Complete sample essay for Essay 2 assignment

THE QUIET EXCLUSIVES:  AMERICAN DOMINANT CULTURE

            This course has attempted to analyze America’s dominant culture in readings of The Exodus, Of Plymouth Plantation, Bread Givers, and excerpts from Hunting Mr. Heartbreak.  These narratives feature:  the ideology that has led the dominant culture of today (The Exodus); the earliest ancestors of America’s dominant culture, practicing the habits that would establish their dominance (Of Plymouth Plantation); and glimpses of the Dominant Culture in its quiet, regal inconspicuousness (in Bread Givers and Heartbreak).  

            The Exodus and Of Plymouth Plantation contrast the standard immigrant narrative in two key ways:  they concern national migration, a whole people migrating en masse; and they show people immigrating to new lands “without the intention of assimilating to another culture but rather of imposing their own culture on a new place” (class notes from website).  Whereas standard immigrant narratives describe individuals or families struggling to assimilate to the dominant culture with varying degrees of resistance and success, the Jews of The Exodus, the Pilgrims in Of Plymouth Plantation, the father in Bread Givers, and the dominant culture in general, especially as featured in Raban’s Mr. Heartbreak, do not assimilate, but keep themselves separate. 

            Reading The Exodus is useful in beginning to understand the roots of this idea of staying separate from--even being hateful towards--people of other cultures.  Understanding the ideology of the Jews in Canaan, and the Pilgrims, and later the Puritans in New England provides us with a possible explanation of their rise to dominance:  God told them they were superior!  Moses tells the Jews that “ye may know how that LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel“ (Exodus 11.7).  How ironic then that so many immigrants come to American believing it to be a country where “all men were created equal“!  Yet, the dominant culture has inherited a superiority complex:  “Chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people….The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number…but because the Lord loved you” (Deuteronomy 7.6-8). 

            Taught to celebrate diversity and welcome different cultures and ethnicities open-armed, the liberally-educated person (OK, me) finds it a bit odd that God advocates not only conquering and displacing people, “dispossess the inhabitants of the land and, all therein” (Numbers 33.53), but also destroying their churches, “overthrow their altars, break their pillars, burn their groves with fire…hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place” (Deuteronomy 12.3).  Used to thinking of traveling and encountering different cultures in terms of the “When in Rome…” advice, The Exodus narrative flabbergasted me with its domineering snatch-&-grab attitude and destruction. 

            God, telling the Jews not to intermarry with the Canaanites, indeed to “destroy” them, is quite in his wrathful rejection of all things un-Israelite:  

“When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it,. and hast cast out … seven nations greater and mightier than thou…thou shalt smite then and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them:  neither shalt thou make marriages with them…for they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods….But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars and break down their images and cut down their groves and burn their graven images with fire: (Deuteronomy 7.1-6).

Following this no-intermarriage rule diligently until quite recently, the Jews have “resisted intermarriage more successfully than any other American Immigrant group” (notes from class website).  This contrasts decidedly with immigrant narrative in which the ultimate sign of having assimilated successfully is intermarrying.  An attitude of dogmatic entitlement-- believing they have a Biblical permission slip to displace another group of people--and superiority perhaps accounts for the terrible lack of compromise seen in the present-day Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  Nonetheless, The Exodus narrative sets a standard for future migrants:  there can be no symbiotic mixing of the cultures.  The red carpet of superiority and separation is clearly rolled out.

            In Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford also describes the Pilgrims as special, chosen people, led and protected and provided for by God.  Where the Jews displaced the Canaanites, the Pilgrims displaced the Native American Indians from ancestral lands.  But the Pilgrims begin to spread, acquiring significantly more land, “no man now thought he could live except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep them, all striving to increase their stocks” (Bradford 281) until the Indians are indeed pushed out.  The Pilgrims cooperate to some extent with the Indians at first, sharing food and hunting techniques, yet they are forbidden from intermarrying or consorting sexually with them.  

