credit the film’s producers with a critical distance toward their own commercial product. Rather, it appears that social protest can itself be packaged like any good consumer product and made palatable to an audience in the form of a pseudopolitics.104 In this manner, the film reflects the pseudopolitics that surrounded the issues of immigration and naturalization and that would be apparent as such to an enlightened consumer of film and less apparent to the naïve viewer. Herein lies the ambivalence (and uniqueness) of Hungry Hearts in that it at once points to formulaic and subversive aspects of Ghetto melodrama. One of the main tenets of critical melodrama, the viewing of the familiar as significant and inherently political, is given in the film’s various subplots, which foreground the interactive relations between private, even



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banal, concerns and the public sphere. Of particular interest here is how the domestic concerns of Hanneh and Sara are represented as being of national importance, contributing to the making of Americans, and simultaneously belittled. The dominance of the women is suggested in the first section of the film, which anticipates their authority in the New World and also situates the insignificance of Abraham as the father figure. The first indication is given in Hanneh’s abilities to perform arduous physical tasks—shoveling coal, fetching water, and even wrestling with the intruding Cossack. The letter from America further foreshadows the rise of the women in its description of the emancipation of American women. The first part of the film ends with Hanneh and Sara’s decisive response to emigrate. Abraham’s representation as the “Pathetic Patriarch” is established in his inability to protect his family or to make important family decisions, and in his indifference to anything but his Hebrew studies. Thus his point-of-view shots are restricted to Hebrew texts (the Talmud and letter), anticipating not only his future inability to assimilate due to his Old World learning, but the authority of the emancipated woman as the catalyst for assimilation. At the same time, however, the letter also suggests that American women are petty and domineering tyrants whose emancipation consists mainly of forcing their henpecked husbands to wait upon them and “even wash the dishes.” Its overwrought and highly exaggerated rhetoric is not designed to give an objective description of the New American woman but to emphasize the cliché of the émigré letter with its fantastic descriptions of riches, opportunities, and a better life. More important and in the context of an American audience, the letter serves to deflate humorously the democratic practices of America, which while offering a better alternative to a disintegrating Eastern Europe are nevertheless strongly marked by inequalities of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Hanneh and Sara, who naively believe the contents of the letter, will shortly discover, as the audience itself knows, the truth about the Promised Land. Once in America, Hanneh and Sara work hard to move the family out of the Lower East Side ghetto and the despised condition of “greenhorns.” The authority of Hanneh and Sara, however, is established not so much by their being the family’s breadwinners but, more precisely, by their status as consumers. It is only when Sara is able to earn enough money as a janitor to buy herself proper American dress and thereby earn more money in the better position of garment worker that David falls in love with her. In their first meeting when she is scrubbing the tenement’s porch steps, he greets her politely but indifferently while she attempts to hide her clumsy striped stockings. In their second encounter, however, her new, stylish American clothes combined with her good looks succeed in catching his eye. In a significant point-of-view shot, he takes in her American dress, particularly her




Ethnic Modernisms

fashionable boots, prominently displayed in a matted close-up, and falls immediately in love. In this comical close-up soliciting the viewer’s complicity and laying bare the materialistic concerns surrounding love, the theme of successful acculturation underlying the love plot is likewise belittled. The shallow norms of consumerism, the film suggests, have superseded any sense of profound national identity. The importance of dress in the New World had by this time become a convention in immigrant literature, popularized in Abraham Cahen’s Yekl (1896), “A Providential Match” (1898), and particularly in The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). The ritual of sending a picture to Old World relatives in rented American clothes upon landing at Ellis Island to document the immigrant’s remarkable overnight transformation had already been firmly established as early as 1902.105 This association of American dress with democracy and social mobility is comically represented in the film, exploiting an absurd catch–22 type of logic, in which money is needed for clothes in order to gain employment and its privileges. Just as absurd, especially to an audience of the 1920s, is the film’s representation of the position of sweatshop or garment factory worker as desirable in that it necessarily leads to bourgeois status. And yet, as Miriam Hansen has explained, this form of economic logic, in which consumption is promoted at the expense of production, was used to capitalize on the labor of immigrant workers (notably women), promising mobility, liberation and romance through consumption: For working-class women, especially recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, consumerist styles and fashions—to the extent they could afford them—promised access to a modern, American world of freedom, romance, and upward mobility. At the same time, it was their cheap labor that enabled the mass manufacturing and sale of consumer goods.106

The film depicts this vicious economic cycle in which romance and freedom are bought by further economic enslavement of women immigrants and conversely, in which enslavement is borne through the consumption of an illusionary image of freedom. Whereas Marxism argues that factory workers are alienated from the product they create as well as the activity of work itself, the film’s capitalist logic puts forth an opposing view, equating democracy and economic rewards. Whereas Sara’s project of assimilation centers on romance, Hanneh desires a beautiful white kitchen like that of her wealthy American employer. Like Sara, she works hard to earn the required money, which will make her kitchen so attractive “that even the President from America will be proud to step into such beautifulness.” As in the case of Sara, it is not so much the



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money or hard hours put in by Hanneh that is emphasized, but her consumption. Renovated as a tribute to Sara and David’s engagement, the new kitchen symbolizes the hopes and ideals of Americanization that will raise the Levin Family to middle-class status. However, Hanneh’s desire to have a beautiful white kitchen is as much ludicrous and extravagant as it is touching. The whitewashing of her tenement kitchen walls exposes her extreme hubris as well as naïveté in her effort to reach the lifestyle and status of her millionaire employer and thereby redeem her social origins. Hanneh’s aspirations make her a laughing stock as someone who has foolishly bought into the myth of America’s classless society and its assimilationist ideologies. The absurdity of Hanneh’s drive for Americanization is further underscored in the film’s deployment of the cliché of the reform tenement kitchen. In the Progressive Era, the reform of the Eastern European immigrant centered on personal and household cleanliness, with special attention given to the kitchen as the center of the domestic sphere. As Elizabeth Ewen has pointed out, reformers realized that unlike the fathers and children of the ghetto who received their “daily dose of American values” in work and school institutions, immigrant mothers remained outside their sphere of influence and were a threat to Americanization.107 Reformers made special attempts to diminish the vital influence of the non-Americanized mother by infiltrating the apparently disorganized immigrant home and attempting to instill within it elements of American domestic culture and its values of order, function, and cleanliness. To this end, reformers designed model tenement kitchens that advocated “white painted walls, and unadorned, rugless, wood floors.”108 In reality, however, as Jenna Joselit explains, the kitchen of the average immigrant of the Lower East Side fell considerably short of reformers’ ideals of simplicity and minimal design and was instead used for a variety of activities: Packed with furniture, the kitchen was a far cry from the neatly organized work space envisioned by reformers, at once a room for eating, preparing homework, socializing, and manufacturing a startling array of commercial products, from cigarettes to shirtwaists.109

In fact, immigrants generally disliked the austere and antiseptic look of whitewashed walls, preferring instead, to the dismay of reformers, “colored wallpaper, brightly patterned linoleum, and yards of lace and fabric trimmings” that were “anything but visually comprehensive and ordered.”110 Ironically, Hanneh’s white kitchen reveals her to be exceptional as a textbook model of reform and exceptional among immigrants precisely because she is such, suggesting the possibility that the image of the assimilated Jew is merely a reformer’s fantasy.




Ethnic Modernisms

While much of the initial irony concerning Hanneh’s obsessions are made benign through comic presentation, the parody of her assimilative endeavors abruptly moves into a hyperbolic and pathological dimension once she discovers they will lead not to middle-class status but to eviction. As the melodrama switches to a more realistic (but still stereotypical) depiction of the immigrant’s social plight, with the Levins at the mercy of a ruthless Jewish landlord, its irony ceases to be entertaining. In the most remarkable scene of the film, Hanneh’s sorrow over the loss of her beautiful white kitchen transforms into violent rage, revealing the immigrant’s deep-seated ambivalence toward the project of Americanization. Told by a policeman that the landlord has the right to do whatever he wants with his property, Hanneh returns downtrodden to her kitchen. In a medium close up, Hanneh is shown mourning, laying her cheek against the kitchen wall and apparently accepting the landlord’s victory. In a sudden revelation, however, Hanneh cries out “No! The landlord ain’t going to get the best from me” and runs for a very large meat cleaver hanging on the wall. In a close-up of Hanneh’s hand, we see the cleaver striking violently and repeatedly, gashing the white wall and causing the plaster to scatter. The shots of the smashing cleaver alternate with tight grotesque close-ups of Hanneh’s grimacing and contorted face, depicting the brutal intensity of her actions. The duration of her rage is given not only in lengthy alternating close-ups but also in cross-cutting sequences showing Sara and Abraham running errands and returning home as well as the janitor fetching the landlord across town. Meanwhile a stove fire starts and her neighbors and husband are still unable to restrain her. Two burley policeman are finally able to subdue her before hauling her off to jail. In a last fit of rage she yells “The Cossack! The Cossack!” and faints from sheer exhaustion. Exceptional in its intensity, violence, and duration, this scene of destruction melodramatically demonstrates the irrational and uncivilized nature apparently lurking within the hysterical female that must be contained by the male hero. The position of the women, strengthened through their quick assimilation and their role as consumers and breadwinners, must be held in check and not allowed to threaten the hero’s position as the proper head of the patriarchal household and representative of American culture. It also creates a rupture in the otherwise chronological, if condensed, timeline of the film and its assimilationist model. In contrast to the seamless and conventional plot, the explosiveness of this scene underscores the violence that underlies an administrated or ideologically prescribed acculturation, foregrounding the resulting traumatic emotions of ethnic self-hatred, resentment, and frustration. A film meant to provide visual pleasure and entertainment begins to destroy its own carefully crafted cinematic appeal and, in doing so, comes close to representing accurately Yezierska’s stance. It is at



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this point of rupture that the cynicism and pretense of the film come undone and give way to a radical expression of disenchantment with the ideology of Americanization and, significantly, with its own manipulative enterprise of projecting social illusions. The white kitchen wall that Hanneh violently and repeatedly gashes represents in this context the white screen upon which Hollywood has projected its fictionalized and idealized America with its romance of visual assimilation. This scene further reveals how the site of the ghetto is constructed as transitional or temporary in the Americanization narrative, allowing for no legitimate form of residence or culture. Yezierska’s notion of a hybrid Angloimmigrant culture emerging from within this site of domesticity is contradicted by the socioeconomic reality of the ghetto that does not tolerate even beginning signs of domestication and affluence from within. Hanneh cannot remain within her apartment once she has remodeled her kitchen, since it marks an attempt to make herself at home in the ghetto and thereby legitimates immigrant culture. The project of Americanization is not complete until one leaves the ghetto and becomes integrated with the mainstream. The rent is raised beyond her means so as to mark the socioeconomic difference between the immigrant and the more prosperous Americanized immigrant. Social dignity, white kitchens, and clean rooms, ultimately, are reserved for Americans and properly acculturated immigrants, naturalized Americans, who possess enough capital to leave the ghetto. “Greenhorns” like Hanneh who attempt to acculturate while staying in the ghetto merely mock the American lifestyle, since they do not possess the required capital to move out. By the film’s end, David, the native-born son-in-law, and not Hanneh, emerges as the all-American hero, since his capital as a successful defense lawyer will propel the family into middle-class status. The American myth of consumption, with its promises of romance, mobility, and social status, is unmasked as a vicious and insidious illusion. Crass capitalism as espoused by David’s uncle, Rosenblatt the slumlord, emerges as the only real criterion of Americanization, setting a clear limit to any other form of acculturation that falls short of economic affluence. Rosenblatt also points to the breakdown of ethnic solidarity in America’s capitalist landscape, with Americanized Jews exploiting immigrant Jews. The traditional happy ending of the final scene appears to restore the broken plot structure through the reestablishment of patriarchal dominance and appropriately takes place in the courtroom. However, it contradicts the rest of the film, in which the women, though naïve, were nevertheless dominating and responsible figures—unlike the men, who were represented as inept and comical (Abraham and Mindel), avaricious (Rosenblatt), or nondescript and uninspiring (David). The film emphasizes this contradiction in its remarkable transformation of Hanneh’s heretofore




Ethnic Modernisms

larger-than-life character into an inexplicably meek, downtrodden, and fearful woman scarcely able to speak. Acting as her defense lawyer, David must now coax her story out of her, and upon telling it, she faints. Her case is dismissed and the judge delivers a stern reprimand to the landlord, scolding him for exploiting his fellow immigrants. As the representative of American law, the judge functions not only as a legal and moral adjudicator but also as an agent of social reform and assimilation, demonstrating to immigrants the proper way to behave in America. The burden of ethics and integrity is thus placed upon Jewish immigrants, who are shown to be selfpromoting and ruthlessly opportunistic, while the ideology of Americanization remains seemingly intact as demonstrated by the judiciousness of the court. Hanneh’s now meek and submissive behavior in the courtroom is rewarded, whereas the grasping and “ethnic” demeanor of the landlord is punished. Predictably, the film delivers the traditional happy ending, displaying the rich rewards of assimilation. The family, only after “their second summer in a new land,” is now shown living happily in a large and beautiful white house on abundant property. This idyllic scene, with the father and mother sitting on the front porch swing and the children playing the American games of skipping rope and catch while wearing American dress, recalls the film’s opening long shot of shtetl life in Russia, now prosperously enhanced by the affluence of America. Meanwhile, David has become a successful defense lawyer who, as Mindel notes, is now earning “fat fees” by freeing murderers. According to Yezierska, who was very unhappy with this happy ending, Goldwyn hired Montague Glass to give the film “laughs and a happy ending.”111 A popular Jewish writer and creator of the beloved comic duo of Potash and Perlmutter, Glass is described by Yezierska as a type of hack writer who “turned out his caricatures of Jews like sausage meat for the popular weekly and monthly magazines.”112 For Yezierska, Glass’s happy ending and editing ruined Hungry Hearts, turning it into sentimental pulp that exploited immigrant culture for profit. In “Wild Winter Love,” a short story published in 1927, Yezierska expresses her ambivalence toward happy endings, linking it intimately to Americanization. “This is a story with an unhappy ending,” begins her narrator. “And I too have become Americanized enough to be terrified of unhappy endings. Yet I have to drop all my work to write it.”113 Unhappy endings, Yezierska suggests, though painful to write, are in the end more truthful and to the point where Americanization narratives are concerned. In Yezierska’s story “The Lost Beautifulness,” upon which the kitchen and court scenes are based, the outcome is decidedly different. Hanneh is punished for her belief in America’s democratic system, which is revealed as a sham, and loses not only her court case to the landlord but is held re-



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sponsible for her family’s eviction. However, while superficially stressing an opposing ideology to that of Yezierska’s work, the screen adaptation nevertheless articulates the same anti-Americanization message. Hanneh’s unexpected and violent outburst has profoundly called into doubt the film’s entire mode of address, pointing to its own complicity in the nation’s assimilationist project. In particular, the expected happy ending appears in this context as mechanical and staged, purposefully revealing itself and Americanization as part of an institutional and national formula. In his discussion of films that exploit an unmotivated happy ending, David Bordwell argues that they draw attention to the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema, displaying for its audience “the demands of social institutions (censorship, studios) which claim to act as the delegates of audience desires.”114 If “the happy ending is the natural heritage of a happy, democratic nation,” then an ending, highlighting an immigrant family happily living off of money earned by setting murderers loose, provocatively calls attention to this convention.115 The ending of the film points more properly to a nation ruled by a savage capitalism masked by social concerns of Americanization, immigration, philanthropy, and reform. Mindel’s joke concerning David’s financial success reveals David’s heretofore unnoticed similarity with his avaricious uncle Rosenblatt, namely that of crass opportunism. Hollywood’s image of the assimilated Jew is exposed as one motivated by the sole purpose of commercial profit. The blame of exploitative economic practices is shifted away from the capitalist system onto the convenient anti-Semitic stereotype of the greedy, dishonest Jew. The film’s xenophobic ending appears to endorse the nation’s immigration restrictions in its evocation of threatening and systemsubversive Jews who quickly turn from helpless immigrants into manipulative lawyers fleecing America. However, the ambivalent ending of the film can also be construed as a couched threat of an already empowered and assimilated Jewish community here to stay in America and no longer intimidated and naïve, like newly arrived immigrants. According to Magdalena J. Zaborowska, whose study of Yezierska discusses the author’s strategic use of literary conventions to rewrite the “New World Woman,” Yezierska purposely used the required happy ending to deflate the illusions of acculturation. Yezierska, Zaborowska maintains, “did not fall prey to her clichéd romantic endings, as most critics suggest, but, rather, used them for an ironic self-conscious contrast highlighting the unglamorous side of female Americanization.”116 Indeed, many of Yezierska’s stories and novels employ the same forced and stilted happy ending, causing the reader to question problematic assumptions about the American Dream. Yezierska’s complaints about the ending of the film and Hollywood in general no doubt centered on conditions of production that relegated her authorial power to a secondary position; however, it could not have been, as




Ethnic Modernisms

she insists, due to the violation of her work. Her own subtle literary use of cliché and melodrama belies this claim. But as an ardent socialist, she would not have been happy with the film’s deliberate stance of ambivalence, one that allowed it to depict the contradictions of Americanization while simultaneously profiting from this protest. Success in Hollywood as the pinnacle of Americanization, as Yezierska’s unexpected return to Hester Street underscored, remains as much an illusion of an imagined identity as its empty screen fantasies. And yet, as the film adaptation of Hungry Hearts demonstrates, commercial narratives of immigration and assimilation, when raised to the level of critical melodrama, unveil in their own manner the fantasy production that surrounds the fabrication of national and cultural identities.



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Black Folk Culture and the Aesthetics of Dislocation in Zora Neale Hurston At certain times, I have no race, I am me. —Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

Introduction

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s discussed in the previous chapter, the stories and novels of Anzia Yezierska were shown to be counternarratives to those of assimilation and Americanization. By means of her narrative strategies and use of Immigrant English, Yezierska questioned the democratic promises that acculturation held up to the new immigrants and exposed its goal of cultural unity, e pluribus unum, as that which maintained rather than opened the boundaries of the nation’s already established Anglo-American social and cultural landscape. In doing so, Yezierska attempted to rewrite the narrow social vocabulary of a standardized America and its officialese English, thereby envisioning a new and radically democratic America. Like Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston also wrote counternarratives, depicting the lives and communities of African Americans and their various reshapings of the country’s cultural and social terrain. And in similar fashion, Hurston used an idiolect to articulate the desires and goals of everyday African Americans. It is, however, important to understand the differences of the collective experience of displacement that each writer represents. Yezierska and other new immigrants came to America in order to escape political, social, religious,



Chapter II

Ethnic Modernisms

and/or economic oppression, an experience reflecting that of the first Pilgrims. Many, like Yezierska, were conscious of the inherent contradictions contained within the logic of American democracy; however, as the group quickest to become integrated into mainstream American society and to move into the middle classes, new immigrant Jews were able to adapt to and strategically use democratic principles for their social benefit and advancement with astounding success. In the African American experience, on the other hand, a violent history of displacement, slavery, and racial discrimination marked its basic relationship to American democracy. Whereas the culture of non-Anglo Saxon white immigrants, like those of Eastern European Jews and Italians, was perceived as a problem or threat to the country’s AngloAmerican ideals of democracy and enlightenment, that of African Americans was held to be not only inferior but radically antithetical. The inability of white America to confront its history of oppression and to explain the peculiar institution of slavery in traditional democratic logic led to an equally peculiar transfer of guilt in which African Americans were framed as inherently inassimilable and consequently outside the purview of a liberal democratic discourse. Whereas white immigrants were strongly encouraged or forced to forget their old world culture and assimilate, African Americans were marked as socially nonexistent, first as slaves and later as an inferior race incapable of assimilation and undeserving of democratic rights. For example, the sweeping democratic social reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal ultimately had little real consequence for the mass of African Americans. The question of cultural assimilation, so relevant in the case of immigrants acculturating to a different sociocultural landscape, is ultimately misleading in the case of African Americans. It obscures the fact that black Americans were not newcomers to America but actively participated in the nation’s founding and establishment of a cultural and national identity. Nevertheless, assimilation was and continues to be a problematic paradigm from within which African Americans are judged, and judge themselves, with regard to their cultural legitimacy in a white-dominated America. For American democracy at large, the question of assimilation spells out the persistent difficulty in articulating a meaningful cultural difference while acknowledging a cultural sameness. In the New Negro movement—today called the Harlem Renaissance— which attempted to articulate such a difference, the charge of assimilationism was often deployed against ideological opponents from within the movement. For example, according to the young Hurston and her colleagues, the established Harlem leaders—among them W. E. B. DuBois, Charles S. Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and even the younger and more sympathetic Alain Locke—looked too often in the direction of cultural and artistic assimilation as that which could bring about



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racial and social equality.1 The younger generation strongly disapproved of their enthusiastic, almost fanatic, belief in the ability of the high arts to redress the racial situation and advance black culture. Allied to the NAACP and the National Urban League, as well as their respective journals The Crisis and Opportunity, the Harlem intelligentsia was highly ideological and reformist in spirit and young Harlem writers often felt constrained by the duties and responsibilities imposed upon them and their work. Led by Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, this younger generation disagreed with what they considered to be its elitist and assimilationist politics and its subordination of art to race and class issues. Provocatively calling themselves the “Niggerati,” they instead turned radically to the black folk tradition for inspiration unlike DuBois and Locke, for example, who associated it with a crude or primitive aesthetics in need of literary refinement. Whereas DuBois and Locke, inspired by Johann Gottfried von Herder’s conception of folk culture as that which gives voice to a national literature, had always acknowledged the oral tradition as the foundation of black culture, they viewed folk culture purely as a base on which a formal and more sophisticated black literary tradition needed to be erected. This new tradition was to be patterned on the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the high arts. DuBois and Locke similarly viewed the folk as an inarticulate mass in need of representation and guidance by its intellectual elite.2 Such beliefs were unacceptable to the younger generation, which advanced claims for a more democratic representation of the black masses. The subversive quarterly Fire!! (1926), edited by Hurston and her colleagues and published in reaction to The New Negro, was meant to shock and provoke their elders and the genteel tradition through the presentation of “those elements within the race which are still too potent for easy assimilation.”3 The goal of Fire!!, so named because it hoped “to burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past,” was to give voice to this new ethnic avant-garde and its modern usage of folklore.4 As that which could restore the pigment and the proletarian background from which educated blacks had become removed, the black folk tradition, with its unique dialect, spontaneity, and populist tendencies, seemed to provide the answer. Black folklore not only offered proof to white America that blacks did indeed have an individual and productive culture but in its cultivated low literary style, it resisted the gentrification of urban black discourse to which many Harlem intellectuals had fallen prey. Moreover, it figured as a vivid reminder of the grass roots origins of an African American culture displaced into the urban space, recapitulating the earlier violent displacement of the African slave Diaspora. Folklore, as deployed by Hurston, attempts to stem against the hegemony of assimilation, with its prevailing modern amnesia of cultural displacement and its romantic




Ethnic Modernisms

liberal understanding of urban resettlement promising cultural and economic normalization. However, in spite of all that it offered, the use of folklore by the younger generation of the Harlem Renaissance was not without its problems. In its depiction of the baser elements of reality, it also pandered to the exotic and the primitive, elements that fascinated many white Americans and formed their general attitude toward blacks. DuBois therefore accused the young generation of itself assimilating to white standards. They were following, he claimed, “the lead of Carl Van Vechten and Knopf and Boni & Liveright and cater[ing] to what white America thinks it wants to hear from Negroes.”5 Furthermore, folklore’s strong ties to the minstrel tradition could be seen as perpetuating racist stereotypes, reducing the literary possibilities of folk culture to grotesque humor and caricature. And while it has socially leveling tendencies, folklore also contains conservative, if not potentially reactionary, elements, as seen in its adherence to tradition and its slow acceptance of change and the new. Hurston attempted to overcome this orthodoxy in her updating of folklore, demonstrating that folk and urban concerns are not, as usually assumed, mutually exclusive. Indeed, much of the controversy surrounding Hurston’s work can be traced to a conventional understanding of folklore as essentially premodern and antiprogressive in perspective. Hurston’s recent revival in the late 1970s and 1980s emphasized her importance as a folk writer and feminist whose stories and novels depict the inassimilable difference of African American culture, generating a sense of ethnic pride. In her well-known foreword to Robert Hemenway’s biography of Hurston, Alice Walker, for instance, cites “racial health” as “the quality [she] feels is most characteristic of Zora’s work . . . , a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.”6 However, in foregrounding the specific cultural and regional aspects of Hurston’s folklore, critics like Walker have focused on only a small part of her work. Accordingly, Hurston’s notions of community and tradition appear to be rooted in premodern forms of a conservative black folk culture that have persisted into the 20th century. Pro-Hurston critics often equate this persistence with a form of strategic survival, casting the author and her work as paradigmatic examples of cultural resistance and antiassimilationism. What is ignored in this revival of black folk culture is Hurston’s aesthetics of dislocation that calls into question any primordial belonging to a specific region or people. Reacting to this romantic treatment of Hurston’s folklore and attempting to direct attention to ongoing problems in black communities, some critics have of late begun to question Hurston and her reception. Hazel Carby, for example, locates Hurston’s work of the 1920s and 1930s in “a discourse of nostalgia for a rural community” that displaces



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the black urban problem7 and idealizes the folk as a formal aesthetics, and Cornel West asks why Hurston’s reactionary essays and conservative politics are overlooked or dismissed by contemporary feminist thinkers.8 While Carby’s and West’s criticisms point to important problems in Hurston’s politics and reception, they cannot account for the radical elements in her work (feminism, positive ethnic image, critical anthropology, linguistic decentering) and its contemporary appeal to many of her present readers and critics. It appears that we are dealing with two or more competing versions (ethnic, feminist, sociopolitical) of Hurston at the neglect of a more unified perception of the author which at once foregrounds her highly original visionary agenda and at the same time acknowledges the reactionary elements in her work that ultimately led to her eventual backslide into conservatism in the 1950s and what has been generally understood as a consequent loss of vision. Certainly, the complex contradictions found in Hurston’s work and life have created not only various but opposing perceptions, ranging from accusations of Uncle Tomism, opportunism, and political reactionism, to assessments of the author as a radical black feminist, resistance writer, and literary genius. In an effort to gain a more complete picture of this controversial and dynamic thinker and writer, I will focus in particular on neglected works in Hurston’s oeuvre, which because they do not easily fit into established norms, have been discussed infrequently or dismissed too quickly as problematic. By compartmentalizing Hurston narrowly within African American and/or feminist canons, critics have closed the door to other aspects of her work, particularly her transnational treatment of African diaspora culture in the various regions of the Americas. Hurston’s works are often judged by the standards set by those texts that are considered to be her best—her anthropological collection of folklore and voodoo rituals Mules and Men (1935) and her folk novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)— to the disadvantage of those that are comparatively more experimental, unorthodox, and ambivalent. For example, Hurston’s last major work Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), which depicts the marriage of an upwardly mobile white couple, is generally seen as a weak novel, illustrating Hurston’s attempt to validate herself as a universal or nonblack artist and resulting in what has been called the abandonment of the black community, “the source of her creativity.”9 Hazel Carby is one of the few critics to have recognized that Hurston was “actively trying to demonstrate her ideas of cultural influence and fusion in her novel.”10 Unfortunately, Carby does not see how this concept of influence and openness was already at work in Hurston’s earlier folk writings. Similarly, Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938), a collection of essays discussing the tales, voodoo rituals, and politics of Jamaican and Haitian folk cultures, has been summarily dismissed by critics




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as “her poorest book,” one which reveals Hurston’s embarrassing political shortcomings and nationalist sentimentalities.11 Little is made of Hurston’s attempt to describe how diasporic black cultures in Jamaica and Haiti are in fact a blend of cultures, a mixture of the African and various European cultural mores disseminated through imperialism and colonial occupation. Likewise, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), though acknowledged by Hemenway as “by far Hurston’s most ambitious book,” continues to receive little analysis except to mention its folkloric appropriation of the Bible.12 In ignoring problematic aspects of Hurston’s work, the complexity and the internal contradictions of her work are lost and we are left with a cultural icon that one either accepts or rejects, depending on one’s ideological interests. It is precisely, however, the ambivalence generated by Hurston that has enduring value for the cultural and literary study of her work. Her portrayal of black culture inflected by various regions (the Northeast and South in the United States, the Caribbean) breaks down its homogeneous appearance and thereby questions the stereotypical binaries of a black and white American society. Granted, these binaries are still strongly enforced, institutionally, during Hurston’s career; however, they are negotiated in different ways in different regions and thus undermine any attempt to construe a monolithic African American tradition. Here the internal tensions and contradictions shed more light on the overlapping cultural phenomena of race and displacement, under which Hurston had to labor and which produced in her work both positive and pathological utopias. Seen in this light, her work can be understood both as emancipatory as well as symptomatic of a nation’s pathological racial ideology displaced onto black culture. Hurston’s dismantling of a monolithic African American tradition also follows the pluralist spirit of modernism, faithfully heeding the particular contexts of communities and cultural settings. As a consequence of this fragmentation of tradition, Hurston’s work turns to the performative present in which race, dislocation, and culture can be staged at the moment of their problematic inception. This modernist emphasis on the disjunctive present also allows Hurston to free African American culture from a seemingly unbroken tradition of victimization and refocus its identity on the vitality of its expression. I will thus look closely at Hurston’s less popular and more experimental works—her urban folklore set in Harlem; her appropriation of the Judaic myth of Israel’s flight from Egypt as a universal myth of exile, emancipation, and dislocation in Moses, Man of the Mountain to imagine a modern transcultural nation; her portrayal of Southern white folk in Seraph on the Suwanee, as well as her controversial political writings in various essays and Tell My Horse—and show their relevance as performative lifeworlds of diverse African American cultures, lifeworlds defiant of victimization, and as richly productive in their communal stories and exchanges.



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In particular I will discuss the tension in her work between the universal and the regional, between that which makes American black culture cosmopolitan and cross-cultural, as well as singularly unique and different. As we will see, this tension between the universal and the specific generates much of the conflict and ambiguity found in her work, helping to explain why Hurston in one moment sounds like a black writer pandering to white or mainstream expectations and in another like a black nationalist. It also depicts more clearly Hurston’s difficult attempt to universalize black Southern folk. This task of projecting a representative, healthy, and productive black culture and tradition often led her to deny the problems created by a history of oppression and a racialized social order, to deny what DuBois has termed the “double-consciousness” of African Americans—the contradiction of being both black and American. Instead, as Henry Louis Gates has noted, Hurston was determined to form a modern literary tradition based upon “the representation of the speaking black voice in writing.”13 In her creation of the “speakerly text,” Hurston appropriated black Southern vernacular and brought it into the 20th century, breaking out of the conventions of a local dialect and exploring its larger potential as a unique artistic form that combines the black oral and literary AngloAmerican traditions. The result is a sophisticated aesthetics that does not so much privilege a black oral culture as point to its complex structure of identity and difference. Hurston’s folklore is thus not entirely, as Carby claims, “a discourse of nostalgia for a rural community” nor a displacement of the black urban problem (PF 77). At its most positive, it is a critical anthropology that offers a counternarrative to the myths and stereotypes of race, cultural homogeneity, and generalizations that reduce the diverse life experiences of African Americans. Nor is her folklore merely that which describes a productive, self-sufficient black community while ignoring its problematic aspects. As we will see, Hurston’s concept of folklore, at its most acute, is inseparable from the experience of race and dislocation, and suspends the traditional ontologies associated with folklore. In her groundbreaking visions, Hurston viewed the tensions among race, dislocation, and folklore as phenomena that affected any modern culture, pointing ultimately to their interdependence. Suffering from these ruptures, the modern condition of culture was in deep need of a communicative narrative rather than a fundamental form of identity. Cultural roots and belonging are not taken for granted or assumed as “natural” but seen as constructions of a community attempting to define and legitimate itself. At its most negative, Hurston’s work appears symptomatic, reflecting the racial pathology of American society. In such cases, Hurston falls into oversimplified and monolithic interpretations of black culture, ironically




Ethnic Modernisms

generating the pathological stereotypes attributed to blacks that she fought so hard to destroy. Here Carby’s criticism, which consciously echoes Richard Wright’s scathing attack that Hurston “voluntarily continues [in] . . . the tradition . . . [of ] the minstrel technique that makes the white folks laugh,” hits its mark and points to the problematic and reactionary elements in her use of folklore.14 It also points to an important conflict experienced by almost all writers of a minority heritage. On the one hand, minority writers feel compelled to write in a manner that will attract a mainstream (white) audience in order to boost sales and especially to prove their larger worth as artists with a universal appeal. Langston Hughes refers to this “urge within the race toward whiteness,” to write “like a white poet,” as the “racial mountain” that stands “in the way of any true Negro Art in America.”15 On the other hand, as spokespeople of their race, black writers feel equally compelled to represent their race and protest and document racial and social injustices. Though Hurston sometimes tried to escape this conflict by denying the problems created by race and poverty, her work nevertheless is fraught with contradictions created by this dilemma of the minority artist whose concerns are mediated through the double perspective of both a mainstream and minor culture. To her great credit, however, Hurston appears to have had little difficulty in accepting and living with the contradictions in her work and life, choosing like Walt Whitman to view them as healthy signs of complexity and diversity. Indeed, Hurston’s idiosyncratic and exuberant literary style deliberately intensifies contradictions, transforming them into productive dynamic expression. When one considers the full and complex range of Hurston’s modern reinterpretation of folklore as represented in her entire oeuvre, one understands that Hurston’s Eatonville is not simply a local color setting but, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, portrays particular communities caught in a dynamic tension between universal narratives of emancipation and ethics and those concerned with a local and regional culture of the American South. Hurston’s work thus offers, along with its insurmountable contradictions, a radical reinterpretation of the complex relations between rural and urban spaces that provide the topography of the modern experience of race and dislocation, one that has profoundly shaped the American identity. As a result, her rural settings often bear the mark of a displaced culture typical of the city, whereas her urban stories display rural and folkloric characteristics. Hurston’s brilliant imaginative mappings betray an uneasy cross-contamination that sheds light on the negative symbiotic racial relationship between black and white America. This relationship, while suggesting the mutual negotiation of a national consciousness, ultimately cannot conceal the pathological circumstances of the origin of an enforced and estranged encounter.



