Abstract
Beyond rendering the ethos of the nation sacrosanct, the purpose of national mythology—in the form of, for instance, the immigrant success narrative—is to obscure the particulars of the heroism it dramatizes. This may explain why a leisurely encounter with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), might not reveal the curious chromatics that inform the logic of this immigrant American bildungsroman. A ghetto pastoral set early in the second decade of the twentieth century, Tree chronicles the emancipation of Austrian-Irish Francie Nolan from urban squalor. The precocious adolescent protagonist realizes that education is a prerequisite to a bright future. Yet her admission to public school and that of her brother (Neely) are contingent on being thoroughly immunized so as not to release unknown contagions upon her peers and instructors. Despite her mother’s instruction to “wash yourselves good” before venturing into the public health clinic, Fran- cie and Neely seek to assuage their fear of the needle by frolicking in mud.4 The narrator notes that the “mud-pie making was so beguiling. Their hands and arms got very dirty playing in the mud” (143).
[I]t is not just that various white immigrant groups’ economic success came at the expense of nonwhites, but that they owe their now stabilized and broadly recognized whiteness itself in part to these nonwhite groups.
—Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color1
[T]he power to suppress the body, to cover its tracks, is the sign of real authority, according to constitutional fashion.
—Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life”2
I could beat them all if I only let loose the love of colour in me.
—Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers3
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Notes
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9.
Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), 113.
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New, with an introduction by Alice Kessler Harris (New York: Persea Books, 1925), 19. All further references will be featured as page numbers in the text.
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York: Perennial Classics, 1943), 142. All further references will be featured as page numbers within the text.
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 247.
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, Gender (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 50.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 129.
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Classic Essays on the Cultures of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), 52.
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 55.
Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.
Mary V. Dearborn, Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey (New York: Free Press, 1988), 116.
Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 160.
In his work on Jewish American assimilation, historian Andrew Heinze remarks upon the “Jewish tendency to infuse material objects with symbolic meaning,” as a means of explaining immigrants affinity to American materialism. Material objects, once a sign of religious devotion, became a conspicuous sign of American social ascent. For more see, Nancy Von Rosk, “‘Go Make Yourself for a Person’: Urbanity and the Construction of an American Identity in the Novels of Cahan and Anzia Yezierska,” Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Culture Studies 27 (2001): 295–335, doi:10.1017/S0361233300000958.
Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, Advertising in Capitalist Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 111.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), 47.
Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto; Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 28–29.
Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 171.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1991), 40.
The godfather of American sociology, Robert Park, for one, seemed to believe that physical alteration of the immigrant body could help whiten it. In fact, Park metaphorized social assimilation as an epidermal process. He ventured, “[A]ssimilation may be compared with skin grafting, where the new tissue is not applied to the whole surface, but spots are grafted and from their connecting tissues ramify” (280). For more see Robert E. Park and Herbert Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York: Harper Brothers, 1921).
Louise Levitas Henriksen, Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life, with assistance from Jo Ann Boydston (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 167.
Michael de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 115, 122.
Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), 218.
Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 14.
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” trans. Jean Roussel, New Left Review 51 (1968): 64.
Lori Harrison-Kahan, “‘Drunk with the Fiery Rhythms of Jazz’: Anzia Yesierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance,” Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 419.
Robyn Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 123.
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 12.
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© 2012 Tyrone R. Simpson II
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Simpson, T.R. (2012). The Love of Colour in Me. In: Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature. The Future of Minority Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014894_2
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