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The Possessive Self in Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska: Gender, Jewishness, and the Assumptions of Americanization
Ist Teil von
Prospects (New York), 1998-10, Vol.23, p.357-377
Ort / Verlag
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
1998
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Mary Antin was not modest in her use of the possessive case in The Promised Land — in her iterations of Mine, Mine, Mine. While still a schoolgirl, Antin asserted that everything she saw in the Boston Public Library, a “treasure house” of wisdom and art, was “Mine.” As the child of a newly naturalized American, she felt entitled to claim possession; the library and its treasured holdings were “Mine,” she said, “because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien; mine … My palace — mine! … This is mine” (266, original emphasis). By the time Antin came to the soaring conclusion of The Promised Land, she had exchanged her natural (and naturalized) father for the country's Founding Father, and as the child of George Washington, she claimed as her “heritage” everything in human evolutionary history that had led to the creation of America and everything yet to be evolved. “I am the youngest of America's children,” she wrote, “and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage … Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future” (286). In swooping hyperbole, Antin equated American citizenship with possession, and possession with inheritance, property, and rights: with a treasure house in which she “had a right to be … at home” (266).