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One of the first thinkers to confront the question of the problematic national identity of his race was W. E. B. DuBois. In the famous opening paragraph of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the narrator explicitly articulates white America’s “unasked question”—“How does it feel to be a problem?”— and thus begins his account about “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the 20th Century”: Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.16

African Americans, as The Souls of Black Folk discloses, do indeed pose a problem for democracy in the traditional sense—in that their difference is not recognized or honored. DuBois also realized that this nonrecognition signifies nothing more than a negation of democratic principles, namely the refusal to acknowledge black difference as anything but a problem. The “Negro problem,” he writes, represents “merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic” (SBF 14). From the perspective of the “veil,” the peculiar and ambivalent “doubleconsciousness” of African Americans, Souls’ narrator tells the story of black America’s struggle to come into its own in a world which yields [the African American] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (SBF 8–9)

And just as DuBois’s narration of American blacks began with a question, it similarly ends on one: “Your country?” How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of



Race, Nation, and Art: The Harlem Renaissance

Ethnic Modernisms story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; . . . Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs . . . Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people? (SBF 189)

Far from being a problem to the nation, concludes DuBois, the African American race has been at its center, actively producing its history and its culture. DuBois’s answer to the unasked question is the complete questioning of the Anglo-Saxon’s implicit claim on America. This challenge is especially seen in his insistence that black culture is distinctly American, effectively suspending the question of black assimilation. DuBois’s defiant stance signaled a significant change in the perception of black American leadership weary of the accomodationist policies of Booker T. Washington that asked blacks to give up political power, civil rights, and the higher education of their youth in order to form a compromise with the New South and an indifferent North (SBF 42). As Nathan Huggins has pointed out, the Harlem Renaissance marks “a shift in sentiment from the leadership of Washington to that of DuBois.”17 DuBois also raises questions concerning the inseparable link between race and nation that continue to plague us into the present day. If race is a founding element of American nationhood alongside its democratic and social principles, how can it be revoked or abolished? Is it possible or even desirable to construct an American identity outside the question of race? What does it mean to be black and American in a nation that excludes blackness from its definitions of Americanness? Almost twenty-five years later, the publication of The New Negro (1925), a key text of the Harlem Renaissance and regarded as its manifesto, would again return to white America’s unasked question “How does it feel to be a problem?” only to dismiss it as invalid. Presenting the works of the “Talented Tenth,” editor Alain Locke announced in his introduction the death of the Old Negro and the birth of the New.18 No longer willing to be a problem discussed by “the [white] Sociologist, Philanthropist and Race-leader” who understands the African American as “more of a formula than a human being,” the New Negro, claimed Locke, will now answer by way of art.19 Conscious of their work as “the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance,” the members of this movement attempted to depict and articulate artistically the



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complex cultural and social identity of the African American existing in a modern urban mass society.20 What makes the objectives of the Harlem Renaissance unique from those of previous writers and thinkers—Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Charles Chestnutt, Booker T. Washington, and even DuBois—who were also concerned with similar questions of modern black identity, is the scope and confidence that underlie its articulations. Rather than a single voice of an exceptional individual speaking for a silent and oppressed people, The New Negro, as Houston Baker points out, “is the first fully modern figuration of a nation predicated upon mass energies,” reflecting a new self-perception of African Americans as “a newly emergent ‘race’ or ‘nation’—a national culture.”21 We “discover in the artistic self-expression of the Negro to-day,” writes Locke, “a new figure on the national canvas and a new force in the foreground of affairs”: “America seeking a new spiritual expansion and artistic maturity, trying to found an American literature, a national art, and national music implies a Negro-American culture seeking the same satisfactions and objectives.”22 This self-recognition of and confidence in the validity and potential power in the artistic voice of the New Negro reveals the increasing sense of cultural pride and awareness in African American consciousness that had been slowly coming to the fore since the Reconstruction. And though segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching were the rule in the New South and the civil status of black Americans was never lower since the Emancipation, this new national consciousness continued to grow in intensity. Spurred on by the Great Migration, World War I, and the reformist spirit that swept the nation, it manifested itself particularly in a black intelligentsia that now laid public claim to such diverse and complex identities as the critical thinker, citizen, individual subject, artist, and consumer—identities that had heretofore been reserved for a white elite culture. “Our poets,” states Locke, “have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.”23 This rich complexity is reflected in the varied artistic expressions of the Harlem Renaissance, ranging from poetry, short stories, and novels, to music, drawing, design, sculpture, and cultural criticism. It is also reflected in the many divergent and conflicting opinions among Harlem’s thinkers and writers as to the role of the black intellectual and black art. As the cultural center of the New Negro, Harlem also symbolized the cultural energies and visions of African Americans and as such was seen as the vortex and birthplace of modern black America. One of the movement’s most vivid and dramatic younger members, Zora Neale Hurston, a former student of Locke’s at Howard University, captured in her work the spirit of the movement and its pride in the African American tradition, particularly through her provocative revival of the folklore of




Ethnic Modernisms

Southern blacks and skillful use of vernacular. Hurston’s contribution to The New Negro, a short story entitled “Spunk,” already in content and form anticipated her more mature folktales. The story of a Southern black lumber camp worker who lives by his own rules and is “skeered of nothin’ on God’s green footstool—nothin’!,”24 “Spunk” captures the youthful exuberance and self-assertiveness that has since become representative of Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance in general. In a controversial and well-known essay from the Renaissance period, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), we clearly see these qualities as an integral part of Hurston’s literary strategies, especially in her bold representation of race and confrontational yet ironic mode of address that becomes a hallmark of her style: Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!”; and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or weep. The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.25

Hurston’s style with its paratactic and declarative sentences articulates the new confidence, underscoring the active force of the narrator’s voice. The rhythmic sentences of the essay’s self-assured narrator, Zora, are shot at the reader and project a forward direction, breaking with any nostalgic or selfcommiserative look at the past. As Zora emphatically states in the essay: “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who believe that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it” (CM 153). Nevertheless, the new start indicated in the bold prose does not aim to forget altogether what has happened. The sentences are filled with Zora’s ironic tags—“thank you”—and insertions—“the choice was not with me”—that mock the emancipatory efforts to which African Americans are subjected. The dilemma of whites haunted by their own barbarism and their false consciousness is joyfully flaunted at them in contrast to an African American history still at point zero, full of promise and utopian energy—“The



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world to be won and nothing to be lost.” In a quasi-Nietzschean move, Hurston undertakes a “transvaluation of values” that restores the self-esteem of the black community at the expense of its former oppressors.26 Zora’s insistence “But I am not tragically colored” (CM 153) is the semantic tenor of the entire essay. It is corroborated by the dominant metaphor of the stage that turns the little Zora from Eatonville, looking at various white folks passing through town—“My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter” (CM 152)—into an active performer: “They liked to hear me ‘speak pieces’ and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la” (CM 152). The young Zora’s minstrel act eventually becomes transformed into a performance of cultural identity commanding the attention of America: “It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or weep” (CM 153). The once-sidelined black girl entertaining the white spectator now takes center stage in the theatre of America, declaring in the vital spirit of modernism her own autonomy and significance. As this remarkable passage shows, Hurston is profoundly aware of both the potential impact of the Renaissance on national affairs and the subversive influence that she could wield over white readers as a black writer, turning them into passive spectators occupying an uncomfortable position marked by conflicting feelings of guilt, anger, admiration, and envy. Flaunting her difference, displacement, and apparently guilt-free status as a victim of slavery, Zora turns the tables on white spectators and celebrates the nowenviable situation of having no promises to keep towards a tradition or cultural origin. Unlike DuBois, who mourned that “[the Negro people] have no traditions to fall back upon, no established customs, no strong family ties, no well defined social classes” on which to build an educated people, Hurston realizes that there was nothing to be mourned in a history irrevocably marked by social death.27 In fact, Hurston has more in common with fellow modernist T. S. Eliot, who defines tradition as that which “cannot be inherited” but must be “[attained] by great labour” rather than by “following the ways of the immediate generation.” A historical perception, claims Eliot, involves not only an understanding of “the pastness of the past, but of its presence,” its “contemporaneity.”28 With the renaissance of the New Negro then, Hurston inaugurates the post-reconstruction era in which African American culture was finally to determine its own origin, direction, and national significance. As a modernist and antitraditionalist, Hurston defines her cultural identity not in received modes of ancestry and history but in the performative time of the present: “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” says Zora, but “it fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past” (CM 153).




Ethnic Modernisms

Hurston emphatically rejects DuBois’s notion of black progress, indebted, as Paul Gilroy explains, to Hegel’s “view of the history of the world as ‘none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.’”29 Defined as an unfolding teleology, it stressed the steady advancement of the black masses, led by its talented tenth, toward emancipation and civilization. However, for Hurston, DuBois’s model of racial temporality reduced the folk into a sociological project, one that refused to acknowledge its historical presence or the authenticity of its experiences. The folk, she believes, are not in need of reform or philanthropy; nor do they require a representative bourgeois elite to articulate their desires. Hurston advances instead a modernist contextual model of time in which the temporal horizons of past, present, and future cyclically converge upon one another. This narrative presentation of black experience, indebted to the mythic temporality of folklore, allows Hurston initially to overcome the notion of race and folk as a social paradigm. Similarly, Hurston refutes the DuBoisian notion of associating blackness with oppression and tragedy, giving a unique interpretation of “what it feels to be colored me.” “I remember the very day I became colored,” says Zora, recollecting the day she left her black hometown at age 13 to attend school in the city of Jacksonville: I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run. (CM 153)

As Barbara Johnson has pointed out in a perceptive analysis of this essay, Hurston “undercuts the presuppositions of her question.” “If one can become colored, then one is not born colored, and the definition of ‘colored’ shifts.”30 Her identity, Zora concludes, is determined by a racialized social order, but its interpretation is entirely left up to her. This act of selfdetermination is subtly hinted at in Zora’s phrase “a fast brown,” with its play on the various meanings of “fast”: solid and irreversible, as well as quick, slippery, and unable to be caught. The term “race” likewise becomes a footrace to be won: “Get set! . . . Go!” And the similar ambivalent phrase “rub and run,” points to a threatening contamination of color that could escape and seep into affairs of whiteness. This transgressive use of color is further emphasized by the stress on Zora’s unburdened consciousness that refuses to be contained by a history of victimization: But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the



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The threat strategically underscored throughout this essay is that of a socially enlightened, confident, and exuberant “New Negro” who actively negotiates her own cultural and social context, assuming a central position in national affairs. This discreet but clearly menacing stance of the black American, patiently but intensely awaiting her promised portion, anticipates Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too,” in which the narrator, the darker brother, is forced to eat in the kitchen.31 Like Zora, who bides her time sharpening her oyster knife, Hughes’s darker brother patiently eats in the kitchen, all the while growing stronger and preparing for his future place at the formal dining table. Quietly confident about his growing strength, America’s darker brother can afford to wait until the time of revolution is ripe. The darker brother’s ironic self-assertion clearly follows the lead of Zora, who had sharpened her oyster knife four years prior to Hughes’s Emersonian gesture of selfreliance in “I, Too.” Thus rather than demand racial equality as DuBois’s narrator had done in Souls, Hurston’s Zora takes this so-called privilege for granted and humorously belittles it: “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me” (CM 155; emphasis by Hurston). Behind Hurston’s triumphant and comical tone of this essay is her deliberate rejection of DuBois’s black doubleconsciousness, with its tragic and alienating perspective: “I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong” (CM 155). Like Anzia Yezierska’s conscious pariah, Hurston’s Zora delivers an implicit threat not only to white mainstream America but to the black intelligentsia of Harlem as well, particularly DuBois, and to what Hurston saw as its fixed definitions of “what it means to be colored.” Unlike many of their Harlem elders who linked art to racial and social reform and used it as a medium to portray the injustices suffered by black Americans and other colonized races of color around the world, the younger generation, the New Negroes, sought instead to present a more positive and active image of black culture to white America, in which mourning over their ancestors and oppressive history did not play an active role. In other words, a history of domination and oppression needs to be obscured and forgotten so as to bring forth one of action, vitality, and consummation that they believed would retrieve the Negro from social death.



sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. (CM 153)

Ethnic Modernisms

As part of her celebration of black folk culture, Hurston presents race in terms of a social drama that is enacted or experienced, rather than as a formalized sociological process. Again the metaphor of the theatre serves to illustrate the performative character of identity. Recalling the arguably minstrel-like performances of Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, catering to white audiences in search of the primitive, Zora moves through the stereotypes of untamed blackness in bold strides towards a cosmic supraracial and suprahistorical identity: when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. . . . This orchestra grow rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. . . . At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. (CM 154–55)

For Hurston, race becomes a complicated cultural construction rife with contradictions and multiplicities. While it is certainly a determining force in identity, it can be negotiated, strategically advanced and/or retracted. Whereas the earlier passages stress the contaminative force of color, this passage opts to cancel out color altogether and celebrates instead a timeless femininity. The multipositional shape and migrating characteristics of race necessitate that Zora become an actor with many masks, negotiating an essentially displaced and dynamic identity that is always in the process of transforming itself. Hurston’s racial performativity of the present is thus radically marked by an aesthetics of nonsynchronicity that does not allow for a total concurrence with experience. In her autobiography, Hurston notes that terms such as “race pride, “race prejudice,” “race man,” “race solidarity, “race consciousness,” and just “race” in general have no innate consistency but are elusive and subject to a particular appropriation and bias: What fell into my ears from time to time tended more to confuse than to clarify. One thing made a liar out of the one that went before and the thing that came after. At different times I heard opposite viewpoints expressed by the same person or persons.32



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Such contradictions, she writes, made her curious, and more importantly, made her realize not simply the complexity of “race” as a concept but of her race in general. Barbara Johnson’s discussion of Hurston’s representational strategies has shown how the author deliberately plays with structures of difference, suspending all reference in the telling of her stories, or “lies.” She does so, concludes Johnson, not to erase these differences but to “[foreground] the complex dynamism of their interaction.”33 These lies or contradictions point not so much to “untruths” in general (exaggerations, story-telling) but “untruths” upholding single viewpoints as “truths.” These lies are seen especially in matters of “race,” with its various and shifting constructions. Race, Hurston realizes, is a fiction in the very same manner as her lies, a dynamic narrative that imagines a community’s culture, identity, and history. Race is not biologically determined, as in DuBois’s nineteenthcentury outlook, but derives its identity from dislocation and difference. Hurston’s remarkable essay of black self-confidence ends on a democratic metaphor in which she compares herself to a “brown bag of miscellany propped up against a wall . . . with other bags, white, red, and yellow” (CM 155). The leveling metaphor of the shopping bag, a mass-consumer item filled with valuable and trivial things, “a jumble of small things priceless and worthless” (CM 155), deflates the question of race as one having been excessively stressed at the neglect of a common humanity: “Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?” (CM 155). This flippant treatment of so-called big questions such as God (the Great Stuffer), humanity (bags), race (bags of various colors), and inherited personal traits (jumble of things) spells out a comically reductive chain ranging from metaphysics to the most common denominator in mass culture. Hurston’s leveling fantasy, in spite of ending on a question of uncertain outcome—“who knows?”—playfully attests to the newly found confidence of a radical democratic vision of America: “I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored” (CM 155). As David Headon has argued, there has been a deliberate effort among critics to ignore or deny the political stance that frames all of Hurston’s work. Certainly this denial is due to the political and social “paradoxes and contradictions, the rash generalizations and occasional braggadocio” in Hurston’s work and life.34 But it is also due to Hurston’s own assertions that her ambitions were mainly literary, as well as her scorn for “racial uplifters,” whom she derisively called “Negrotarians.”35 Nevertheless, as Headon correctly points out, there is a coherent political/racial perspective in Hurston’s work that informs her literary aesthetics. According to Headon, this outlook was first clearly stated in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in which she sets herself apart from DuBois and his “sobbing school of Negrohood.” In fact, says Headon, Hurston’s “[steadfast refusal] to acknowledge DuBois’s ‘veil,’”




Ethnic Modernisms

“to [measure herself ] with the tape of the white world,” and her deliberate turn to “celebration, love, discovery and [transcendence]” are the major characteristics of her politics of her early period, one that distinguishes itself from DuBois’s modern narrative of black struggle and alienation and instead attempts to liberate black Americans from the self-hatred produced by the misrepresentation of race.36 Her exuberance, ironic humor, confidence, and contemporaneity are all used toward the deflation of the race problem and channeled into the celebration of modern folk ideals. “My sense of humor,” she would later write in her autobiography, “will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation.”37 While “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” marks a critical point in Hurston’s career in its modernist style and articulation of a coherent political agenda, it is not until the 1930s with the publication of Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Mules and Men (1935), and what many critics consider Hurston’s best work, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), that her politics would be expressed in a sustained literary manner. This politics, as we have sketched it out here in a preliminary manner, displays a significant shift from nineteenth-century historical and emancipatory models of race construction toward a radicalized aesthetic and performative model depicting the sociological and cultural lifeworld of African Americans in the process of its creation. Following in the vein of a modernist perception of history, Hurston no longer operates within teleological and developmental concepts of race that she believed reduce the race question and the civil status of African Americans to an ongoing and seemingly endless sociological problem. Her modernist stance with its insistence on difference and dislocation allows her to overcome predetermined notions of victimization and problematic citizenship that afflicted the identity and confidence of African Americans as actors and agents on the national stage. Ultimately, however, Hurston’s bold advances were made at the expense of any notion of social progress and transformation at a time when extreme discriminatory practices—lynching, segregation, disenfranchisement—and white supremacy were prevalent. Hurston’s disassociation of race from social and political praxis was to prove problematic and outmoded, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when racial unrest manifested itself in nationwide collective protests, rebellion, and militant action. At this time, Hurston’s perspective on race led her to speak openly against Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation and to endorse the Southern senator, Spessard Holland, an “old-line segregationist” and friend.38 As we will also see, Hurston’s racial temporality at times is dangerously close to becoming a timeless history of the folk, shutting out a critique of American society and its continuing history of racial oppression. In such moments, as Carby has noted, Hurston’s representation of a vital and authentic black folk



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finds itself repeating its inaugurating act of self-authentication without a reciprocal history accurately reflecting the social landscape. This is not to say, however, that Hurston’s point of view has since become entirely invalidated. As a recent study by Mitchell Duneier has shown, the characterization of the black community as a problematic one is persistent to the present day in the many one-sided sociological accounts of inner city destabilization. What started with DuBois’s path-breaking portrayal of urban misery in Philadelphia, Duneier claims, has since turned into a standard routine of social indictment and typification, thereby “[making] the most ‘respectable’ patterns of black life invisible.”39 Focusing exclusively on the social plight of African Americans, sociology has not only ignored the constructive and self-regulatory legacy of their communities but also contributed to their distorted public representation as problematic groups in need of continued supervision and intervention.40 Adding further to this distorted interpretation of black society is sociology’s tendency to promote what it commonly typifies as traditional middle-class values of social cohesion and stability while devaluing social structures among the working classes as categorically bankrupt. Duneier’s study challenges such facile characterization by exploring the manner in which practices of working-class black men, contrary to sociological expectations, foster their own standards of ethics and communal and social stability. This sociological description of instability and backwardness imputed to the black masses was recognized early on by Hurston and her colleagues, who chose instead to foreground the self-regulating social structures already present in rural black communities and their adaptation in urban lifestyles. The lasting contribution of Hurston lies with the recognition of a self-esteem engendered from within a dislocated community. Indeed, as Cornel West discerns from a present perspective, liberal philanthropy and social reform cannot overcome the nihilism threatening the very existence of a “people hungry for identity, meaning and self-worth.”41 It is not surprising that Alice Walker would begin her famous foreword describing her “need of Zora Neale Hurston’s work,” instilling as it does racial health and self-affirmation.42 The Folk in Harlem: Zora Neale Hurston’s Urban Folklore As one of the few critics to discuss extensively the conservative political and sociological underpinnings in Hurston, Hazel Carby has focused on Hurston’s work from the 1920s and 1930s and its uncritical reproduction of an authentic black folk culture and “discursive displacement of contemporary social crisis” (PF 76). Hurston’s representation of black culture as predominantly rural and oral is a nostalgic response, argues Carby, that ignores




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or displaces the historical fact of the great urban migration: “Hurston did not take seriously the possibility that African-American culture was being transformed as African-American peoples migrated from rural to urban areas” (PF 76). Instead, her main anthropological concerns—the preservation and proper recording of a quickly dying folklore—are obscured by a “romantic (or colonial) vision” that problematically fetishizes cultural difference and the Other. Ultimately, claims Carby, Hurston’s early work reconstructs the folk into an ideal aesthetic device outside the confines of African American history and culture, giving “a representation of ‘Negroness’ as an unchanging, essential entity, an essence so distilled that it is an aesthetic position of blackness” (PF 77). Carby points to the problematic aspects of Hurston’s work that were briefly discussed above: in particular, the author’s representation of a black folk located in a mythic time outside the confines of its history and enclosed within its circular act of self-authentication. Interpreting Hurston from a one-sided context, however, Carby at the same time ignores the radical elements of Hurston’s early folk writings and their unique modernist perspective, with their representations of an already-displaced people. Carby returns to Richard Wright’s notorious review of Their Eyes and asks critics to reconsider seriously its claim that “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues . . . the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.”43 Richard Wright, in his review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, accused Hurston of recreating minstrelsy. Though this remark is dismissed out of hand by contemporary critics, what it does register is Wright’s reaction to what appears to him to be an outmoded form of historical consciousness. Whereas Wright attempted to explode the discursive category of the Negro as being formed, historically, in the culture of minstrelsy, and as being the product of a society structured in dominance through concepts of race, Hurston wanted to preserve the concept of Negroness, to negotiate and rewrite its cultural meanings, and, finally, to reclaim an aesthetically purified version of blackness. (PF 79)

Wright, claims Carby, realized that Hurston’s attempt to preserve black culture was ultimately that of an “outmoded form of historical consciousness,” one that Wright was intent on destroying. Though Carby is correct in pointing to Hurston’s belief in and reproduction of an authentic black folk culture, she does not take into consideration the equally strong counter perspective in Hurston’s work that also demonstrates the transformative process of this culture and its various adaptations to modern urban America. Carby’s analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God ultimately misreads



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Hurston’s references to foreign cultural influences (particularly Caribbean) and the different patterns of migration in Florida. Instead, Carby chooses to read these as exotic evocations of “the romantic imagination so characteristic of ethnography in the 1930s” with their “romantic discovery by the writer of people and places unknown to the reader” (PF 80). Rather than explore in the manner of Wright the urban crisis created by the black migration northward, Hurston, claims Carby, depicts the Florida of Their Eyes as part of an exotic tale in the manner of the adventurous travelogue. In doing so, Carby ignores the unique history and geographical location of Florida, which had and continues to have close ties with Caribbean and Spanish cultures. Documenting the multiethnic culture of the state in the 1930s, the Florida Writers Project noted the “great conglomeration of people hardly equaled anywhere in America,” including “Cuban exiles, black migrants from Georgia, black immigrants from the Bahamas, Caribbean, etc.”44 Similarly, the migration patterns of Florida tended to be southward in direction and not always to large urban centers (as accurately described by Hurston in Their Eyes), due to the state’s significant migrant population and the seasonal jobs offered by citrus growers, truck farms, and lumber and turpentine camps.45 Indeed, it was not until the 1940s “that more black Floridians lived in urban rather than rural areas.”46 Ultimately, Carby’s analysis ignores the manner in which different regions or locations adapted to America’s modernization. Far from being a displacement of the northern migration and urban crisis or a romantic vision of the folk, Hurston’s Their Eyes demonstrates one manner in which a region of the rural South and its black folk confront an increasingly modern lifestyle in which folk culture was not only transformed in the process but also transformed America’s urban smalltown culture. In the end, Their Eyes emphasizes the cross-cultural and transnational characteristics of Florida, demonstrating that modern social, demographic, and cultural changes occur differently in various regions across the United States. In addition, Hurston’s metropolitan folklore set in Harlem proves that the author was far from being a rural idealist or nostalgic ethnographic writer. Looking closely at Hurston’s urban folklore, a small and largely ignored body of her work, I would like to recover the obscured modern element in her writings, thereby refuting the myth of Hurston as being solely concerned with the preservation of “Negroness.” These stories set in Harlem allow us to foreground the central modernist concerns of Hurston that are perhaps not so evident in her rural stories. As this discussion will show, both Hurston’s urban and rural folklore exhibit similar patterns of displacement in their narrative and linguistic strategies. This discussion will further clarify reactionary elements in Hurston’s work without reducing it to minstrelsy or an outmoded folkloric perspective.




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One of Hurston’s first works to use an urban setting, the short story “Muttsy” (1926) demonstrates the pervasive element of dislocation in black culture and is also an example of her attempt to distinguish her work from the emancipatory discourse of DuBois. The story describes the meeting and eventual marriage of Muttsy Owens, a successful and wealthy high-stakes Harlem gambler, to Pinkie Jones, a pretty and inexperienced country lass from Eatonville, Florida, and plays with the popular myths and stereotypes associated with the corrupting influences of the city and the wholesomeness of the country.47 Upon her arrival in Harlem, Pinkie is directed to a social house/brothel, where hard-living men like Muttsy gather to drink, gamble, and socialize with women. The story takes place mainly in the brothel run by the dubious Ma Turner, formerly known as “Forty-dollars-Kate,” because as her husband explains, “twenty-five years ago . . . men wuz glad, ‘nough to spend forty dollars on her if dey had it” (M 22). Young and childlike, Pinkie nevertheless mistrusts Ma immediately, noting how “her smile resembled the smile of the Wolf in Red Riding Hood” (M 20). In fact, Pinkie’s girlish appearance hides her keen perceptive skills, showing the seemingly sheltered country girl to be no stranger to the so-called urban traits of deceit and decadence. The traditional narrative of migration from country to city, likened to one from innocence to corruption, is thereby questioned and the modern condition of dislocation, one involving the breakdown of common morality, is shown to affect both urban and rural regions. From the start, Hurston makes it clear that Pinkie has not been spared abuse. Pinkie has left the South not simply to better herself economically but because it was never truly her home: Pinkie smelt the liquor on Ma’s breath and felt contaminated at her touch. She wished herself back home again even with the ill treatment and squalor. She thought of the three dollars she had secreted in her shoe—she had been warned against pickpockets—and flight but where? Nowhere. For there was no home to which she could return, nor any place else she knew of. But when she got a job, she’d scrape herself clear of people who took toddies. (M 24)

For all intents and purposes, Pinkie is a true migrant, belonging to no place and time except the present. The stress on the single lost word “Nowhere,” placed centrally into the paragraph, iconographically depicts Pinkie’s fate as a floating itinerant. As a migrant, she is drawn to sites offering some type of shelter and employment. Contrary to Carby’s claim that Hurston ignored the phenomenon of urban migration, this story clearly depicts a prototypical homeless and uprooted protagonist, reflecting the fate of people who migrate to the cities. This fate, as Hurston’s story describes it here, offers no return to a presumably safe sanctuary like the rural countryside but



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is an irreversible migration. Worse, it merely repeats the displacement— joblessness, breakdown of family and social structure—that had already occurred in the provinces. Hurston’s story betrays no nostalgia for pure or unencumbered origins but projects only the hope for partial economic stability in a thoroughly diasporic world. Similarly, Muttsy leads a migrant lifestyle and is well known in Harlem for his gambling and philandering. As Ma proudly exclaims to Pinkie: “Mah Gawd, chile! He’s de bes’ gambler in three states, cards, craps, un hawses” (M 29). Drawn to Pinkie’s seeming inexperience and vulnerability, Muttsy decides to “treat her white” by marrying her and giving her a home in the traditional sense (M 34). He gives up his unstable but prosperous occupation of a gambler and instead takes the more socially acceptable job of dock foreman. Unable to adjust to this “white” and conventional lifestyle, however, Muttsy, after one month of marriage, returns to his old vice of gambling. Hurston’s story suggests that even economic and middle-class stability cannot overcome a pervasive sense of dislocation that has become a part of African American culture. This dislocation, however, is not viewed in negative or pathological terms as the failure to adjust to mainstream society but instead articulates a vital difference. Muttsy’s closing remark, “What man can’t keep one li’l wife an’ two li’l bones [dice]?” insists upon a sociocultural balance that acknowledges his ability to take care of his wife and lead an unconventional lifestyle (M 37). In fact, Muttsy figures as an antidote to imposed middle-class values of stability and standardization that deplete the vitality and experience of the African American lifeworld. As Langston Hughes writes: But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised! The people who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O let’s dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations.48

This vitality of the folk is underscored in Hurston’s story by a similar modernist insistence on performative time: “They danced on, played on, sang their blues and lived on hotly their intense lives” (M 21). Also, its central character, Muttsy, frames the tale as the brothel’s pianist, establishing a




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partial identification with the perspective of the author. Muttsy is the hero of the story and his lifestyle is not to be questioned but displayed as exemplary of the modern condition. Unlike traditional folklore, which operates teleologically—the return to one’s native soil—Hurston’s urban folklore dwells on the contemporaneity of her characters’ actions, which resolve in no conclusive telos other than that of the fully lived present: “The pianist kept time with his heel and informed an imaginary deserter that ‘she might leave and go to Halimufack, but his slow-drag would bring her back’” (M 19). This temporal imprisonment of the deserter in the rhythm of the music depicts the condition of a present from which there is no escape into a safe past or home, only the “slow-drag” of time. Indeed, even the present cannot provide ontological grounding, as it is thoroughly marked by displacement, migrancy, and the prospect of impending death. As the story’s repeated refrain of a blues song intones: “Ahm gointer make me a graveyard of mah own” (M 26). Within the African American tradition, Hurston’s story refutes the emancipatory, assimilationist narratives of the talented tenth and instead presents seemingly uneducated and uprooted “Negro” life as sufficient and adequate rather than as deficient or pathological expressions of culture. Sites such as gambling houses, drinking joints, and brothels, Hurston and Hughes suggest, are not aberrations of a folk culture corrupted by the urban environment but adaptations of traditional social forms. These sites function as social institutions, often replacing the traditional ones of family, the neighborhood, and the front porch of the general store. Indeed, these social sites are updated folkloric representations of Henry James’s “hotelspirit” that captures the mobility of the modern urban era.49 As James Borchert’s fascinating study on the evolving communal structures of alley life in Washington, D.C., shows, folk life was not erased in the Great Migration but was adapted to fit urban conditions. Far from being a lifestyle exhibiting signs of cultural breakdown or degeneration, alley life in Washington is a site of nonsynchronicity and demonstrates black migrants’ sophisticated abilities to modify and adapt their folk culture and hence to remodel their urban environment.50 Characters like Muttsy in many ways anticipate the well-known character Jake Brown, the working-class hero of Claude McKay’s dynamic novel Home to Harlem (1928), with its depiction of a social side of the black metropolis that many of its educated and elite inhabitants did not want publicized. An unpublished play, written by Hurston (and heavily edited by Hughes) around the same time as “Muttsy,” heightens this irreverent stance towards emancipatory narratives in the form of a farce depicting the all-toostereotypical sexually promiscuous African American male.51 Indeed, this one-act play, variously entitled The Death of Sugar Foot and The Funeral of



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Harlem’s Sheik, would hardly be distinguishable from minstrelsy, were it not for the context of the Harlem Renaissance from within which it must be read and against whose discourse it reacts. Set in an elaborate and ornate Harlem funeral parlor, the play opens to the cries of newspaper boys, declaring the death of a prominent Harlemite: “Extra Paper! All about the death of Harlem’s great lover! Extra, just out!” (SF 2). Dozens of grieving women claiming to be the dead man’s lover or fiancée push to reach the casket as funeral attendants unsuccessfully attempt to keep them at bay. The promiscuous male protagonist, nicknamed Sugar Foot or the Harlem Sheik, would seem to underscore the inability of male African Americans to abide by traditional social contracts such as marriage. In the play, however, this inability is comically parodied as an irreverent gesture of freedom, albeit one that is eventually curbed by the protagonist’s spouse, who pursues her philandering husband. The farce acquires a second layer of critique, in which it ridicules the patriarchal power of the male hero who stages an elaborate mock funeral so as to escape the wrath of his betrayed wife after she espies him with “Lulu Belle” in a “low-down cabaret” (SF 2). With The Death of Sugar Foot/The Funeral of Harlem’s Sheik, Hurston mischievously engages the myths surrounding the black male’s imputed social unreliability and his seemingly unchecked masculine power. The play also pokes fun at the creative economics of Harlem’s citizens, who attempt to profit from any event, including death. Sugar Foot charges an entrance fee to his own funeral; local newspapers sell his last words (HS 3); a vendor hawks 10 cent engagement rings (HS 3); a creditor attempts to remove the gold coffin handles as repayment; and, a movie camera is set up at Sugar Foot’s head to film the entire spectacle. Moreover, Sugar Foot manages to stage a lavish funeral on a tight budget, saving money by purchasing formerly used elaborate wreaths with inscriptions such as “Rest in Asbestos,” “Keep Cool with Cal,” “Babe Ruth for President,” and “Vote for Light Wines and Beer” (HS 3). Commenting on the wreaths in her stage directions, Hurston notes, “there may be a wreath of cabbage leaves with a pork chop motif, or one of red roses in shape of slice of watermelon” (SF 7). As becomes evident from the farcical setting and props, the stereotypes are merely masks deliberately deployed to evoke comedy as well as produce a defiant gesture that challenges typification. In the fictional farce, the stereotype ultimately no longer possesses the framing power of perception that it has in everyday discourse. Instead, the farce depletes the stereotype of its content, foregrounding its arbitrary manipulability or its fictional and metaphorical aspects. It is on this point that Hurston’s farce differs from minstrelsy, in which stereotype and mimesis are not disjointed but reinforce one another so as to lend even greater power to the stereotype. Sugar Foot/the Harlem Sheik, a man with one wife, 18 fiancées, and countless lovers and admirers,




Ethnic Modernisms

is a hyperbolic construct, which through exaggeration explodes the myths surrounding the sexual prowess and activity of the black male. In the end, we are left with a comical deflation of the stereotype as well as of minstrelsy. Indeed, Hurston’s farce is best described as “critical minstrelsy.” In the play Color Struck (1926), one of her contributions to the shortlived journal Fire!!, Hurston dwells on another controversial topic, namely the internalization of the color hierarchy by African Americans, in which those with white blood (mulattos) are considered to be socially, culturally, and/or biologically superior.52 Hurston’s complex play, however, does not focus on the sociological aspects of this phenomenon within America’s apartheid society but instead shifts her attention to the self-hatred it produces within the black community. The play, set around 1900, opens on a train with its passengers leaving Jacksonville, Florida to participate in a statewide cakewalk-dancing contest in St. Augustine. In using a Jim Crow rail coach as her opening setting, Hurston at once demonstrates the social restraints that American blacks confront as well as their ability, or inability, to live productively within these limitations. A microcosm of America, the train evokes its cultural contradictions such as technological modernity existing side by side with parochial racial beliefs, promises of social mobility overshadowed by apartheid laws, and a romanticized notion of leisure and travel infused with the frontier spirit that is contrasted by painful displacements, ongoing migrations, and diasporas. The title of the play, Color Struck, refers to the young, dark-skinned female protagonist, Emmaline, and her restricted self-perception that like the Jim Crow train ranks the two races not only as separate but also as first-class and third-class passengers. In Emma’s discriminatory outlook, this social stratification of race leads to an internalization of society’s color-coded rules. The dark Emma’s excessive envy of yellow-skinned blacks points ultimately to her own self-hatred of her race and the underlying belief in its inferiority. Unable to love anyone, especially herself, Emma breaks off her engagement for fear that her fiancé will eventually leave her for a “yaller wench” (CS 8). The play strongly suggests that she also kills her illegitimate half-white daughter by refusing to call the doctor on time. Hurston dramatizes this internalization of America’s racial hierarchy and suggests that this type of self-perception, even more so than actual discriminatory practices, constitutes the real obstacle of racism. Unlike the other characters (particularly Emma’s fiancé John), who are able to live productively in spite of America’s racist society, Emma is kept back mainly due to her own mental outlook. Racism, Color Struck suggests, is not merely perpetrated by white society as an external force but has, more significantly, taken on an independent internal life in the black imaginary. Moreover, it points to Emma’s inability to accept the fact of black Americans’ racial (miscegenation) and cultural hybridity. Hurston’s narrative be-



