Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Merish, Lori

Titel

The Matter of Identification: Yezierska's Arrogant Beggar and the Gendered Injuries of Class

Ist Teil von

• Studies in American fiction, 2012-09, Vol.39 (2), p.207-241

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Repudiating the passion for fancy dress exhibited by contemporary "working girls" and resisting more transient pleasures such as an ice-cream soda or "a moving picture that I'm crazy to see" at the nickelodeon-the site of what Miriam Hansen calls a "proletarian public sphere" for working-class women-Hanneh saves up pennies from "extra washing" to purchase white paint and material for curtains in an effort to "shine . . . up the house" (77), especially the kitchen-which, in its refurbished state, she compares to a "parlor," a space dedicated not to bodily necessity but to domestic display.3 Like Progressive-era reformers who cast their political ambition in maternalist terms, Hanneh's "consumer citizenship" is tied to maternal devotion: the joy of aesthetic expression (she refers to the kitchen as "my painting") and home beautification equate to "the ecstasy of loving service" for her son and constitute an antidote to his class "shame" (67). While the "educatedlooking" texts she finds in the library seem "a head without a body," she envisions her own writing as intensely embodied, infused with "flesh and blood"; this working-class language is, significantly, characterized by imagery of orality (a "feast of language") and pregnancy.100 In Arrogant Beggar, music is a metonym of this shared oral culture, conveying the repressed (maternal) plenitude of ethnic working-class experience: like a lost "mother tongue," music is a medium for evoking the class losses-the hidden injuries-not dignified or given expression in the symbolic order.