News
The Invention of Ethnicity and Gender in Suzanne Strempek Shea's Fiction
The Polish Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3, 2003: 327-345Grazyna J. Kozaczk
The American literary scene during the final decades of the twentieth century was energized by the critical acclaim gained by a group of women writers who hailed from strong ethnic traditions and whose creative work probed the complex experiences of immigrants and their children caught between the ethnic and the dominant host cultures. Their female characters have often been placed in an unenviable position of double jeopardy since they not only represented a marginalized ethnic group, but also faced prejudice due to their gender. In constructing a female perspective, fiction writers and poets such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Julia Alvarez, and Lorna Dee Cervantes have forced many of their characters into a process of reinventing both their gender and ethnic consciousness. Unquestionably, the Polish American fiction of Suzanne Strempek Shea deserves to be included with that of the above-mentioned group. In her first three novels, Selling the Lite of Heaven (1994), Hoopi Shoopi Donna (1996), and Lily of the Valley (1999), Suzanne Strempek Shea chronicles the small town Polish American neighborhood found among the slightly dilapidated working-class settlements of New England. A strong sense of nostalgia for the familiar and comfortable albeit far from idyllic life within an ethnic enclave infuses her writing about the fragile world endangered both from within and from without. Suburbanization, the disappearance of the family farm, divorce and intermarriage, all seem to add urgency to her writing, as if a record must be completed before even the memories disappear. Ironically, the sensitively drawn female characters who are caught within the tension created by the often conflicting values and demands embedded in the Polish traditions represented by their immigrant parents or grandparents and the seductive promises of American society become themselves the agents of change. As they struggle for an understanding of self, their ethnic consciousness becomes intricately intertwined with gender awareness, and in the constant process of inventing ethnicity and gender, the heroines of her novels re-invent the Polish American community.
Since the concept of invention suggests a conscious act of an inventor fabricating something new, its application to the notion of ethnicity or gender may seem questionable. Isn't ethnicity, just like gender, predetermined by the accident of birth? Isn't it a part of the inheritance received from ancestors together with physical characteristics? In the late 1980s, Werner Sollors continuing the research of Antonio Gramsci and Eric Hobsbawm (Cygan 210) published two works, The Invention of Ethnicity and Beyond Ethnicity which by many scholars were quickly acknowledged as presenting an important challenge to the accepted view of ethnicity and gender. Using the postmodern paradigm shift suggested in the discourse of Jacque Derrida's deconstruction as well as in the works of Kristeva, Bakhtin and Foucault, Werner Sollors in The Invention of Ethnicity identifies ethnic and gender identities as two of the categories such as childhood, romantic love and generations that have moved from being perceived as 'essentialist' categories'to being recognized as ìcultural constructs crucial in the social construction of realityî (Sollors x). The notion of ethnicity as invention pivots on the points of conflict identified by Sollors in his seminal work, Beyond Ethnicity, as 'the central drama in American culture'(Sollors 5-6). For Sollors, the clash pits consent against descent; what is self-made against what is ancestral; and what is hereditary against what is contractual (Sollors 5). His construct of ethnicity as invention has quickly found resonance among literary critics interested in ethnic literatures and has been used very successfully in, for example, the analysis of the discursivity of ethnic identity in the narratives of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston as well as by Thomas S. Gladsky in his study, Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature where he analyzes a number of works which ìmay be read as contributing to the literary creation of ethnic selves and American ethnicityî(Gladsky 2). The notion of invention is echoed by many postmodern feminist critics such as Judith Butler who has also defined ìgender identityî not as an essentialist category, but rather as a fluid and ever-changing process (Flynn 41). Butler, in her work aptly titled Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, defines gender as ìalways a doingî (qtd. in Flynn 41).
In this paper, I wish to examine the concept of ethnicity and gender as a social construct constantly reinvented and recreated in selected texts by Suzanne Strempek Shea.
Strempek Shea's first three novels, Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna and Lily of the Valley, foreground the process of evolution by which her Polish American women transcend their limitations and the restricting roles assigned to them by their ethnic family and community. Since both gender and ethnic categories predetermine power relations, the author manages to subvert the status quo as she moves her characters from powerlessness to a position of power by endowing them not only with the knowledge of self but also with an ability to create a sense of self. In each novel, she employs a very similar plot structure, uses the first-person point of view with the narrator always fulfilling the dual role of the storyteller and the protagonist, and develops an important metaphor of a journey of self-invention. Her conflicts usually originate from a serious act of male betrayal which strips the female protagonist cum narrator of all she thought essential to her well being and initiates her journey of self-reinvention.
In Selling the Lite of Heaven, the nameless protagonist is identified only through her familial relationships to her mother Edna and father Stanislaus and through a failed engagement to Eddie Balicki who leaves her practically at the altar for the priesthood. Since both her Polish-born mother and American popular culture have indoctrinated her with a conviction that female self-validation is only achievable through marriage, Eddie's desertion seriously undermines her self-esteem. Forced to recreate her identity, Edna's daughter spends the whole year selling Eddie's engagement ring and reinventing her ethnicity and gender through voyeuristic excursions into the lives of others. Eventually, she is ready to define herself through another relationship, but one in which she becomes an active partner with full rights of self-determination.
