Anzia Yezierska Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The American Dream has, at least for the past century, been an important feature of class discourse in the United States. Jennifer Hochschild defines the dream as the promise held out to each and every American that he or she has a reasonable chance of achieving success through his or her own efforts (1995, xi). Achievement, therefore, translates into reaching "some threshold of wellbeing, higher than where one began" (Hochschild 1995,16).] Anzia Yezierska's 1923 novel, Salome of the Tenements, brings to the fore and dramatizes various aspects of the American Dream. Success, as the protagonist Sonya Vrunsky defines it, means leaving poverty—"the prison of... soul-wasting want"—behind; Sonya is described as wanting more than anything else to move away from the "blackness of poverty" and to reach the "mountain-tops of life" (5). The image of upwardness, whereby poverty is presented as low and wealth as high, is a central trope in the novel. In this way, Yezierska portrays the United States not only as a society with clear class stratifications, but also a society in which individuals are capable of changing their location in the hierarchical formation, that is, they can rise above want and need, and enjoy the "higher life," where the "luxuries of love, beauty, plenty" abound (68).
In the following pages, I argue that Salome of the Tenements explicitly queries and dramatizes the logic of upward mobility and provides a fascinating staging of class "conflict" in (Yezierska's fictive) Progressive-Era America.4
This novel tells the story of Sonya Vrunsky, an orphaned child of Jewish immigrants working as a columnist on the Lower East Side, who falls in love with the millionaire and progressive philanthropist John Manning. Sonya is determined to get what she wants, and she eventually finds a way into Manning's life. Things fall apart soon after Sonya and Manning's marriage, however, and Sonya leaves Fifth Avenue and returns to the Lower East Side. Here, she works as a dressmaker, and through her hard work and talent, makes a name for herself as a fashion designer. At the end of the novel, Sonya re-encounters Jaky Solomon, who has also worked himself up from a lowly tailor to a Fifth Avenue designer; the two ultimately become partners, both in work and in love. Yezierska's flamboyant and sometimes hyperbolic narrative style alongside her constant invocation of class norms make this text a particularly suitable site for investigating the way in which class status is constituted by and through performativity. Concentrating on the functions of class discourse in the novel, I contend that the narrative reveals many of the ways this discourse has operated in the U.S., and how class, as a category of identification—similar to gender and race—is constituted by and through certain regulatory ideals or norms. Yet, I go on to argue that class also needs to be rethought as a specific and unique modality of performative reiteration and therefore operates differently from gender and race.