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trays an unease that is uncharacteristic of traditional folklore, with its harmonization of cultural tensions and images of communal stability. In Hurston’s play, the belief in a pure ethnic identity ultimately conflicts with those identities that do not belong to a neat bipolar black and white reality, as Jim Crow laws and Emma’s hatred would have it. The black community is not portrayed in any cohesive sense but carries from within it ruptures, tensions, and insurmountable contradictions. In fact, Hurston’s work is far from being ethno-centric in any traditional sense. If, as Henry Louis Gates claims, Hurston’s work is concerned with the “representation of the speaking black voice in writing,” it is also concerned with its transformation as it encounters a modern era of nonsynchronicity decidedly marked by migration and dislocation. Barbara Johnson’s astute comment that Hurston’s work erects difference in order to erase it is more accurate here, pointing out how Hurston does not so much privilege a black speaking subject as point to its complex formulations of identity and difference.53 In doing so, Hurston’s work also points to the irrelevance of the assimilationist question that presupposes clear-cut cultural identities, repressing the fact of migration and displacement. It is particularly in her rendering of black speech that Hurston depicts this condition of dislocation. The innovation in Hurston’s use of black vernacular rests not so much with her accurate transliteration of black folk speech (which Hurston herself took great pride in) but with her depiction of its communicative agency that allows it to adapt to and interact with different environments. Her urban folklore captures this flexibility of folk speech, foregrounding its ability to absorb and be absorbed by (cross-assimilation) its environment. In Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang: Jelly’s Tale,” which first appeared in American Mercury in 1942 complete with a glossary explaining the slang to its white audience, we see this linguistic ability depicted in the argot of black male prostitutes. The story’s narration, with its shifting and often mixed repertoires of Standard English and Harlem slang, allows white readers to enter into the ghettoized world of Harlem, giving them the satisfaction of linguistic competence in this otherwise exotic and foreign linguistic terrain. The story both enlightens and entertains its readers by laying Harlem’s lower culture open for a reassessment of its spirit. What may be viewed stereotypically as a dreary social ghetto takes on for the reader a surprising vitality exhibited in linguistic games of boasting and playing the dozens. These verbal games can be considered indicative verbal conventions of black speech, deriving their origin from the difficult communicative transaction with white authority. Rehearsing and training verbal competence, these games possess the function of making their speakers survive in a hostile world through wit, quick retorts, and elaborate linguistic inventions. The narrator, borrowing from the speaking skills of the protagonist




Ethnic Modernisms

Jelly, likewise moves and mediates between the idioms of different cultures. And still on another level, Hurston successfully markets this story by being at once faithful to its depicted community and by also being able to anticipate the imaginative horizon of its addressed readers. The story, a day in the life of a Harlem hustler and prostitute nicknamed Jelly, is narrated mainly in slang but significantly switches to Standard English at certain times. The narrator’s opening makes use of folkloric conventions, as seen in its emphasis on orality, playful association of words, and the active role of the narrator, whose comments and asides are an integral part of the tale: Wait till I light up my coal-pot and I’ll tell you about this Zigaboo called Jelly. Well, all right now. He was a sealskin brown and papa-tree-top-tall. Skinny in the hips and solid built for speed. He was born with this rough-dried hair, but when he laid on the grease and pressed it down overnight with his stockingcap, it looked just like that righteous moss, and had so many waves you got seasick from looking. Solid, man, solid!54

Unlike traditional folklore, the tale is not so much concerned with the story itself but with language and its playful variation of the semantic wealth of speech. “Story in Harlem Slang,” Robert Hemenway has noted, “was less fiction than a linguistic study.”55 More precisely, it concentrates less on the tale itself than on what motivates the telling of the tale, namely the sheer exuberance and performative aspects of Jelly’s language as seen in its vitality, its innovative potential, and above all, its migrating characteristics. As an argot, a language of exclusion and recognition, Jelly’s slang is subject to constant change, proliferating new vocabulary daily as a necessity. The secret greetings that he gives to his fellow prostitutes and those interested in his services help to keep law enforcers at bay. Hurston also makes it clear that language sustains the hungry Jelly and his colleague Sweet Back, since their linguistic skills not only attract customers but also provide them with solace when they are unsuccessful in finding women to buy them a meal and give them money. Unable to admit truthfully to his fellow prostitute (and himself ) that he is “cold in hand,” Jelly draws on the semantic wealth of his language, telling “lies” to make up for his poverty and sustain his hopes: Man, I come on like Gang Busters, and go off like The March of Time! If dat ain’t so, God is gone to Jersey City and you know He wouldn’t be messing, ‘round a place like that. Know what my woman done? We hauled off and went to church last Sunday, and when they passed ‘round the plate for the penny collection, I throwed in a dollar. De man looked at me real hard for dat. Dat made my woman mad, so she called him back and throwed in a



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The account, with its deliberate boasts, shows how innovative exaggeration legitimates the illegitimate reality of criminals. Turning two wrongs into a right, Jelly thrives on the imaginative power of reinforced and escalating lies. While he may be a dubious character by traditional standards, Jelly is also a fine rhetorician who knows how to bend and reimagine reality in his colorful speeches. Judged from a literary point of view, his speech is more productive and creative than that of the ordinary law-abiding citizen who hides behind linguistic commonplaces. Jelly also depends upon his creative use of language to attract women and compete with the other prostitutes. “But baby!” he exclaims to a potential customer, “Dat shape you got on you! I bet the Coca Cola Company is paying you good money for the patent!” (HS 88). Jelly, unfortunately, is unsuccessful in the end and the story closes in Standard English and switches to a third- person narrator, revealing the limitations of his language and “lies”: “Jelly’s thoughts were far away. He was remembering those full, hot meals he had left back in Alabama to seek wealth and splendor in Harlem without working. He had even forgotten to look cocky and rich (HS 89).” The tale’s final paragraph, which demystifies Jelly’s linguistic ability and places his exuberant and racy rhetoric squarely into the more sobered context of urban poverty, ends on a tone of nostalgia associating the South with a natural abundance and the North with shattered illusions. It is, however, a self-conscious nostalgia, one that the narrator knows is a dream and foreign—hence its pronouncement in Standard English— and one that remains ambivalent in its critical suspension of Jelly’s voice. The story’s two narrators do not entirely converge in a single vision but offer competing and diverse versions of reality. The structural features of Hurston’s urban folklore, its sobered depiction of displacement, and conversely, the farcical dismantling of minstrel stereotypes and their joyful linguistic heteroglossia, ultimately do not passively represent but actively reconfigure urban life so as to point to its inherent modern ambience. As a conscious modernist, Hurston is not content in giving the reader a mere portrayal of a modern social milieu but wants the reader to experience actively a vivid urban atmosphere that the author is still in the process of discovering. Language, plot, setting, and character function as objective correlatives of the theme of dislocation and its shaping influence on African American identity. They also convey the exuberance of a community that is far from being downtrodden. In the above examples, as we have seen, characters and their histrionic language create a unique urban setting, reminding the reader that dislocation is not merely a material given, the result of urban migration, but a stubbornly conscious preservation of its



twenty dollar bill! Told him to take dat and go! Dat’s what he got for looking at me ‘cause I throwed in a dollar. (HS 86)

Ethnic Modernisms

uprooted lifestyle as a legitimate mode of dwelling. Hurston thus does not characterize this diasporic outlook as unnatural but explores its imaginative possibilities as a valuable cultural paradigm. Herein lies the great contribution of Hurston’s modernism, namely her narrative illustration and documentation of a modern sensibility of affirmed dislocation that has shaped both folk and urban lifestyles of African Americans. Just as Gertrude Stein took pride in the fact that the United States had lived longer in the twentieth century than Europe and was therefore in the end more modern, Hurston implicitly suggests that the African American experience stands at the very forefront of modernism through its long history and intimate familiarity with dislocation. In her rural folklore, moreover, Hurston provides hardly any more stability than in her urban folklore, showing instead that these communities, while seemingly established and timeless, are similarly initiating, undergoing, and adapting to profound changes and disintegrations. As in Faulkner’s Yoknapathawa County, social ruptures mark Hurston’s rural domains. Divorced from tradition and custom, her characters turn to theatrical improvisation for lack of any profoundly felt belonging. Admittedly, as Carby has argued, Hurston’s rural folklore at times reverts to traditional and hermetic portrayals of a self-sufficient folk life. In her introduction to Mules and Men (1935) for example, Hurston characterizes black folk as evasive, offering a “feather-bed resistance” to the curious, suggesting that only other members of their community (like Hurston) are allowed real access to their culture.56 At the same time, however, it is hard to discount that these stories are also marked by a profound restlessness and dispersion that shatters the illusions of a sedentary black folk. The recent fascination with Hurston as an ethnic folk and feminist writer has upheld a traditionalist interpretation of her work at the expense of its modernist advances. Carby correctly questions this recent elevation of Hurston’s traditional folklore by the academy and culture industry at a time when college enrollments show a sharp drop in black students and the presence of blacks in universities is at best fragile. Pointing out the link between the transformation of Hurston into a profitable cultural icon and the lack of response by academic critics to the ongoing black crisis in urban America, Carby astutely reveals how Hurston has been used as a vehicle for cultural commodity interests and conformist acquiescence. However, in questioning Hurston’s iconic value without evaluating her work from within its own operative historical context, Carby repeats the mistakes she attributes to other academics. Carby ultimately does not question the misleading representation of Hurston’s work but intervenes in the cultural polemics surrounding it. As I have tried to show here, the ahistorical representation of Hurston as a traditionalist cannot be sustained if one carefully considers her urban folk-



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lore and its impact upon her subsequent work. Keeping in mind Hurston’s aesthetics of dislocation, her keen modernist sensibility, and her conscious positioning from within the Harlem Renaissance, one wonders if her entire work, though admittedly not without problems, deserves a thorough reevaluation. In other words, Hurston’s work begs for a more sober acknowledgment of its modernist aspects apart from present cultural politics that serve to obscure the historical context in which she wrote. The Transnational Perspective: The Experience of the African Diaspora in Tell My Horse and Moses, Man of the Mountain Just as Hurston’s urban folklore places her more well-known folk stories into the larger context of the black American experience of displacement and migration, Hurston’s travelogue Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) and her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) similarly place the African American experience into a larger cosmopolitan perspective of the African Diaspora. In these works, which have been relatively ignored or dismissed by critics, Hurston follows the lead of DuBois and his attempts to create a transnational solidarity with other communities of color. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy, using DuBois as one of his models, describes a world of the black Atlantic, one that offers a compelling intercultural alternative to specific cultural and nationalist epistemes of black identity. Gilroy, however, outright dismisses Hurston and her work as contributing to such an intercultural perspective, citing Carby’s analysis as proof that Hurston saw the folk as “custodians of an essentially invariant, anti-historical notion of black particularity.”57 In this section, I want to discuss Hurston’s use of Caribbean and other cultures to break open African American consciousness and to locate alternative expressions of identity. Unlike Mules and Men, with its near-mythical temporality and reproduction of a seemingly hermetic and self-sufficient black folk community, Tell My Horse and Moses, Man of the Mountain foreground the ideological ambivalence and sense of dislocation that constitute the modern experience of community and nation. Hurston’s territorial excursions outside the American mainland in Tell My Horse are not motivated by a search for exotic settings, as Carby asserts, but are an attempt to confront the variety of hybrid African diaspora cultures. Moses, Man of the Mountain, an overlooked work of great ambition and certainly one of Hurston’s best, modifies the expansive focus on the African Diaspora and once again seeks to integrate an aesthetics of dislocation into a nationalist discourse. We therefore see in Hurston an ongoing dialectics between an interiorizing and, an externalizing, or expanding of the African American experience so as to translate this experience into other cultural contexts.




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Read alone, Mules and Men would appear to display none of the cosmopolitan features typical of Hurston’s later work but instead emphasize the hermetic nature of African American consciousness. In her introduction to Mules and Men, Hurston discusses the difficulty one encounters when attempting to collect black folklore. Due to a suspicious wariness of outsiders, underprivileged blacks, as Hurston observes, will often hide their true sentiments beneath a mask of unburdened gaiety: Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually underprivileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries. The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.”58

Hurston describes the inability of an outsider, or more precisely, a white American or even middle-class African American, to collect and access properly black folklore, suggesting not only the complexity of black folk culture but that it is hermetic, reclusive, and self-sufficient. These hermetic aspects of the culture are foregrounded in the stories that comprise Mules and Men and may give the reader the misleading impression that black folk culture is foreign, exotic, and ultimately disconnected rather than marginalized from the mainstream American perspective. Indeed, in an attempt to depict the African American experience from beyond a patronizing, emancipatory discourse, Hurston portrays her hometown of Eatonville, one of Florida’s first all-black townships, as an entirely independent and self-reliant community. She does so, however, at the expense of any internal critique, ignoring the interdependence and interrelations of cultures. Hurston’s ideal community in Mules and Men as a result represents a utopia entirely disconnected from America’s social reality and its possible transformations. Poverty, ignorance, and disenfranchisement become seemingly unchanging ontological conditions, characterizing the black community as having no recourse to civic and social agency in the larger context of America’s sociopolitical landscape. For all their vitality, charm, and independence, Hurston’s characters display a



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political complacency that unwittingly upholds the Southern feudal order, with its social stagnation and white supremacist outlook. Hurston’s programmatic attempt to recover the black oral tradition from the brink of its extinction leads in Mules and Men to a more stringent typification of her community than in, for instance, her earlier loosely assembled “The Eatonville Anthology,” with its underlying critical exposure of destructive communal behavior, such as domestic violence, alcoholism, and prostitution. Since Hurston, as she claims in her introduction to Mules and Men, had to detach herself from her community so as to observe it more objectively through an “anthropological spy-glass,” it comes as no surprise that the delineation of her object of study is too-sharply drawn. While this hermetic depiction stresses initially the autonomy of a culture that had always been reserved for whites or blacks fulfilling the expectations of whites as well as upper-class blacks, it ultimately produces a culture isolated within America and from its historical connections with the African Diaspora. Once having achieved this delineation of a black ethnicity that had been denied to African Americans, Hurston consequently found it necessary to portray black folk culture with more flexibility, describing the variety of interactions that surrounded and shaped its core. One should also bear in mind that the introduction to Mules and Men already announces the unreliability of the narrator, one that is at the mercy of the hermetic community, with its deceiving masks worn when communicating with outsiders. And if Hurston is an insider, as her wellknown introduction claims, then she herself falls under the suspicion of using similar evasive strategies of communication. This persona of the unreliable narrator is even more clearly seen in her Caribbean study that extends the communal focus of Mules and Men to other African diaspora cultures, placing the American black folk experience into a larger African context. Here the anthropological collector of communal myths and tales can barely be distinguished from the storyteller-narrator, casting doubts upon the empirical evidence of her account. Canceling the distance between observer and observed object, the narrator takes us into the act of storytelling itself, stressing its performative value rather than its sociodocumentary status. According to Hemenway, Tell My Horse is Hurston’s “poorest book, chiefly because of its form.” She was a novelist and folklorist, not a political analyst or traveloguist. Yet Tell My Horse is filled with political analysis, often of a naïve sort, with superficial descriptions of West Indian curiosities. She reports a good deal of public gossip as accepted fact, and she reveals a chauvinism that must have infuriated her Haitian hosts.59




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Carby agrees, finding “Hurston’s overtly political comments” in the work “usually reactionary, blindly patriotic, and, consequently, superficial” (PF 87). At the time of its publication, Alain Locke simply dismissed the work, calling it “anthropological gossip.”60 However, the value of Tell My Horse is found especially in its unreliable narrator, one that challenges the objective and realist mode of address associated with the social scientist and the documentary genre. The narrator’s discussion, for example, of women’s issues in Jamaica and the United States ironically flaunts its naïve subjectivity. Under the broad chapter heading “Women in the Caribbean” that promises or at least suggests some sort of informed discussion on the subject, the reader instead finds these personal comments and opinions: The majority of men in [the United States] are pretty much agreed that just for being born a girl-baby you ought to have laws and privileges and pay and perquisites. And so far as being allowed to voice opinions is concerned, why, they consider that you are born with the law in your mouth, and that is not a bad arrangement either. The majority of the solid citizens strain their ears trying to find out what it is that their womenfolk want so they can strain around and try to get it for them, and that is a very good idea and the right way to look at things. But now Miss America, World’s champion woman, you take your promenading self down into the cobalt blue waters of the Caribbean and see what happens. You meet a lot of darkish men who make vociferous love to you, but otherwise pay you no mind. If you try to talk sense, they look at you right pitifully as if to say, “What a pity! That mouth that was made to supply some man (and why not me) with kisses, is spoiling itself asking stupidities about banana production and wages!” It is not that they try to put you in your place, no. They consider that you never had any. If they think about it at all, they think that they are removing you from MAN’s place and then granting you the privilege of receiving his caresses . . . Naturally women do not receive the same educational advantages as the men.61

In this account it becomes evident that Hurston writes a type of Hurstonese similar to Gertrude Stein’s autonomous language of Steinese that is characteristic of her modernism. While raising the expectations of the semiobjective travelogue, Hurston’s account fulfills none of these conventional features but instead becomes a modernist folktale told in Hurston’s idiosyncratic expression. The passage is provocative rather than neutral, quick to insult every cultural sensibility involved. Caribbean culture is claimed to be deeply misogynist whereas American culture is pompously self-confident: “But now Miss America, World’s champion woman, you take your promenading self down into the cobalt blue waters of the Caribbean and see what happens” (TMH 57). In an argument that cuts against both cultures in its comparison, the reader is left with no conclusive evidence of cultural customs.



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Exploding the anthropological perspective of her mentor Franz Boas, himself suspicious of anthropological generalizations, Hurston takes the reader into the midst of her narrative universe, one that stubbornly resists the rule of facts and delights instead in the inevitable reality of subjective bias and prejudice. What emerges is a hilarious semifictional encounter of two cultures that highlights their internal prejudices and discounts objective representations. Here it is surprising to note that Richard Wright, an unsympathetic critic of Hurston but fervent admirer of Stein, whom he praised for her ability to create black dialect in “Melanctha,” could not see the striking similarity of their stylistic insistence on self-generated language that resists genres and conventions of any kind.62 Hurston’s modernism, similar to Stein’s, acts in response to the increasing scientific and objectifying gaze that is brought to bear upon culture. The communicative universe, her prose indirectly asserts, is grounded in narrative and cannot be abstracted into pure fact. Ironically, the above paragraph’s concluding sentence, “Naturally women do not receive the same educational advantages of the men,” ends on a verifiable sociological fact. Highlighting linguistically the prejudicial nature of cultural statements and generalizations, the narrator alerts the reader to be wary of similar statements couched in the prose of science and at the same time exposes her own prose as subject to prejudice. The unreliable narrator in Hurston is no longer a narrative device of ambiguity but functions as a modern episteme, pointing to the prejudicial nature of all linguistic utterances. Tell My Horse should thus be read against the grain, keeping in mind not only Hurston’s intentionally unreliable and inept narrator, who confuses gossip and fact, but the national “habit of lying” that she attributes to her equally unreliable source, the Haitians (TMH 81). However, what the reader should take seriously is the symbolic dimension of culture expressed through Voodoo ritual and other folk customs of the West Indies. Cultural understanding, Hurston suggests, requires a narrative frame of mind attuned to fiction and its playful and ironic manipulation of so-called truths. An account of various Voodoo rituals in Jamaica and Haiti, Tell My Horse not only describes religious practices but their significance as a repressed plebeian imaginary, coexisting alongside the official assimilationist bourgeois public sphere of mulattoes and higher-class Caribbean Africans. As with her earlier work, the condition of modernity is not harbored exclusively by the progressive or enlightened forces of society but appears as the tension between so-called progressive and regressive elements, namely civic and folk culture. With its focus on cultural dislocation, Hurston’s modernism reproduces an analogous situation in the Caribbean world, where cultural identity is always surrounded by ambivalence and complex expressions of affiliation. For example, Voodoo folk culture carries the repressed memory




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of slavery and social death (as embodied by the ritual rebirth of zombies and duppies) and exists in the shadow of Haiti and Jamaica’s official cultures. Hurston, however, realizes that the official public sphere and its repressed counterpart, represented by the Voodoo religion of the folk together spell out the larger discourse of the nation. These two opposing cultures reflect in particular the contradictions of Caribbean African emancipation and its ongoing, though unacknowledged, difficulty in abandoning or normalizing the traumatic history of slavery, colonization, and despotism. These articulations of ambivalence are especially seen in Hurston’s analysis of zombies in Haiti. The fear of zombies (people who have returned from the dead) and all that they represent, she claims, “seeps over the country like a ground current of cold air. This fear is real and deep” (TMH 179). While both the folk and upper class Haitians undergo elaborate rituals or precautions to safeguard bodies of the recently dead, the latter tend to disavow zombies as part of folk myth and superstition. These disavowals, however, cannot account for the apparently documented existence of zombies. One doctor, whose hospital holds a patient identified as Felicia Felix-Mentor, claimed by the narrator to have died almost thirty years prior, offers a rational explanation: it is not a case of awakening the dead, but a matter of the semblance of death induced by some drug known to a few. Some secret probably brought from Africa and handed down from generation to generation. These men know the effect of the drug and the antidote. It is evident that it destroys that part of the brain which governs speech and power. The victims can move and act but cannot formulate thought. (TMH 196)

Mindless but able to carry out menial duties, zombies are well suited for labor exploitation. It is suspected by educated Haitians that most are sold into slavery by close relatives in need of quick cash. While demystifying the myth of Voodoo from a rational perspective and pointing to its unacknowledged utilitarian side, Hurston’s narrator also preserves in her account its present and ongoing ritual significance of a shared communal memory. The doctor’s explanation is treated as merely another interpretation and is listed alongside the irrational explanations of the folk. Modernity, as Hurston realizes, can never entirely overcome the irrational but coexists alongside it. In this respect, her text becomes a metaphor for the schizophrenic political situation governing Haiti and Jamaica, with its distorted internalization of white mastery now perpetrated by a black elite. Similarly, the work’s strange biographical account of General Francois Antoine Simon, a peasant who rose in the army ranks to become in 1908 the President of Haiti, and his daughter, the powerful Mambo (Voodoo



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priestess) Celestina Simon, illustrates this schizophrenic sociopolitical situation. Installed as a puppet president, General Simon along with his daughter, whose constant consort was her pet goat Simalo, rumored to be her betrothed and the source of her powers, prove at once to be the pride and laughing stock of the nation. Simon, Celestina, and Simalo are hailed by the folk as national heroes in stories celebrating their heroism and patriotism, now a part of Haiti’s rich folklore and national myths. Celestina, respectfully called “the Black Joan of Arc” by the narrator, is not only responsible for her father’s spectacular rise to the presidency, but also successfully leads the army with Simalo in its battle at Ansa-à-veau. Beloved by the Haitian soldiers, Celestina and Simalo the goat are said to make the army invincible simply with their presence at the forefront of the troops. At the same time, Simon and Celestina’s improper civic behavior and public ties to Voodooism create disgust, embarrassment, and fear among the upper and ruling classes. Forced by social codes to partake of the palace’s lavish dinners and civic functions, the latter classes are afraid of being poisoned or cursed and served the wrong type of meat. For it is rumored that their President and his daughter also belong to the dreaded Secte Rouge, a secret society and officially disavowed minority of Voodoo practitioners who sacrifice and consume human meat as part of their religion. Hurston’s account of Haiti’s Voodoo culture would appear as strangely exotic were it not for the political symbolism (zombies as slaves) that must have struck her as relevant in her own search for black self-determination in the United States. Confronted with a plebeian sphere that has managed to exert its influence through folkloric and narrative expression, Hurston ultimately cannot overlook its strong impact, however distorted and problematic, upon civic and national life. Apart from its many internal contradictions, Haitian folk culture has nevertheless managed to make its voice heard with the telling of myths of power and omnipotence in the public. This situation is different from that in the United States, where black folk still live in relative obscurity, with their folklore lacking a national resonance. The distortions or pathological elements of Voodoo, as Hurston’s account suggests, stem not from the religion itself but from its repression by an official or national culture. Defamed and distorted in public accounts by those who deem it primitive and unworthy of a civilized people and nation, Voodoo has become something that is compulsively denied a legitimate existence, while taking on underlying mythical proportions magnified far beyond its range: As someone in America said of whiskey, Voodoo has more enemies in public and more friends in private than anything else in Haiti. None of the sons of Voodoo who sit in high places have yet had the courage to defend it publicly,




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though they know quite well and acknowledge privately that Voodoo is a harmless pagan cult that sacrifices domestic animals as its worst. The very same animals that are killed and eaten every day in most of the civilized countries of the world. So since Voodoo is openly acknowledged by the humble only, it is safe to blame all the ill of Haiti on Voodoo. I predict that this state of affairs will not last forever. A feeling of nationalism is growing in Haiti among the young. They admire France less and less, and their own native patterns more. They are contending that Voodoo is not what is wrong with Haiti. The thing fettering the country is its politics and those foreign priests. (TMH 92)

Imagining Voodoo as a counter-culture to “foreign priests” and despotic politics, Hurston views Haitian folklore as a subversive mythology that assists the folk in their quest for political self-determination. The attraction of Voodoo as a distorted cultural expression is its invisible or inarticulate, but omnipresent force. Hurston’s travelogue portrays provocatively its cultural significance in the Caribbean, depicting at once its contradictory expressions of resiliency, cultural flexibility, communal affiliations, and social pathologies. As a cultural narrative, Voodoo becomes in Hurston, as Ishmael Reed writes in his foreword to Tell My Horse, “less a religion than a common language of slaves” extending to their heirs in modern Haiti and Jamaica (TMH xi-xv). With this common language, Hurston creates a transnational link from her earlier revival of African American folklore and Voodoo in Mules and Men to a Caribbean lore vitally alive in the public. Extending the hermetic world of Mules and Men, Hurston’s collection of Caribbean folklore explores the intimate links between folk expression and the larger community of nation. This dialectics between the various folk cultures and an official or national culture creates the ambivalent discourse of the nation, expressing “the disjunctive time of the nation’s modernity” that mediates “between the teleology of progress tipping over into the ‘timeless’ discourse of irrationality.”63 In her subsequent work, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston explores more deeply this ambivalent language and temporality of the nation, with its narratives of slavery, race, emancipation, and community. In Moses, Hurston manages to reconfigure the schizophrenic worlds of Tell My Horse into a more coherent expression of cultural displacement that is at once disruptive and productive. Tell My Horse, ultimately, could only depict a disjunctive temporality in the form of severe social pathologies represented by the despotic political landscapes of Haiti and Jamaica, with its distorted articulations and repression of Voodoo.64 This pathology is overcome in Moses by Hurston’s visionary attempt to project an ontology of dislocation that contrasts her ontology of belonging in Mules and Men. This ontology of dislocation allows Hurston to conceive of cultural disruptions in a much more productive rather than pathological



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sense. As with her Harlem folklore and “The Eatonville Anthology,” Hurston realizes that marginalized communities derive their identities and substance from underlying discontinuities, from contradictions that can never be fully harmonized. At the same time, she understands that these discontinuities do not necessarily shatter a community’s sense of self as much as introduce novelty, change, transformation, and alternative possibilities to the larger community of the nation. Since Mules and Men, the symbolic figure of Moses had intrigued Hurston, representing at once the more regional cultures of Africa and its diasporic communities as well as the larger, more cosmopolitan JudeoChristian culture and the Western world in general. In Mules and Men, Hurston discusses Moses’ significance in African American Voodoo lore as the man who could talk with God, and who learned from him the magical power of Voodoo. In Haitian Voodoo culture, as Hurston writes in Tell My Horse, Moses is associated with Dambhalla, the god of gods, whose symbol is the serpent. According to Hurston, all African cultures worship Moses and his significance cannot be solely explained, as it often is, as resulting from contact with Christianity. This contact helps to explain certain manifestations of the Moses myth but not the phenomenon itself and its many variations scattered throughout Africa and the world. In Moses, Man of the Mountain Hurston combines these various myths, bringing the concerns and perspective of a localized folklore into tension with a modern, universal narrative of emancipation, freedom, democracy, and nationbuilding. From the black folklore of the South, Hurston draws upon the concept of Moses as the great liberator, leading his chosen people out of slavery to form a great nation. This modern notion of Moses as a nationbuilder is combined with the Moses of African American and Caribbean Voodoo culture, in which religion is associated with magic (shamanism) and national politics. The result is not so much a clear representation of a nation but what Homi Bhabha calls the antagonistic and agonistic expression of a minority discourse that “acknowledges the status of national culture—and the people—as a contentious, performative space of the perplexity of the living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fullness of life.”65 Bhabha’s definition of the nation as an agonistic and performative space of competing interests and ethical lifeworlds concurs with Hurston’s depiction of Moses and the people of Israel as having various definitions of communal living, groping towards some form of understanding and consensus built on the dissonance of conflicting views. In this interpretation, Moses figures not so much as a lawgiver who brought the laws governing a new people down from Mt. Sinai carved in stone but as a man who “had the power to go up the mountain and to bring them down.”66 In stressing the power of Moses




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to build a nation, Hurston emphasizes the will and strength of the community to come together agonistically rather than the formal laws regulating it. “Anyone could bring down laws that had been handed to them,” Hurston writes in her introduction to the novel. “But who can talk with God face to face? Who had the power to command God to go to a peak of a mountain and there demand of Him laws with which to govern a nation? . . . That calls for power, and that is what Africa sees in Moses to worship” (MMM xxiiixxiv). Moses, Man of the Mountain offers not only a critique of nations such as the United States or the more extreme Nazi Germany, unable to come to terms with its heterogenous makeup, but a new vision of national identity and expression based on dislocation and difference. The agonistic expression of society and the nation in Hurston depicts the dilemma of modern democracy caught between incompatible desires: on the one hand, to speak as a whole, forming a coherent national expression; and, on the other, to balance the competing self-interests of various social and cultural communities as well as those of the individual. Rather than providing answers to such complex questions of nation, freedom, democracy, and tyranny, Hurston’s novel instead foregrounds the difficulty and the doubts suffered by Moses and the people of Israel. Confronted with an incomprehensible force and desire to create a nation from a community of slaves and other dispossessed peoples, Moses is unable to articulate his vision to a people more concerned with the daily aspects of life. “You have lost sight of your high destiny in your scramble for food,” Moses tell a group of Elders who have come to complain about the manna he provides for them (MMM 252). From the beginning to the end, misunderstanding, doubt, and suspicion, along with awe and respect, form the basic communicative elements between Moses and the people. Indeed, Moses’ life is in danger several times and only his magical powers keep the people at bay. Within the community of Israel, there is only one person he trusts, and even his purported siblings, Aaron and Miriam, prove to be enemies. Hurston makes it clear that the narratives of nation and freedom are governed not only by pure ideals but also by self-interest, greed, tyranny, and the desire for wealth and power. Similarly, Hurston’s account does away with the nationalist myth of pure origins. The story that Moses was born a Hebrew and adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter is depicted as a fabrication, one invented by Miriam to avoid a whipping from her mother after she fails to look after her baby brother properly. Miriam’s parents sense their daughter’s falsehood but eventually choose to overlook it for fear of confronting the truth of their son’s disappearance, namely that the baby was eaten by crocodiles or drowned by the Pharaoh’s soldiers (MMM 33). Likewise, in spite of suspicions to the contrary, the people of Israel accept and repeat Miriam’s story, turning it into a legend expressing a collective desire to have “a Hebrew in the palace”



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(MMM 35). The people, Moses later notes, in fact do not believe the story of his Hebrew origins but retell it in order to repress his Egyptian heritage and close relation to their former master. Moses’ Hebrew origin also helps to explain his irrational behavior of forsaking his position as nephew to the Pharaoh and leader of the Egyptian army to become the liberator of the country’s slaves. At the same time, the fact of Moses’ Egyptian origin resurfaces, as does his wife’s different race, whenever there is strife within the community. The biology of race, as the novel makes clear, is not the essence of a nation but merely a supporting myth of homogeneity or collective identity upon which a nation comes to stand and represent itself, particularly in moments of crisis and confusion. Behind this constructed wall of sameness lurks a repressed hybrid identity of cross-fertilizing engagements, dissonances, and negotiations among a variety of social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds that form the backbone of the community. Dislocation and difference, and not the myth of a pure race, are the productive forces behind nationbuilding; for it is only in the interaction and the disjunctive jarring of competing lifeworlds and temporalities that new and vital forms of national identity and solidarity can emerge. As the ultimate expression of pure origins, “God” would appear to approximate in Hurston’s account a metaphysical or self-evident principle. However, God remains a figure of undecidability, raising the question of whether Moses’ charismatic leadership rests entirely on his powers of Voodoo, with which he can fool the people. “Sometimes I thought God’s voice in the tabernacle sounded mighty much like yours,” Miriam tells Moses (MMM 263). Similarly, Hurston’s narrative strongly suggests that God’s appearance as a burning bush ordering Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt is a magical act performed by Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law. At the same time, Hurston never allows the reader to see God as an arbitrary cultural construction. One is never certain if Moses, Jethro, God, or another power is performing the miracles. Religion in Hurston’s presentation carries a transcendent perspective that allows a community not to attain but to envision salvation. The question as to whether this visionary power is divine is ultimately unimportant. The implementation and result of this power lies with the practical and everyday concerns of the nation, as much as it does with those of transcendence. Indeed, much of the book follows Moses as he performs everyday domestic tasks, such as herding sheep, plotting with Jethro against pilfering neighbors and greedy cousins, and courting “Zipporah of the tawny skin” and “of the flowing body” (MMM 102). These daily tasks are presented with as much significance as Moses’ great public tasks as the Pharoah’s nephew and Commander-in-Chief of Egypt’s army and later as the liberator and leader of Israel. In particular, matters of national importance, such as war,




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are often played down. The significant battle with the Amalekites, for example, in which Israel defeats another nation and thus for the first time perceives itself as a nation, is given the same attention as Moses’ less impressive earlier skirmishes against cow thieves. Similarly, the jealousy between Miriam and Zipporah is described in telling detail, as is the petty jostling for status by Aaron and Miriam. Hurston’s insistence on the unremarkable and everyday brings a new perspective to nationbuilding, revealing it to be an arduous daily task. It is only at the novel’s end that we begin to experience the unique transcendent and visionary power of Moses. However, even this vision of unity is grounded not in the metaphysical but in the plain difference of the everyday. Looking down from a peak on Mt. Nebo upon the community he helped to build, with the Promised Land glowing in the distance, Moses suddenly realizes that the nation is formed out of the nonsynchronic and disjunctive temporalities of the visionary and the social realms: Moses sat on the peak of Pisgah, looking both ways in time. He looked down first and saw the tents of Israel spread out like the pattern of a giant rug that moved and shimmered in the sunlight. It was a sight such as the world had never seen before. A whole nation assembled together and under tents. Prominent in the front was the Tabernacle, the Tent of the Testimony that sheltered the Ark of the Covenant and the sacred mysteries that had made Israel a nation and set it apart from other nations. Inside were the gold and silver vessels, and candlesticks and basins. The rich and jeweled vestments of the priests and attendants and the instruments of worship. Outside, the cloudy pillar of the Guiding Presence hung serenely above the entrance as a sign and a promise to Israel. The Tabernacle sat brooding in the plain and hovering its mysteries like the sphinx. . . . The sounds of Israel’s existence came up to him. The lowing of the herds, hammering of metal, sounds of strife, of crying and dying and sounds of songs. (MMM 281–82)

For Hurston the significance of religion does not rest with the certainty or supreme truth of metaphysical force but with the inherent human desire to transgress and imagine the unknown—“a sight such as the world had never seen before.” Israel marks itself as nation only in relation of difference from other nations, a difference that is at once imagined and performed in its establishment of practices of difference (its religious rituals and “sacred mysteries”). In the disjunctive space between iconic religious power (the tabernacle) and concrete communal practices (hammering, strife, songs) emerges the people of Israel heterogeneously bound to both visionary and social traditions. God becomes the ability of a community not simply to imagine itself but more significantly to enact and respect laws and boundaries that mark difference, discontinuity, strife, change, and novelty. Moses,



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as the visionary element of Israel’s communal narrative, can only gaze at the Promised Land from a distance. He cannot cross into it, as this would mean the fulfillment of a teleology of emancipation and imply that Moses’ project of nationhood has been completed. Instead, Moses, who has sacrificed everything to build a nation, leaves Israel with ambivalent feelings of success and failure, still uncertain of his chosen country’s national destiny. Gazing down at the Promised Land, Moses realizes that “His dreams had in no way been completely fulfilled. He had meant to make a perfect people, free and just, noble and strong, that should be a light for all the world and for time and eternity. And he wasn’t sure he had succeeded. He had found out that no man may make another free. Freedom was something internal” (MMM 282). Unable to give freedom to his people, Moses offers them instead “the strife of freedom” and “the full courage of responsibility” (MMM 284). The qualities of Moses’ leadership that Hurston emphasizes, then, are not those concerned with origins or destiny but with the active seeking and envisioning of freedom, the demand to live as a free nation. With Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston’s folklore reaches a level of metaphor and unifying vision that is not present in the dispersive account of the multivocal Tell My Horse. In the latter work, Hurston’s representation remains strongly metonymic, reflecting the contiguous aspects of disjunctive communities that never quite converge upon any form of identity or partial synthesis. While Hurston is far from harmonizing social contradictions in Moses, she creates a space of communal renewal, a vision of a nation united that paradoxically arises from unforeseen continuities amidst discontinuity. This unity is not unlike the function of metaphor that brings together discreet elements into an articulate form, “a well-blended mash.” As Moses warns Joshua before he leaves Israel: “You can’t have a state of individuals. . . . A great state is a well-blended mash of something of all of the people and all of none of the people. . . . How can a nation speak with one voice if they are not one?” (MMM 278–79). Moses thus begins to extend the level of metaphor, which Hurston had mostly displayed in the folk language of her earlier work, to imagine larger social wholes and contexts, such as transnational perspectives on African American identity. This unity, however, is a dynamic force, stressing intercultural dialogue, tension, and transformation. Hurston’s cosmopolitanism, moreover, is not attained without a significant local and regional core in which the author’s fictive worlds retain their specificity. The cosmopolitan figure of Moses speaks in an African American dialect that grounds his universal vision of nationhood and freedom in the cultural and material context of a specific and historically delimited lifeworld. As has often been noted, cosmopolitanism has long been associated with Jewish culture: “Cosmopolitanism,” writes the German poet Heinrich




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Heine, “sprang from the soil of Judea; and Christ, who . . . was truly a Jew, had actually established a propaganda of world citizenship.”67 Moses exhibits a cosmopolitanism tempered with black folk culture. He is thus a world citizen rooted in the everyday vital history of a local culture, reflecting both the universal and regional aspects that motivate the interdependent formation of national cultures. This intersection of unity and diversity is displayed by the narrator, who moves between objective third person narration and a type of narration taking on the subjective idioms and dialects of its characters. Crossing back and forth between different temporalities and lifeworlds, Hurston’s narrator chronicles the difficult birth of a nation. In addition, the narrator performs a pedagogical function of mediation for linguistic outsiders (mainstream white readers), allowing them to partake of the local community’s lingo or idiolect. Like Moses who “[looks] both ways in time,” the narrator occupies a nonsychronic space and performs the complex task of cultural translation between mutually exclusive audiences, drawing them across their cultural divides into a common story (MMM 281). While taking Hurston’s modernist project a significant step forward, Moses, Man of the Mountain is not without problems. To the dismay of feminist critics who view Their Eyes Were Watching God as the paradigmatic text of Hurston’s oeuvre, Moses does not envision a crucial role for women in the building of a nation. In fact, Moses and Jethro believe women are ultimately inimical to the concerns of nationhood: “You are just like all the rest of the women,” Jethro tells Zipporah, his daughter and Moses’ wife, “ready to upset the whole world to make an opportunity to dress yourself up in ornaments. . . . You make property-grabbers out of otherwise good men” (MMM 109–10.) This demeaning position of women is further borne out in the selfish actions and petty social concerns of Miriam and Zipporah, Moses’ sister and wife, the only women of importance in the novel. For the perceptive reader of Hurston, however, this inconsistency should not come as a surprise. From its very inception, Hurston’s work is marked by insurmountable tensions between conservative and progressive versions of communal life, with each work balancing the claims of these respective ideologies in different, new, and unexpected forms. Unlike Richard Wright, whose work unfolds teleologically along the lines of a progressive social and political ideology, Hurston’s work appears much more experimental and less judicious, to the point of being politically incorrect in that it never attempts to resolve social, political, and cultural contradictions. Urban Harlem paradoxically becomes a site of folklore, the rural South one of women’s liberation, the despotic Caribbean a site for populist mythmaking, and the epic myth of Israel’s deliverance from slavery, a demonstration of petty and everyday communal friction as well as misogyny.