Donna Milewski, from Hoopi Shoopi Donna also has to refashion her life after experiencing a crushing betrayal from her father, the man she has loved above all others. Adam Milewski not only transfers most of his affection and attention to Donna's sister, Betty, adopted from Poland, but also unfairly blames Donna for a car accident which cripples Betty and causes serious injuries to Donna. Alienated from her father, Donna spends the next twenty years on a futile journey of self-pity and revenge, but finally manages just like Edna's daughter, to recreate her womanhood as a Polish American individual. Although she only slightly resembles the virginal Edna's daughter, she also finally links her femininity to a fulfilling relationship with a man and reasserts her ethnicity through forming an ìall girl polka band.î Donna's new ethnic identity is so well defined, that she does not feel threatened by crossing ethnic boundaries and choosing an Italian American for a partner.
In her third novel, Lily of the Valley, Strempek Shea, moves away from the homogenous Polish American community and places her narrator Lily Wilk in a more multicultural setting, although Lily is still undoubtedly an ethnic woman. The shock that prompts her self-reexamination comes from a husband who leaves suddenly to return to his first wife and deprives Lily not only of her identity as a wife but also as a stepmother to his young son. Lily's journey is an artistic quest to reinvent herself as an artist and a Polish American woman. And true to the schema, Strempek Shea leads her to a possible relationship with another man, a father of an adopted son, who could offer what was lost through Jack's desertion.
The previously mentioned image of a journey of self invention is not unusual in ethnic literature since, as Magdalena J. Zaborowska suggested in her essay on Maria Kuncewiczowa, 'any geographic immigrant journey follows, contains, and inspires a literary one' (Zaborowska 171). Thus, Toni Morrison in Beloved sends Sethe on a perilous journey to reinvent herself as a free woman capable of love; Louise Erdrich's Marie Lazarre, the mixed blood teenager from The Love Medicine, trudges up the hill to a Catholic convent to transform herself into a white saint, and years later her granddaughter, Albertine Johnson, leaves the Ojibwa reservation to invent her Indian self; and Yolanda, the alter ego of Julia Alvarez, from her recent novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, returns to the Dominican Republic to piece together her identity as a Latina. Unfortunately, these journeys are not always successful since a character may lack tools or support to construct her identity as illustrated by Lorna Dee Cervantes, in her deeply moving poem ìThe Refugee Ship.î Her young female speaker fails to recreate her ethnicity and link her existence with that of her female ancestors. In the end, she despairs over her homelessness:
I feel I am a captive
Aboard the refugee ship.
The ship that will never dock.
El barco que nunca atraca. (Cervantes 267)
The image of the immigrant's journey is probably the most apt metaphor to use in unlocking Strempek Shea's vision of ethnic and gender invention. She gives this often overused symbol, a new and fresh meaning as it echoes the artistic perceptiveness of other ethnic writers. In each of her novels, she empowers her ethnic protagonists to reject the self of despair, misery, repression and suffering and refashion the same identity to one of fulfillment, power and contentment. Their emotional journey parallels the movement of their parents or grandparents from Europe to America.
Already in her first novel, Selling the Lite of Heaven, Strempek Shea suggests that gender and ethnic boundaries are culturally constructed as Edna's daughter identifies herself with a character depicted in a pattern decorating their Thanksgiving china:
In the circle of china that is my dinner plate, there is the Mayflower. And there I am, on the bow of that ship, dressed in a Pilgrim's drab gown, holding on for dear life as the craft pitches and yaws in angry waters made even more dangerous by the presence of the mother shark below. Through torrential rain, I see the land of Eddie straight ahead. There the sun is shining, and somebody is signaling a welcome to me from his place atop a rock. (Shea Selling 156)
Strempek Shea develops here a multifaceted, complicated and even somewhat troubling image. Edna's daughter celebrating a quintessentially American holiday in a strongly ethnic home of her parents where the roasted turkey follows cabbage soup symbolically sheds her Polish American identity to associate herself with Anglo-American tradition. Her initial position exemplifies a female stereotype characterized by the pejorative qualities of weakness, obedience, and dependence. She clearly isolates one set of dangers to her autonomy, and that is the figure of her overprotective and controlling mother who instead of fostering her daughter's resistance to the patriarchal restrictions placed upon her, becomes herself an agent of oppression. The mother epitomizes the Polish America Catholic ideology. Here Strempek Shea subverts power relations usually encoded in gender categories and endows a woman with the power to oppress another female, an issue of special interest to Toni Morrison in her analysis of traditional fairy tales. Morrison sees the domestic environment presented in many fairy tales as a world 'of women gathered together and held together in order to abuse another woman' (Morrison 282). Just as in the story of Cinderella analyzed my Morrison, Strempek Shea in Selling the Lite of Heaven forcefully illustrates an assault on a young woman's self esteem
'Paciara,' my father said, calling Willard one of his favorite derogatory names - the one that meant leftovers, something pushed to the side of the plate and then thrown to the pigs. I many times have been called a paciara by my mother, but I remind myself that it's only food. (Shea Selling 146)
Edna's daughter, cognizant of the danger represented by her mother, fails to perceive even a greater assault on her identity, because, the avid reader of Today's Bride, she wholeheartedly buys into the media supported definition of gender. She erroneously believes she can reach self-realization by snatching power from her mother and surrendering it to Eddie. In this moment of daydreaming, she also engages in an act of ethnic impersonation where she exchanges one ethnic identity for another. Strempek Shea will return to this intriguing notion of interchangeability of ethnicity in her third novel, Lily of the Valley, with much more radical results.