            They do not want to be influenced by surrounding cultures, wishing to maintain the integrity of their own separate ways.  They leave Holland in large part because “their children, by…the great licentiousness of youth in that country and the manifold temptations of the place were drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses, getting the reins off their necks and departing from their parents” (25).  This sentiment is similar to that of the elders in “Poets in the Kitchen,” who speak of the New York children running wild with their parents left helpless to discipline them because of those meddling American laws. 

            A sense of superiority classifies the Puritan outlook as well,  as JH pointed out aptly in her midterm:

 “In 1630, John Winthrop gave a speech upon the deck of the Arabella. In it he asserted, ‘For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.’ This quote of Winthrop’s speech is taken from the Bible in which Jesus tells his disciples, ‘You are the light of the world, a city set on a hill cannot be hid’ (Matthew, 5 14-16). …this description of America provides a backdrop for the American Dream” (2004 class website).

This hilltop lookout foreshadows the Air People of Raban’s essay, living far above the poor street people huddled on the ground.  During the time when Raban visited the New York he writes about in Heartbreak, Reagan, a representative of the dominant culture, was president. Reagan borrowed the “city upon a hill” line often in his speeches, altering it to “a shining city.“  This became a symbol for financial ascendancy:  a city of sparkly steel and glass skyscrapers enticing the culture‘s greed for more sparkly, glinting riches.  It also hearkened back to the sense of being a chosen people, better than the rest, watched over by God.          

            The Pilgrim ideal of plainness in Plymouth offers a preview of the later dominant culture: unmarked, “avoiding as a deadly plague…all singularly affected any manner of way. Let every man repress in himself and the whole body in each affected….Be not shaken with unnecessary novelties or other oppositions” (57).  This contrasts with what the Pilgrims find in Holland where the people’s “strange and uncouth language…with their strange fashions and attires, all so far differing from that of their plain country villages” (16), where they live their “plain country life” (11).  Bradford endeavors, the introduction says, to write in “plain” language.  Rejecting the ornate, ceremony-laden Catholic church, they “wanted, above all, to return to a simpler church,“ (xi), a plainer style, without icons or rococo designs and intricate rituals, just relying on the word of God. 

            The Pilgrims’ love of the plain style foreshadows the plainness of the dominant culture with which Sara falls in love in Bread Givers.  The students at her college possess “that sure, settled look of those who belong to the world in which they were born” (211).  Sara is fascinated by their “plain beautifulness,” “simple skirts and sweaters…neat finished quietness of their tailored suits. There was no show-off in their clothes, and yet how much more pulling to the eyes and all the senses” (212).  She longs to achieve their “spic-and-span cleanliness,” “white like milk,” “all shaved up with pink clean skins,” “so ironed out smooth and even they looked in their spotless, creaseless clothes as if the dirty battle of life had never yet been on them” (213).   Her desire for a clean, bare, light, airy room of her own recalls the Pilgrim and Puritan ideal of newly plain, light, airy churches.  She finds the suburban neighborhood outside the city where her college is located to be heavenly:  “it was like a picture out of fairyland to see people…watering their own growing flowers.   A leisured quiet, whispered in the air:  Peace.  Be still.”  She is realizing the modern experience of owning one’s own property, living on an uncrowded, green expanse with increased privacy, as well as its converse:  detachment from the rest of the world as seen in Raban’s piece. 

            Yet, Sara does not intermarry.  Though she follows the standard Immigrant Narrative on all other scores (becoming educated and independent, securing a good job, imitating their plainness, owning her own property), she maintains the separateness of her culture on this one point, marrying within her own ethnicity.  This point is complicated, a bit hard to analyze clearly, since in resisting intermarrying she does not earn the badge of ultimate assimilation; but in another sense, not intermarrying means she is more like the dominant culture who do not intermarry either.   Sara rediscovers her ethnic identity (Stage 5 of the Immigrant Narrative) when she befriends the principal.  Delighting her rascally father by finding and marrying a fellow Jew--a man who even asks Father to teach him Hebrew--Sara reaffirms her Jewishness. “Countrymen!” they rejoice at discovering they are from villages only a few miles apart in Poland.  “They talked one language.  They had sprung from one soil….You and I, we are of one blood“ (278).  This shows a clear preference for marrying your own people, a belief-- shared by Jews and the dominant culture and inherited from The Exodus and the Pilgrim narrative--that a real connection is best found with someone of your own blood.  