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This unorthodoxy in Hurston, with its stress on discontinuity and dislocation as productive cultural forces, has given ideologically oriented critics a great deal of trouble, forcing them to ignore one or the other work that would contradict their claims for the author. However, in reading Hurston’s work in view of its discordant construction of culture, these difficulties do not appear as egregious contradictions or errors on the part of a confused author but highlight the more relevant contributions of her writing and its innovative approach to culture and modernism. As we will see in the final section of this chapter, Hurston’s works are each time positioned differently and strategically to challenge accepted notions of culture, society, and tradition. In doing so, she never settles for ideological certainty but preserves the work of culture as one of ongoing strife and tension. “Getting in Touch with the True South”: Pet Negroes, White Crackers, and Racial Staging in Seraph on the Suwanee In her provocative essay “The ‘Pet’ Negro System” (1943), Hurston describes the complex racial dynamics of the post-reconstruction South. While upholding racism and its values of white supremacy and black inferiority, this system, Hurston claims, nevertheless establishes mutual individual interests and friendships across racial lines. Unlike the North, whose interest lies in the promotion of justice for blacks as a race but not as individuals, the South, Hurston asserts, is concerned solely with the promotion of black individuals while maintaining the inferiority of the black masses. Quoting from the South’s unofficial doctrine, the imagined “Book of Dixie,” Hurston explains tongue-in-cheek this seemingly divine right of white men to possess a pet Negro: And every white man shall be allowed to pet himself a Negro. Yea, he shall take a black man unto himself to pet and to cherish, and this same Negro shall be perfect in his sight. Nor shall hatred among the races of men, nor conditions of strife in the walled cities, cause his pride and pleasure in his own Negro to wane.68

Blacks who attain the status of pets, says Hurston, are generally seen by whites as “truthful and honest, clean, reliable and faithful,” that is, “as white inside as anyone else” (PNS 158). Blacks outside the confines of the pet system fall into the class of “stray niggers” and “nobody gives a damn about them” (PNS 158). As these remarks make evident, Hurston’s deliberately provocative language at once polemically advances and questions the pet system as the paradigmatic unofficial social doctrine of the South.




Ethnic Modernisms

Similarly, blacks, says Hurston, have their pet whites, generally whites of high social standing with whom they want to be associated. Hurston gives the example of the black servant who, in order to preserve his own class prestige, chastises his master and mistress whenever they fall off their pedestal of whiteness. Exempted from this category of whiteness are “pore white trash” and “strainers” who, due to their lower class and economic standing, are seen by blacks as undeserving of the label “white” (PNS 158). This complex and contradictory system of racial hierarchy, claims Hurston, came into being during slavery and “symbolizes the web of feelings and mutual dependencies spun by generations and generations of living together and natural adjustment” (PNS 157). Fulminating against well-meaning Northerners making racial policy “in some New York office” (particularly black thinkers), Hurston points out how their seemingly perfect plans are doomed from the start since they do not consider the Southern everyday experience of race as regulated by this entrenched system (PNS 156–57). Certainly Hurston’s essay provokes much discussion and criticism, raising disconcerting and uncomfortable questions about race (as well as Hurston’s own stance on the subject) that cannot be easily answered. Perhaps the most unsettling of these is Hurston’s controversial belief that the Jim Crow system somehow worked to establish harmony in the South. In addition, her implication of blacks in this racial system of patronage equally offends conventional race perceptions operating with clear demarcations between victims and victimizers. Insensitive to the fact that the South systematically disenfranchised its entire black population and committed atrocities on “erring” blacks unwilling to conform to the system, Hurston’s essay makes the unnerving claim that Southern blacks have in reality been collaborators in the upholding of white supremacy. She deliberately chooses not to condemn the pet system but to reveal alongside its expressions of racial hatred and violence those of genuine care, loyalty, and affection. In Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), published five years after “The ‘Pet’ Negro System,” Hurston elaborates on this system, revealing the central and overlapping roles that race, class, and gender play in the production and representation of the New South. While it is easy to dismiss Hurston’s political views expressed in her later works as reactionary, naïve, or self-serving (as has often been done), it is more challenging to attempt to understand her idiosyncratic manner of intervention in the predominant discourse of race in a pre-Civil Rights era. Because of Hurston’s controversial politics, her later works have been disregarded or marked off as an embarrassment and we are instead given a one-sided portrait of the author based on her most popular works, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men. The aim of this discussion is to trace the workings of this pet system as put forward in Seraph, to analyze Hurston’s complex and contradictory stances on race that



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place her work at once at the rear and at the vanguard of her time. As I will argue, Hurston’s ambivalence illustrates not simply the self-evident shortcomings of the author but more significantly, America’s pathological and contradictory discourse of race, with its fundamental inability to explain the institutions of slavery and second-class citizenship from within the context of democracy. Hurston’s writings reflect this pathological situation, exposing the inevitability and impossibility of writing as an African American woman. I will begin by reviewing Hurston’s discussion and exploration of the contradictory and schizophrenic form of Southern racial relations, tracing in particular her analysis of whiteness as a ubiquitous frame of reference in the construction of Southern identity. Examining specifically Hurston’s representations of her white female heroine and her relation to other characters, I will show how Hurston maps a complicated network of private and social interactions informing racial self-perception and identity. Unlike the work of her contemporary Richard Wright, Hurston’s depiction of race accepts no simple binaries but shows racial identity as a realm that is more negotiable than heretofore traditionally perceived. In Seraph Hurston articulates what she sees as the unspoken golden rule of the South and thus lays bare a messy system in which traditional oppositions of perpetrator and victim, master and slave, white and black, overlap and are at times indistinguishable from one another. Neat binary distinctions, Hurston realized, are not operable in the context of race: “It happens that there are more angles to this race-adjustment business than are ever pointed out to the public, white, black or in-between” (PNS 156). If, as Walter Benn Michaels provocatively claims, Hurston is a nativist modernist whose work reinscribes a racial ideology even more insidious than that it sought to replace, we will also see that Hurston believed race to play a primary role in imagining and creating a modern American identity in a pre–Civil Rights era.69 The nation’s emerging cosmopolitan multicultural, or pluralistic, identity, Hurston acutely understood, did not transcend racialized concerns as many believed but instead represented an evolving yet persistently troubled American identity. To gauge Hurston’s modernism solely from a post–Civil Rights perspective, as is usually done by contemporary critics, is not only ahistorical but fails to appreciate the partial progress towards racial justice and equality achieved in this particular period, with its unique context and limited repertoire of solutions. Though dismissed by many critics as a failure and a classic example of a minority author pandering to white mainstream concerns, Seraph is one of Hurston’s most compelling texts, with its detailing of this messy “race adjustment business.”70 Never one to avoid controversy, Hurston deliberately provokes at all levels. Like her other work, especially Tell My Horse and Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph has proved a bane to feminists,




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particularly black feminists. To be sure, it is difficult to come to terms with Seraph’s heroine, a xenophobic, insecure, and whimpering woman seemingly the exact inverse of Hurston’s most popular character, the vital and towering Janie Crawford of Their Eyes Were Watching God.71 To complicate matters further, the husband of Seraph’s heroine establishes his dominance in their relationship through rape and violence, acts the novel does not condemn but depicts as motivated by love. Similarly, as Hazel Carby points out, Seraph has created distress among critics and readers who view Hurston as an ethnic writer attempting to portray and preserve the difference of a distinct African American ethnicity.72 Not only is the linguistic difference between her white and black characters virtually unnoticeable in the novel but Hurston also has whites in Seraph repeat the same folk sayings and aphorisms of her earlier black folk characters.73 Carby refers specifically to Hurston’s letter to Burroughs Mitchell, her editor at Scribner’s, in which the author revises her earlier linguistic theories: “I think that it should be pointed out that what is known as the Negro dialect in the South is no such thing. . . . What is actually the truth is, that the South, up until the 1930s was a relic of England. . . . and you find the retention of old English beliefs and customs. . . . They did not get it from the Negroes. The Africans coming to America got it from them.”74 Whereas Mules and Men depicts an independent black folk community that produced unique cultural artifacts, Seraph upholds the view that white Southerners and black Southerners ultimately share the same cultural heritage. It appears, then, that in writing a novel about poor white Southerners or Florida “crackers,” Hurston did not believe she was leaving her black folk culture behind, as many critics have accused her of doing. Instead, she saw herself as depicting and imagining a transcultural New South, in which the sociocultural bonds between blacks and whites are acknowledged, leading to a better understanding of the complex relationships between these two races. Contrary to claims accusing her of pandering to white interests, Hurston draws no flattering portrait of her white heroine but exposes her as a woman of petty prejudices acting in complicity with social, racial, and patriarchal oppression. Seraph is the story of Arvay Henson, born into a seedy, shiftless, and no-account white family (the Hensons are more realistic counterparts of Faulkner’s infamous Snopes and Bundren families). Hurston’s narrative opens in turn-of-the-century Sawley, Florida, a rural town on the banks of the famous Suwanee River plagued with “malaria, ignorance, poverty and the ever-present hookworm.”75 Its inhabitants are mainly poor white sawmill and turpentine workers cut off from the land on which they live. The few fields that are cultivated have only “scratchy plantings” and the scant flowers in front yards are placed in homely tin cans and buckets (SS 1). Sawley’s haggard and pinched landscape, one that reflects the character of



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Few [in Sawley] were concerned with the past. They had heard that the stubbornly resisting Indians had been there where they now lived, but they were dead and gone. Osceola, Miccanope, Billy Bow-Legs were nothing more than names that had even lost their bitter flavor. The conquering Spaniards had done their murdering, robbing and raping and had long ago withdrawn from the Floridas. Few knew and nobody cared that the Hidalgos under De Sota had moved westward along this very route. . . . The Reconstruction was little more than a generation behind. Men still living had moved into west Florida after Sherman had burned Atlanta and made his triumphant march to the sea. A dozen or more men who had worn the gray of the confederacy were local residents. Damn Yankees were suspect [sic] of foraging around still looking for loot; and if not that, gloating over the downfall of The Cause. (SS 2–3)

In making the antebellum period merely another event of the past in Sawley’s varied and multicultural history, Hurston does away with the timeless, ahistorical myth of the Old South and “The Cause,” with its attempts to repress other historical claims of precedence (those of the Native Americans and colonizing Spaniards). Thus in the opening pages of Hurston’s narrative, any claims to original belonging and nativism are effectively challenged along with their accompanying myths of cultural and racial supremacy. Sawley is instead presented as a degenerate community of “white crackers” desperately clinging to the Old South’s grand myth of whiteness based not on the actual belief in white superiority but on white resentment, insecurity, and anxiety. Against this setting of cultural poverty and degradation, Hurston’s novel unfolds its at once sympathetic and parodistic narrative of the unacknowledged white Other. The focus of Hurston’s analysis lies with the fate of a poor white woman, complicating the notion of oppression as being perpetrated only from a position of power and strength—Hurston’s heroine, though weak and subservient, is ultimately shown to assert her racial privileges albeit in a passive and indirect fashion. At the age of 21, Arvay Henson, the novel’s protagonist, is well on her way to becoming, according to Southern terms, an old maid when the ambitious Jim Meserve, who comes from an upstanding family that has lost its plantations and wealth in the Civil War, begins to court her. Having already lost an earlier suitor to her designing older sister, Arvay had chosen to devote her life to God. Before Jim’s arrival in Sawley, she had stood before her congregation on Communion Day, “young and



the town and people, reveals absolutely no traces of the noble and elegant agrarian lifestyle stereotypically associated with the antebellum South. Indeed, Hurston’s narrative opens with a chronicle of Sawley that elides this glorious era, stressing instead the region’s diversity and constantly changing cultural topography:

Ethnic Modernisms

white, and teasing to the fancy of many men” and announced vague plans to become a missionary and “take the Word to the heathens” in China, India, and Africa (SS 4). However young, unschooled, and impoverished Arvay may be, she, like the rest of the townspeople, nevertheless instinctively understands the unquestioned value of her whiteness, one that enables her to imagine herself in a superior cultural and moral position and to enlighten nonwhites. While her marriage to Jim does away with her dream of becoming a missionary, Arvay continues to indulge in its underlying myth of whiteness, along with the resentment that feeds it, causing her marriage and family life to founder and hindering her own self-growth. Unable to adjust to the quick changes and modernization taking place and intimidated by the new middle-class lifestyle eagerly sought by her enterprising husband and children, Arvay instead takes solace in an illusionary past that glorifies her heritage: Arvay tossed her head defiantly and rhymed out that she was a Cracker bred and a Cracker born, and when she was dead there’d be a Cracker gone. . . . Let Jim and them have their ways. She would go back and let Jim strain with his house and his impudent, biggity niggers his ownself. . . . The corroding poverty of her childhood became a glowing virtue, and a state to be desired. Arvay scorned off learning as a source of evil knowledge and thought fondly of ignorance as the foundation of good-heartedness and honesty. Peace, contentment and virtue hung like a rainbow over turpentine shacks and shanties. There love and free-giving abided and not on decorated sun-porches. . . . Arvay felt eager to get back in the atmosphere of her humble beginnings. God was showing favor to His handmaiden. (SS 272)

Arvay’s nostalgic perspective on the antebellum South conflates race and class into the quasi-Christian virtue of humility with its “humble beginnings” where God “[shows] favor to His handmaiden.” Poverty and whiteness, in contrast to Jim’s social ambition built on the work of his black servants, become an untainted natural expression of God’s grace. Hurston’s text unmasks this onto-theological recovery of a pure cultural origin as an anachronistic illusion in the face of overwhelming economic decline and cultural disintegration. Even though Hurston uses the same linguistic idiolect in depicting the white rural South as she had used in her depiction of black folklore, she nevertheless treats the two cultural contexts very differently. Unlike Mules and Men and her folk novels, in which poverty permitted its own poetic and imaginative forms of redemption, it appears here as a falsely inflated myth lacking empowerment, thriving instead on resentment and a sense of inadequacy. Whereas Hurston’s black folk could nevertheless lead enriched lives from within their restricted condition, the “white crackers” in Seraph dis-



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place the negative values of poverty onto black culture and embrace an illusion embodied by the Old South. As handmaidens to God, poor whites or “crackers” in Arvay’s perspective are not impoverished because they are shiftless, lazy, and dishonest, as she believes is the case with black folk, but are so due to external causes, such as greedy Yankees and foreigners as well as traitorous blacks demanding equality. DuBois has pointed out how low-paid white workers “were compensated in part by a public and psychological wage” of whiteness that made them feel racially and culturally superior to nonwhites and able to deal better with their economic inequality and contradictions of their situation as poor whites.76 Similarly, Anne McClintock has discussed how national and imperialist pride compensated white British workers for their class subordination.77 As Hurston’s work likewise suggests, this compensation of whiteness allowed Southern whites, especially poor whites, to cope with the reality of the New South as a structurally backward and impoverished region in the face of rapid transformations and modernization impinging upon traditional Southern lifestyles and attitudes. In her depiction of Arvay as a “cracker,” Hurston ultimately complicates the traditional perception of whiteness as a seemingly undisturbed hegemonic force and entity. Instead, she focuses on the ambivalent position, perhaps even double-consciousness, of impoverished whites who are at once, as Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray claim in their analysis of “white trash,” “inside and outside whiteness, becoming the difference within, the white Other that inhabits the core of whiteness.”78 In their discussion of stereotypes concerning poor whites, Newitz and Wray argue how terms such as “white trash,” “redneck,” “cracker,” and “hillbilly” point to the seemingly oxymoronic position of “subordinate white”: Unlike unmarked hegemonic forms of whiteness, the category of white trash is marked as white from the outset. But in addition to being racially marked, it is simultaneously marked as trash, as something that must be discarded, expelled, and disposed of in order for whiteness to achieve and maintain social dominance.79

In their understanding of terms like “cracker” as representing a defective whiteness, Newitz and Way point specifically to that which white compensation covers up or hides, namely the inability of poor whites to live up to ideal and privileged standards of whiteness. A pathological form of DuBois’s black double-consciousness, Hurston’s depiction of poor white Southerners traces a schizophrenic whiteness that is divided against itself, a myth of supremacy concealing a sense of economic and cultural inadequacy, anxiety, and degradation.




Ethnic Modernisms

Gender and its production of sexual identity, or more precisely, the powerful ideology of white Southern womanhood, further define and complicate our heroine’s perspective. Hazel Carby has convincingly argued that the relationship between the two different but interdependent ideologies of white Southern womanhood and black Southern womanhood is based mainly on a negative dialectics that disguises or mystifies social relations in order to keep a racial system in place.80 In antebellum times, the dominant image of white Southern womanhood was based on the “four cardinal virtues [of ] piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” that placed white women on saintly pedestals.81 As its antithesis, the image of black Southern womanhood was based on stereotypes of overt sexuality and brutish physical appetites that excluded female slaves from the category of “humanity,” recreating them into breeders and perpetrators of their own rape committed by their white masters. While white women were oppressed in certain significant ways, they nevertheless shared in the power of their husbands, fathers, and sons and thus in the oppression of blacks. The apparent fragility and purity of the ideal white woman, like the brutishness of her black counterpart, ultimately worked to keep a system of enslavement functioning smoothly and efficiently as well as to affirm the power of the white patriarch. In her nostalgic outlook and bearing, Arvay retains the antebellum image of white Southern womanhood, with its expected social privileges and compensations. Hurston reinforces this image in the description and portrait of her heroine. Unlike her lusty and well-built sister Larraine, [Arvay] was pretty if you liked delicate-made girls. Her shape was not exactly in style in those parts, but that could easily be overlooked. She had breasts to her bosom, but elsewhere Arvay was lean-made in every way. No heavyhipped girl below that extremely small waist, and her legs were long and slimmade instead of the much-admired “whiskey-keg” look to her legs that was common. She had plenty of long light yellow hair with a low wave to it with Gulf-blue eyes. Arvay had a fine-made kind of a nose and mouth and a face shaped like an egg laid by a Leghorn pullet, with a faint spread of pink around her upper cheeks. (SS 4)

This delicate refinement is also revealed in Arvay’s unusual and refined musical talent, her sexual priggishness, her seeming piety, reserved bearing, and her overall incompatibility with the crudeness of Sawley and its people, her father and sister in particular. Like the stereotypical white mistress, she is condescendingly kind to her assumed inferiors when they are dependent on her. At the same time, Arvay is unable to escape from her “degenerate” white background, represented by her birth of a deformed first child who takes after her family, and is also unable to live up to the ideal of whiteness pro-



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jected by her husband and other successful children. At once white mistress and white “cracker,” Arvay reflects the schizophrenia of Southern whiteness with its ideals and suppressed deficiencies. The overlapping dynamics of gender, class, and race is most interestingly given in the mimetic triangular relationship among Jim, Arvay, and Joe Kelsey, Jim’s pet Negro. Uncertain if Arvay is marrying him out of duty and in love with someone else, Jim turns to Joe, who advises him: “Most women folks,” Joe tells Jim, “will love you plenty if you take and see to it that they do. Make ‘em knuckle under. From the very first jump, get the bridle in they mouth and ride ‘em hard and stop ‘em short. They’s all alike, Boss. Take ‘em and break ‘em” (SS 46). Heeding Joe’s advice, Jim “rapes” Arvay and then elopes with her. This conversation between white master and black servant foregrounds a complex cross-racial patriarchal bond that upholds the oppression of women and places Joe, the pet Negro, in a position of complicity. Joe does not simply affirm Jim’s position of patriarchal power but shares it as a male. He not only encourages Jim to make Arvay “knuckle under” but also explains to him in the manner of a teacher how this act is to be performed. In Joe’s statement “They’s all alike, Boss,” Hurston captures the complex sociocultural dynamics of the modern pet Negro system that at once places Joe in an equal and subservient position to Jim. Similarly, as a white woman and the spouse of Jim, Arvay is simultaneously an accomplice and victim of the South’s white patriarchal ideology. This ambivalent situation is depicted in Arvay’s rape, in which Jim’s violent offense is transformed into an act of love and becomes the basis of their marriage: Jim was gritting his teeth fiercely on encountering the barrier of her tightlegged drawers, seeking an opening. Finding none, Arvay felt one hand reach up and grasp the waistband. There was a “plop” and the girl knew that the button was gone. A tearing sound of starched fabric, and the garment was being dragged ruthlessly down her legs. Arvay opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. Her mouth was closed by Jim’s passionate kisses . . . Not until Jim lay limp and motionless upon her body, did Arvay return to herself and begin to think . . . She was terribly afraid. She had been taken for a fool, and now her condition was worse than before. . . . What was to become of her now? Where would she turn for refuge? Not to her folks, certainly. . . . Unconsciously, Arvay’s own arms went up and were locked around Jim’s neck. . . . Some unknown power took hold of Arvay. She pressed her body tightly against his, fitting herself into him as closely as possible. A terrible fear came over her that he might somehow vanish away from her arms, and she sought to hold him by the tightness of her embrace and her flood of kisses. . . . She must eat him up, and absorb him within herself. Then he could never leave her again. (SS 51–53)




Ethnic Modernisms

Hurston’s careful description of the event plots the course of this transformation, revealing how Arvay’s fear of abandonment gradually turns an initial act of violence and mastery into one of consensual seduction and intimacy. Rather than yell rape, an act that would place her in the clear position of victim, Arvay realizes that by conceding to the upper-class Jim she will be compensated socially, economically, and racially, thereby possibly escaping the degenerate whiteness of her family. As the novel demonstrates, however, the compensation of whiteness, based on anxiety and deficiency, can never be sated and requires constant reaffirmation and expansion. Its supremacy must always be affirmed because it is forever in danger of slipping into inadequacy. Accordingly, Arvay is especially threatened by those she views as nonwhite and hence undeserving of social privileges, namely Joe and white outsiders like her Yankee son-in-law and her husband’s foreign white assistant and his family. In Hurston’s modern complex grid of overlapping identities, both Joe and Arvay are deeply implicated in the perpetuation of racism, classism, and sexism. The novel is careful, however, to delineate the differences in their respective situations. As Jim’s pet Negro, Joe plays the role society has assigned to and expects of him. The historian David Goldfield describes Southern racial etiquette and its elaborate attempt to preserve the feudal hierarchy of the antebellum period into the modern period: An act of bad manners was not merely a regrettable faux pas, but a major social transgression that threatened order, violated expectations, called into question the rectitude of social and racial givens, and challenged integrity. The players assumed their roles carefully, especially the blacks. The code of etiquette governed every social situation from hunting to casual meetings in the street. For blacks encountering whites, the code demanded, among other things, “sir” and “ma’am,” averted eyes, preferably a smile, never imparting bad news, never discussing other whites, and always exhibiting a demeanor that would make a white comfortable in believing that this deferential mien was not only right but the way things ought to be. The white, in turn, would almost always address the black by a first name or by generic terms such as “boy,” “uncle,” or “aunty,” regardless of age. . . . From this etiquette flowed an array of assumptions whites held about blacks that reinforced the inferior role of black Southerners. Blacks were childlike; they were prone to steal and prone to violence; they were oversexed, stupid, lethargic, dependent on whites, and, above all, happy.82

Certainly Joe retains the mannerisms of the “old-time Negro.” He always refers to Jim as Mr. Meserve, Mr. Jim, or “Boss,” while Jim simply calls Joe by his first name. Similarly, Joe never brags about his economic successes to Jim but instead delights in telling him entertaining and exaggerated stories about his many failures.



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Seraph suggests, however, that this publicly staged and official racialized behavior is only the veneer of a much stronger and deeper bond that both men acknowledge and confirm in private actions. As Jim tells Arvay: “Joe knows where he stands with me. I would trust Joe Kelsey quicker than any man on earth I know of, and Joe knows it” (SS 60). Indeed, it is precisely because Jim is able to see through racial stereotyping of blacks as being childlike and shiftless that he is able to reap economic benefit. Jim’s entire economic success is founded on business deals made with blacks and other outsiders whose skills other Southerners, including Arvay, are unable to discern. “That shows the difference between me and you,” Jim tells Arvay. “I see one thing and can understand ten. You see ten things and can’t understand one. A person can have very good eyesight, Arvay, and even wear glasses on top of that, but if they get in the habit of butting around with their eyes shut tight, they won’t be able to see a thing” (SS 261). As Hurston’s representatives of the “true South,” both Jim and Joe are able to negotiate and to subvert prevailing social structures due to their comprehension that the South’s complex racial and social conventions are not set in stone but are an ongoing performance of Southern racial staging. While restricted in his social maneuverability as a black man, Joe is nevertheless able to empower himself through racial staging. The pet Negro system for Hurston is not simply that which reinforces white supremacy as Goldfield explains above but also, and more importantly, a strategic intervention that enables blacks like Joe to survive and even to flourish under oppressive Jim Crow laws. Both Jim and Joe benefit socially and economically from this unofficial and private association. To further complicate Joe’s position as a pet Negro, Seraph also foregrounds its transitional and changing nature in Joe’s son, Jeff, who represents a new generation of Southern blacks. Unlike his father, Jeff does not tell entertaining stories about his failures but carefully notes the reason behind them so as not to repeat the same mistakes. Whereas Joe’s playful demeanor seems to confirm negative black stereotypes, Jeff ’s behavior reveals a quiet self-reliance and confidence. In the most telling scene of the novel, Jeff becomes the moral enunciator and passes judgment on Arvay’s cowardly outlook and her inability to act and think for herself. When Arvay becomes paralyzed with fright and is unable to save her husband, Jeff not only rescues Jim but also lets Arvay know she has failed: “But Jeff gave her a look that halted her where she was. . . . The look held. Jeff wanted her to know that she had been judged. . . . In that moment Arvay realized what fear had done to her, and how she looked to those who knew it” (SS 256). This look is later repeated when Jim separates from Arvay, leaving her in the care of Jeff: She went to sleep one afternoon on the sleeping porch with her face turned towards the wall. When she somehow woke up suddenly and turned her face




Ethnic Modernisms

over her shoulders, there was Jeff . . . [with] his face pressed against the screen wire, staring at her. His face was pressed so hard against the screening that his nose was flattened, and his lips were distorted into purple blobs. His eyes were fixed on her and unmoving. Neither did he jump away when he saw her see him. Traditionally, Arvay immediately thought of rape and murder. That look was so powerful and intense. But as she studied Jeff ’s face and eyes she got another shock. Jeff was not longing after her body. It was anger and dislike. If only he had his hands on her, he would tear her to little bitty pieces like a ragdoll. (SS 269)

In these crucial passages, Hurston endows Jeff with the returning gaze of the black Other that displaces whiteness in its refusal to authorize its superiority. Arvay’s attempt to fix Jeff as the black rapist and savage comes undone and instead she becomes the object of his gaze and repressed hatred. Arvay can neither escape his look nor his judgment by conveniently falling back onto petty racial stereotypes and in the end must admit to her own cowardliness and inadequacy. Ultimately, it is Jeff ’s moral gaze that shocks Arvay into recognizing who and what she is. Returning to Sawley, she recognizes her resentment and anxiety in the house of her family that has come to represent her entire Southern heritage: Now Arvay looked at it with a scrutiny and darkened . . . it was no house at all. It was an evil, ill-deformed monstropolous accumulation of time and scum. It had soaked in so much of doing-without, of soul-starvation, of brutish vacancy of aim, of absent dreams, envy of trifles, ambitions for littleness, smothered cries and trampled love, that it was a sanctuary of tiny and sanctioned vices. Its walls were smoked over with the vapors from the dead souls like smoky kerosene lamps. By a lucky chance, she had been carried away from it at a fairly young age, but still, its fumes and vapors had stuck to her sufficiently to scar Jim and bruise her children. . . . How much had it blinded her from seeing and feeling through the years! (SS 306–07)

In a symbolic act she burns down her family’s house and attempts to patch together her marriage. However, she must first gain Jeff ’s approval, for it is only after she accepts him on his terms that she is able to win back her husband. In the character of Jeff and his difference to his father, Hurston depicts the ongoing transformations in the Southern racial hierarchy and suggests the real possibility of the pet system becoming, like the Old South, an anachronism. Arvay’s childhood home, now “an evil, ill-deformed monstropolous accumulation of time and scum,” becomes in this sense representative of an Old South built on a history of slavery, rape, and murder. However, whereas Hurston offers a pointed analysis of whiteness in the characters of Arvay, Joe, and Jeff, she is not so successful in the characteriza-



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tion of Jim. Because he remains a one-dimensional character used mainly to gauge Arvay’s growth, Jim falls outside of Hurston’s critique of whiteness. His privilege and power as a white upper-class male remain unchecked throughout the novel. Embodying Hurston’s ethical model of the New South, Jim espouses a liberal perspective that would seem to transcend racism and provincialism but ultimately proves more insidious. Not only does Jim share the same lines with the notorious wife abuser of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Joe Starks, but much of his masculine outlook as well. Jim’s race-neutral ideologies of liberalism and humanism are in fact invisible norms of whiteness that in the end reinscribe gender, class, and race and thus rightly make us suspicious of Arvay’s self-development. In addition, Hurston’s privileging of private face-to-face contact as given in her concern with folk communities is often done at the expense of the public realm, ignoring how institutions and traditions shape and produce racial identity alongside private encounters. Despite these obvious shortcomings, however, Hurston’s novel offers a highly sophisticated depiction of frequently interchangeable and overlapping discourses of power in the complicated maze of race, gender, and class relations. These discourses of power function as “articulated categories,” to borrow Anne McClintock’s term. They represent “not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other but come into existence in and through relation to each other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways.”83 In this light, Seraph specifically analyzes a form of whiteness divided against itself in the outlook of the “cracker.” From the perspective of a poor white Southern woman, Hurston reveals how whiteness presents itself as the natural center of privilege and power and manifests itself in daily domestic life. In emphasizing Arvay’s social position as a “cracker” unable to live up to the imagined norms of whiteness, Hurston undermines this centrality of white identity and exposes the myth of white supremacy as one of ambivalence and inadequacy. In this context, the pet Negro system is more clearly presented in all its complex, conflicting, and messy relations to whiteness, doing away with the reductive oppositions of black and white, master and slave, oppressor and victim. In the pet system, then, Hurston depicts a pre–Civil Rights institution in which social identities, however constrained, were nevertheless negotiable. Pet Negroes are able to pass as white and white strainers become “white Negroes.” While the pet system is also without doubt an institution of inequality serving the purposes of racial oppression, it also contains within its social and symbolic realm of negotiation the possibility, however limited, for change and advancement regarding the cultural and socioeconomic status of African Americans. In this way, Hurston was able to claim that black Southerners did not live merely in oppressive and




Ethnic Modernisms

degraded circumstances but could and did lead productive, if not happy, lives. Black Americans did not simply survive in an atmosphere of institutionalized racism but through strategic intervention were able to turn subordination into affirmation. And as Hurston claims, the pet system also allowed for cross-racial expressions of affection and care that society did not otherwise encourage. Far from being simply an attempt to win a white mainstream audience or a spokespiece for assimilationist and universalist discourse, Seraph offers a compelling analysis of Southern race relations and whiteness that reveals the contradictions at the core of racial identity. This ambivalence is deliberately staged in Hurston’s dedication of the novel. Codedicated to Mrs. Spessard L. Holland, the wife of Senator Spessard Holland, the former governor of Florida and staunch advocate of segregation, Seraph is a deliberately doubleedged or ambivalent account of race that in typical Zoraesque fashion at once flatters and parodies Mrs. Holland. In attempting to understand Hurston’s articulation of Southern race relations, we cannot adhere to the conventional linear and progressive narrative of racial emancipation. Such a model ultimately prevents us from appreciating the significant albeit limited advances made within the context of a historical epoch of racial inequity situated between the era of slavery and Civil Rights. Instead, Hurston gives us a self-reflexive perspective that is not so much concerned with its past heritage of slavery nor a future vision of racial equality. A modernist in outlook, Hurston is concerned with the performative present of racial staging that enabled Southerners, black Southerners in particular, to reproduce and to reimagine their racial identities. Southern culture, Hurston demonstrates, is ultimately a racialized but transcultural tradition that continually reenacts and reimagines America’s racial drama with its attendant codes of whiteness and blackness. And if, as Walter Benn Michaels argues, writers like Hurston replace biological perspectives of race with a nativist, pluralist modernism that celebrates cultural difference by grounding it in essentialized notions of race-specific cultural practices, we can also see how Hurston understood race as a stubbornly persistent phenomenon of culture that ultimately cannot be transcended, since it remains the defining core of modern America’s subjective and collective identities.