The vision of Edna's daughter is doubly problematized by the origin of the dishes received as a premium for purchases in a grocery store chain. Material success seems to be the only form of success offered to the weary pilgrim by American society. Thus at this point, Edna' daughter, the quintessential ethnic woman, whom Urszula Tempska dubs with the name of 'Everywoman of the late twentieth century'(288) is suspended between the two shores, the immigrant shore of her parents and the shore of her own ethnic and gender identity. The Polish American landscape is familiar to her, but she has not taken possession of it quite yet.
As she details the Polish American landscape of her small New England communities, Strempek Shea's novels offer most American readers an ethnic milieu unfamiliar and exotic. The ethnicity of her characters is clearly understood both by the members of the community and perceived by those on the outside (Sollors The Invention xiii). Thomas S. Gladsky's definition of Polishness in fiction about war refugees and peasant farmers is quite applicable to Strempek Shea's Polish milieu, 'Polishness is the ubiquitous peasant wedding, foods, a sprinkling of myths, proverbs and Polish language phrases, and occasional references to history and geography' (Gladsky Princes 5). In Strempek Shea's texts, enclaves of Polishness characterized by racial, religious and social homogeneity are isolated as they follow their own rhythm of life with hardly any intrusion from the outside reality. Although the novels are set during a turbulent twenty-year period between the 1970s and 1990s, references to controversial political, social or cultural issues of the time both in the United States and in Poland are extremely rare. Her world centers around a family strongly tied to a community unified by religious and educational institutions such as the Roman Catholic parish and the parochial school. Clearly marked ethnic boundaries of these communities have first been invented by the grandparents or parents of her protagonists, who represent the pre- or the post-World War II waves of economic migration mainly from rural Southern Poland. Often, they were unwilling immigrants, banished from the familiar into a punitive exile for real or imagined offenses, who continued to long for the lost life in Poland. This was the case of Adam Milewski whose journey to the United States was a form of punishment for ìthe shame he had brought on the family (Shea Hoopi 349). These individuals provide first models for ethnic reinvention to their daughters as they selectively perpetuate old country traditions which without the strong connection to the country of origin or without any contextualization are valued but not comprehended by the next generation of ethnics. Strempek Shea's working class characters unapologetically spend their entire lives within the realm of the blue-collar culture punctuated by the polka tunes of Frankie Yankovic, Gene Wisniewski or Lou Prohut's Polka Rounders (Shea Hoopi 26).
Ethnic expression in Strempek Shea's texts is grounded in powerful forces of the simple folk religiosity, the web of family relationships, and the ubiquitous polka music. (Both religion and music will receive only a cursory treatment in this paper: however, they deserve a whole separate discussion).
As Deborah Anders Silverman argues in her monograph, Polish-American Folklore, 'Although Polish-American's relationship with God is intense, it is also complex and mediated by priests, the Virgin Mary, and a host of saints who act as intercessors for the faithfulî (Silverman 89). In the new and strange environment, the church provides the comforting support of the familiar with Polish language services, yearlong cycle of holidays, individual and family rites of passage celebrations and the opportunity to renew and strengthen social ties within the community. Religious faith and loyalty to a Roman Catholic parish are never questioned in Strempek Shea's fiction and even when her protagonists reconsider their identity, they never enter the realm of religious doubt. It is a deeply emotional religiosity that permeates her fiction where God's constant presence is tangible in the daily existence of his faithful; where his saints intervene on behalf of the pious and where the statues of the Blessed Virgin respond with physical signs to the pleas of the people. Eddie justifies his decision to break the engagement by a direct intervention of the Mother of God. He explains to his shocked fiance, 'I went to church this morning and I prayed to the Blessed Virgin. I asked her if I should become a priest. About a minute later, she nods. Twice' (Shea Selling 233). Faith and ethnicity are inseparable since Strempek Shea's characters equate their Polishness with their religious affiliation and membership in a Polish parish. They hardly notice the existence of other ethnic parishes in their town and they judge it as unacceptable to attend services there, just as it is unacceptable not to enroll their children in a parochial school. When Donna realizes that Betty's education is being jeopardized by the nuns who use her as a living teaching aid in Polish language classes, she attempts a solution knowing full well that her parents would not 'move Betty to another school. In my family you sooner would have grown a horn from your head than disconnect from anything to do with the parish' (Shea Hoopi 59). It is the parish that perpetuates traditional Polish holiday observances and continues celebrating uniquely Polish feast days. Just like the parochial school it offers a balance between the religious and the patriotic. A description of a necklace worn by one of the musicians in The Polka Boys band where ìa ruby-and-diamond Polish flag, a gold Liberty Bell, [and] a pair of praying handsî (Shea Hoopi 156) were suspended from the same chain, serves as an apt symbol of the religious and also political sensitivities of the ethnic community. Piety and patriotism for both the ancestral and the new country blend into a new ethnic philosophy.
