Jonathon Anderson

7/5/2014 

Suffused with Light: The Immigrant Narrative and the Blurring of the American Dream

            I came to American Immigrant Literature with very vague ideas of immigration and the American Dream that were mostly gleaned from Hollywood and CNN. With my background, there had never been too much occasion to think about it, other than to match up the most general information about my ancestors to adventurous, Romanticized notions of old Ireland, England, Germany, or Romania. I didn’t have any clearly delineated concept of the American Dream because I had never encountered any serious challenge to its sovereignty (At this point, even what would have been called “counter-culture” thirty or forty years ago seems to have become so formalized as an exact reciprocal of “mainstream, conformist” society that it offers just as many stock characters, just as much opportunity for satire, and as little inherent value on its own merits). In other words, as a product of the dominant culture in the United States, it was impossible for me properly to assess the legacy of the Immigrant Narrative and its intimate relationship with the American Dream.

            The texts we read over the next five weeks provided the necessary distance to begin to see patterns. From fairly straightforward stories like Yezierska’s “Soap and Water” and Far’s “In the Land of the Free” to the complications of stories like Mukherjee’s “A Wife’s Story,” Jen’s “In the American Society,” and, of course, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, we have been able to see the recurring patterns, or basic stages and social pressures, of the “departure of an old world and culture, of a known lifestyle and pattern, into a (predominantly) new and ‘unknown’ place and system of living” (Daniel Stuart, “The Multi-Faceted Nature of Multicultural Literature: Issues Beyond the Narrative”). The American Dream of opportunity and “a land in which life is better and richer and fuller” for men and women who are “recognized by others for what they are, regardless of…birth or position” acts as a catalyst that propels the train of thought that “the far-off ‘golden country’” can supply what one’s home country may lack in religious freedom, job prospects, or educational possibilities (Wikipedia, “James Truslow Adams,” Yezierska). Once enmeshed in American society, however, the social pressures to assimilate, to measure up to a “model minority,” or constantly to cope with an unaccustomed “marked status” can easily obscure, or blur, the outlines of the American Dream, since all three concepts threaten the immigrant’s identity in a way that they don’t for the dominant culture.

            Much of Jake’s story in Cahan’s Yekl is devoted to this sort of identity crisis. “Jake had never even vaguely abandoned the idea of supplying his wife and child with the means of coming to join him,” we are told at the beginning of chapter three. This is qualified a few paragraphs later, though, by the statement that Jake “had lived so much more than three years” in the three years he has been in America, that “his Russian past appeared to him a dream and his wife and child, together with his former self, fellow characters in a charming tale, which he was neither willing to banish from his memory nor able to reconcile with the actualities of his American present.” By this point we have already seen Jake as thoroughly assimilated, but the cognitive dissonance between the fast-paced excitement of New York City compared to the traditional life of his hometown in northwestern Russia, his employment as a cloak maker in a sweatshop compared to his father’s business as a town blacksmith, and his American identity as “Jake, enthusiastic ladies’ man” compared to “Yekl, affectionate son, husband, and father” is too great. By the end of the chapter, Jake has been driven back into his former life by news of his father’s death. He is “filled with a keen sense of desolation and self-pity,” and the neighborhood he has grown so fond of “suddenly [grows] alien and incomprehensible” to him. We might easily overlook these moments in light of the contemptible unfairness with which he later treats his wife, but Cahan seems to take too much care to build these nuances into Jake’s character for us to see it as anything but the psychological anguish that can accompany the cultural confusion of people with divided identities (like we saw with Sonia Guevara’s essay concerning her identity).

            Long Day’s Journey into Night takes these crises of identity and elevates them to the stuff of tragedy. Here, we see the Tyrone family teetering on the precipice of complete disaster. All four family members are struggling with questions of identity and are isolated to a certain degree by their “marked status” as Irish Catholics, but James is the one for whom the realities of immigrant experience have completely obscured the American Dream. He is scarred by the desertion of his father, which meant he had to go to work at ten years old in order to help support his mother and five siblings. This has left him with a “fear of the poorhouse” that no amount of prosperity has been able to relieve. Because of this distrust of money, he has invested it in dozens of near worthless properties. In the blind pursuit of the means to provide opportunity and security for his family, he has not only sacrificed his own dreams (along with his own accent), but has let his hard-earned wisdom become bitter points of resentment and argument.