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White Mythologies: Jean Rhys’s Aesthetics of Posthumanism Before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book. —Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Biography

J

Introduction

ean Rhys offers a singular case of a modernist writer exploding the myth of race from within its white supremacist definition. As her late novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) amply illustrates, the normative standard of a white Western civilization not only meets its challenge among the colonized but has become too much of a burden for white civilization itself.1 Accordingly, in Rhys’s work the mythology of white supremacy collapses from within, exposing the formerly unchallenged race as merely another ethnic construct, devoid of any internal legitimation. In this sense, Rhys remains ahead of our time, in which ethnic insecurity and the burden of representation are still mainly assigned to ethnic minorities, ignoring that white majority cultures are themselves constructed and far from self-evident. Her counternarrative of white displacement deepens traditional modernist accounts of the fragmentation of an Anglo-American cultural legacy (Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Stein) by linking this decline directly to the unacknowledged though implicitly assumed foundation of race.



Chapter III

Ethnic Modernisms

Like Yezierska and Hurston, Rhys drew her literary material from her own experiences with ethnicity and displacement. Growing up in turn-ofthe-century Dominica as a British colonial of Welsh, Irish and Scottish extraction, Rhys was exposed early on to a colonial system already in decline. This decline was directly reflected in the status of her family: Her maternal great-grandfather had once been a slave holder and master of a prosperous sugar plantation, but due to emancipation (1834) and devalued sugar prices, this plantation had become by the 1850s a derelict estate. The contradictions that Rhys experienced in this decaying colonial system are reflected in the displaced and alienated character of her heroines, whose transient and expatriate lives in the metropolitan centers of Paris, London, and Vienna reveal a profound ambivalence about national and cultural identity. This sense of homelessness and dislocation, so pervasive in Rhys’s works, challenges not only colonial models of master nations and narrations, with their unquestioned ontologies of belonging but, more importantly, a concomitant mythology of the white race. However, unlike Hurston or Yezierska, Rhys depicts dislocation mostly as a single rather than collective fate and thus sharpens the sentiment of crisis found in ethnic modernism. Her heroines can no longer find any shelter in a group or collective identity. Yezierska and Hurston’s heroines, while often seriously at odds with their ethnic communities, nevertheless define their identity in part or negatively through ethnic collectives. In Rhys, this collective gives way to an abstract model of mass culture, a modern by-product of faceless and anonymous individuals living their lives according to the assembly-line rhythms of industrial and time-efficient production. This element of dehumanization, of assembly-line individuals, pervades Rhys’s cold modernism, in which the unsettled artifice of tradition can only find renewed shelter in the artifice of what Siegfried Kracauer has called “the mass ornament,” a new aesthetic understanding of collectivity that attempts to come to terms with the consumer and productive economy of capitalism. Rhys’s social spectrum in her ethnic modernism, focusing mainly on the lower middle classes, differs from Yezierska’s immigrant poor or from Hurston’s economically underprivileged black masses. This is not to say that Rhys’s déclassé middle classes, always on the verge of dropping in status to the subcultural and even the criminal, are in any manner economically more secure. However, as part of the middle classes, they participate significantly in mainstream consumer culture even if only as its service providing employees or models. In this respect, as we will see, Rhys’s depiction of ethnicity cannot be seen apart from a commodity culture that trades in and markets cultural identities. Rhys’s early European works of the 1920s and 1930s must be read within this framework in order to be understood correctly as narratives challenging



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the construct of a white European culture seemingly unafflicted by the burden of representation. It is here that her work of “ethnicizing” white Europe and tracing its own peculiar displacements joins up with writers of the ethnic avant-garde such as Yezierska and Hurston. Her dismantling of European culture proceeds from two ends, stressing on the one hand the fate of a white, outmoded, nineteenth-century Europe and, on the other hand, the increasing dehumanization to which all modern culture is subject. To be sure, ethnicity in Rhys is not understood in the socioanthropological sense that would consider, for example, the Irish or Welsh as ethnic groups within Britain. Rather, Rhys’s Caribbean upbringing subjected her to a socialization in which race and ethnicity (much as in the United States) were never divorced from one another. Rhys can therefore be read as a “white” ethnic writer who understands ethnicity in a racial sense similar to Yezierska’s or Hurston’s. Her entire work is especially important in the context of a modernist ethnic avant-garde in disabusing us of the conventional view that places white or Caucasian mainstream cultures into binary opposition to ethnic or minority cultures. Also, with the onset of modernity, all ethnic groups become subject to its forces of dislocation and a white majority can no longer easily view its minority cultures as society’s Other. As recent critics including Mary Lou Emery, Veronica Marie Gregg, and Judith L. Raiskin have demonstrated, Jean Rhys’s Caribbean background is crucial to an understanding of her literary aesthetics.2 Elaine Savory’s recently published work pushes this Caribbean perspective even further, making it the authoritative source of Rhys’s writing. Rhys’s position within the Caribbean, as Savory has shown, is highly complex, since she was thoroughly familiar with local white and black Creole cultures, English and French colonial traditions as well as varying class backgrounds: It is virtually impossible to overestimate the formative years in Dominica as shaping the idea of language Rhys worked with. The tension between West Indian, white Creole accent she had as a young woman and could produce even in old age and the middle-class English voice she mainly used towards the end of her life reflects her response to British middle-class, largely literary connections. But her Caribbean childhood must have taught her that language is almost always a layered means of communication, with hidden codes and contrasting registers.3

This complexity in background and socialization made Rhys highly suspicious of any reductive identity and led, according to Savory, to her hermetic and abstract prose in an effort to conceal tangible identities. “It is crucially important to explore the contexts of Rhys’s work, Savory writes, “especially her placement of the role of writing in her life and of race, class, nationality,



White Mythologies

Ethnic Modernisms

gender, and religion. She was interestingly contradictory on these subjects, and inclined therefore to tell a story which was Janus-faced, capable of capturing opposing readings of the world.”4 While Savory points out that “one of the most obvious established characteristics of Caribbean writing is linguistic multivalency, a characteristic shared in some ways by other literatures of resistance, such as Irish, African-American and African writing,” I would also like to draw attention to the equally significant characteristic of modernism and mass culture in the particular case of Rhys.5 In Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” Mary Lou Emery has discussed the productive tensions of modernism and West Indian colonialism in Rhys’s writing, resulting in “new ways of seeing the world, of constituting identity in the previously occluded, marginalized, or in-between social spaces” 6: “Within the crosscurrents of female, European and Third World modernisms, her writing suggests reconceptualizing the subject beyond victimization in a way that no longer asserts Europe as the historical subject, but replaces it on a ‘certain territory,’ elsewhere.”7 This “elsewhere” is the nonsynchronic site of cultural negotiation. As this chapter argues, the multilayered sense of culture and identity makes Rhys particularly suitable for a transnational modernism, with its onset of multiple and conflicting claims of contexts. Rhys’s language can thus be seen as an amalgamation of linguistic multivalency and the more abstract discourse of modern mass culture. In a prose that reflects the recycled nature of modern mass culture, Rhys expresses not only a sense of dislocation but also, paradoxically, a new sense of shelter in a language without foundation, portraying a posthumanistic stance or what Miriam Hansen has called in her work on Kracauer, a “humanity under erasure.”8 Rhys’s complex cultural identities and linguistic strategies have also given rise to ambivalent assessments in her literary reception. Critics and readers have particular difficulties in classifying her work as that of a European modernist, feminist, expatriate, or, more recently, postcolonial and West Indian writer. In fact, it is only of late that critics have begun to acknowledge and appreciate the complex multipositional stances of Rhys’s work, moving away from earlier one-dimensional readings of her work that focused obsessively on its autobiographical and “confessional” elements and her presentation of alienated women as passive victims or underdogs. As Helen Carr notes, this recent change in critical attitude has been brought about by Caribbean thinkers who “rather than evoking notions of a ‘Rhys woman’” in their criticism instead “recognized that these fictions were exploring a troubled and divided subjectivity at a very particular historical and social nexus.”9 For example, two years after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, Wally Look Lai addressed the question of Rhys’s exclusion from the category of West Indian writers. Hailing her late novel as “one of the genuine master-



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pieces of West Indian fiction,” Lai argues that Wide Sargasso Sea is written completely “within the context of West Indian history, and the definitions born of that history.”10 Kenneth Ramchand and V. S. Naipaul point respectively to Rhys’s divided subjectivity in her depictions of the “terrified consciousness” of the colonizer11 and of a white Creole woman who has “lost the way to England.”12 More recently, Gayatri Spivak has interpreted Rhys’s last novel as the narrative of a white Creole woman caught “between the English imperialist and the black native.”13 Following this outlook, recent critics such as Helen Carr, Judith L. Raiskin, Benita Parry, Teresa O’Connor, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Coral Ann Howells, Mary Lou Emery, Veronica Marie Gregg, Sue Thomas, and Elaine Savory are now taking into account both Rhys’s cultural origins and her understanding of an identity marked by ethnicity, gender, class, displacement, and religion. For example, Judith L. Raiskin’s recent study of Rhys’s “white Creole consciousness” and its contribution to colonial theory has led the reception of the author’s work further in this direction. Raiskin places Rhys into the context of 1950s postcolonial thinkers influenced by Algeria’s struggle for independence from France, in particular, Fanon, Sartre, Camus, and Memmi. Raiskin sees Rhys’s later work—Wide Sargasso Sea, Tigers Are Better Looking, and Sleep It Off, Lady—as a “theoretical contribution . . . to a deconstruction of colonial binarisms (black/white, English/native, civilized/savage, pure/polluted).”14 Raiskin discusses in particular the complex and ambiguous situation of colonial settlers like Camus and Rhys to that of Sartre and Fanon. Unlike Sartre, “unambiguously a French citizen, and Fanon, a black West Indian,” Rhys and Camus write from a white Creole perspective that ultimately cannot share in the discourse of liberation and resistance that Sartre and Fanon put forward.15 Instead, Camus and Rhys inhabit that impossible, nonsynchronic space of the white Creole caught between ambivalent loyalties and irresolvable conflict. “There is no vocabulary for such writers,” says Raiskin, “to consciously express their ambivalent loyalties and ‘terrified consciousness’ as their class loses political power. In his Nobel Prize speech in 1957, Camus finally decides, “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”16 Rhys, however, made no such choice to defend her so-called mother country of Britain. She also realized that she could not adopt the perspective of Fanon and attempt to speak for a people she is trying to mobilize. Instead, Rhys’s own and ultimately only credible form of resistance lay in the challenge of the mythology of white European superiority. Here, Rhys has accomplished a task of postcolonial demythologization of identity and humanity, in which, according to Homi Bhabha, even Fanon sometimes fell short: “It is as if Fanon is fearful of his most radical insights: that the politics of race will not be entirely contained within the humanist myth of man.”17



White Mythologies

Ethnic Modernisms

Rhys’s peculiar middle-position of the white Creole has allowed her to draw more awareness to the construction of cultural identity as a concealment of masks, as an attempt to anchor identity in seemingly unchallenged appearances of authenticity and belonging. Rhys’s fictive world thereby explodes any myth of cultural uniformity and synchronicity, grounding the construction of culture in the conflicting middle-positions that determine the negotiation of identity. Raiskin confirms this assumption by linking Rhys’s work with that of Spivak and Bhabha: “Like them, Rhys wants to emphasize the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and the complexity of racial, cultural and national identity.”18 Her ambivalence is not found in any residual racial solidarity but in the unsettled sense of cultural construction occurring among overlapping and conflicting boundaries, histories, and identities. However, while the interpretation of Rhys within the context of postcolonialism benefits the present ongoing clarification of these discourses and helps us to recontextualize Rhys as a provocative West Indian writer fundamentally concerned with racial and cultural identity, it must also be considered alongside the equally strong Anglo-modernist sensibility in Rhys. Concerning her Caribbean roots, Rhys cannot be fitted solely into the canon of Caribbean literature, since her writing career was spent in Europe and directed toward a European readership. Indeed, during most of her writing career, Rhys’s writings did not have any defining impact on Caribbean literature as, for instance, T. S. Eliot’s poetry paradoxically did.19 Only with the present rediscovery of Rhys’s Caribbean roots has her writing finally been reconsidered as part of the literatures of the West Indies. Drawing on the cultural and racial perspectives of Dominica and her own experience of discrimination against “white Creoles” in England and Europe, Rhys set out to challenge an imperialist Anglo-European modernism from within its own parameters. The attempt, then, to claim Rhys mainly as a postcolonial writer potentially leads to a distortion of Rhys’s work in its tendency to disregard or subordinate her modernist style and aesthetic sensibility concerned particularly with the complex linking of displacement, commodity, and mass culture. These modernist concerns underlie Rhys’s entire oeuvre, including her Caribbean writings. Indeed, Rhys’s work reveals that the crisis of modernism is intimately linked to the colonial tradition and therefore calls for a thorough rethinking of its premises. If, as Raiskin suggests, Rhys is to be read as a postcolonial theorist in the manner of Fanon and Memmi, she should also be read as an avant-garde theorist commenting on modernity and its commodification of ethnic and cultural identities in a mass society. Rhys’s modernist style, as will be discussed, reflects the externality of commodity culture along with its dislocated sense of tradition. Similar to Kracauer’s concept of the mass ornament, Rhys finds in commodity culture the expression and



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desperate refuge of modern displaced masses emancipating themselves from bourgeois patronization while yearning for new forms of social affiliation and solidarity. Interestingly enough, this solidarity is achieved through a disciplined act of dissociation from traditional identities, thereby allowing for erosion of class structure and of social and national genealogies, with their underlying ontologies of race and belonging. Stylistically, Rhys’s writing reflects a retreat from bourgeois subjectivity and its exhaustive domestic focus (the novel of manners) and translates its voice into mediated forms, such as her typified heroine, the “Rhys woman,” and her serialized isolation and disconnection from her surroundings. These stylistic features place Rhys’s writings clearly into the tradition of modernism, deployed to point to the epistemic impasses of a postmetaphysical era in which consciousness and subjective agency are beginning to erode as the center of social action.20 However, Rhys’s modernist style moreover advances a posthumanistic perspective so as to gain new direction on the question of colonialism and race inequality.21 In Rhys’s work it is no longer the moral failure of a dominant white European culture alone that creates the social and cultural inadequacies of colonial and racial oppression. Instead, the very notion of Western humanism and morality, as Rhys attempts to show, contains within its liberal discourses of emancipation the structural elements of social oppression. Rhys’s modernism, in this sense, reflects the structural contingencies and binarisms on which discourses of belonging and displacement, majority and minority, social privilege and deprivation are construed. Her heroines are not merely battling with the concrete forces of oppression but, more significantly, with those that they perpetuate from within their own unconscious and assumed notions of humanism and humanity. In this section, I will begin with an analysis of Rhys’s last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, in order to establish in her work the simultaneous presence of modernist and postcolonial concerns with mass culture, commodification, and the construction of cultural identities. This approach will allow us to do more justice to Rhys’s multipositional concerns and indirectly suggest partial continuities between two paradigms that are often seen as mutually exclusive or, in ideological fashion, weighed against one another. Once having established the full expression and telos of Rhys’s concerns in her late work, I will then return to her early work, asserting that it already carries within it these concerns, although they may not yet have found their most adequate linguistic and literary correlatives. If there is any development to be traced in Rhys it is only that of a sharpening of her focus, her increased insistence on a posthumanist analysis of culture and her conscious deployment and appropriation of modernist stylistic techniques such as abstraction, dehumanization, serialization, and multiple and conflicting temporalities.



White Mythologies

Ethnic Modernisms

In its concerns with the various cultural positions of race, class, gender, and nationhood, Rhys’s work clearly addresses a European model of culture founded on its pillars of humanism, enlightenment, and progress. This model is not simply challenged by Rhys but is itself subjected to a “racialization.” Rhys’s treatment of racism is less preoccupied with a stereotypical focus on the victims, representing them only in a position of powerlessness. Instead, her work enters the white racial perspective from within so as to unmask its white mythologies that are variously played out in arbitrarily constructed hierarchies of biology, social status, patriarchy, national belonging, and a dubiously legitimating morality of humanism. Rhys’s work situates itself at the breakdown of these white mythologies as Western bourgeois and imperialist culture enters the demythologizing transformation into a mass culture. Rhys thus recovers the early stages of mass culture that are not yet marked entirely by totalitarian designs but also reflect a revolutionary antihumanist and antibourgeois conception of culture. Wide Sargasso Sea: White Masks and Their Creolization Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a path-breaking psycho-social study on the internalization of normative white standards in the formation of a black colonized consciousness, explores colonialism’s detrimental impact on the colonized psyche in the form of racial neurosis and ethnic selfhatred.22 Fanon’s study, critically seen, at times makes it appear as if a white ethnicity existed unmediated by itself in the sheer presence of white skin pigment. Racial awareness on the part of the colonized is experienced only as a negation, leading to symptomatic expressions of white posturing. As such, whiteness is presented as a standard that has to be learned by “nonwhites” but seemingly belongs to whites as their second nature. Fanon’s model of internalization, while explaining the phantom world that inhabits the colonized consciousness, nevertheless still leaves that of the white colonist intact and does not fully penetrate to the less visible phenomenon of a racial pathology afflicting those taught to be white from birth. Rhys’s colonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea provocatively raises the question that Fanon had for the most part elided in his effort to emancipate black skin from white masks. Revealing that whiteness is itself a mask, Rhys’s novel opens with a paradoxical denial of whiteness to its white protagonist Antoinette/Bertha and her family, former slave owners who have lost their social standing and become “marooned” with the emancipation: “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks.”23 Due to its impoverished economic status, the undoubtedly white family to which the novel refers no longer enjoys this privilege. In Rhys’s depiction of decolonization and its subsequent dis-



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mantlement of white power, whiteness is now seen for the phantom construct that it is. The heroine and her mother are shunned not only by the former slave population but also by their white neighbors. Their whiteness is further challenged by the former slave population, who call them “white cockroaches” (WSS 23) and ultimately “creolize” them into a lesser form of blackness: “Plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. . . . Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger” (WSS 24). This demotion of Antoinette’s family from the white race to the lower rank of “white nigger” marks only one of a series of dislocations in Rhys’s novel. The young heroine in the novel’s declining colonial and postemancipation setting of 1830s Jamaica, for example, does not even attempt to escape her ostracized existence as the heir to former slave owners: “This never saddened me. I did not remember the place when it was prosperous” (WSS 19). Unlike her mother Annette, Antoinette accepts her “marooned” status as an equally legitimate condition: “I got used to solitary life, but my mother still planned and hoped” (WSS 18).24 A white Creole from Martinique, Annette is likewise a displaced figure geographically, historically, and culturally but sees in her second marriage the chance to rescue herself and her family from this fate. Whereas Antoinette more or less accepts her demotion to the status of a “white nigger,” Annette refuses to fall into this class. “And my mother,” Antoinette thinks to herself, “so without a doubt not English, but no white nigger either. Not my mother. Never had been. Never could be” (WSS 36). Antoinette’s difference from her mother in outlook and generation is significantly expressed in qualitative degrees of whiteness, isolating her even further. In the equally displaced Christophine, her maid and a former slave from Martinique who was a wedding gift from Antoinette’s father to her mother and who is also shunned by the local black population, the heroine finds a further parallel to her own uprooted life: “though [Christophine] could speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, she took care to talk as they talked. But they would have nothing to do with her” (WSS 21). Abandonment both on the part of society and a “marooned” mother who is eventually locked away shapes the heroine’s consciousness to a degree that she no can longer belong unequivocally to traditional shelters of identity of family, race, class, or nation. Whiteness, along with all its colonial privileges, has become a mask replaced by new masks of uncertain origin. Like Julia, the heroine of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), Antoinette sees her life narrative and history as “a disconnected episode to be placed with all the other disconnected episodes which make up her life.”25 Mr. Mason, the Englishman who marries Annette and temporarily restores the decaying estate of her family, is similarly seen from the narrator’s



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perspective as a hopelessly ridiculous impersonation of the white mask of the colonizer. Completely out of touch with the island’s political situation and arrogant in his display of power and English propriety, Mason quickly manages to turn the entire village against him, leading to the burning down of his wife’s estate, the death of her son, and her “madness.” “So black and white, they burn the same” (WSS 44) is the terse insight voiced by a black bystander as Pierre, the heroine’s brother, is dying of burns. Antoinette’s response to his death is marked by the same cold indifference that she had displayed during earlier moments of crisis: “‘Pierre is dead, isn’t he?’ ‘He died on the way down, the poor little boy,’ [her aunt] said. ‘He died before that,’ I thought but was too tired to speak” (WSS 46). Rhys’s exposure of the breakdown of white mythology is not marked by sentimentality or regret; it merely and stoically documents the inevitable decline that accompanies any assertion of power and dominance. The heroine simply notes the death of her brother but does not mourn him. Her mother’s condition of “madness” (as well as her sexual abuse by her black caretaker) is likewise elided as a passing event, a nightmare from which she wakes: “What was the use of telling her that I’d been awake before and heard my mother screaming ‘Qui est là? Qui est là?,’ then ‘Don’t touch me. I’ll kill you if you touch me. Coward, Hypocrite. I’ll kill you.’ I’d put my hands over my ears, her screams were so loud and terrible. I slept and when I woke up everything was quiet” (WSS 46–47). Unlike Conrad’s dawning realization of colonialism’s underlying barbarism in Heart of Darkness, Rhys’s narration is not given to cathartic expressions of terror and horror, thereby allowing for an empathetic accord with the former oppressor. Rather, indifference and a dehumanizing paucity of words create a linguistic correlative for the just sequence of events. The former colonists succumb to their own masks and mythology and are phantoms that deserve no pity. Indeed, as the example of Pierre’s death illustrates, the West Indian colonists died long before their actual death due to the lack of any communicative dimension giving social weight and body to their masks. The empty ritual of impersonating a white mask of respectability is most prominently embodied in Antoinette’s husband, the implied Rochester, who significantly remains nameless in the novel but whose account dominates its second part. Like his precursor Mr. Mason, he is out of touch with the political setting, culture, customs, and climate of Jamaica. His arranged marriage to Antoinette, the wealthy heiress chosen to rescue him from the pecuniary fate of an English second son, becomes in this respect a miniature depiction of the colonial enterprise and its inherent moral bankruptcy and lack of legitimation. Rochester’s courting of Antoinette is simply part of this already-established ritual of colonialism and patriarchy. Though his every move is “an effort of will” and he is in a foreign setting, he is well prepared for the role of English imperialist:



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When at last I met her I bowed, smiled, kissed her hand, danced with her. I played the part I was expected to play. She never had anything to do with me at all. Every movement I made was an effort of will and sometimes I wondered that no one noticed this. I would listen to my own voice and marvel at it, calm, correct but toneless, surely. But I must have given a faultless performance. If I saw an expression of doubt or curiosity it was on a black face not a white one. (WSS 76–77)

Rochester takes an unusual pride in his assumed role of the master, objectively noting his detached movements. However, it is in the black face and its “expression of doubt” that his English identity becomes visible as a mask, as a representation of imperial impersonality and convention. Unlike Fanon’s white gaze that fixes “the fact of blackness”—“Look, a Negro!”—Rhys’s naked expression of doubt in the black face challenges the fact of whiteness and exposes this representation as a violent and parasitic appropriation of other cultures.26 Early transnational modernists such as Stein and Picasso, as Michael North has shown, also appropriated the African mask to articulate their difference to and transgression of mainstream bourgeois culture, particularly in their situation as expatriates.27 Their avant-garde art, says North, stages a racial masquerade and reenacts the aggression of this act in content and form as seen in Stein’s strategic use of an estranged and forced black dialect in “Melanctha” and Picasso’s violent and crude depictions of prostitutes’ faces and bodies in Les Demoiselles. “The virtue of works like Les Demoiselles and ‘Melanctha,’” writes North, “is that they bring out into the open the dialectical relationship between the mask as raw nature and the mask as cultural convention, and thus approximate the power of the African mask in its own context.”28 Rhys follows in this subversive tradition of modernism but instead appropriates the racial mask of whiteness, juxtaposing its empty façade to the questioning black face. At a later point in the novel, Rochester notes that Christophine has assumed a mask; however, her mask is one of power associated with her Obeah, and is used to confront Rochester, who is forced to acknowledge her power: “When I looked at her there was a mask on her face and her eyes were undaunted. She was a fighter, I had to admit. Against my will I repeated, ‘Do you wish to say good-bye to Antoinette?’” (WSS 161). Rochester, as the scene from the wedding ceremony shows, knows that he can at best give a good performance of white respectability but ultimately remains as unconvinced of his assumed mask as the black locals. Mastery is reduced to a weak assertion of status and in the end Rochester will come to realize the absolute hollowness of his identity as an Englishman. Moreover, he learns that mastery is not only an illusion but also something altogether unattainable, leading him to an irrational hatred of Antoinette and Jamaica. As a result, he desires to master her completely:



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I was tired of these people. I disliked their laughter and their tears, their flattery and envy, conceit and deceit. And I hated the place. I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would thirst and long for what I had lost before I found it. (WSS 172)

Rochester’s unfulfilled longing resembles that of Kierkegaard’s “unhappiest man,” the embodiment of modern man, who “has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside himself.”29 Kierkegaard interprets this sense of absence that cuts through experience as the malaise of modern consciousness and its rational domination of the world: “For the future he has already anticipated in thought, in thought already experienced it, and this experience he now remembers, instead of hoping for it.”30 In the case of Rochester, this anticipation of an experience that is itself a substitute of experience characterizes not only his stay in the Caribbean but his entire life. His colonial consciousness, narcissistically wounded by that which negates its control, turns upon itself in a desperate effort to possess that which it never really had. Rochester’s memory of his stay dissolves into nothing but hatred and disenchantment, weak negations that stand in for illusionary power. The sequence that follows and repeats the disastrous marriage of Antoinette’s mother to Mr. Mason underscores the cultural bankruptcy of a white supremacist ideology that is devoid of any originality and is parasitically attached to other cultures. Unlike a developmental novel or a novel of manners, Rhys’s text does not advance a progressive or emancipatory model of growth but instead foregrounds a history condemned to repeat itself. In the modernist manner of serialization and its reproducible and commodified identities, the novel recasts the first disastrous marriage plot in the ensuing relationship between Antoinette and Rochester and in the many triangular relationships of mimetic rivalry that motivate the novel’s plot. Reproducibility and serialization, as Walter Benjamin has noted, deplete the modern object or artwork of its aura of uniqueness and originality.31 In addition, mimetic rivalries point to the derivative nature of action based simply upon parasitic imitation and desire. For example, Daniel’s denunciatory letter to Rochester that casts doubt about the racial origin and sanity of Antoinette’s family is a repeat of Rochester’s own letter alarming the police about Christophine. Rochester’s sexual affair with the “colored” Amelie compulsively repeats and rivals Antoinette’s rumored premarital affair with Sandi, a “colored” man of pale complexion. Indeed, Rhys’s entire novel construes it-



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self as a recycled plot of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which it recasts both in revisionary cultural terms but also as a sentimental mass commodity (the novel of manners) meeting its ultimate reification as a disguised imperialist and racist text. The commodity fetish in Bronte’s novel, namely the illusion of Britain’s culturally and morally superior standards, is critically dismantled as that of obsessively perpetuated stereotypes and the masking of economic and national interests. All the characters in the novel stand in the relation of commodities to one another: Christophine was purchased as a slave and given as a wedding gift to Antoinette’s mother; the mother agrees to marry Mr. Mason since his wealth and English heritage promise to rescue her from her impoverished fate as a marooned white Creole; and, in a reverse repetition, Antoinette and her wealth are willfully annexed by Rochester, relying on English law, which grants no ownership rights to the female spouse. The modernist style of abstraction and serialization in Rhys is not merely coincidental but is strategically deployed to depict a false consciousness of commodified gender, racial, cultural, and national identities. Like the cubist abstraction of figurative representation, Rhys’s novel analytically dissects the “natural” illusion of the nineteenth-century novel and exposes its purportedly biological elements of gender, race, and nationality as inanimate constructs. For example, Christophine’s doubt about the existence of England should not be read as a representative statement of the provincial and ignorant native. Instead, it points, in a manner reminiscent especially of Hurston and Faulkner’s regional and folkloric characters with their vernacular grasp of epistemological uncertainty, to the entire phantom existence of nationality: “‘You do not believe that there is a country called England?’ [Christophine] blinked and answered quickly, ‘I don’t say I don’t believe, I say I don’t know, I know what I see with my eyes and I never see it’”(WSS 111–12). In her later confrontation with Rochester, Christophine tells him: “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know” (WSS 161). Thus, in a seemingly folkloric sequence, Rhys manages, not unlike Hurston and Faulkner, to turn the vernacular style into a critical phenomenology. This refusal to acknowledge the existence of England is itself a repetition of an earlier discussion between Antoinette and Rochester: “Is it true,” she said, “that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.” “Well,” I answered annoyed, “that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.” “But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal? “And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?” “More easily,” she said, “much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.” (WSS 80–81)



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Consistent with the novel’s foregrounding of serialization, this passage recalls Eliot’s depiction of London as the “unreal city” where “death had undone so many” which in turn recalls Baudelaire’s descriptions of a rapidly modernizing Paris.32 The unreality of Eliot’s London is extended in Rhys’s novel to the entire nation of Britain and reflects the empire’s claim to a natural territory merely to be the product of a cultural imaginary, a “dream.” Unlike Eliot, Rhys challenges not merely a modern lifestyle (mass culture) as devoid of substance but questions the entire myth of national culture and belonging from within which Eliot still attempted to salvage a tradition. Structurally, Rhys’s work similarly draws on the modernist attempt to make the medium transparent as an inorganic and repeatable construct. The novel does not operate with plot continuity and character development typical of traditional novels but recasts the schemata of plot and character rather mechanically into what is only superficially a chronologically constructed plot. Simon Gikandi identifies this use of conflicting temporalities as a strategy of creolization commonly found in Caribbean modernist writings: “Creolization . . . is appropriated as a figure of modernism because it opposes the synchronic vision of colonial historiography with the diachronic narrative of a cross-cultural imagination.”33 Or, in Rhys’s reverse appropriation, creolization also paralyzes the diachronic time of colonial narratives (progress, emancipation) by subjecting it to static synchrony and emptiness from within (Benjamin’s “homogeneous, empty time”).34 Consequently, the repetitive plot is patterned like a chiasmus, in which the key events, marriages and the burning of the estates, are merely mirror inversions of one another. Antoinette’s final destruction of the Thornfield estate is a perverse repetition of the first arson attack that led to the destruction of her family’s property, the Cosway estate. Similarly, the characters emerge as dehumanized and inanimate figures. With the single exception of Christophine, they are dead and frozen masks of lifelike characters. “The doll had a doll’s voice,” Rochester remarks about Antoinette, “a breathless but curiously indifferent voice” (WSS 171). Upon closer analysis, these characters are devoid of any real interiority and appear instead as mouthpieces, representing public stances in the colonial grid of identity and its ambivalent negotiations. Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea analyzes the false consciousness of the colonial mentality not entirely from within an ethical humanistic perspective (thereby elevating human agency over the structural context determining its significance) but from within a posthumanistic context. In the character of Rochester, the disintegration of the colonial mind is shown in its ultimate logical and structural absurdity when he attempts to live up to his own standards of racial purity and superiority. For example, when Rochester receives an incriminating letter from Daniel, who claims to be Antoinette’s black half-brother, warning that madness and racial impurity run in Antoinette’s



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family, he displays not the slightest doubt about its veracity. The irony of this episode exposes the contradictory discourse of race. Infected by a pathological belief in his superiority, Rochester believes and acts on a source he himself views as unreliable, namely the black bastard, Daniel. The colonialist, as Rhys brilliantly illustrates, becomes trapped in his own absurd rationality. Rochester appears as a white Othello who merely needs a dark Iago (Daniel) to disclose to him the suspicions he already harbors. The seemingly powerful colonialist falls prey to his own self-deception and the rational concept of humanism and its supposed morals are exposed as myths that function to uphold racism and domination. Unlike Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the colonial consciousness is redeemed by its moral underpinnings, Rhys’s work views Western morality as that which has in actuality motivated colonialism. Floating on the Thames at sunset, Conrad’s Marlow begins his famous narrative into the heart of darkness with a discussion of this morality: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and a selfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.35

While acknowledging the “horror” associated with Mr. Kurtz and his systematic rape of Africa, Marlow nevertheless admires, or more precisely worships, the “idea at the back” of Kurtz’s thinking that motivates his action, namely Western humanism. According to Rhys’s posthumanistic approach, this entire structure of enlightenment has failed and we are left with no redeeming idea. In fact, Marlow’s insistence on an idea that “you can bow down before” is itself a sentimental pretence, an outdated romanticism that masks itself as morality. Wide Sargasso Sea destroys this sentimental and ethical perspective, exposing its plot and characters as flat constructions perpetuating the myth of whiteness. While belonging to a postcolonial tradition, Rhys’s explicitly ethnic novel also operates, as we have seen, with modernist tools of cultural analysis and representation. Wide Sargasso Sea is in this respect an interesting novel falling between several paradigms—modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism—challenging our secure sense of any of these paradigms. Modernism in Rhys, as we have also seen with Yezierska and Hurston, is intrinsically connected to the question of ethnicity, which becomes in their work not just an additional ingredient of modernist discourse but constitutive of it. Foregrounding white ethnicity, Rhys’s work allows one to make this assertion in