Polka tunes, just like religion, pervade the community life within Strempek Shea's ethnic reality as they provide focal points for family life. For the young ethnics like Donna music mythologizes the land of the ancestors as when she imagines that her father came from 'the place -some world that must have had music like that playing everywhere, old-country versions of 'Pretty Maryska' and 'When It's Evening' and the Polish national anthem flowing out of every house and tree and lake and cloud the whole day longî'(Shea Hoopi 4), while at the same time grounding them in the American reality. Music promotes family unity when everybody joins in front of the radio for 'The Polka Hour' or enjoys an afternoon dance at the Pulaski Park, ìthe place known to all as the Polka Capitol of New Englandî (Shea Hoopi 29). In Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Strempek Shea associates different polka tunes with particular characters as means of characterization and character development. Before Betty's arrival, the Milewski family enjoyed nightly music entertainment with the father taking on the role of ìhis own disc jockey. He'd shout into the kitchen that Victor Zembruski's 'Wiejska Dziewczyna' - the one about the pretty country girl - was being played for my mother even though she had grown up in the city. Frank Wojnarowski's 'Jedzie Boat' was my Babci's favorite and usually began the night's music. (Shea Hoopi 26)
Music defines the relationship between the protagonist and her father, provides a plot structure, focuses the mood of a particular section, and allows the main character to reinvent her ethnicity. Donna's most intimate connection with her father rests in their love of music and his dreams for her future, where she could simultaneously break the gender barriers and reassert her ethnicity by becoming the first leader of an 'all girl polka band'. Only after his death, Donna realizes that 'For nearly eight years straight, from the first grade on, my favorite thing in the world was playing the accordion. Mostly, I must add, my favorite thing was playing it for my father. It was the main way we talked, though no words were used' (Shea Hoopi 3). In encouraging Donna to please him, her father reinforces the model of a submissive female and at the same time negates her chance for success. Thus her need to reconstruct her identity after he abandons her for Betty results in the destruction of every element of her life over which her parent exercised control, thus music is very openly abandoned and can be enjoyed by her only surreptitiously. And only after she transcends the self imposed limitations, the final understanding that polka playing fulfills her own internal need as well as provides a way out of a dead end job into an activity valued by the ethnic community, will allow her to create a new ethnic identity for herself as a leader of an all girl polka band.
The invention of Polish American identity depends on the efforts of both the immigrant and the ethnic women who by blending the Polish with the American recreate many of the rituals that become powerful ethnic markers. Festive occasions centered on religious, family, school or social celebrations are redefined by a blend of customs brought from different regions of the old country, adopted from the host culture or invented by a particular community. Thus women wearing white and red outfits representing Polish colors, produce hundreds of pierogi for parish sales; they cook meals of barszcz and lasagna; they use the language of their ancestors to express endearment and to seek a connection with the divine through prayer; they call their grandmothers ìbabciî and their aunts ìcioci,î and at a Sunday polka dance in a park they join ìLaughing Ritchie and Jolly Marcia and their orchestra, who all led the crowd in 'God Bless America,' then to a sharp drumroll, asked everyone to join in a song for the homeland, 'Boze Cos Polske' (Shea Hoopi 32). Urszula Tempska identifies this last example as a perfect representation of the blending of descent and consent in creating ethnicity (297).
For Suzanne Strempek Shea's always thirty-something protagonists, ethnicity which has little to do with cultural genuineness is an emotional and not an intellectual construct as clearly illustrated by Donna Milewski's telephone exchange with a woman who answers her advertisement for members of an ìall girl polka band.î The woman verbalizing some of the attacks Strempek Shea herself had to deflect about her fiction attempts to present an argument for Polish high culture:
'about how polkas, my dear, are not Polish, that you would not hear one note of this kind of music if you went over there (You have been there, haven't you? What? You haven't? How can you call yourself Polish American?), and how we have a rich cultural heritage with people like Ignacy Jan Paderewski to inspire us, and how polka is a big farce, and how people like me just perpetuate it with our stupid songs about sausages. (Shea Hoopi 297)
Strempek Shea is well aware of the class tensions that characterize the Polish American community. The answer to the caller's concerns articulated by the protagonist could probably serve as a motto for this paper as it epitomizes the writer's position on ethnic invention. Donna explains patiently to the readers since the frustrated caller has already hung up, not ready to dispute her essentialist position:
Öwhat did I know what they listened to over there? I only knew that this was the music we played here, and it happened to be sung in Polish, and sometimes it told of Polish things like the mountain men called gorale and of how they wept when they left their homeland. I wasn't trying to insult anybody'. (Shea Hoopi 297)
Because the ethnics are distant from their ancestral country both through physical space and through time, cultural soundness of ethnicity can only be achieved by using a variety of media since it has little to do with the culture of the country of origin. Ethnicity is not an attribute transplanted miraculously from the old country, but rather it is created by individual migrants and their communities to fulfill their needs. Thus Donna recreates her own Polishness within the context of her own social group. Strempek Shea's ethnics, although isolated, are not immune to the influences of American popular culture even if only through the intrusion of the media into the home and that popular culture also leaves an indelible mark on ethnic invention. The author's intertextuality in linking her Polish American characters to such icons of American popular culture as Tonto (Hoopi 45), Roots (Selling 89), and the Pilgrims (Selling 156), for example, underscores her view on ethnic invention.