            This Biblically-based belief perhaps explains the longevity of the dominant culture’s reign of power.  By the 1980’s, when Raban visited New York and wrote Mr. Heartbreak, the dominant culture was enjoying an unabashed heyday of fantastic social elevation and personal enrichment (of the monetary, not spiritual, sort--except in the sense of being a chosen people deserving of privilege).   Their superiority fully established, WASPs did not deign to interact with the street people but lived in the upper echelons, at the tops of high-rises, as far removed from New York as they could manage.  The gap between the rich and the poor was immense but could be bridged with a 3-inch credit card.  “Dream was the codeword for that ache for transcendence, for moving up and moving on, which had been sanctioned by the republic as a democratic right….“trading up,” and “going upscale” (Raban 73).   

            Raban marvels about the iconic status that Ralph Lauren reached in the 1980’s.  Son of a house painter immigrant from Russian, Lauren grew up in North Bronx, one of many boroughs the Air People of would never visit.  Yet, he styled his clothing line on how he thought, from watching PBS television, the upper crust of British society looked.  He was a sweeping success, wildly popular and trend-setting.  Describing the philosophy implicit in Lauren’s strange designs, Raban simultaneously describes the dominant culture.  One can substitute dominant culture or Pilgrim for any spot where Lauren is used.  They:

 “recoiled from the melting pot.  Ralph Lauren’s America was aggressively Anglo-Saxon.  Nothing in it derived from Mediterranean Europe, let alone Afro- or Hispanic America.  It was the Lowell-Cabot axis of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, pitched squarely against the teeming mass of blacks, browns, yellows and of-whites. When you kitted yourself out with Ralph Lauren in the paneled Club Room at Macy’s, you aligned yourself with the Mayflower versus the Rest….it was in flight from New York--from the dense streets, the mix of peoples, the electric up-to-dateness of the place.  It was marketed as a ‘conservative’ vision--as a return to ‘the classic,’ the ‘things that endure,‘ to a ‘style beyond time’” (Raban 82-83). 

Some of the attractions of investigating the dominant culture are to try to figure out the secret of their successful dominance.  By priding themselves on quiet good taste, they never draw much attention and therefore not much criticism to themselves, intentionally.  As long as they “elude analysis” and no one criticizes them, they need not fear that their power is at all threatened.  Many people do not feel the impulse to analyze the dominant culture.  This is partly because to say that the Pilgrims and Puritans were Chosen People who fathered the dominant culture of today seems a bit like an overgeneralization and oversimplification.  WASPs are not all one pure race, so how can we see them as separate at all?  Are all the super-wealthy supposedly dominant culture people really descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans?  I doubt it.  Also, people do not question something of which they are unaware; many people are inculcated, indeed, blissfully unaware, of the unconscious dominant culture ideology that murmurs, with a whispery sleight of hand, “We will entice you to worship us in all our hushed refinement while never for a second allowing you to doubt that ‘all men created equal,’ though you know unconsciously and accept as inevitable our secret: we are the best.  We have the best.  We have an obscenely disproportionate amount of wealth, and we want more.  The only thing you can do is continue to emulate us and hope for the best.  You might climb the ladder to the very top!”  Wink wink.   

            As Sholom Aleichem says about the endless opportunity and freedom of choice in “On America”:

 “A land flowing with milk and honey. People with money left and right. Beggars use two hands. They rake it in. And there’s so much business, it makes you dizzy. Want a factory--it’s a factory. Want to open a store--fine. Want to push a pushcat, that’s permitted to. Or you can become a pedlar, even work in a shop! It’s a free country. you can be bloated with hunger, die in the street--and no one will bother you; no one will say a word.”

Ah, the Promised Land!  [AP]