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a more compelling manner, since it does not operate under the so-called stigma of a minority literature. In other words, Rhys’s work can be seen as expressing the ethnic uncertainty that in the canonical works of writers like Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald is often displaced onto concerns of culture and class (elite versus mass culture), obscuring the deeper uncertainty concerning the inherent unraveling of an Anglo-American conception of culture. Given the recent reevaluation of the role of ethnicity in modernism, we can now begin to appreciate modernism properly as a cultural revolution. In recent years, the modernist aesthetic has been increasingly retrieved from its stereotypical representation of offering merely a functionalist stylistic innovation of cultural expression. For example, Jürgen Habermas’s discussion of the advances of modern architecture confronting the problem of mass housing and mass facilities as problems of social space and not merely as problems of design, reminds us that the functionalist and abstract aesthetic of modernism understood itself for the most part in a comprehensive cultural and sociopolitical sense.36 Keeping this in mind, the full force of modernism as a cultural revolution, regardless of its incomplete and deficient manifestations, can be appreciated and defended against belittlement by subsequent paradigms such as postmodernism, which in its polemics against modernism often reifies its traditional exponents and obscures its most productive voices. While not trying to diminish the conceptual and theoretical clarity of postmodernism, we also should not overlook the aesthetic innovations of modernist discourse, particularly among its writers concerned with the question of ethnicity. This claim of an ethnically self-conscious modernism can be substantiated by Rhys’s early work that sets the stage for her later Wide Sargasso Sea. Her first novel, Voyage in the Dark, which was belatedly published as her third novel in 1934, already anticipates and develops an expanded discussion of race that would eventually resurface in Wide Sargasso Sea. In her last novel, Rhys’s work thus comes full circle with her initial depiction of white mythologies in Voyage in the Dark. The novel presents common Rhysian themes such as mass culture, exile, class, and gender struggle, which are more carefully worked out in subsequent novels. However, the novel also provides many interesting excursions into the question of race that are only minimally present in the other novels written between her first and her last novel. Anna, the Rhysian heroine, is not only introduced to the vagaries of a male world, with its uses and abuses of mistresses drawn from the lower strata of society but encounters along with these disappointments the whole phenomenon of a white English master race. The novel, reflecting Rhys’s own initial encounter with England after her departure from Dominica, exhibits the writer’s alienation in an environment devoid of a significant, large black population and thus appearing as exceed-



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ingly white: “this is London—hundreds thousands of white people rushing along and the dark houses all alike frowning down one after the other all alike stuck together.”37 This image of white homogeneity is contrasted at various times with the heroine’s memory of a less Western and standardized world of the Dominican islands but also with her own development of an ambivalent racial awareness. At one point, she remembers her discovery of an old slavelist and links her own fate to her dubious ancestral past: “Maillote Boyd, aged 18, mulatto, house servant. The sins of the fathers . . . are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (VID 53). When she surrenders to her lover, this image returns to the 19-year-old Anna, who in her own economic and sexual dependence wishes to internalize the role of the slave: “Maillotte Boyd, aged 18. Maillotte Boyd, aged 18. . . . But I like it like this. I don’t want it any other way but this” (VID 56, emphasis Rhys). On another occasion, she is chided by her stepmother for her present degraded social position as a chorus girl and sometime-mistress, activities her stepmother blames on her exposure to black culture and language back in Dominica: “I tried to teach you to talk like a lady and behave like a lady and not like a nigger and of course I couldn’t do it. Impossible to get you away from the servants. That awful sing-song voice you had! Exactly like a nigger you talked—and still do. Exactly like that dreadful girl Francine” (VID 65). Francine, the black maid, prefigures in this first novel the more powerful portrait of Christophine as a surrogate mother and adopted mentor in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys recasts in Francine and Christophine the traditional figure of the nanny, a sentimentally belittled black caretaker upholding a racial hierarchy, into that of a subversive presence within the structure of racism. This subversive role is also acknowledged by Anna, who wishes to become Francine’s accomplice: “But I knew that of course she disliked me too because I was white; and that I would never be able to explain to her that I hated being white. Being white and getting like Hester, and all the things you get—old and sad and everything. I kept thinking, ‘No . . . No . . . No’” (VID 72). Ethnic self-hatred, a phenomenon usually associated with traditional minorities (African Americans, Jews) is extended in Rhys’s critical writings to the seeming master race itself, inaugurating a demythologization of whiteness. Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’s first novel, and Wide Sargasso Sea, her final novel, frame and map out an imaginative trajectory in which white ethnicity is dismantled, while traversing at the same time the dehumanizing landscape of modernism. An Expatriate among Expatriates: The Banality of Exile When American expatriate writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway claimed either London



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or Paris as their temporary residence in their disenchantment with their own native country and its cultural landscape, they did so still with a sense of productive displacement. Notwithstanding economic hardships, they found in their newly adopted country of residence either a “sophisticated” or a “bohemian” cultural lifestyle that they felt put them at the heart of their particular version of modernism. For Eliot and Pound, the migration to Europe meant an escape from America said to be lacking a cultural “vortex” (Pound) and provided a richer exposure to European culture at a crucial stage of its reinvention into modernity. In the case of Fitzgerald, Stein, and Hemingway, the worship of European culture was less pronounced and they settled more for the open definition of a seemingly boundless metropolitan culture as given in the bohemian setting of Paris. Hemingway’s memoirs A Moveable Feast, while reviewing nostalgically his Paris years, are not without their element of realism, hinting at squalid living conditions and petty strife among the variously assembled artists. However, at no point do they hint at cultural dislocation as a mutilating rather than productive force in the artist’s development. In fact, as Hemingway recollects, Paris provided the necessary distance to his home country so that he could write there in a more unburdened sense about Michigan: “That was called transplanting yourself.”38 Similarly, Gertrude Stein speaks of the importance for writers to inhabit a “second country of the imagination”: “After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”39 Expatriate writing, as it becomes evident from this quote, says little about cultural displacement but with a considerable degree of narcissism and self-referentiality indulges in the benefits of an optional and romanticized affiliation with more than one national culture. However, this version of a transnational or expatriate writing that equates artistic creativity with dislocation, as Edward Said has shown, obscures irreparable losses and mutilations, sustaining the myth of a redemptive exile. As Said more soberly insists, “exile is neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible,” particularly when it is not self-chosen.40 Rhys’s work, as described by V. S. Naipaul, reflects more accurately the disinheritance of language, geography, and community that usually accompanies exile: Even in her early stories, of Left bank life in Paris, she avoided geographical explicitness. She never “set” her scene, English, European or West Indian; she had, as it were, no home audience to play to; she was outside that tradition of imperial-expatriate writing in which the metropolitan outsider is thrown into



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As an expatriate marginalized from the expatriate community in Paris, Rhys did not draw any special sustenance from her condition but chose to settle into her foreign residence in the unsettled and disruptive sense of the Rhys heroine.42 Rhys’s full-fledged understanding of dislocation and homelessness, so prominently displayed in her final novel, did not emerge in this type of complexity in her early work. As will be shown here, Rhys developed partial aspects of displacement in her early novels and only subsequently was able to synthesize these into a more comprehensive expression of dislocation. Rhys’s early writing focuses on the “nothing” that, according to Naipaul, made up the heritage that Rhys brought to her exile residences. Unlike Naipaul, however, Rhys views this “nothing” metaphorically, denoting the lack of foundation at the core of any culture heritage.43 In other words, Rhys’s development as a writer can be explained not as a coming-toterms with displacement but as an increasingly expanded verbalization of its unsettling experience. Rhys’s first published novel, Quartet (1929), centers around Marya Zelli, who, shortly after her marriage and the subsequent arrest of her husband for illegal sales of antiques, finds herself stranded in Paris without money.44 During her husband’s imprisonment, she is taken in by a couple, the Heidlers, enters into a condoned relationship with Mr. Heidler, and is eventually abandoned after her husband’s return from prison. Marya’s marriage is lost from the very beginning, as her husband, in addition to serving his prison term, will eventually be deported from France. The novel’s structure consists of the intersection between a domestic (Marya and the Heidlers) and a bureaucratic (Marya, her husband, and the law) triangle of mimetic struggles that rather than steadying Marya’s life in the traditional sense of the institutions of family and law, contribute to its disarray and disintegration. Her whole life in Paris runs up against legal and domestic codes that subvert any stability in the heroine’s life. What is often idealized as Paris’s open bohemian setting of transnational cultures turns out in Quartet to be the dreary reality of an overcoded society that both legally and domestically restricts rather than expands the heroine’s sense of agency. Rhys’s novel, aiming at a demystification of exile, captures in great detail the unsettling experiences of the everyday that make up its banal reality. To begin with, the heroine’s contact with the local French is practically nonexistent. Instead, her circle of friends consists of other expatriates, such as the German-English Heidlers, the Jewish Italian Miss DeSolla, and her



relief against an alien background. She was an expatriate, but her journey had been the other way round, from a background of nothing to an organized world with which her heroines could never come to terms.41

Ethnic Modernisms

own Polish husband. It is interesting to note that the heroine’s own origin remains for the most part obscured. The reader is told that “before her marriage she had spent several years as a chorus girl with Mr. Albert Prance’s No. 1 touring company” (Q 15) but is given nothing conclusive about her prior life or family background. Heidler at one point asks her with uncertainty: “But you are English—or aren’t you?” (Q 12). Even the other exiles perceive her as an outsider: “Marya, whom they spoke of in the third person as if she were a strange animal or at any rate a strayed animal—one not quite of the fold.” (Q 11) And, to underscore her heroine’s absolute state of homelessness, the narrator depicts her as a product and not a victim of dislocation: “Marya, you must understand, had not been suddenly and ruthlessly transplanted from solid comfort to the hazards of Montmartre. Nothing like that. Truth to say, she was used to a lack of solidity and of fixed backgrounds” (Q 15). The novel’s action, however, runs counter to this assertion in that its heroine desperately seeks to belong and only eventually accepts the absolute condition of her dislocation. Not unlike Wide Sargasso Sea, the novel gradually parts with a traditional definition of cultural identity based on fictive ontologies of national, institutional, and domestic affiliation. Unlike the novel of manners, in which the heroine is instructed to use social codes to her fullest advantage in securing marital and economic success, Rhys subjects her heroine to their disruptive and destructive effects. As Molly Hite states: Rhys continually places a marginal character at the center of her fiction and in doing so decenters an inherited narrative structure and undermines the values informing this structure. In particular, the novel, a form that emerged with the bourgeoisie and embodies the ethical priorities of this ascendant class, privileges agency—and, more insidiously, privileges the assumption that an agent who is motivated and tenacious enough will necessarily bring about the desired results.45

In fact, it is not only the Rhysian heroine that “decenters an inherited narrative structure” but it is the institutional power informing these structures that likewise comes undone, failing to fulfill its promise of stability and order. Having escaped the lot of a chorus girl by marrying her Polish husband, Stephan Zelli, the heroine cannot take refuge in this relationship since shortly thereafter he is arrested. Marriage exposes the heroine to rather than protects her from the harsh economic lot of exiles. In addition, her economic situation forces her to give up any sentimental notion about marriage and enter into a compromise by becoming Heidler’s mistress. In this extra-



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marital relationship, she is quickly confronted with the inherent social hypocrisy of such affairs, in which the Heidlers keep up their social appearance and place her in a position of dependency masked by the philanthropic pretense of taking in a stranded girl. The economic and supportive benefits from her affair are eventually cancelled once her husband returns from prison. “I certainly do not intend to help you to join your husband,” says Heidler, withdrawing his support once he becomes tired of Marya (Q 163). She is left once again stranded, with her husband about to be deported. The domestic plot of the novel, as mentioned, revolves within a triangle of mimetic rivalry, exposing its participants both as victims and accomplices. As Judith Kegan Gardiner notes, the novel can be considered a more critical recasting of The Good Soldier (1915), written by Rhys’s mentor, Ford Maddox Ford.46 In The Good Soldier, an extramarital affair between wife and best friend is exposed in hindsight, serving as an illustration of a dawning age of distrust and disenchantment. Florence Dowell, the American wife, fulfilling the misogynist cliché of the modern emancipated woman, dupes her husband into believing that she is chronically ill with a heart problem while entertaining intimate relationships with men, including his best friend, the good soldier Edward Ashburnham. The novel bemoans the demise of idealism as given in the good soldier (who also happens to be English) in an era of American modernity and calculating women. Rhys’s novel, it can be said, questions the easy categorization of innocence and corruption in Ford’s work, implicating all characters. With considerably less nostalgia for a presumed age of innocence and humanity, Rhys dissects the altruistic claims of romance and marriage in the modern era. All participants enter into relationships with a self-interest that is both helpless and exploitative at the same time. In her affair, Marya longs to fulfill the marriage that was so abruptly suspended by state intervention, and find a social and economic sanctuary. Heidler sees in Marya a narcissistic fantasy of himself, one that he pursues in his frequent marital trespasses and his pursuit of power: “What mattered was that, despising, almost disliking love, he was forcing her to be nothing but the little woman” (Q 118). Finally, his wife seeks to reclaim her husband’s desire and love, but she displaces her emotions in the form of a jealous codependency onto Marya. As the victim and beneficiary of this mimetic triangular arrangement, Marya is continually subjected to Lois Heidler’s jealousy, her husband’s advances, and the social role of having to act as a friend and beneficiary of the Heidlers’ apparent generosity. In Rhys’s narration, women are certainly as calculating as in Ford’s but express more a condition of displaced ambitions of belonging, owning, and possessing. Significantly, an era that has often been described as the emerging age of commodity and consumerism is depicted in Rhys as one in which almost everything can be bought but virtually nothing can be



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owned. Paris, with its ubiquitous consumer goods, ranging from fine food and clothing to cultural embellishments of diverse kinds, cannot provide a safe haven or a moveable feast for its drifting expatriates who fail to anchor themselves in the fleeting pleasures of consumption. Instead, a phantom world of elusive plots of mastery is evoked, silencing the myth of belonging in its ontological and economic sense. The domestic triangle of struggle is further repeated on the institutional level of the law. Thus, while the heroine’s sense of a national identity is only vaguely developed, she is brutally reminded of its administrative significance in the case of her husband who, upon having committed a legal offense, is refused residence in France. Unlike French citizens, who take their residence for granted even as they are arrested for crimes, Marya suddenly finds her husband’s and her own life at the mercy of anonymous institutional forces. The novel’s depiction of Marya’s visit to the courthouse is tinged with irony, calling into doubt the universal and democratic precepts of the French revolution: “Next day she went to the Palais de Justice. Shining gates, ascending flights of steps. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité in golden letters; Tribunal de Police in black. As it were, a vision of Heaven and the Judgment” (Q 29). As Marya enters the courthouse, she is at first led by a friendly journalist through the maze of the building: She was hurrying along corridors and up staircases after a bright little man in horn-rimmed spectacles, who had informed her that he was a journalist and asked if he could be of any service to her. He knew the Palais very well indeed, he said. He would dart at a door, tap on it, ask a rapid question and set off again in the opposite direction, and Marya, hastening after him, began to feel as though she were playing some intricate game of which she did not understand the rules. As they ran he talked about the bolshevist scare. He said that the arrests had become a scandal, that it was time that they were stopped, that they would be stopped. (Q 29)

The promise of liberty and equality, as this depiction shows, is negated both by the bureaucratic machinery whose rules escape Marya and by the willful executive orders against political enemies such as the bolshevists and their demand for equality. The journalist, representing the principle of fraternity, mistakes Marya’s case as that of a falsely charged journalist and initially proceeds to offer his help in determining the cause of the arrest: “I am only happy to assist a confrère” (Q 29). However, once he is assured of the real cause of arrest—theft—he is not even interested in inquiring about the circumstances but quickly leaves the courthouse in embarrassment and feigned civility: “‘Bon soir, Madame, bon soir,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I’m most happy to have been of service to you.’ He backed towards the door, looking nervous



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as though he were afraid she would try to keep him with her, drag him by force into her disreputable existence” (Q 30). Rhys’s ironic depiction of the legal and institutional apparatus by itself would parallel a Kafkaesque awakening to modern administrative violence. However, in Quartet, administrative violence is not left at the level of a quasi-epistemic order of bureaucratic victimization. The author instead subtly links the machinery of the law to the status of citizenship and national identity. As Marya is informed about the charges brought against her husband, she is indirectly indicted for a “suspicious” second nationality she had acquired through marriage, one which also evokes the earlier mentioned “bolshevist scare”: “‘Theft, Madame,’ he said reproachfully, when had finished laughing, ‘is always a serious affair.’ He ran hard eyes over her with the look of an expert passing intimate judgments, smiled again and asked her nationality. ‘Polish, also?’” (Q 30–31). The principles of democracy are not only negated by the dubious court and police practices but by their national containment, thereby creating citizens of a second order who deserve less justice than others. Moreover, the moral impeachment of theft curiously elides the question of restricted economic possibilities among members of an exile community. “Anything to do with money was swooped on and punished ferociously,” Marya at one point remarks about the self-righteous facade of morality held up by the law (Q 34). Similar to the domestic plot, Marya’s public life turns out to be circumscribed by unfathomable and indifferent rules of self-interest and displaced systemic aggression. Rhys’s conscious crossing of private and public triangles of struggle in the novel, as we have seen, does away with any facile myth of exile culture as shaped on a popular model of the American expatriate writer who is mostly a connoisseur of bohemian taste and expert in productive forms of alienation. Instead, her work reflects the intensity of exile’s restriction in which only temporary identities and sanctuaries are attainable, and even then without any legitimating claim to a heroic existential authenticity. As Edward Said has pointed out in the case of Hemingway and Fitzgerald: “Expatriates may share in the solitude and estrangement of exile, but they do not suffer under its rigid proscriptions.”47 Similarly in Rhys’s novel, the exiled Marya has significantly less self-determination than the expatriate writer; she can only resign herself to her situation. Eventually, she must even forego the bourgeois pursuit of meaning and significance. Rhys’s work, in this respect, does not even express a residual melancholy for a belonging found in the act of writing, as given in Said’s description of Adorno’s Reflections from a Mutilated Life: “Adorno’s reflections are informed by the belief that the only home truly available now, though fragile and vulnerable, is in writing.”48 Rather, Rhys’s writing fulfills an act of disengagement from and disabuse of conventional notions of belonging, as given in a lucid statement



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made by Adorno himself: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”49 In the character of Marya, Rhys thus rids herself of any residual and sentimental notions of belonging in order to undo its vicious metaphysics of identity administered in selective and exclusionary fashion. Quartet, accordingly, offers a rich spectrum in its portrayal of modern dislocation in a metropolitan culture. Frequent depictions of anonymous crowds in either administrative or other public settings (court, transportation, sidewalk cafes) foreground a social isolation reminiscent of Baudelaire’s Paris, the unreal city: “People hurried along cowering beneath their umbrellas, and the pavements were slippery and glistening, with pools of water here and there, sad little mirrors which the reflections of the lights tinted with a dull point of red. The trees along the Boulevard Clichy stretched ridiculously frail and naked arms to a sky without stars” (Q 26). In these depictions of urban Paris, the question of race is only occasionally invoked, suggesting a racism that operates not so much systematically but in a more latent and insidious manner. It is instead sporadically encountered in overheard remarks concerning “internationalists who invariably got into trouble sooner or later” or in Monsieur Hautchamp’s dismissal of a theory of evolution based on the mixing of races, which he reads in a newspaper: “‘Le mélange des races est à la base de l’évolution humaine vers le type parfait.’ ‘I don’t think,’ thought Monsieur Hautchamp—or something to that effect” (Q 32–33). The most prominent invocation of race is given in a scene in which Heidler, while making love to Marya, calls her “Kalmuck face” (Mongolian) and frames her in the stereotype of the prerational Oriental: “Open your eyes savage. Open your eyes, savage” (Q 131). The domestic attitudes of the Heidlers and the Hautchamps, which reveal their presumed cultural and moral superiority, parallel and reflect that of their official governments, namely the colonial powers of England, Germany, and France. Rhys’s second novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), can be read as a sequel to Quartet, although its characters are not identical to those of the first novel. Julia Martin resembles Marya but her story begins where Marya’s ends. She is no longer looking for shelter in marriage but enters the novel as the already-abandoned mistress of Mr. Mackenzie. Rhys intensifies the dislocation of her heroine, who also vents her resentment and disillusion in more unmistakable terms as, for instance, in a comment concerning her landlady: “‘She can’t possibly be a Frenchwoman.’ Not that you lost yourself in conjectures as to what she was because you didn’t care a damn anyway” (ALMM 7). Much of Julia’s private and social identity appears to have been erased as a result of her displacement: “It was always places that she thought of, not people” (ALMM 9). Likewise, her appearance proves to be strangely disconnected from traditional markers of identity: “Her career of ups and downs had rubbed most of the hall-marks off her, so that it was not easy to



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She made herself up elaborately and carefully; yet it was clear that what she was doing had long ceased to be a labour of love and had become partly a mechanical process, partly a substitute for the mask she would have liked to wear. To stop making up would have been a confession of age and weariness. It would have meant that Mr. Mackenzie had finished her. (ALMM 11)

Julia’s demise, as with other Rhysian heroines, is anticipated by the reader and is solely of interest due to its particular nature and expression. In contrast to Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie no longer focuses on the victimization of its female heroine by cunning manipulators of power and social etiquette. While the profile of a “master” mentality is still given in the character of Mr. Mackenzie, who echoes the Heidlers and the Hautchamps, this mentality is itself subject to the systemic power of a code: “His code was perfectly adapted to the social system and in any argument he could have defended it against any attack whatsoever. However, he never argued about it, because that was part of the code” (ALMM 18). Mr. Mackenzie’s goal in life, the narrator informs us, is to protect himself by not departing from this code as he had foolishly done in his youth—he published a small book of poems—and in his taking on Julia as a mistress. “The secret of life,” he realizes, “was never to go too far or too deep” (ALMM 20). Similarly, Rhys’s heroine no longer aspires to marital security but has developed a habitualized strategy of survival: “She had been an artist’s model. At one time she had been a mannequin. But it was obvious that she had been principally living on the money given to her by various men. Going from man to man had become a habit” (ALMM 20). The distance between victim and victimizer, already tenuous in Quartet, is further eroded in this novel, as is the erosion of the white bourgeois European mythology of mastery, with its seemingly secure sense of belonging. Dislocation no longer figures as an anomaly afflicting only the marginalized, like Rhys’s heroines, but becomes constitutive in the lives of all the novel’s characters. George Horsfield, Julia’s new lover after Mr. Mackenzie, may still have the objective status of power and wealth yet he suffers from the same symptoms of displacement and isolation that afflict Julia: “It occurred to him that as a rule he fought shy of lonely people; they reminded him too painfully of certain aspects of himself, their loneliness, of course, being a mere caricature of his own” (ALMM 31). His assertions of power and dominance become



guess at her age, her nationality, or the social background to which she properly belonged” (ALMM 11). Unlike Marya, who stumbles from one plot into the next in order to preserve her fragile identity as a kept woman, Julia’s sense of belonging is already that of a weak mask and posture:

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He took out the five hundred and one of the thousand notes. They were creased carefully into four. He put them into her hand and shut her fingers on them gently. When he had done this he felt powerful and dominant. Happy. He smiled at Julia rather foolishly. “Will that do you for a bit?” he asked. “Will you be able to manage?” “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. You’re very kind. You’re kind and a dear.” But he noticed that she took the money without protest and apparently without surprise, and this rather jarred upon him. (ALMM 36)

As the foil to Julia and a replacement of Mr. Mackenzie, Horsfield is demystified and exposed in his helpless effort to please himself in the role of the patriarch and patron. To his great surprise, Horsfield himself has become substitutable in a world where exchange value rules and people are traded like commodities: “‘I don’t care whether you send me any money or not,’ she said . . . ‘If you think,’ she said, ‘that I care . . . I can always get somebody, you see. I’ve known that ever since I’ve known anything’” (ALMM 126). Julia’s quick dismissal of Horsfield as something that is easily replaceable clearly contrasts with Marya’s submissive and compulsive attachment to Heidler and her subsequent separation anxieties once the affair is over. Indeed, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie begins to articulate a first critique of humanism in Rhys’s work that questions and dismantles the traditional foundations of morality and humanity built on the illusions of rightful ownership and belonging. Rhys’s critique also serves to reveal the role that literary discourse plays in disseminating these illusions, in which literature serves as the morally edifying voice of humanism. In this respect, Rhys follows in the tradition of nihilism, which had begun to haunt European culture since Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, and Joseph Conrad. Anticipating some of the ideas Sartre puts forth in Nausea, Rhys focuses likewise on the total depletion of meaning from within conventional bourgeois traditions and everyday life. For example, Julia’s attendance of her mother’s funeral merely honors the physical death of a person who had died long ago. As a grieving family member, Julia is afflicted even more so by her own sense of internal dissolution: “My life’s like death. It’s like being buried alive” (ALMM 75). “The lot of the Rhys heroine,” as Peter Wolfe remarks, “is to do nothing and to do it alone.”50 Much of the novel, with its absence of any decisive action and its resigned and dejected tone, illustrates a vacuum of meaning that can be explained both as a result of Europe’s postimperial history, with its sense of loss of a historical mission and its newly emerging mass culture, with its rituals of empty repetition and hollowed-out bourgeois conventions.



likewise a caricature of his intentions in a social reality that no longer allows him to assume full mastery:

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Unlike Sartre, however, Rhys does not confront this vacuum of meaning and the banality of everyday nihilism with a growing sense of social engagement. Sartre’s existential principle of being for oneself (l’être pour soi) is dismissed by Rhys as part of the bourgeois sense of agency of which her uprooted characters have been deprived. It is consequently through the more contingent and material forms (l’être en soi) that Rhys’s characters begin to express their sense of a continually displaced form of agency. Here Rhys’s writing approximates the diasporic expressions of identity as voiced by Walter Benjamin and particularly Siegfried Kracauer. In fact, Rhys’s characters begin to take on the belittled bourgeois existence of the Angestellte, or service industry employees, who have become anonymous and dispensable agents in the mass market of commodities. The nonheroic (not even in the negative sense of the absurd hero) and anticlimactic features of Rhys’s writings reflect this thorough curtailment of meaning and significance in a modern mass culture. Thus, as will be seen in our discussion of Good Morning, Midnight, even such existentially loaded topics of nothingness, still found in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, become subject to deflation and irony. This more consistent development and analysis of a form of reason operative outside the subject-centered tradition of European humanism and nihilism and its concomitant existential and volitionist model of social action, is already, albeit only in passing, announced in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. At the novel’s end, the heroine ultimately leaves behind her earlier preoccupation with the absence of meaning. During her mother’s funeral, she initially confronts the existential void left by the death of a person: “But all the time she stood, knelt, and listened she was tortured because her brain was making a huge effort to grapple with nothingness” (ALMM 94). However, Julia’s reflections on nothingness quickly give way to an acute perception as she observes the other mourners: “They managed it all very well, very well indeed. The word slick came into her mind. Slick” (ALMM 94). Nothingness and absence of meaning, Julia realizes, are not merely primal boundaries that affect all human lives equally but are themselves subject to management and manipulation. By stressing the banality of suffering and the gesture of mourning through the management of pain, Rhys alerts us to a false consciousness, “slickness” that is no longer the expression of a dominant class but of an entire social and cultural tradition pervasively shaped by rationalization: “She was crying now because she remembered that her life had been a long succession of humiliations and mistakes and pains and ridiculous efforts. Everybody’s life was like that” (ALMM 94). The distortion and slickness at the root of “everybody’s life” (in particular Anglo-Saxon culture as stressed by the London setting) takes on a structural quality in Rhys’s novel in the form of a cultural and psychic defense against any sense of dislocation



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Good Morning, Midnight: Commodity, Distraction, and the Displaced Masses Unlike Yezierska’s and Hurston’s characters, who were mostly drawn from the underprivileged working class, Rhys’s heroines exemplify the common, though often overlooked status of the Angestellte, the clerical worker or service industry employee who occupies a tenuous middle position between the urban proletarian and the established middle classes. This emerging class of the Angestellte had caught the attention of Siegfried Kracauer in Berlin when he was trying to define the new phenomenon of a mass and consumer culture.51 The Angestellte, Kracauer noticed, was particularly prone to the seductions of commodity culture, with its appeal to bourgeois style and taste. Adapting bourgeois mannerisms, however, could not hide the fact that socially and economically, the Angestellte resembled the despised working class. The Angestellte thus embodied from its inception an alienated and dislocated consciousness within an emerging mass culture. “Fancying themselves a ‘new middle class,’” as Miriam Hansen points out, “they tended to deny any commonality with the working class and instead to recycle the remnants of bourgeois culture.”52 The social ambience in Rhys’s work is largely drawn from this petty white-collar worker milieu. Like Kracauer, she understood that these displaced masses from within bourgeois culture represented its internal contradiction more clearly than the outright negation of bourgeois culture in its proletarian counterpart. The white-collar worker who originally hailed from either the working class or an impoverished bourgeois background can be seen as the product of the structural transformation from an industrial capitalism to a postindustrial consumer society in which the growing exchange of commodities gradually replaced industrial production in its significance (SM 30). This structural change created an increased need for nonmanual labor, although it was still shaped in the style of assembly line factory labor in terms of its specialized, serialized, and mechanized tasks: “An industrial reserve army of salaried employees” such as typists, desk clerks, accountants, sales personnel, and other service providers transformed, according to Werner Sombart, Germany’s industrial cities into “cities of salaried employees and civil servants” (SM 30, 32). Along with this change, as Kracauer notes, a new profile of the eligible white-collar worker emerges, centering particularly upon youth and



and disjunction. Rhys thus challenges the notion of dislocation as extraneous to society and instead shows how society as a whole is increasingly becoming a stranger to itself. By collapsing the opposition between exile and mainstream society, Rhys soberly acknowledges exile as the modern and permanent condition of homelessness and self-alienation.

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appearance. Gender also plays a defining role, with women now making up almost half of Berlin’s new salaried work force. Young men and women fill out job applications, requesting “a non-manual job, preferably in sales, work that’s light and clean” (SM 33). Commodification, quickly characterizing not only the traded products but the work force as well, extends itself to various fashion and leisure industries that preserve the necessary youthful appearance in an era in which age takes on the notion of a used-up commodity (SM 32–39). “Fashion and economy work hand in hand,” as seen in the increasing standardization of the salaried worker: It is scarcely too hazardous to assert that in Berlin a salaried type is developing, standardized in the direction of the desired complexion. Speech, clothes, gestures and countenances become assimilated and the result of the process is that very same pleasant appearance, which with the help of photographs can be widely reproduced. A selective breeding that is carried out under the pressure of social relations, and that is necessarily supported by the economy through the arousal of corresponding consumer needs. Employees must join in, whether they want to or not. The rush to the numerous beauty salons springs partly from existential concerns, and the use of cosmetic products is not always a luxury. For fear of being withdrawn from use as obsolete, ladies and gentlemen dye their hair, while forty-year olds take up sports to keep slim. (SM 39)

Kracauer’s analysis shows how a reversal of cause and effect produces the salaried worker who patterns herself on a type as represented by the photograph so as to become employed as a salaried worker thereafter. In short, one must already be what one hopes to become. In doing so, one first buys the very products (clothes and cosmetics) that one will later sell to others. The service industry thus constantly refuels itself from within its own ranks, enslaving the employee not only to its decorum but its consumer products as well. Kracauer’s concept of the Angestellte may even do more justice to Yezierska and Hurston, who, due to their education, left the proletarian background proper and struggled in the intermediary milieu of the service employee. Since their heroines, however, were predominantly proletarian, critics have falsely assigned the writers themselves to the same social background, ignoring how these writers only retroactively cultivated their own images in close resemblance to those of their characters. Jean Rhys, as was mentioned at the outset, comes from a colonial bourgeois background in decline and dissolution. Upon the death of her father, a medical doctor, Rhys found herself impoverished and sought work in British popular theatres as a chorus girl. As with Kracauer’s Angestellte, this degraded position of bourgeois theatre still allowed Rhys to stem against a total descent into poverty and entire loss of bourgeois respectability. As Mary Lou Emery summarizes



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It is not surprising that Rhys, then called Gwendolyn Williams, changed her name to Vivien or Ella or Emma Gray and found work in a traveling chorus troupe. . . . The theater can make legitimate and pleasurable the fractured identities of socially displaced women, yet it cannot give them the “solid” class background they may lack or have lost by entering the theater. It disguises women whose social status might be questioned, and yet it immediately renders questionable their social status, especially their sexual respectability.53

Kracauer, who has analyzed the significance of chorus girls in his essay “The Mass Ornament,” suggests a similar veiling and unveiling of social contradictions in popular entertainment (cabarets, picture palaces) arising from within and created for the culture of the Angestellten. As Miriam Hansen notes, “unlike the industrial proletariat, [the Angestellten] were ‘spiritually homeless,’ seeking escape from their actual situation in the metropolitan ‘barracks of pleasure’ (entertainment malls like the Haus Vaterland, picture palaces, etc.).”54 Social identity, as Kracauer concludes from the widely popular and mechanically streamlined choreographic display of traveling chorus groups such as the Tiller Girls, no longer rests on bourgeois individuality but on a disembodied context of the mass: “It is the mass that is employed here. Only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves to be formed from within, do people become fractions of a figure.”55 This new constellation of a disembodied, displaced, and compromised mass identity is borne out by the majority of Rhys’s heroines, who are border-walkers between a world of Angestellte and its carnivalized and commodified versions of entertainment such as cabaret and dance troupes, in which its members are also mistresses and part-time prostitutes. Rhys’s world represents at once Angestelltenkultur and its darker underside, particularly in the framing of women as sexual and market commodities. As we have seen with Marya and Julia, both characters are on occasion forced into the demimonde of being a mistress and the ensuing compromise of their sexual respectability. However, in both novels the heroines still carry to some degree the profile of the bourgeois mistress, or kept woman. In Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys approximates the new mass culture that redefines not only bourgeois respectability but the entire concept of the autonomous subject as well. In her previous novels, Rhys pointed to the erosion of autonomy in her characters and illuminated their vague and vulnerable identities as foreign nationals. Good Morning, Midnight, published in 1938 as her last early work, offers a more consistently developed image of modern mass culture and its loss of subjective agency.