Strempek Shea's conception of ethnicity as social construct is further problematized in Lily of the Valley. Young ethnics growing up within the context of the American culture of material success find it difficult to process stories of economic depravation and victimization of Poland and still maintain the attitude of pride in the country of their ancestors, so often their response focuses on the denial of the unpleasant or the embarrassing. Mrs. Szczypiorski, the mother of Lily's best friend and a survivor of a concentration camp, insists, to Lily's chagrin, on telling stories of her horrific experiences and constantly compares her childhood to that of her daughter's. 'You see that bird?' Here she'd point to Alice's parakeet, a jerky pickle-colored thing. 'It would have fed six of us in the camp'î (Shea Lily 65). It is so much easier, and so much more acceptable within the American decorum to tune her out and avoid listening to such unpleasantness. It is so much more comfortable for Lily to see the war years through the prism of the American TV's Hogan's Heroes. The ethnics find it much easier to create a Polish American identity separated from its European roots since they receive mixed messages from their immigrant parents or grandparents who on the one hand instill in them strong feelings of patriotism while on the other hand use horrific stories of suffering and poverty to justify their own migration,
Strempek Shea looks at some of these inventions with a good dose of humor as when Edna's daughter ponders the meaning of a safety pin handed her by Mrs. Balicki and decides that 'This had to be one of the few old country customs I'd yet to run into' (Shea Selling 72) only to discover that it was to serve a very practical purpose of holding her rings while she helped with making dozens of pierogi for the church fundraiser. The reaction of this young woman is not untypical of the ethnic invention presented in contemporary fiction. After all, one of the characters in Maxine Hong Kingston's, China Men, explains, 'That wasn't a custom.We made it up. We can make up customs because we're the founding ancestors of this place' (Kingston 118).
In her third novel, Lily of the Valley, Strempek Shea moves beyond timid attempts at ethnic invention into a completely new territory of ethnic fabrication and transethnic migration, as she explores a possibility of creating a new ethnic construct. The complete ethnic change only imagined by Edna's daughter in her vision of a Pilgrim woman aboard the Mayflower is achieved here. The narrator uses a metaphor of her successful trompe l'oeil work where illusion becomes more real than reality itself. Lily ponders a situation where 'people could look at something I made up out of nothing and think it was so real that they could walk right through it and into whatever was on the other side' (Shea Lily 168). Just as they could attempt crossing her illusionary threshold until they painfully bumped into the wall, they could also trust the ethnic construct created by Lily's sister, Louise, until they came face to face with her. Louise Wilk for whom Polish roots are not exotic enough, builds a transethnic identity for herself. The shift is not the predictable shedding of her Polishness to become assimilated or blended with the dominant Anglo culture, but rather she appropriates an identity of a member of another ethnic group. Through a name change to Lu Wi, and a whole host of almost theatrical props, she builds an illusion of being an oriental:
Lu Wi's message machine asks you to wait for the sound of the gong. Her see-through rice paper business card bears a series of Chinese characters. 'Lu Wi's home has screens for room dividers, straw mats for rugs, pillows for chairs .Lu Wi grew her hair long just so she could keep it up with chopsticks, and she dyes it from our family brown to a shiny black.' (Shea Lily 97-98)
Louise is so completely comfortable with the change that she does not perceive the moral implications of her creativity when she without guilt or embarrassment appropriates as her own ethnic landmarks that belong to the other. She, in an ironic twist, fits very well into the description of so many colonizers who freely have taken and misrepresented the cultural identities of these they conquered, a theme explored by both Louise Erdrich in her Ojibwa novels and by Michael Dorris in his essays, especially in 'Indians on the Shelf.'
As Strempek Shea experiments with the idea of ethnic and racial transformation, she is not unaware of the very real need some immigrants and ethnics feel in abandoning their old country identity since it could be an insurmountable obstacle in reaching their American dream of success. In her third novel which is probably the most daring in articulating the possibility of invention, she introduces an Italian American character, Flossie Pirelli, an aspiring Hollywood starlet, who believes that an identification with a particular ethnic background could hinder her success in the mainstream American media. Thus she eliminates 'the most easily cast-off part of [her] ethnic identityî (Shea Lily 231) and reinvents herself as a ìgeneric Flo Parker' (Shea Lily 231). The other variant of ethnic attitudes is that of an ethnic in name only, an ethnic whose last name suggest ethnicity, but who like Joseph Angelo, from Hoopi Shoopi Donna, identifies himself exclusively with the host culture.
In Strempek Shea's narratives, ethnic and gender identities are integrally linked since her characters exist within a reality defined not only by strong ethnic makers but also described by powerful gender definitions. What modern feminists see as the binary male/female opposition is further problematized in the Polish American community by the fact that the definition of gender is informed by forces that are themselves in conflict. Gender roles prescribed by the cultural traditions of the family and the Catholic Church are simultaneously supported and negated by the mixed messages transmitted to young women by American popular culture. The major images of women are still associated with their biological roles of wives, mothers and sex objects while at the same time females are encouraged to strife for social and sexual empowerment.
