Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ungar, Cara-Lynn

Titel

Discourses of Class and the New Jewish Working Woman in Anzia Yezierska's Arrogant Beggar

Ist Teil von

• Legacy (Amherst, Mass.), 1999-01, Vol.16 (1), p.82-92

Ort / Verlag

Amhurst, Mass: Pennsylvania State University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

1999

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Nonetheless, the act of embracing this ideology in some sense "whitened" as it reclassed the Jewish charity women. When Mrs. Hellman, for example, takes on these attributes she sheds her status as "Jew" (which, as Ann Pellegrini suggests, at the turn of the century marks her as "not white") to perform the white, middle-class American role that charity work signifies. Typically. German Jewish women's Americanization processes involved taking on the virtues associated with a white, middle-class model of womanhood ([Baum], [Paula Hyman], and [Sonya Michel] 53). In fact, the American Jewess, a paper read widely by middle-class German Jewish immigrant women, printed a poem "summing up" the prevailing image of the Jewish woman, describing her as "pure, as the lily is white and pure," "wise," "loving," and "trustworthy" (Sonneschein 33-34). German Jewish women, like the charity women and their gentile "white" counterparts, had internalized the ideologies that were meant to mark virtuous, white, middle-class womanhood. [Adele Lindner] initially finds the charity women's application of middle-class ideology liberating. She believes that the home was "a place where a girl had the right to breathe and move around like a free human being" (8), and in a letter to the charity board, she writes that the home was an "oasis in the depths, of the heartless city" (43). Adele refers to the home as a place that seeks first and fore most to "legitimize" and "uplift" the girls, an uplift, she assumes, which will materialize as the charity women teach her how to be a real lady. For example, in the first third of the novel, in order to "get the clean feel of her new life," Adele longs to escape the "ugliness and clutter" of the lower east side for the "quiet beauty of the home" (27). Further, Adele wants to distinguish herself from the other immigrant girls in ways that would make her seem "suitable" (in the sense that she would appear to be like the charity women as opposed to like the other "girls") and so "different" (29). However, as the novel progresses Adele rejects the charity women's notion of womanhood on the grounds that the women were interested only in "making" servants who would not challenge them. This rejection also signifies her resistance to a model of womanhood that would demand she deny her ethnicity and class. Adele first demonstrates this resistance at a charity women's luncheon. Adele is serving at the luncheon and overhears the women's plans to publicize their own "good deeds." Mrs. Hellman and several other members of the Hellman Home hoard of directors plan to invite reporters to the home to show case their charity programs. However, in the privacy of this meeting, the women confess that they are really just encouraging the "girls" to "face the conditions in which they were born and to which they must adjust themselves" (64). During the course of the meeting, the women also talk about the importance of "keeping the undisciplined girls from wanting more and more" (64). Further, Mrs. Hellman explains to Mrs. White (a board member) that "keeping" the "girls" is advantageous to her because she does not have to pay Adele, for example, "as much as the girls from the agency" (69). When Adele hears this last comment, she drops her tray to the floor, understanding finally the extent to which she is being exploited. It is in this scene that she recognizes the tension between the moves both to "aid" and "limit" her implicit in the charity women's articulations of middle-class ideology.