            Gish Jen’s “In the American Society” offers a more humorous take on an immigrant father’s identity struggles. Like James Tyrone, Ralph Chang sees hard work and personal sacrifice as the key to safeguarding his family’s future. He takes over a pancake house in order to build his financial foundation so that he can send Callie and Mona to college. We see quickly, however, that Mr. Chang is not making the efforts to assimilate that we saw from Tyrone. “My father had no use for nice clothes,” says Callie, “and would wear only ten-year-old shirts, with grease-spotted pants, to show how little he cared what anyone thought.” He entertains ideas, adapted from memories of his grandfather “and the village he had reigned over in China,” of a legacy of paternalism that he extends to his employees, which culminates with his attempts to help two illegal immigrants obtain their citizenship. As he gets more and more involved with their situation over the objections of his wife, he explains “the province comes before the town, the town comes before the family.” Unfortunately, Chang’s dream of prosperity and community collapses when the two immigrants flee, and he subsequently withdraws from his involvement at the restaurant. In the final scene of the story, we see that, despite owning and operating a more or less successful business in an upper middle class community, the Chang family is still subtly ostracized, and made to feel their “marked status,” by the dominant culture that is represented by Jeremy Brothers, who is belligerently condescending with Ralph, and Mrs. Lardner, who imposes upon Callie to take over serving duties. In a humorous, but significant, final flourish, the Changs, with Ralph in the lead, storm out of the party. In both Long Day’s Journey into Night and “In the American Society,” we are confronted by immigrant characters whose adherence to the social contract of “hard work, planning, and discipline” has been subverted by the “wear and tear” of both the pressure to assimilate and their “marked status.”

            This theme is taken up again by Juan Romero in Gilb’s “Romero’s Shirt,” who begins the story in this familiar state of identity crisis. He has been successful by the standards in Mexico, where “his parents were born and he spent much of his youth,” but people he knows have left El Paso to live and work in “Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, [or] Chicago and [have come] back for holidays with stories of high wages and acquisition.” He “constantly [has] to discipline himself” in order to forestall hopeless frustration and regret. Gilb mentions Romero’s severity with himself throughout the story, telling us that he “so often was disappointed, so often dwelled on the difficulties of life, that he had become hard,…spare with his words…had taught himself to not care, to not want, to not desire for so long that he’d lost many words.” In the precarious balance between success and failure that has resulted from the pressures of his marginalized social and economic existence, Romero’s Pendleton shirt has become the symbol for his meagre share of the American Dream, and when it disappears, he settles into a full-blown (albeit wordless) breakdown. Like James Tyrone and Ralph Chang, he reacts to this breach of the social contract of the immigrant narrative and American Dream by withdrawing from those around him into a solitary remoteness, but is rescued from bitterness or anger when, in the last nine lines of the story, he “look[s] in on his daughter still so young, so beautiful…, his sons still boys when they were asleep, who dreamed like men when they were awake, and his wife, still young in his eyes in the morning shadows of their bed.” Gilb seems to imply that Romero has reevaluated and redefined his share of the American Dream, leaving him at peace for the first time in the story, as he abandons his vigil for his shirt and finally gets into bed next to his wife.

            Surprisingly, one of the major patterns that begins to emerge in the texts from this semester is in opposition to the stereotypical American Dream story as one of “high wages and acquisition.” Many of our texts offer the possibilities of interpersonal success and the intimations of a community in contrast to the materialistic cataloguing of possessions as the key component of the American Dream. This is actually what Silko’s “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” seems to be built on. It may be because we are seeing conflict between the dominant culture and Native Americans, who are a distinct minority community and are understandably resistant to the liturgical demands of Father Paul, that the possibility of non-authoritarian actions on the part of the priest are so meaningful. This story turned out to be one of my favorites of the semester for the wonderfully understated scene of Father Paul’s decision that the members of his community are more important to him than the principled, inflexible certainty of church dogma. The attitude toward this “reaching across the aisle” seems to be one crucial point of differentiation between minority and immigrant narratives, in that, while minority groups never seem to expect the dominant culture to reach out to them, immigrant groups not only count on it, but are shocked if it doesn’t happen.

            In some ways my experience in American Immigrant Literature has been revelatory. Looking back over my work this semester, it’s easy to see the rapidly increasing engagement and attention to detail with the material. Comparing my two Research Posts, I can see that, while both consider real-world expressions of the melting pot concept, the second is much more concerned with the application of our objectives and terms to the cultural narrative of its subject. The whole semester I’ve been constantly overwhelmed by the range of discussion and the variety of experiences in the texts. The notion that it could all coalesce into something that is not only intelligible but distinctly and intrinsically American is inspiring. In a way, this seminar enacts part of James Truslow Adams’s definition of the American Dream through our recognition of others for “what they are, regardless of…birth or position,” which helps lead to “a land in which life is better and richer and fuller.” One of our first texts may have articulated this almost mystical character of the American agenda at its best with Yezierska’s rhapsodic response to finding “one from the other side of the world who was so simply and naturally that miraculous thing – a friend: […] My past was the forgotten night. Sunrise was all around me. I went out from Miss Van Ness’s office, singing a new song of life: ‘America! I found America.’”