Strempek Shea's narratives enter fully into the sphere of women's lives by chronicling the ordinary, the mundane, the unimportant, and the smallest detail of everyday existence. Her traditional Polish American community identifies only three possible roles, that of a daughter, wife and mother ascribed to women, which undermine their human identity by defining them only in relation to another be it a parent, a spouse or a child. Consequently, women without men often consider themselves a failure and their status is viewed negatively. Although present in all her fiction, the female stereotype finds its strongest articulation in Lily of the Valley, where the visual imagery reflects the restricted life of women. When young Lily's talent for visual arts is finally discovered, she receives her first two commissions from both parents. The mother requests a picture of Jesus for her kitchen since as she says, ìI have nothing to pray to while I do the dishesî (Shea Lily 17) and the father asks for a portrait of the mother to display in their bedroom. For a long time, Lily struggles with the artistic representation of her mother and although she seems to faithfully render her mother's physical features, she is unable to capture the essence of the woman who appears unnatural, strange and unhappy. Finally, purely by chance, Lily discovers the solution. The mother is a stranger since she is portrayed as an individual unattached to the rest of her life which for Lily means the rest of the family. The mother, Dorothy, exists only through her roles of a mother and wife. The girl's moment of epiphany comes when she understands that ìMy mother was not herself without the rest of us near her. I couldn't show her without showing everybody who made her the person I knew her to beî so in the end Lily draws 'my father's head to the right of my mother's, Louise's and Chukie's above. Mine down below, and, to the right of me and just beneath the knot of my father's abbreviated tie, I drew our house, as genuine a member of the family as I knew there to be' (Shea Lily 19). Lily's portrait of her mother stands in the center of Strempek Shea's reinvention of womanhood within a Polish American community and it is flanked by Lily's two other important works of art. The first one is Lily's depiction of Jesus which again situates him within a traditional family setting ìat a homemade kitchen table, fork in hand, reading a stone tablet by the light of his halo while enjoying a heaping plate of fish(Shea Lily 17). At the same time, Saint Joseph mows the lawn while the Blessed Virgin Mary washes the dishes in a stone sink as if transplanted straight from an episode of The Flintstones. Lily's artistic vision of both her own family and the Holy Family foregrounds her total acceptance of status quo. She has completely internalized the Church promoted ideal of womanhood which, following the example of the Virgin Mary, suggests feminine attributes such as goodness, caring and nurturing, to be realized within a family structure or within religious orders. However with Lily's adult masterpiece, her painting of Mary Ziemba's family, Strempek Shea subverts that ideal by allowing women to search for an alternative of self-fulfillment through invention. Mary Ziemba, the legendary rags-to-riches story who from her beginnings as ìa young, skinny immigrant in a long, dumpy dressî moves on to become ìthe richest local woman anybody can think ofî, the owner of a chain of eleven Grand Z grocery stores (Shea Lily 11), fictionalizes her womanhood just like Lu Wi fictionalizes her ethnicity. Since her business success does not fit with her community's perception of womanly success, she has to create a story to validate her gender. Mary arrived in America alone, thus was deprived of the male authority of a father or a brother and of a sisterly support of a female sibling. Since she was never married, she could not claim her identity as a wife or a biological mother to a child. So Mary through an intricate fabrication, subverts the cultural definition of gender through its social roles of wife and mother. Out of the scraps of memories and one fuzzy photograph, she molds a husband, Michal; chooses a man to fill the role of her father and yet another to stand in for a brother. She also refuses to surrender her motherhood to the male control and finds a troubled youngster to take as a son and allow her to fulfill her nurturing role. It may appear that Mary Ziemba only conforms to the expectations her community places on women, but in reality she distorts these expectations by finding a new way of achieving acceptance and self-fulfillment. Although Mary herself is a Polish immigrant, she does not perceive ethnic origin as an issue of substance and creates a sister for herself out of a young Italian woman and her son, Tim, does not seem to share her ethnic origins either. Strempek Shea's creative juxtaposition of fact and fiction in Mary's life story, empowers Lily to develop a sense of self separate from the negative public perception of a divorced woman and her own dependency on family relationships. In the course of this narrative she travels from ìa kid who's whimpering, Don't leave me-stay, stay, please stayî (Shea Lily 104) to a self-assured woman who for her fortieth birthday paints another portrait of a family she has consciously chosen:
I fill up the paper. White space must be left for the sake of balance, but it must also be left to acknowledge those I don't include. Who might have made it into this scene, but for some reason, aren't there. In Florida, in showbiz, in Europe, in heaven. One space I fill in last, in the center, where I draw myself. I am Mary, who knows and appreciates the people around her. (Shea Lily 270)
In Lily of the Valley, Strempek Shea subverts not only the ethnic definition of gender, but also the dominant marry-and-live-happily-ever-after plot as she does in Selling the Lite of Heaven.