Rhys’s transformation in the tension between social and gender expectations placed upon her identity:

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While the novel is told from an “I” perspective, it ironically displays little of the autonomy associated with subjective narration. “I’m a bit of an automaton, but sane, surely—dry, cold and sane,” confesses the heroine at the outset of her narration.56 This assertion of a residual sanity is immediately negated by a merciless suicidal fantasy—“You jump in with no willing and eager friends around, and when you sink you sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter”—and a disjointed reflection on public restrooms and mass coercion: “A London lavabo in black and white marble, fifteen women in a queue, each clutching her penny, not one bold spirit daring to dash out of her turn past the stern-faced attendant” (GMM 10–11). These two images of fragmentation and mechanization as part of the interior narrative consciousness are mirrored externally by a “shop-window full of artificial limbs,” thus calling into question to what degree the narrator’s consciousness still stands apart from its reified and fragmented representations in mass culture (GMM 11). The biographical “I,” promising a life story or autobiography, likewise can no longer sustain the memory or enduring self-identity required for such an endeavor: Was it in 1923 or 1924 that we lived round the corner in the Rue-VictorCousin, and Enno bought me that Cossack cap and the imitation astrakhan coat? It was then that I started calling myself Sasha. I thought it might change my luck if I changed my name. Did it bring me any luck, I wonder—calling myself Sasha? Was it in 1926 or 1927? (GMM 12)

The narrator’s failing memory surprisingly remains precise with regard to dressing and appearance, indicating to what degree exteriority has already supplanted interiority. This substitutability of identity is also seen in the empty freedom of renaming oneself at will. Similarly, the opening of the novel evokes the wealth of an interior psychological world only to cancel it out in the exteriority of modern mass culture. The narration initially progresses in dream-like fashion and recounts in condensed manner the heroine’s dissolute life in London, from which she is rescued by a friend who gives her money to return to Paris. Surrealist settings, such as a disorienting forest of signs in a London underground station with contradictory directions of “this way” and “no exit” followed by a nightmarish vision of the heroine’s father with blood streaming from a wound, attest to the heroine’s hallucinatory sense of reality. This dream sequence eventually gives way to a more realistic setting, in which the heroine finds herself in a Parisian hotel with the patron asking for her passport, suspecting the financial insolvency of his boarder. Escaping into the streets of Paris, the heroine visits a cinema and recalls her earlier stay in Paris as a shop assistant, which is summed up in the assistant’s tirelessly reiterated response:



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“Good morning, madame. Has madame a vendeuse?” (GMM 17). The loosely constructed and drifting stream-of-consciousness narration accordingly finds its eventual steadied focus in the banal social setting of the world of the Angestellte. Rhys’s description of her heroine’s job as a saleslady strongly contrasts with the fantasy-like opening of the novel and places the reader into the presence of a dreary and mundane routine of work: Every time a customer arrived, the commissionaire touched a bell which rang just over my head. I would advance towards the three steps leading down to the street-door and stand there, smiling a small, discreet smile. I would say ‘Good afternoon, madame. . . . Certainly, madame,’ or ‘Good afternoon, madame. Mademoiselle Mercédès has had your telephone message and everything is ready,’ or ‘Certainly, madame. . . . Has madame a vendeuse?’ Then I would conduct the customer to the floor above, where the real activities of the shop were carried on, and call for Mademoiselle Mercédès or Mademoiselle Henriette or Madame Perron, as the case might be. If I forgot a face or allotted a new customer to a saleswoman out of her turn, there was a row. There was no lift in this shop. That’s why I was there. (GMM 18)

The subtle irony in this description rests with the insistence on personal familiarity with customers in an environment that depersonalizes the shop assistant, making her an automaton of rehearsed responses and a substitute “lift” or elevator. Along with her dissatisfaction with her job, the heroine develops a compensatory imagination of feigned bourgeois style—“I would pretend that I could recognize the various scents. Today it’s L’Heure Bleue; yesterday it was Nuits de Chine” (GMM 18)—and of imaginary verbal confrontations with the employer which, however, never take place: Well, let’s argue this out, Mr. Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That’s my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there’s no denying it. . . . We can’t all be happy, we can’t all be rich, we can’t all be lucky—and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isn’t it so, Mr. Blank? There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. Some must cry so that the others may able to laugh more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary. . . . Let’s say you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple—no, that I think you haven’t got. And that’s the right you hold most dearly, isn’t it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit. But I wish you a lot of trouble, Mr. Blank, and just to start off with, your damned shop’s going bust. Alleluia! Did I say all this? Of course I didn’t. I didn’t even think it. (GMM 29)



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The novel’s sense of unreality, as the closing statement “I didn’t even think it” suggests, reasserts itself, though not in the manner of a traumatized bourgeois interiority. Rather, the evocation of what the heroine can no longer even begin to think points to the complete externalization of consciousness. However, it would be wrong to assume that the absence of any subjective agency lies at the root of the heroine’s problems. As Kracauer has pointedly remarked: “It is not externality that poses a threat to truth. Truth is threatened by the naïve affirmation of cultural values that have become unreal and by the careless misuse of concepts such as personality, inwardness, tragedy.”57 Sasha echoes this observation when commenting on her acquaintances in London: “It isn’t their cruelty, it isn’t even their shrewdness— it’s their extraordinary naïveté. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliché. Everything is borne out of a cliché, rests on a cliché, survives by a cliché” (GMM 42). Rhys’s narrative proceeds with this unsettling sense of externality that can no longer refer to a bygone era of social stability and harmonization. The novel in which the heroine recalls an earlier stay in Paris gives no indication of a time when she supposedly was better off. As an antimemoir, the recollection of the heroine’s past merely forecasts or repeats the heroine’s present in reverse. Memory is at every point disembodied and returned to its material contingency: Thinking of my jobs . . . There was that one I had in the shop called Young Britain. X plus ZBW. That meant fcs. 68.60. Then another hieroglyphic— XQ 15th—meant something else, fcs. 112.75. Little boys’ sailor suits were there, and young gentlemen’s Norfolk suits were there . . . Well, I got the sack from that in a week, and very pleased I was too. Then there was that other job—as a guide. Standing in the middle of the Place de l’Opéra, losing my head and not knowing the way to the Rue de la Paix. North, south, east, west—they have no meaning for me. (GMM 30)

The demystified account of the heroine’s occasional jobs is broken down into job ads, salary quotes, and the merchandise to be sold. Similarly, her job as tour guide is remembered as abstract directions, reflecting a sense of disorientation that pervades even her memories. The novel’s central action, if one can even speak of such a plot device, is equally devoid of meaning, and farcical. Sasha, whose forays into Paris lead her to a series of restaurants, bars, hotels, a painter’s studio, is on one occasion approached by a petty con-man, the gigolo, who mistakes her for a wealthy lady due to an expensive looking fur coat that had been given to her as a gift. Sasha willingly listens to his tale, in which he is supposedly running away from the Foreign Legion and needs money to secure entry papers to



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England. Although he eventually realizes his mistake, they sympathetically recognize one another as accomplices in a world in which deceit and trickery have become imperative for survival. This moment of recognition is framed by the memory of Sasha’s past failed marriage and the death of her child and by the novel’s ending, in which Sasha submits to a meaningless sexual encounter with the repulsive traveling salesman, the commis voyageur, who in her fantasy turns into her friend, the gigolo.58 While the novel’s ending, as Judith Kegan Gardiner points out, clearly parodies a redemptive modernism as given in Joyce’s “Penelope-sequence” in Ulysses, it should not be construed as more than a deflationary closure. Literary allusions are used in Good Morning, Midnight in pastiche-like fashion and merely provide the scaffold for the empty time and distractions that make up the bulk of the narration: “But when I think of ‘tomorrow’ there is a gap in my head, a blank—as if I were falling through emptiness. Tomorrow never comes” (GMM 159).59 Reading the novel in terms of character development and depth ultimately prevents one from understanding the complete externalization of Rhys’s heroine and her accurate portrayal of mass culture and the Angestellte lifestyle. Unlike Joyce’s Ulysses, in which a stream-of-consciousness technique is still deployed to express some type of integrating artistic sensibility, Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight illustrates the end of the project of interior reflection. Her heroine is preoccupied mostly with distractions that do not add up to any significant content or expression. Her reflections center upon the utterly banal, such as dyeing her hair to counteract old appearance and age: “Shall I have it red? Shall I have it black? Now, black, that would be startling. Shall I have it blonde cendré?” (GMM 52). Or, on another occasion she plans to go the hairdresser merely to keep up the pretense of action: “Tomorrow I must certainly go and have my hair dyed” (GMM 56). Sasha recalls here T. S. Eliot’s equally superfluous modern antihero, J. Alfred Prufrock, plagued by indecision and a compensatory imagination similar to that of Sashas in that reflection is entirely divorced from action: “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.”60 Eliot’s modern day Hamlet, for whom there is “time yet for a hundred indecisions / And for a hundred visions and revisions, / Before the taking of a toast and tea” represents the total absence of bourgeois concepts such as “tragedy” or “inwardness” based upon an Oedipal constellation of culture and its incestuous family rivalry with the father for the mother’s primordial status.61 Similarly, Rhys’s heroine, who at the outset of the novel is briefly haunted by the nightmarish appearance of her mortally wounded father, does not even begin to sort out her ancestral memory but leaves this Oedipal fantasy behind as she leaves England for Paris. The novel’s ending can be construed as the return of this repressed memory but begs the question of its significance.62



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Just as Eliot criticized the lack of impersonality and of an objective correlative in Hamlet’s ruminations, Rhys equally asserts that consciousness is as much, if not altogether, constituted from without rather than within. And going further by questioning Eliot’s concept of “sensory experience,” which is still linked to a whole subject (the impersonal artist), Rhys extends the objective correlative to the mass culture of the everyday. Her characters consequently no longer dwell in the hallucinatory world of a private psyche but of publicly circulated and commodified fantasies. The novel’s references to the world exhibition, ads, fashion magazines, shopping windows, and the cinema underscore the pervasiveness of modern mass culture whose “reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions.”63 Visits to the cinema are frequent activities of Rhys’s heroines, suggesting not only escapism but in Kracauer’s sense of the “cult of distraction” a possible encounter with one’s own unsettling displacement as a member of a homogeneous mass audience.64 In Good Morning, Midnight, one scene in particular, offering a lengthy depiction of a typical film plot trying to uphold a fantasy of bourgeois social ascent, affects Sasha in a strikingly different manner than predicated by its plot. As Kracauer remarks in an essay commenting on the increasing commodification of cinema, commercial film had virtually eroded its once-revolutionary potential as a site for mass mobilization: “Indeed, the films made for the lower classes are even more bourgeois than those aimed at finer audiences, precisely because they hint at subversive points of view without exploring them.”65 Sasha not only recounts the film in the novel but, more importantly, describes her own and the audience’s responses as spectators: The Cinéma Danton. Watching a good young man trying to rescue his employer from a mercenary mistress. The employer is a gay, bad old boy who manufactures toilet articles. The good young man has the awkwardness, the smugness, the shyness, the pathos of good young men. He interrupts intimate conversations, knocking loudly, bringing in letters and parcels, etcetera, etcetera. At last the lady, annoyed, gets up and sweeps away. She turns at the door to say: ‘Alors, bien, je te laisse à tes suppositoires.’ Everybody laughs loudly at this, and so do I. She said this well. (GMM 108)

At this point the film still fulfills the subversive function referred to by Kracauer in its ridiculing of the petty bourgeois existence of the manufacturer who is left by his mistress with a bawdy comical remark: “Well, I leave you to your suppositories.” The later part of the film predictably restores the balance between subversive humor and bourgeois respectability: The film goes on and on. After many vicissitudes, the good young man is triumphant. He has the permission to propose to his employer’s daughter. He is



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waiting on the bank of a large pond, with a ring that he is going to offer her ready in his waistcoat pocket. He takes it out to make sure he has it. Mad with happiness, he strides up and down the shores of the pond, gesticulating. He makes too wild a gesture. The ring flies from his hand into the middle of the pond. He takes off his trousers; he wades out. He has to get the ring back; he must get it back. Exactly the sort of thing that happens to me. I laugh till tears come into my eyes. However, the film shows no signs of stopping, so I get up and go out. (GMM 108)

Sasha leaves the film not upon its predictable happy ending but at the point where the hero is once more reminded of his unstable social position (loss of wedding ring). Here Sasha identifies with the clumsy hero—“exactly the sort of thing happens to me”—as one unable to make happiness work for herself. She therefore preserves the potentially subversive message drowned out by the film’s restorative bourgeois plot. At the same time, however, she remains not entirely unaffected by the film’s bourgeois illusions. As she leaves the theatre, she enters a bar next door and indulges in mockbourgeois respectability: “Another Pernod in the bar next door to the cinema. I sit at a corner table and sip it respectably, with lowered eyes. Je suis une femme convenable, just come out of the nearest cinema. . . . Now I really am O.K., chère madame. If I have a bottle of Bordeaux at dinner I’ll be almost as drunk as I’d hoped to be” (GMM 108). Mocking bourgeois conventions such as posture, language, and taste (getting drunk on fine wine), Sasha subverts the film’s social message and recovers a part of its latently unsettling vision. Similarly, Sasha’s room in a cheap Parisian hotel at once represents and mocks bourgeois style and taste in its attempt to make her transient and demi-monde lifestyle outwardly respectable. The novel significantly opens with Sasha having an imaginary dialogue with her room: “Quite like old times,” the room says. “Yes? No?” There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse. I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life. (GMM 9)

The room’s layout, with two separate beds and a hidden wash-basin represses any objectionable suggestions of sexual intimacy or physicality. It also attempts to make the idea of a kept woman more socially respectable, even if



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That’s the way it is, that’s the way it goes, that was the way it went. . . . A room. A nice room. A beautiful room. A beautiful room with bath. A very beautiful room with bath. A bedroom and sitting-room with a bath. Up to the dizzy heights of the suite. Two bedrooms, sitting-room, bath and vestibule. (The small bedroom is in case you don’t feel like me, or in case you meet somebody you like better and come in late. Anything you want brought up in the dinner-wagon. (But, alas! the waiter has a louse on his collar. What is that on his collar?) (GMM 33)

Like the cockroaches and the smell of cheapness that Sasha occasionally “imagines” (especially when she’s hungry), the louse on the waiter’s collar questions the respectability that money buys. The hotel room, an empty facade of social respectability, is thus unveiled for what it is, namely a disguised economics that caters to a modern disposable and transient lifestyle: A beautiful room with bath? A room with bath? A nice room? A room? . . . But never tell the truth about this business of rooms, because it would bust the roof off everything and undermine the whole social system. All rooms are the same. All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair and perhaps a bidet. A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that’s all any room is. (GMM 38)

This type of depiction of a modern hotel civilization, disguising its own migratory status from itself, calls to mind Kracauer’s discussion of the hotel lobby as an inverted church. The hotel lobby, Kracauer claims, with its pomp and ornament, would appear to imitate the ritual and transcendental space of the church; however, the hotel lobby pays tribute to no higher cause or being but simply becomes an empty ritual space of modernity, one from which the gods have withdrawn. As with a church, the hotel lobby gives off the air of contemplative serenity: “The observance of silence, no less obligatory in the hotel lobby than in the house of God, indicates that in both places people consider themselves essentially as equals.”66 Yet this radical democratic and leveling space of the hotel ultimately contains no significance: “The togetherness in the hotel lobby has no meaning. While here, too, people certainly do become detached from everyday life, this detachment does not lead the community to assure itself of its existence as a congregation.”67 Rather, the effect of the hotel lobby is both a concealment and intensifica-



an indiscernible smell of “cheapness” hangs faintly in the air. Her unsettled existence in an anonymous hotel thus takes on the acceptable appearance of order and habit, with set meals and drinks. Overhearing a young man asking the hotel patronne about “a room for a young lady-friend of his,” Sasha thinks to herself:

Ethnic Modernisms

tion of alienation: “Instead it merely displaces people from the unreality of the daily hustle and bustle to a place where they would encounter the void only if they were more than just reference points.”68 “The hotel management,” writes Kracauer, “therefore thoughtfully conceals from its guests the real events which could put an end to the false aesthetic situation shrouding that nothing.”69 Or as Rhys more callously writes, “a beautiful room with bath” is ultimately nothing more than “a place you can hide from the wolves outside” (GMM 38). Though Kracauer’s hotel lobby is more ornate and caters to the upper classes (like James’s Waldorf Astoria) it nevertheless bears a striking resemblance to the seedy hotels in which Rhys’s heroines reside in that they are a “mere gap that does not even serve a purpose,” serving as a space for “guests” “who go there to meet no one,” “an encounter with the nothing.”70 More significantly, Kracauer and Rhys see in the aesthetic of the hotel and its concern with the surface, a proper reflection of a modern culture lost in an illusion it no longer perceives as an illusion, a culture that “has lost the power of self-observation.”71 In the hotel aesthetic, the power of self-observation is rendered redundant, if not superfluous, in the externality of mass culture. As a retreat “into the unquestioned groundlessness” of modernity, the hotel serves as a paradigmatic space for modern homelessness.72 Similarly, Henry James, returning from Europe and reflecting on New York’s Waldorf Astoria, calls the hotel “a synonym for civilization,” indicating the passing and demise of bourgeois interiority and foregrounding instead a modernity in which “the present is more and more the day of the hotel.”73 Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight thus clarifies even further the reconfiguration of the traditional bourgeois subject that had begun in her earlier works. Whereas in the earlier works, the absence of agency could still be construed as the result of disabling transformations (social and economic decline, male dominance) affecting the heroine and her social setting, this novel makes it unmistakably clear that Rhys had all along aimed for a different definition of social and cultural identity that transcended the bourgeois confines of a humanistically conceived and wholly individualized subject. Rhys has thus moved beyond the model of self-alienation that is traditionally read into modernist texts, and particularly into her work. As Miriam Hansen has illustrated in a comparison between Benjamin and Kracauer’s interpretations of Charles Chaplin, a paradigmatic modern figure, the conception of the subject can be seen as the divisive line between early modern (post-Romantic) and truly modern texts. In Benjamin, as Hansen notes, the subject is still residually present and absorbs the alienating shocks of modernity. In Kracauer, conversely, these tremors are mediated by mass experience to the extent that the entire notion of subjective agency is called into doubt:



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Kracauer’s Chaplin is neither as baroque nor as avant-garde as Benjamin’s. Where the latter emphasizes allegorical mortification and “self-alienation,” Kracauer locates the appeal of the Chaplin figure in an already missing “self ”: “The human being that Chaplin embodies, or, rather, let’s go of, is a hole. . . . He has no will; in the place of the drive towards self-preservation or the hunger for power there is nothing inside him but a void which is as blank as the snow fields of Alaska.”74

Discussing Kracauer, Hansen points to Chaplin as an exemplification of “humanity under erasure,” an absent center that “allows for a reconstruction of humanity under alienated conditions.”75 Hansen sees in Kracauer’s Chaplin, then, an epistemic shift to a shared mass identity, in which the shock of modernity can no longer be observed from the privileged vantage point of a bourgeois subject: mass culture instead offers “an imaginative and reflexive horizon for people trying to live a life in the war zones of modernization.”76 Due to his portrayal of dislocation and displacement, Chaplin was often mistaken for a stereotypical diaspora Jew (even by Hannah Arendt). Rhys’s concept of a posthumanistic mass identity similarly foregrounds a modern “homelessness” not unlike that of Chaplin’s wandering tramp. In order to reach this “imaginative and reflexive horizon” and realize the potential of mass identity, Rhys’s heroine discovers that she must rid herself of the traditional concept of a stable and sheltered identity. Her final embrace of the repulsive traveling salesman indicates an acceptance of the new social order of the Angestellte and its combative zones of day-by-day survival. This final scene harks back to an earlier parallel passage in the novel in which a similar acceptance had failed. In this earlier passage, the painter relates to Sasha the sad story of a woman from Martinique, “halfNegro,” (GMM 95), shunned by her Parisian fellow boarders. He confesses that in the end he could not bring himself to be kind to her, nor to make love to her. The passage foreshadows ironically the path of the heroine whose suffering will also be met with equal hostility and indifference. It is only in her active embrace of her degraded position and thereby sharing the humiliation of the black woman from Martinique that Sasha is able to come to terms with her displaced identity and realize potentially new mass forms of affiliation and solidarity. This solidarity is achieved through a disciplined act of dissociation from traditional identities, thereby allowing for the erosion of class structure and social and national genealogy, with their ontologies of race and belonging. The failure to liberate themselves from false bourgeois notions that repress their real economic status and thereby realize new forms affiliation represents the major crisis of the 1930s German Angestellte, notes Kracauer, which instead of siding with democracy chose “to listen to Nazi promises.”77



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The aspect of race is especially significant here, pointing to the considerable role it plays in identity formation. Dislocation occurs not only at the levels of class, nationality, location, and gender but also at that of race and ethnicity. This idea of a displaced whiteness is echoed in Sasha’s curious remark about the gigolo, who is of French Canadian descent and expects to improve his social position by moving to London: “But he’ll find out that he will be up against racial, not sexual, characteristics” (GMM 157). In Rhys, then, white European culture is represented as merely another ethnic discourse and no longer granted its privileged position. Race and ethnicity are first and foremost constructs of dislocation rather than biologically inherited features. Racialization and dislocation are ultimately co-original and not, as with traditional modernism, a secondary feature of humanistic selfalienation. The Rhys woman is thus thoroughly unsettled, refusing in the end the illusionary compensation of the wages of whiteness. If “the human being that Chaplin embodies, or, rather, lets go of,” as Kracauer states “is a hole,” then Rhys’s narrative world can similarly be construed as voided humanity, a letting-go of a Eurocentric bourgeois heritage and its illusionary privileges.78



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oday it is likely that students are thoroughly familiar with Zora Neale Hurston and know little or next to nothing about T. S. Eliot. One may even argue that the current restructuring of the canon and reading curricula have finally allowed us to overcome the disregard for ethnic literatures altogether. In her essay “The Politics of Fiction” Hazel Carby expresses perplexity over the belated justice that is apparently done to the work of Hurston: Clearly a womanist- and feminist-inspired desire to recover the neglected cultural presence of Zora Neale Hurston initiated an interest in her work, but it is also clear that this original motivation has become transformed. Hurston is not only a secured presence in the academy; she is a veritable industry, and an industry that is very profitable.1

As Carby points out, however, Hurston’s recent success in academia is paradoxically accompanied by “the demise of the black intellectual presence in the academy.”2 The uncritical reception of Hurston by the literary academy, argues Carby, perpetuates and reproduces a discourse that upholds the authenticity of black folk life while ignoring an existing racist social order. Carby thus rightfully asks: “Does the current fascination of the culture industry for the cultural production of black women parallel the white fascination for African-American peoples as representatives of the exotic primitive in the 1920s?”3 Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys show a high degree of awareness concerning the commodity value of ethnic narratives in an era when these perceived marginal elements of society were being discovered, exoticized, and massmarketed for the first time. All three have been accused of pandering in some way to the lurid tastes of the foreign and exotic. In fact, Yezierska and Hurston often promoted themselves as ethnic insiders or tourist guides, leading mainstream readers through worlds heretofore unavailable to them.



Concluding Remarks on the Marketability of Ethnicity

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They tell me that if I wish to succeed in literature in America I should dress in Chinese costume, carry a fan in my hand, wear a pair of scarlet slippers, live in New York and come of high birth. Instead of making myself familiar with Chinese Americans around me, I should discourse on my spirit acquaintance with Chinese ancestors and quote in between the “good mornings” and “how d’ye dos” of editors, “Confucius, Confucius, how great is Confucius. Before Confucius, there never was Confucius. After Confucius, there never came Confucius,” etc., etc., etc.4

Modern ethnic writers, as this telling passage suggests, experience modernity less as an increasing domination of technology and more as one brought about by the persuasiveness of commodity markets that control the symbolic repertoire of ethnic writers and transform them into marketable prejudices. Their conscious and strategic use of these prejudices on the literary market could be held against them as perpetuating the very stereotypes they strive to abolish. However, as we have seen in our discussions of the Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys, this use of ethnic stereotypes is done with an ironic selfawareness, at once implicating the writer in its inevitable use value but also creating a distance to the convenient commodity of race and ethnicity. Reading their works, we no longer come away with a secure sense of an ethnic world. Instead, we are quickly forced to suspend the simple binary categories of insider and outsider and take on a much more complex plurivocal reality. Herein lies perhaps the remaining value of ethnic modernists like Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys in that they at once acknowledge the modern market forces, accept them as inevitable, work with them, and stem against them. Unfortunately, as Carby has pointed out, this perspective of productive irony is not often found in current institutional practices in which narrow approaches to ethnicity lead to a hermetic defense of camps and terrains said to represent underlying ethnic identities in their best interest. While not denying that such intraethnic reflection is productive and at times necessary, it should not be conducted at the expense or exclusion of transcultural interests. Ethnicity in present academic institutional life is still a relatively new phenomenon, comparable to the emergence of ethnic literature in modernism. It seems as if we have yet to develop the same complex stances of ethnic modernists and recapitulate their insights in our institutional practices so as not to reduce ethnicity to a marketable stereotype alone but preserve it as a complex compound of inherited legacy and elected affiliation, of partially fixed and partially open identities.



Sui Sin Far, a modern American Eurasian writer, perceptively describes the commodity forces that surround ethnic writing in her “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”:

Notes to Introduction 1. Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907) 82. Hereafter referred to in text as AS. 2. Ernest Hemingway, to a friend, 1950; quoted as an epigraph in Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964). 3. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russel Ferguson, et al. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990) 357–66; here 358. Hereafter referred to in text as RE. 4. Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1999) 39. Originally published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1951. Also quoted in Said, 365. 5. Adorno, 40. 6. Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism” in American Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Spring 1987) 7–26. Hereafter referred to in text as AM. 7. Shari Benstock, “Expatriate Modernism: Writing on the Rim” in Women’s Writing in Exile, eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989) 20–40; here 20. See also Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 8. Ibid., 28–29. 9. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indies Novel and its Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970) 32. 10. See The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 11. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 20–37. 12. Thomas Ferraro, “Avant-garde Ethnics” in The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic Writing Between the Wars, ed. William Boelhower (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1990) 1–61; here 3. 13. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchel (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998) 169. Originally delivered as a lecture in 1908, first published in 1929.



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14. Ernst Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970) 140. 15. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter, in New German Critique, no. 11 (Spring 1977) 22–38; here 22. Originally written in 1932 and published in Zurich, 1935 as part of Erbschaft dieser Zeit. 16. Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, 141. 17. Adorno, 33. 18. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) 10–13. 19. Ibid., 36–39. 20. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 54. 21. Ibid., 73–120. 22. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991) 13. 23. Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 7. 24. Ibid., 59. 25. Adorno, 39. 26. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) 11. 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) i. Notes to Chapter 1 1. Quoted in Anzia Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story (New York: Persea Books, 1987) 40. 2. Louise Levitas Henriksen, Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988) 2–5. 3. William Phelps, “How the Other Half Lives” in Literary Digest International Book Review 2 (Dec. 1923): 21. 4. Samuel Raphaelson, “True Yiddish Flavor” in New York Herald Tribune, 25 Oct. 1925, 20. In this review of Bread Givers, Raphaelson describes its theme as “weary,” another story “of a poor East Side girl who Americanized herself by sheer force.” 5. Alter Brody, “Yiddish in American Fiction” in American Mercury 7 (Jan. 1926: 205–07). Similarly, Yossef Goer called her style “a pandering to tastes of typical Americans who laughs at Englished market Yiddish and wants to believe America great and Judaism not” (Goer, “Her One Virtue,” Menorah Journal 12 (Feb. 1926): 105–08. 6. See Alice Kessler Harris’s Introduction in Yezierska’s Bread Givers (New York: Persea Books, 1975) v-xviii, as well as her introduction in Yezierska’s The Open Cage (New York: Persea Books, 1979) v-xiii.



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7. Dewey’s poems, forgotten and left behind in his office at Columbia University, have been collected and published (The Poems of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977). See Boydston’s introduction describing Yezierska and Dewey’s involvement. Boydston also assisted Yezierska’s daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen, in her biography Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life, which also discusses the couple’s relationship. For a more in-depth study of Yezierska and Dewey’s relationship and its impact on their respective lives and work, see Mary V. Dearborn’s Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey (New York: The Free Press, 1988). Unfortunately, Henriksen and Dearborn focus on the sensational aspects of Yezierska’s biography, thereby reducing her literary work to an illustration of a colorful ethnic life frustrated in its attempt to live the American Dream. 8. Joyce Carol Oates, “Imaginary Cities: America” in Literature and the American Urban Experience (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981) 11–33. 9. Harris, introduction to Yezierska’s Bread Givers, v. 10. Dearborn, 40. 11. Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in 20th Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 54–55. Ferraro is one of the first critics to have acknowledged the importance of Yezierska’s immigrant fiction as serious literature and look beyond her Cinderella image. His penetrating analysis of Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers reveals her skillful use of traditional realist and mobility narratives to describe the struggles of the emerging Jewish American middle classes. 12. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 224. 13. David Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism” in American Quarterly 39 (Spring 1987): 7–26. Singal locates “two predominant streams of American Modernist culture, proceeding respectively from [William] James and [John] Dewey.” The Jamesian stream centers its interest on the individual consciousness, celebrates spontaneity, authenticity, and the probing of new realms of personal experience, and flows mainly through the arts and humanities. The Deweyan stream, by contrast, tends to focus on society as a whole, emphasizes the elimination of social barriers (geographic, economic, ethnic, racial, and gender), and tries to weld together reason and emotion in the service of programmatic social aims (17–28). Yezierska basically follows the latter, revising it to give equal weight to the immigrant perspective and taking Dewey to task for his uncritical stance on reform and philanthropy. 14. Moses Rischin, The Promised Land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) 76. 15. James B. McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of Perspective (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993) 58. 16. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) 149. 17. Ibid., 149.



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18. Naomi W. Cohen, “The Ethnic Catalyst: The Impact of the East European Immigration on the American Jewish Establishment” in The Legacy of Jewish Immigration: 1881 and its Impact, ed. David Berger (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1983) 131–48. 19. Rischin, 99. 20. Ibid., 76–78. 21. Cohen, 137. 22. Isaac B. Berkson, Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study with Special Reference to the Jewish Group (New York: Columbia University Press, 1920) 56. 23. Author Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) 23. See also Rischin, 95–111. 24. For the classic statement of the cultural pluralist position see Horace Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” reprinted in Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924) 67–125. Kallen argues that the United States is in essence a loose confederation of diverse ethnic and linguistic groups. 25. Theodore Roosevelt, “Speech,” reprinted in Language Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 117–19. 26. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988) 259–60. 27. See Marc Shell, “Babel in America; or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the U.S.” in Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn 1993) 103–27. 28. Edward Sagarin and Robert J. Kelly, “Polylingualism in the United States of America: A Multitude of Tongues amid a Monolingual Majority” in Language Policy and National Unity, eds. William R. Beer and James E. Jacob (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985) 20–43. 29. Minorities of color, in particular African Americans, were considered essentially inassimilable, or assimilable only in the distant future, due to America’s racial ideology. Thus the Progressive Era and Americanization movement were relatively unconcerned with racial injustice and the oppressive conditions of urban blacks. See McKee, 55–102. 30. Dearborn, 141–42. 31. Quoted in Henriksen, 71. 32. Dearborn, 107. See in particular pages 107–61 for a discussion of their encounter and its immediate impact on their lives. 33. Anzia Yezierska, “Mostly About Myself ” in Children of Loneliness (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1923) 31. 34. Henriksen, 21. 35. Ibid., 22. 36. Anzia Yezierska, “The Free Vacation House” in Hungry Hearts (New York: Persea Books, 1985) 97–113; here 97. Hereafter referred to in text as FVH. 37. Sherry Gorelick, City College and the Jewish Poor: Education in New York, 1880–1924 (New York: Schocken Books, 1982) 95.



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38. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: The Free Press, 1916) 4. 39. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985) 96–97. 40. David L. Gold, “The Speech and Writing of the Jews” in Language in the USA, eds. Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 273–92. 41. Alter Brody, “Yiddish in American Fiction” in American Mercury (Feb. 1926) 205–07. 42. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951) 22. 43. Ibid., 22. 44. Ewen, 94. 45. Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yinglish (New York: Penguin Books, 1989) 312–13. 46. Ibid., 312–13. 47. Yezierska, “The Fat of the Land,” in Hungry Hearts, 178–223; here 189. 48. Yezierska, “Hunger,” in Hungry Hearts, 35–64; here 64. 49. Anzia Yezierska, “Prophets of Democracy” in Bookman, vol. 52 (1921) 496–99. 50. Quoted in Ralda Sullivan, “Interview with Yezierska” in Anzia Yezierska: An American Writer, Ph.D. diss. (Berkeley: University of California, 1975) 73. Also quoted in Dearborn, 140. 51. John Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy” in John Dewey: The Political Writings, eds. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1993) 38–47. Originally delivered as an address to the Philosophical Union of the University of California, Nov. 29, 1918. 52. Anzia Yezierska, “America and I” in How I Found America: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska (New York: Persea Books, 1991) 144–53. Originally published in Children of Loneliness (New York: Funk & Wagnells, 1923). 53. Bhabha, 55. 54. Yezierska, “Mostly About Myself,” 132. 55. Bhabha, 164. 56. Anzia Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995) 27. Hereafter referred to in text as S. Originally published in 1923. 57. Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 36. Originally published in 1928. 58. See Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, The Life of a Jewish Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1957). 59. See Ferraro, Ethnic Passages, 53–86, for an insightful discussion of Bread Givers and the relationship among patriarchy, ethnicity, and social mobility. 60. John Dewey, “Confidential Report on Conditions Among the Poles in the U.S.” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–83) 260. Originally published in Philadelphia, 1918.



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61. Anzia Yezierska, All I Could Never Be (New York: Brewer, Warren, and Putnam, 1923) 76. Hereafter referred to in text as AICNB. 62. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–1991) 228. 63. Sir Herbert Read, quoted in Philip W. Jackson, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) xii. 64. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980) 3. Originally published in 1934. 65. Dewey, Art as Experience, 326. 66. Jackson, xii-xiii. 67. Quoted in Ralda Sullivan, “Interview with Yezierska” in Anzia Yezierska: An American Writer, Ph.D. diss. (Berkeley: University of California, 1975) 73. Also quoted in Dearborn, 140. 68. Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story, 27. 69. Ibid., 25. 70. Ibid., 40. 71. See Kevin Brownlow’s, “Hungry Hearts: A Hollywood Social Problem Film of the 1920s” in Film History, vol. 1, 1987, 113–25. Referring to studio memos and notes, Brownlow convincingly argues that Yezierska’s autobiography describing her time in Hollywood is not an accurate but fictionalized account that puts forth her literary agenda. 72. The term “Ghetto film” is taken from Patricia Eren’s invaluable historical survey The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 73. Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story, 82. 74. Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 71. In this remarkable and indepth work, Hansen explores the concept of spectatorship in American silent film, discussing the industry’s strategies to integrate small and diverse audiences into a homogenous mass audience, “the more comprehensive, allAmerican public sphere of mass and consumer culture” (70). See especially her well-researched discussion of Ghetto film in chapter 2, “Early Audiences: Myths and Models” (60–89), which informs this study. 75. Erens, 42. 76. Hansen, Babel & Babylon, 71. 77. Ibid., 71. 78. Ibid., 72. 79. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 12. 80. Rogin makes the compelling claim that American national culture, as represented most significantly by Hollywood motion pictures and its melting-pot ideology, is founded on the “spiritual miscegenation” of two American icons: Uncle Sam as the white patriarchal national figure, and that of the black Mammy as a domestic figure of submission and nourishment. In this context, blackface films that actively depict this miscegenation, such as The Jazz



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81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

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Singer (1927), reveal the complex relationship among ethnicity, race, and American national identity. Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Ibid., 106. Hansen, Babel & Babylon, 70. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 70. Thomas Cripps, “The Movie Jew as an Image of Assimilationism, 1903–1927” in Journal of Popular Film, vol. iv, 1975. No. 3, 190–207. Ibid., 191. Lester D. Friedman, “Celluloid Assimilation: Jews in American Silent Movies” in Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 15, Fall, 1987, No. 3, 136. Hansen, Babel & Babylon, 76–77. Ibid., 64–65. Ibid., 65. Erens, 74. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 78–79. Ibid., 74–79. Hungry Hearts was long lost and only recently rediscovered in Britain where it has been deposited with and preserved by the National Film Archive. See Kevin Brownlow’s “Hungry Hearts: A Hollywood Social Problem Film of the 1920s” in Film History, vol. 1, 1987, 113–25, for an account of its discovery and preservation. It is now also available in video format through the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University. Small sections of the film are damaged or missing. The surviving copy, according to Kevin Brownlow, has approximately 15 minutes missing, including shots from the final ending and the second part, which depicts the immigrants’ reaction to seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. See Brownlow’s, “Hungry Hearts: A Hollywood Social Problem Film of the 1920s” and Behind the Mask of Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 392–404. Brownlow, Behind the Mask, 392. One reviewer’s comment that the film is “a tedious recital of the sufferings of a Russian Jewish Family” suggests how tiresome and repetitive the theme of Americanization had by this time become (New York Times, 27 Nov. 1922, 18:1). Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” in Monogram 4 (1972): 2–15. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 39–40.