Lily Wilk is a typical character in Strempek Shea's fiction where gender categories encode power relations and where passive, submissive females who have originally internalized the traditional values, but then slowly, just as they recreate their ethnicity, they also recreate their female identity. The already discussed metaphor of a journey still serves as an appropriate vehicle for the discussion of the construction of gender in Strempek Shea's texts. The shore from which her heroines embark on this journey could be characterized as a shore of disempowerment where women, and especially young women have no voice and no opportunity to assert their own individuality. This is powerfully presented by the author in Hoopi Shoopi Donna when the protagonist, at the time a teenager, who is ready to exercise her rights as a ìgirl humanî (Shea 72) with her own needs and desires, is victimized physically and emotionally. In a scene symbolic of the fates of many ethnic women whose voices are unheard, she is rendered speechless by having her broken jaw wired shut and thus unable to defend herself in face of injustice. She knows that she performed a heroic act which saved her sister's life, but her father's refusal to trust her and to acknowledge her goodness changes her own perception of her identity as a young woman. Donna becomes like her mother, a silent shadow, in the presence of her father and she spends the next twenty years finding ways of negating his ideal of weakness and nonassertiveness as the embodiments of perfect womanhood. As she invents ways of hurting her father by undermining and subverting the Polish American model of femininity, she invents a new woman, one who lives alone, supports herself and exercises sexual freedom. However, at the same time, she continues her ties to the community as she moves back from the suburbs to the old neighborhood, never weakens in her strong religious beliefs and never looses what Strempek Shea identifies as the most important quality of Polish ethnic women, namely her goodness like the goodness and love that permeated all the savory Polish dishes that her babci cooked and served to the family over the years; the goodness and love of her timid mother who spent countless hours designing and sewing beautiful outfits for Donna and who tried to assert herself to her husband not for her own gain, but to plead Donna's case. And through this goodness and love, Donna manages to construct a new gender and ethnic identity of a strong ethnic woman devoted to her own brand of Polishness, and able to reject the American notion of financial success in favor of pursuing a career in an ìall girl polka bandî which brings joy to her community. Secure in her identity, she is not threatened by diversity and eagerly forms a relationship with Joseph Angelo, an Italian American.
Strempek Shea, cognizant of the many ethnic and gender stereotypes that she explores, continues to use humor to debunk some of the mythologized situations often used in attacking women and what could be more typical than a nurse marrying a doctor. However, in Hoppi Shoopi Donna, this situation is humorously subverted, when the doctor turns out to be a woman, Donna's sister marrying a male nurse.
Another issue that Strempek Shea approaches with a mixture of humor and seriousness is the concept of female sexuality, a major taboo topic within her Polish American milieu. For Strempek Shea's characters, the already mentioned Catholic ideal of womanhood focuses on sexual purity as a feminine attribute and invests the girls' parents with the total control of their sexuality until this control is surrendered to the husband. Thus males, perceived both as a threat and as a savior, are usually demonized as dangerous sexual predators until they are miraculously morphed into desired sons-in-law. Sexual ignorance is valued and fostered in a young woman since her sexual initiation belongs to her experienced and worldly husband who will continue to control her sexuality. Sexuality becomes a weapon to assault Donna's self esteem when her father identifies being 'boy-crazy' (Shea Hoopi 69) as the fatal flaw in the young woman's character and when she in retaliation engages in a series of miserable sexual liaisons just to punish him. In Selling the Lite of Heaven, sexuality is subsumed by the romantic imagery provided by women's romance literature and catholic teachings when the protagonist's unexpected night in her fiance's apartment results first in a fantasy taken straight from a Cary Grant movie only to be followed by a realization that no matter how much she desires sexual fulfillment she must ìlet him decide, and lie there is all we do. And it is good and it is rightî (Shea Selling 187). Although she is fully cognizant that her behavior is hopelessly out of step with the mores of American society, her decision reflects her conscious reformulation of her gender in keeping with her ethnic ethos.
In her first three novels, Suzanne Strempek Shea effectively creates a space for ethnic women to reexamine the models of ethnicity and femininity handed to them by their community and to consider their own needs in redesigning their identities. In her success, she joins a group of well-respected writers who explore the notions of gender and ethnicity. It should be noted that Strempek Shea's task is much more difficult than that of authors such as Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich or Maxine Hong Kingston, since she recreates an ethnic community that on the one hand easily blends with the host culture while on the other hand it struggles with negative stereotypes and internal class conflict. Just like Alice Walker who has been attacked by other African Americans for her negative portrayal of black males in The Color Purple, Strempek Shea has been criticized for her focus on working class Polish Americans and for perpetuating negative ethnic stereotypes. Yet her fiction, deeply rooted in her personal experiences, appeals to readers because as Bogna Lorenc-Kot suggested in her review of Lily of the Valley, Strempek Shea 'makes the ordinary matter. She describes without judging or analyzing, which makes the ordinary town, with its ordinary people, come alive'(Lorenc-Kot 1).
While Strempek Shea's approach to gender invention is rather predictable, she is breaking new ground with her notions of ethnic invention as she moves her characters from a passive and absolute acceptance of their own ethnic origins, through conscious construction of ethnic self and even towards experiments in multiculturalism. The creative effort undertaken by the second and third generation Polish American women in Strempek Shea's narratives only on the rarest of occasions leads to the rejection of Polishness while in the majority of cases it allows for a recreation of the ethnic self by yet another generation and supports Mary E. Cygan argument that Polish ethnic culture is not 'fading toward amalgamation with the host society' (Cygan 239). As mentioned before in this paper, Strempek Shea's ethnic and gender constructs are inextricably linked, as her characters must situate themselves in relation to the gender roles proscribed by the Polish American cultural tradition. It appears that Polish American working class women taught to be passive and submissive to the male authority, as well as brought up in a culture which ìprivileged the family over the individualî (Silverman 159), usually gain autonomy not through abandoning the framework supplied by the Catholic Church, the family and the community, but rather through a quiet subversive work within, as they open themselves up to the messages of the American mainstream culture. They still define their identity through networks of relationships, yet these networks resemble less and less the traditional family structure. Although they continue their religious loyalty to the Catholic Church, and its strongly Polish traditions and celebrations, they also take control of their sexuality. Their Polishness is defined not by the allegiance felt to the country of origin, but rather to the ethnic traditions developed in the United States which provides a strong support for Mary Cygan's claim that ìethnicity is not something 'in the blood' or 'in the soul' or carried in ready-made form as immigrant 'baggage' (Cygan 239). These women share strength in reaching their own goals even though they might use subversive ways of achieving them and they might have to sacrifice some of the people they love.
And in the end, Strempek Shea's young Polish Americans do not abandon their ethnic roots although they may replant them yet again in a slightly different soil because in the words of Donna it would make her strangely sad to abandon her ethnic self:
as it was with my family, at the very least there had to be all kinds of songs and expressions not to mention the connection that went way back to people who lived in a totally different country, especially those who made that unimaginable decision to get up and go to this unknown one and in that way they brought [us] here before [we were] born. (Shea Hoopi 268)
Considering such strong patterns of invention present in Strempek Shea's fiction it behooves us to pay close attention to her subsequent narratives and examine how she reinvents herself as a Polish American writer.
Works Cited:
Cervantes, Lorna Dee. 'Refugee Ship.' Issues Across the Curriculum. Ed. Dolores LaGuardia and Hans P. Guth. Mountain View, California: Mayfield, 1997. 267.
Bukowczyk, John J. 'The Image and Self-Image of Polish Americans.' Polish American Studies. (Autumn 1998). V. LV, No 2. 75-83. Polish Americans, Ethnicity and Otherness.' The Polish Review. V. XLIII, No.3. 1998. 299-313.
Cygan, Mary E. 'Inventing Polonia: Notions of Polish American Identity, 1870-1990.' Prospects. 23 (1998): 209-246.
Dorris, Michael. 'Indians on the Shelf.' The American Indian and the Problem of History. Ed. Calvin Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 98-105.
Gladsky, Thomas S. 'Introduction.î Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent. Ed. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita Holmes Gladsky. East European Monographs Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1997. 1-23.
Princes, Peasants and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Flynn, Elizabeth A. Feminism Beyond Modernism. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.
Gornick, Vivian. Essays on Feminism. New York: Harper & Row. 1978.
Kingston Hong, Maxine. China Men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.
Lorence-Kot, Bogna. Review of Lily of the Valley. The Sarmatian Review. January 2000.
Merchant, John. 'Recent Polish-American Fiction.' The Sarmatian Review. XVIII.1.
Obidinski, Eugene E. and Helen Stankiewicz Zand. Polish Folkways in America: Community and Family. New York: University Press of America, 1987.
Pula, James S. Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton. 1976.
Shea Strempek, Suzanne. Hoopi Shoopi Donna. New York: Washington Square Books, 1996.
Lily of the Valley. New York: Washington Square Books, 1999.
Selling the Lite of Heaven. New York: Washington Square Books, 1994.
Silverman Anders, Deborah. Polish-American Folklore. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
'Introduction.' The Invention of Ethnicity. Ed. Werner Sollors. . New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989. ix-xx.
Tempska, Urszula. 'From (Ethnic) Mama's Girl to Her Own (New Ethnic) Woman: Gender and Ethnicity in Suzanne Strempek Shea's Selling the Lite of Heaven.' Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent. Ed. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita Holmes Gladsky. East European Monographs Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1997. 287-304.
Zaborowska, Magdalena J. 'Ethnicity in Exile: Maria Kuncewicz's American Writings.'
Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent. Ed. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita Holmes Gladsky. East European Monographs Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1997. 171-190.
Works Consulted:
Bukowczyk, John J. 'The Image and Self-Image of Polish Americans.' Polish American Studies. (Autumn 1998). V. LV, No 2. 75-83.
'Polish Americans, Ethnicity and Otherness.' The Polish Review. V. XLIII, No.3. 1998. 299-313.
Gornick, Vivian. Essays on Feminism. New York: Harper & Row. 1978.
Merchant, John. 'Recent Polish-American Fiction.' The Sarmatian Review. XVIII.1.
Obidinski, Eugene E. and Helen Stankiewicz Zand. Polish Folkways in America: Community and Family. New York: University Press of America, 1987.
Pula, James S. Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton. 1976.