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103. Paul Willeman, Looks and Frictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 88. 104. See, for instance, Peter Bürger’s discussion of the increasing commodification of the social protest put forth in avant-garde movements in The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 105. Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) 89. 106. Hansen, Babel & Babylon, 116. 107. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985) 96. 108. Jenna Weissman Joselit, “‘A Set Table’: Jewish Domestic Culture in the New World, 1880–1950” in Getting Comfortable in New York, eds. Susan L. Braunstein and Jenna Weissman Joselit (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1990) 19–73. 109. Ibid., 31. 110. Ibid., 31. 111. Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, 82. 112. Ibid., 81. 113. Anzia Yezierska, “Wild Winter Love” in Hungry Hearts (New York: Persea Books, 1985) 316–35. Originally published in The Century Magazine, Feb. 1927. 114. David Bordwell, “Happily Ever After, Part Two” in The Velvet Light Trap 19 (1982/1983) 2–7. 115. J. Stuart Blackton, quoted by Bordwell, 2. 116. Magdalena J. Zaborowska, How We Found America: Reading Gender Through East European Immigrant Narratives (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995) 121. Notes to Chapter 2 1. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). See especially chapters 6 and 7, 156–239. 2. See W. E. B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth” in W. E. B. DuBois: A Reader (New York: Collier Books, 1971) 31–50. 3. Langston Hughes, quoted in Lewis, 193–94. 4. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940) 235. 5. DuBois, quoted in Lewis, 201. 6. Alice Walker, “Zora Neale Hurston—A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View,” Foreword, Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) xi-xvii. Emphasis by Walker. 7. Hazel V. Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston” in New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” ed. Michael Awkward (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 71–94; here 77. Hereafter referred to in text as PF.



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8. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 74. 9. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) 307. 10. Hazel V. Carby, Foreword, Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) vii-xviii. 11. Hemenway, 248–51. 12. Ibid., 256–71. 13. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) xxv. 14. Richard Wright, Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 16–17. Originally published in New Masses, October 5, 1937. 15. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in Voices From the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 305–09. 16. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: First Vintage Books, 1990) 7. Hereafter referred to in text as SBF. 17. Nathan Irvin Huggins, ed., Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 3. 18. Alain Locke, The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1969) 3–16. Originally published in New York: Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. 1925. 19. Ibid., 3. 20. Ibid., xxv-xvii. 21. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 73. Emphasis by Baker. 22. Locke, xxv-xxvii. 23. Ibid., 47–53. 24. Zora Neale Hurston, “Spunk,” in Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (Berkeley, CA: 1985) 1–8. 25. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979) 152–55; here 153. Hereafter referred to in text as CM. Used with the permission of the Estate of Zora Neale Hurston. 26. Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of values” points to the breakdown of the binary system of good and evil which traditionally establishes human morality. His philosophy attempted to revalue morality in terms of its ‘value for life’ (Will to Power), the extent to which it is conducive or detrimental to the preservation and enhancement of human life. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); The Anti-Christ, trans. H. L. Mencken (New York: Knopf, 1920). 27. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth,” 41.



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28. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th edition, vol. 2, eds. Abrams, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979) 2293–300. 29. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993) 135. 30. Barbara Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 317–38. 31. See Langston Hughes, “I, Too” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fourth edition, vol. 2, eds. Baym, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994) 1718–19. 32. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (New York: Harper Collins, 1991) 160. 33. Johnson, 317–28. 34. David Headon, “Beginning To See Things Really”: The Politics of Zora Neale Hurston” in Zora in Florida, eds. Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel (Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991) 29. 35. Hemenway, 22–23. 36. Headon, 28–29. 37. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 765 (XVI). 38. Hemenway, 329. 39. Mitchell Duneier, Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 154. 40. See also James McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of Perspective (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993). A well-researched and compelling study, McKee’s work claims that the failure of sociologists to foresee the black rebellion of the 1960s and better comprehend America’s race relations was due to their “white” one-sided perspective, in which African Americans were continually framed as culturally inferior and incapable of assimilation. This perspective, claims McKee, distorted sociological methods and led to equally distorted findings that did not match up with social reality. 41. Cornel West, “Nihilism in Black America” in Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 17–31; here 20. 42. Walker, xi. 43. Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” review of Their Eyes Were Watching God in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 16–17; here 17. Originally printed in New Masses (5 October 1937). 44. Raymond A. Mohl, “The Pattern of Race Relations in Miami since the 1920s” in The African American Heritage of Florida, David R. Colburn and Jane L. Landers, eds (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995) 326–65. 45. Ibid., 327. 46. Maxine D. Jones, “No Longer Denied: Black Women in Florida, 1920–1950” in The African American Heritage in Florida, 240–74.



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47. Zora Neale Hurston, “Muttsy” in Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Foundation, 1985) 19–37. Hereafter referred to in text as M. 48. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan I. Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 305–09; here 306. 49. Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907) 99. 50. James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and the Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980). 51. Zora Neale Hurston, The Death of Sugar Foot, manuscript 283; The Funeral of Harlem’s Sheik, manuscript 284, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT. Hereafter referred to in text as SF and HS. Used with the permission of the Estate of Zora Neale Hurston. 52. Zora Neale Hurston, Color Struck in Fire!!, vol. 1, no. 1 (Nov. 1926): 7–14. Hereafter referred to in text as CS. 53. Johnson, Barbara. “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God” in Black Literature and Literary Theory. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. (New York: Methuen, 1984) 205–19; here 208. 54. Hurston, “Story in Harlem Slang: Jelly’s Tale” and “Glossary of Harlem Slang” in Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston, 82–98. Hereafter referred to in text as HS. 55. Hemenway, 291. 56. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1990) 2–3. 57. Gilroy, 91. 58. Hurston, Mules and Men, 2–3. 59. Hemenway, 248–49. 60. Alain Locke, “The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer” in Opportunity, 17 (Feb. 1939), 38. 61. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper & Row, 1990) 57–58. 179. Hereafter referred to in text as TMH. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 62. Richard Wright, “Review of Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen” quoted in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1990) 338; originally appeared in PM (11 March 1945). 63. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 142. 64. Here the term pathology is not used in the conservative sociological sense, as discussed earlier in this chapter, to attribute an inherent flaw to a culture that deviates from social norms (i.e., viewing black culture as problematic due to its “failure” to assimilate). Instead, pathology is used here to describe a radical breakdown in communication that does not allow for an affirmative sense of community to develop. Thus the pathology attributed to the cultures of Haiti and Jamaica is associated not with the cultures themselves



Notes

65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

71.

Ethnic Modernisms but with political despotism and the attempt to repress and to deny folk culture. Bhabha, 157. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, introduction (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990) xxiii. Hereafter referred to in text as MMM. Heinrich Heine, quoted in Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan” in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture 1890–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Zora Neale Hurston, “The ‘Pet’ Negro System” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979) 156–62. Originally published in American Mercury, 56 (May 1943), 593–600. Hereafter referred to in text as PNS. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Robert Hemenway, for example, says that in Seraph, “a story of white Southerners, with only random mention of black people,” Hurston “largely turned her back on the source of her creativity.” See Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) 307. Darwin Turner and Robert Bone accuse her of pandering to market tastes and assimilationism, respectively. See Darwin Turner, In A Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971). See Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958). More recent essays have been much more sympathetic to Seraph. Lillie Howard notes that while Hurston may have changed the color of her characters, she nevertheless remains firmly in the Southern folk milieu, retaining her earlier themes. Like other Hurston heroines, Arvay Henson, claims Howard, “searches for self-actualization and love, for life-affirming rather than life-denying experiences. White folks, Hurston perceptively realized, must want those things, too.” Howard suggests, however, that Seraph, in its focus on universal themes, transcends race rather than complicates it. See Lillie Howard, “Seraph on the Suwanee” in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 267–79. Hazel Carby’s astute foreword to Seraph discusses Hurston’s revisionism, in which she repudiates her belief in a unique black culture. Seraph, notes Carby, is “a vehicle for Hurston’s theories on the relation between white and black culture” and the formation of a national expression. See Hazel Carby, “Foreword” in Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) vii-xviii. Recently, however, feminist critics such as Mary Helen Washington have begun to question the popular interpretation of Janie as a prefeminist, noting problematic episodes in Their Eyes that reveal Hurston’s ambivalence towards her heroine and women in general. See Washington’s Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960 (London: Virago Press, 1989). Here, Washington returns to Robert Stepto’s earlier criticism that Janie’s power to speak



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76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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is illusionary, noting disturbing moments in the text when Hurston subverts her protagonist’s voice. See Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). Carby, “Foreword,” viii-ix. Ibid., ix. Hurston quoted by Carby, “Foreword,” viii-ix. Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) 1. Originally published in 1948 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Hereafter referred to in text as SS. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1935) 700. See also David R. Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). Roediger’s compelling study draws upon DuBois’s conception of the raceclass dialectic, analyzing the role that race plays in conjunction with capitalism to form an American working-class identity hostile to blacks. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) 58–59. Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, “What is ‘White Trash’? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997) 168–84; here 170. Ibid., 169. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 20–22. Ibid., 23. David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990) 2–3. McClintock, 6–9. Notes to Chapter 3

1. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: Norton, 1982). Hereafter referred to in text as WSS. 2. I am especially grateful to Mary Lou Emery for asking me to rethink the importance of Rhys’s Caribbean cultural background in her writing. 3. Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 10. 4. Ibid., 1. 5. Ibid., 11. 6. Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End:” Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) xiii. 7. Ibid., 32. 8. Miriam Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California



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9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

Press, 1995) 362–402; here 374. In this excellent and revealing essay, which informs both my discussion of Kracauer and Rhys’s posthumanistic modernism in general, Hansen compares Kracauer and Benjamin’s varying perspectives of Charlie Chaplin as an icon of modernity. Kracauer’s Chaplin, she notes, represents “at once that appeal of a utopian humanity and its impossibility, the realization that the world ‘could be different and still continues to exist’” (374). For Kracauer, Chaplin’s slapstick comedy embodies the potential of mass culture as a radically democratizing mass media with the ability to represent and critique itself. Helen Carr, Jean Rhys (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1996) 14. Wally Look Lai, “The Road to Thornfield Hall” in New World Quarterly 4 (1968) 17–27. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Heinemann, 1983) 223–36. V. S. Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance” in The New York Review of Books, 18 May 1972. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 262–80. Judith L. Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 107. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 107. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 40–65; here 61. Raiskin, 98. Kenneth Brathwaite credits Eliot’s poetry with introducing the “notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone” to mainstream anglophone poets of the Caribbean, thereby allowing for the emergence of subversive local idioms. See Brathwaite’s “English in the Caribbean: Notes on Nation Language and Poetry, an Electronic Lecture” in English Literature: Opening up the Canon, Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr., eds. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). See Coral Ann Howells, “Jean Rhys as a Modernist Writer” in Jean Rhys (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) 24–29; Howells defines Rhys’s modernist voice as speaking “from a self-consciously marginal position, raising issues of gender and colonial difference in fictions of resistance which are always compromised by the conditions of female dependency” (27). Howells clearly stresses the cultural rather than formal modernist in Rhys. However, she reduces the variety of marginal positions (race, class, nationality, gender) to that of gender mostly, thereby obscuring the complicated, interrelated, and simultaneous contestations of identity that emerge in Rhys’s writing. For a complex treatment of Rhys’s modernism, see Emery’s Jean Rhys at “World’s End.



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21. Thomas F. Staley’s Jean Rhys (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), while identifying her work’s critical opposition to the “most cherished values, both public and private, of the bourgeois world,” still sentimentalizes her work by claiming that it addresses “our own deepest human concerns,” thereby locating it within the tradition of a universalized Western humanism (1–2). 22. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 23. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982) 17. Originally published (London: André Deutsch, 1966). Hereafter referred to in text as WSS. Used with permission of the Jean Rhys Estate. 24. For a perceptive discussion of the significant terms Maroon and marronage in Wide Sargasso Sea, see Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) 35–62. According to Emery, Annette’s despairing comment “Now we are marooned” (WSS 18) leads to a reimagining on the part of Antoinette in which Annette’s term “marooned” becomes associated with the rich and complex history of the Maroons, escaped slaves originally from Africa who fled from colonialists and formed communities that staged frequent and often successful insurrections. Antoinette’s imagining of an “elsewhere” of escape, an imaginative marronage, leads her to recapitulate the history of the Maroons, one marked by struggle for freedom, conflicted interests and internal betrayals. Similarly, Antoinette struggles against white colonialists like Mason and Rochester as well as the local blacks, and is also betrayed by those close to her, such as her mother and Tia. In addition, notes Emery, Antoinette also betrays Christophine and herself. This impossible struggle for freedom and self-assertion, says Emery, “allows Rhys to articulate the complex interrelationship between the condition of oppressed races and cultures under European imperialism and the masculine oppression and silencing of women within European society” (62). By viewing Antoinette’s story of escape as paralleling that of the historical Maroons, Emery yokes together the history of British imperialism and the frequently elided history of Jamaica and the West Indies. This provocative interpretation, with its emphasis on concrete local history, also allows Emery to place Rhys into the categories of West Indian writers and Third World modernism. 25. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971) 129. Hereafter referred to in text as ALMM. 26. Frantz Fanon, 109, 114. 27. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and 20th Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 59–76. 28. Ibid., 71. 29. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lilliam Marvin Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944) 220. 30. Ibid., 223. 31. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Henry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969): 217–52.



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32. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land in T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1971) 37–55. 33. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) 17. 34. Walter Benjamin, in his critique of the notion of historical progress, similarly points to a synchronic dimension that deflates the diachronic movement of history: “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1968] 261). 35. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, (London: Penguin Books, 1985) 32. 36. Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) 16. 37. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (New York: Norton, 1982) 17. Hereafter referred to in text as VID. 38. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964) 5. 39. Gertrude Stein, “Paris France,” quoted in Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York: Viking, 1955) 25. 40. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990) 357–66; here 357. 41. V. S. Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie” in The New York Review of Books, 18 May 1972. 42. See, for example, Louis James’s account in Jean Rhys (Thetford: Longman, 1978), in which he describes Rhys’s tangential and marginal role among the Paris exiles and her minimal representation in The Transatlantic Review, a literary journal for expatriate writers, edited by Ford Maddox Ford (15–16). 43. Naipaul’s use of the term “nothing” to describe the history and culture of the West Indies has created a controversy that is still ongoing today. See Naipaul’s The Middle Passage (New York: Vintage Books, 1981). Originally printed in 1962. In this well-known travelogue, Naipaul returns from London to his native West Indies and makes this now infamous remark: “The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (29, emphasis mine). Critics have seen this admittedly insensitive remark about his birthplace as a reflection of Naipaul’s self-hatred, racism, elitism, and Anglophile bias. Postcolonial thinkers in particular, while not denying Naipaul’s brilliance as a writer, have questioned his politics and its tendency to belittle or ignore local as well as Third World cultures, in general. This debate about Naipaul’s politics has been refueled with his recent winning of the Nobel Prize. 44. Jean Rhys, Quartet (New York: Harper & Row, 1929). Hereafter referred to in text as Q.



184

185

45. Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) 25. 46. Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Rhys recalls Ford: Quartet and The Good Soldier” in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1: 1 (Spring) 67–81. 47. Said, 362. 48. Ibid., 365. 49. Theodore Adorno, Minimia Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1999) 39. Originally published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1951. Also quoted in Said, 365. 50. Peter Wolfe, Jean Rhys (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980) 20. 51. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998); originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 1929. Hereafter referred to in text as SM. 52. Hansen, 379. 53. Emery, 3. 54. Hansen, 379. 55. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” in The Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 76. 56. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986) 10. Originally published (London: Constable, 1939). Hereafter referred to in text as GMM. Used with permission of the Jean Rhys Estate. 57. Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 326. 58. The novel’s ending is interesting in its return to the fantasy-like opening of its beginning, suggesting the persistence of imaginative compensation. In the final section of the novel, the gigolo pressures Sasha in her hotel room and steals money from her, although to her eventual surprise he maintains his partial integrity toward her by not taking all of her money. At this point, Sasha regrets having spurned him as a lover and yearns for his return. It is here that in her daydreaming she welcomes the traveling salesman, who had earlier tried to force his entry into her room, as her substitute lover. The novel ends on sexual innuendoes and Sasha’s grotesque affirmative exclamations “Yes—yes—yes” (GMM 190). 59. Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism” in Boundary 2 vol. XI, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1982/1983): 233–51; here 234, 247–49. 60. T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, 1971) 7. 61. Ibid., 6. 62. Mary Lou Emery suggests that Rhys depicts the internalization of “fascistic domination, and patriarchal authority” (150) that haunts Sasha throughout the novel in various male figures (father, Mr. Blank, Enno, the gigolo, traveling salesman) in the steely, monolithic architecture that provides the novel’s background setting. This reading, however, does not fully consider the banal, farcical, and parodistic representations of male authority and mass



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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

culture that make up the bulk of the novel. One setting invoked by Emery can be seen as a parody of masculine futurism: “All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara” (GMM 187). See Emery’s interesting discussion of modernism in Good Morning, Midnight, 144–72. Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction” in The Mass Ornament, 326. Ibid., 325. Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” in The Mass Ornament, 291. Kracauer, “The Hotel Lobby” in The Mass Ornament, 181. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 175, 176, 181. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 183. Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1907) 99. Hansen, 373. Ibid., 373. Ibid., 374. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film (New York: The Noonday Press, 1960) 11. Originally published by Princeton University Press, 1947. Kracauer, quoted in Hansen, 373. Notes for Conclusion

1. Hazel V. Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston” in New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, ed. Michael Awkward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 72. 2. Ibid., 73. 3. Ibid., 73. 4. Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” in The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, eds. Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong (New York: Meridian, 1991) 111–23; here 122–23.



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———. Salome of the Tenements. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. ———. Arrogant Beggar. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Zaborowska, Magdalena J. How We Found America: Reading Gender Through East European Immigrant Narratives. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.





Adams, Henry, 1 Addams, Jane, 24 Adorno, Theodor, 1, 13, 149–50, 169, 185 African American (black) folk culture, 7, 9–10, 69, 71–73, 75–76, 82–83, 88–89,100 American Dream, 7, 19–20, 30, 46, 54–55, 67 American Mercury, 95 Americanization, 20–21, 25, 27–30, 33–34, 46, 51, 53–56, 59–60, 63–69, 172 Anderson, Sherwood, 32 Angestellte (white-collar worker), 153–56, 158, 160,165 Antin, Mary, 19, 30 Arendt, Hannah, 45–46, 165, 173 Armory Show, 6 assimilation, 10, 12, 15, 21–23, 28–29, 31–32, 34, 37, 43–44, 46–47, 50–56, 61–62, 64–71, 78 avant-garde, 1–10, 48 ethnic, 9–10, 22, 29, 71, 129, 132 Baker, Houston, 6, 79, 177 Barnes, Djuna, 7 Baudelaire, Charles, 140, 150 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 40, 138, 140, 153, 164–65, 183–84 Benstock, Shari, 6–7, 169 Berkson, Isaac B., 172 Berlin, 11, 154–155 Bhabha, Homi, 22, 40, 107, 131–132, 171, 179–80

Bloch, Ernst, 11, 170 Boas, Franz, 6, 103 Bone, Robert, 180 Borchert, James, 92 Bordwell, David, 67, 176 Bowery Theatre, 4 Brathwaite, Kenneth, 182 Brody, Alter, 34, 170, 173 Brontë, Charlotte, 139 Brooks, Peter, 60, 175 Brownlow, Kevin, 58–59, 174–75 Bürger, Peter, 8, 169, 176 Burke, Carolyn, 6 Cahan, Abraham, 8, 28–29, 62 Cambridge, Mass., 1 Camus, Albert, 131 Carby, Hazel, 72, 75–76, 86–89, 98–99, 102, 116, 120, 167–68, 176–77, 180–81, 186 Caribbean culture, 129, 132 Carlyle, Thomas, 152 Carr, Helen, 130–31, 182 Cather, Willa, 17 Cavell, Stanley, 60 Chaplin, Charles, 164–66 Chestnutt, Charles, 79 Child of the Ghetto, A, 52 cinema, 161–62 citizenship, 10, 14, 17, 41, 115, 149 class, 11–13, 17, 61, 71, 114, 128–29, 133, 154 clothes immigrant dress, 58, 61–62 Cohen, Naomi, 26, 172



Index

Ethnic Modernisms

commodity culture, 128, 130, 132, 138–39, 147,154–55 Conrad, Joseph, 17, 127, 36, 141, 152, 184 consumerism, 62–63, 65, 85, 128, 154–55 creolization, 134–35, 140 Cripps, Thomas, 54, 175 Crisis, The, 71 Dadaism, 9 Dearborn, Mary, 20, 28, 171 dehumanization, 128–29, 133, 136 democracy, 38–40, 47–49, 69–70, 77, 108, 115 Dewey, John, 6, 9, 14, 20, 22–24, 28–29, 31, 33, 38–40, 43, 46–49, 171, 173–74 diaspora, 4, 18, 54, 71, 73, 99, 104 displacement, 3, 4–8, 9–10, 12, 16, 131 Dreiser, Theodore, 32 DuBois, W. E. B., 15, 70–72, 75, 77–79, 81–83, 85–87, 90, 99, 119, 176–77, 181 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 79 Duneier, Mitchell, 87, 178 Educational Alliance, 26, 28 Eliot, T. S., 6, 17–18, 81, 127, 132, 140, 142, 143–44, 160–61, 167, 184 Ellis Island, 57, 62 Elsaesser, Thomas, 175 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 23 Emery, Mary Lou, 129, 130–31, 155, 181, 183, 185–86 Erens, Patricia, 52, 54–55, 174 ethnic literature, 13–16 melodrama, 42–43 modernism, 1–8, 13 realism, 8–9 ethnicity dislocation, 4–5, 7–10, 12, 14–15, 18, 69, 72, 74, 76, 85–86,

128, 145, 146, 151, 154, 166 marketability, 167 Ewen, Elizabeth, 33–34, 63, 173, 176 exile, 4–5, 7, 12, 13, 144–45, 149, 154 expatriatism, 143–45, 149 Fanon, Frantz, 131, 134, 136, 183 Far, Sui Sin, 168, 186 Faulkner, William, 14, 17, 76, 98, 116, 139 Fauset, Jessie, 70 feminism, 5–6, 73 Ferraro, Thomas, 8–9, 15, 16, 18, 21–22, 169–71, 173 Fire!!, 94 Fitzgerald, Scott, 17, 142–43, 144, 149 Florida Writers Project, 89 Ford, Maddox Ford, 18, 147 Friedman, Lester, 54, 175 Gardiner, Judith Kegan, 131, 147, 160, 185 Gates, Henry Louis, 75, 177 gender, 7–8, 11–12, 13, 16, 61, 114, 120, 125, 130–31, 138, 142, 155–56, 166 Ghetto film, 23, 51–56, 59, 60 Gikandi, Simon, 140, 184 Gilroy, Paul, 82, 99, 178 Glass, Montague, 66 Gold, David, 34, 173 Gold, Michael, 8, 28 Goldfield, David, 122–23, 181 Gordon, Milton, 53, 175 Gorelick, Sherry, 172 Gregg, Veronica Marie, 129, 131 Griffith, D. W., 52 H. D., 7 Habermas, Jürgen, 142, 184 Haiti, 73–74, 103–06 Hansen, Miriam, 52–54, 55, 62, 130, 154, 156, 164–65, 174, 181–82 happy ending, 66–67



198

Harlem, 89–91, 93, 95 Harlem Renaissance, 6, 18, 70–72, 78–79, 81, 93, 99 Harlem slang, 95–97 Harris, Alice Kessler, 20, 170 Headon, David, 85, 178 Hegel, G. W. F., 11, 82 Heine, Heinrich, 111, 180 Heinze, Andrew R., 176 Hemenway, Robert, 72, 74, 96, 101, 177 Hemingway, Ernest, 4, 6, 17, 127, 142–43, 144–45, 149, 169, 184 Henriksen, Louise Levitas, 20, 30, 170–171 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 71 Higham, John, 172 His People, 56 Hite, Molly, 146, 185 Holland, Spessard, 86, 126 Hollywood, 19–21, 23, 50–51, 53–54, 56, 67–68 homelessness, 1, 3, 4–5, 11, 16, 128, 146, 154, 165 Howard, Lillie, 180 Howells, Coral Ann, 131, 182 Huggins, Nathan, 78, 177 Hughes, Langston, 71, 76, 83, 91–92, 176, 178–79 humanism, 131, 133–34, 141, 152–53 Humoresque, 51–52, 55–56 Hurston, Zora Neale, 4–5, 7–13, 16, 18, 69–126, 128–29, 139, 141, 154–55, 167–68 on Caribbean culture, 102–06 on South (United States), 113–18, 122–26 works by Color Struck, 94–95 Death of Sugar Foot, The, 92–94 Dust Tracks on a Road, 84, 86 “Eatonville Anthology, The,” 101, 107 Funeral of Harlem’s Sheik, The, 92–94

199

“How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” 69, 80–86 Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 86 Moses, Man of the Mountain, 7, 74, 99, 106, 107–13, 115 Mules and Men, 73, 86, 98, 99, 100–01, 106, 107, 114, 116, 118 “Muttsy,” 90–92 “Pet Negro System,” 113–14, 121, 123, 125–26 Seraph on the Suwanee, 7, 73–74, 113–26 “Spunk,” 80 “Story in Harlem Slang,” 95–97 Tell My Horse, 7, 73–74, 99–107, 111, 115 Their Eyes Are Watching God, 73, 86, 88–89, 112, 114, 116, 125 Immigrant English, 9, 20, 22, 28, 30–31, 36–37, 39–40, 43–44, 69 immigrant writers, 6, 15–16 immigration, 10, 15, 17, 20, 22–24, 46, 54, 59–60, 67 Jewish, 19–28 Jackson, Philip, 49 Jamaica, 73–74, 102–04, 106, 135–36 James, Henry, 1–4, 18, 92, 164 The American Scene, 1–4, 169, 186 on “hotel-spirit,” 2–4, 92 James, Louis, 184 James, William, 1, 6, 171 Jameson, Frederic, 6 Jazz Singer, The, 15, 17, 52, 55–56 Jew’s Christmas, The, 52 Jim Crow, 94–95, 114, 123 Jolson, Al, 17 Johnson, Barbara, 82, 85, 95, 178–79 Johnson, Charles S., 70 Johnson, James Weldon, 70 Joselit, Jenna, 63, 176 Joyce, James, 18, 160



Index

Ethnic Modernisms

Kallen, Horace, 14, 172 Kazin, Alfred, 35, 173 Kelly, Robert J., 27, 172 Kierkegaard, Soren, 138, 183 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 15–16 Kracauer, Siegfried, 128, 130, 132, 153–156, 159, 161, 163–66, 185–86 on hotel lobby, 163–64 Lai, Wally Look, 130–31, 182 Language, 10, 17, 23, 27–28, 39–40, 44–45, 96–97, 116, 129–30 Lewis, David Levering, 176 Lewis, Sinclair, 17, 32 linguistic standardization, 27–28, 51 Locke, Alain, 70–71, 78–79, 102, 177, 179 London, 128, 139–40, 143, 153, 157, 159, 164–66 Loos, Adolf, 10–11, 169 Loy, Min, 7 mainstream, 8, 14–15, 17–18, 23, 25, 39, 48, 52, 55, 65, 70, 76, 83, 91, 100, 115, 126, 128, 137, 154 Marshall, Thurgood, 86 mass culture, 6, 8–10, 16, 50, 54, 85, 128, 130, 132–34, 140, 142, 152–54, 156–57, 160–61 McClintock, Anne, 119, 125, 181 McKay, Claude, 92 McKee, James B., 171, 178 melodrama, 51–52, 56, 58–60, 67–68 melting-pot ideology, 3, 24, 26, 46–47, 52–54, 172 Melville, Hermann, 14 Memmi, Albert, 131–32 Michaels, Walter Benn, 17–18, 115, 126, 170, 180 migration, 3–5 Great, 10, 89, 90, 92, 95, 97 Miller, Henry, 15 minority writer, 76, 142

minstrelsy (blackface), 10, 15, 17, 72, 76, 88–89, 93–94 modernism, 4–8, 74, 98, 141–42 American, 6, 17 British, 9 Caribbean, 9 European, 5–6, 9, 12, 130, 132 French, 18 high modernism, 8, 10 Third World, 130 Mohl, Raymond A., 178 Moore, Deborah Dash, 171 Naipaul, V. S., 131, 144–45, 182, 184 nation, 11, 13, 17, 48, 77–79, 106–12, 139–40, 149, 166 nationalism, 5, 23–24 nativism, 17, 24, 26 New Deal, 70 New Woman, 59, 61, 67 New York, 1–2 architecture, 2–4, 6 Lower East Side, 11, 19–22, 24–26, 28–29, 39, 41, 44, 50, 55–57, 59, 61, 63 Newitz, Annalee, 119, 181 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 152, 177 nihilism, 152–153 nonsynchronicity, 10–12, 13, 16, 18, 22, 26, 40–42, 84, 92, 95, 110, 112, 130–31 North, Michael, 17–18, 137, 170, 183 Norris, Frank, 32 Oates, Joyce Carol, 20, 171 O’Connor, Teresa, 131 Opportunity, 71 Orientalism, 4, 150 Ornitz, Samuel, 28 Paris, 4, 128, 140, 144–145, 148, 150, 157, 159, 160 Parry, Benita, 131 Phelps, William, 170



200

philanthropy, 41, 46, 67 German Jewish philanthropy, 25–26 Picasso, Pablo, 137 pluralism, 6, 14, 17, 48, 53, 74 poor white Southern culture, 114–22, 125 postcolonialism, 5–6, 130–33, 141 posthumanism, 127, 130, 133–34, 140–41, 165 postmodernism, 141–42 Pound, Ezra, 6, 17–18, 127, 142–43, 144 pragmatism, 29, 39 Puzo, Mario, 15 race, 7–13, 17–18, 61, 70–71, 74–79, 82–86, 88, 94, 109, 113–15, 127–29, 131, 133–35, 138, 142, 150, 165–66 Raiskin, Judith L., 129, 131–32, 182 Ramchand, Kenneth, 7, 131, 169 Raphaelson, Samuel, 170 Reed, Ishmael, 106 reform tenement kitchen, 63 Rhys, Jean, 4–5, 7–13, 16, 18, 127–68 works by After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 135, 150–53 Good Morning, Midnight, 153–54, 156–63 Quartet, 145–51 Sleep It Off, Lady, 131 Smile Please, 127 Tigers Are Better Looking, 131 Voyage in the Dark, 142–43 Wide Sargasso Sea, 127, 130–31, 133–43, 146 Rischin, Moses, 24–25, 171 Robbins, Bruce, 169 Roediger, David, 15, 170 Rogin, Michael, 15, 18, 53, 170, 174–75 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1, 27, 172 Rosten, Leo, 173 Roth, Henry, 15, 20

201

Sagarin, Edward, 27, 172 Said, Edward, 4, 12–13, 144, 149, 169, 184 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 131, 152–153 Savory, Elaine, 129–131, 181 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 152 serialization, 133, 138–140 Shaw, George Bernard, 41, 44 Shell, Marc, 172 Singal, Daniel Joseph, 6, 22, 169, 171 Sirk, Douglas, 59–60 slavery, 70, 80, 104, 114–115 Sollors, Werner, 13–16, 18, 46, 170 Sombart, Werner, 154 Spivak, Gayatri, 131–32, 137, 182 Staley, Thomas F., 183 Standard English, 17, 27, 32–34, 37, 39–40, 44, 51, 95, 97 Stein, Gertrude, 6, 17–18, 32, 98, 102–03, 127, 142–44, 184 Steiner, George, 1 Stepto, Robert, 181 Stokes, Rose Pastor, 28, 40 Stubbs, Katherine, 21 Thomas, Sue, 131 Thurman, Wallace, 71 Tiller Girls, 156 transnationalism, 12, 48, 50, 73, 89, 106, 111, 130, 137, 144 Turner, Darwin, 180 Twain, Mark, 1 urban folklore, 89–92, 95, 98–99 Varnhagen, Rahel, 45 Vechten, Carl Van, 72 Vienna, 11, 128 Voodoo, 103–07, 109 Wald, Lillian, 24 Waldorf Astoria, 2–3, 164 Walker, Alice, 72, 87, 176 Washington, Booker T., 78–79 Washington, Mary Helen, 180



Index

Ethnic Modernisms

WASP culture, 17, 24, 33, 37, 48 Weber, Max, 6 West, Cornel, 73, 87, 177–78 West Indian novel, 7, 130–32 Wharton, Edith, 1 white-collar worker (Angestellte), 153–56, 158, 160, 165 white supremacy, 114, 119, 122–23, 125, 127, 134–35, 138, 141 Whitman, Walt, 23, 76 Wilentz, Gay, 21 Willeman, Paul, 60, 176 Wirth, Louis, 43, 173 Wray, Matthew, 119, 181 Wright, Richard, 76, 88–89, 103, 112, 115, 177–79 Wolfe, Peter, 185 Wolin, Richard, 6 World War I, 6, 9, 26, 53–54, 56, 79 Yezierska, Anzia, 4–5, 7–13, 14, 16, 18–70, 83, 128–129, 141, 154–55, 167–68

works by All I Could Never Be, 23, 29, 45–48 “America and I,” 39 Arrogant Beggar, 23, 45 Bread Givers, 23, 45 “Fat of the Land,” 19, 37 “Free Vacation House, The,” 30–34, 36–37 Hungry Hearts, 19, 22–23, 28–30, 37, 40, 44–45, 50–52, 55–68 “Lost Beautifulness, The,” 66 “Mostly About Myself,” 30 “Prophets of Democracy,” (Bookman review) 38–39, 47 Red Ribbon on a White Horse, 50–51 Salome of the Tenements, 19, 23, 40–45, 47 “Wild Winter Love,” 66 Yiddish, perception of, 34, 37, 39 Zaborowska, Magdalena, 21, 67, 176



202

Ethnic modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the aesthetics of dislocation

Critical Companion to Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas (Mela))

Jean Rhys

Zora Neale Hurston (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), New Edition

Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives on the Past)

Zora Neale Hurston: And A History Of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives On The P)

Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzalez, and the Poetics of Culture

The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West

Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys

Zora and the Zombie

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (Bloom's Guides)

Zora and the Zombie

The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Gothic Modernisms

The costs of worker dislocation

Zora and Me

Neale, Acero, Pineda

Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare

Aesthetics and Painting (Continuum Aesthetics)

Aesthetics and Architecture (Continuum Aesthetics)

Aesthetics of the Opressed

The Principles of Aesthetics

Ernest Rhys - The Green Knight

The Aesthetics of Paradoxism

The Aesthetics of Architecture

Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms

Ethnic modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the aesthetics of dislocation

Critical Companion to Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas (Mela))

Jean Rhys

Zora Neale Hurston (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), New Edition

Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives on the Past)

Zora Neale Hurston: And A History Of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives On The P)

Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzalez, and the Poetics of Culture

The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West

Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys

Zora and the Zombie

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (Bloom's Guides)

Zora and the Zombie

The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Gothic Modernisms

The costs of worker dislocation

Zora and Me

Neale, Acero, Pineda

Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare

Aesthetics and Painting (Continuum Aesthetics)

Aesthetics and Architecture (Continuum Aesthetics)

Aesthetics of the Opressed

The Principles of Aesthetics

Ernest Rhys - The Green Knight

The Aesthetics of Paradoxism

The Aesthetics of Architecture

Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms

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