Ethnicity and American Identity the Basic Conception

Ethnicity and American Identity

The basic conception of American identity in the years between Cahan's Yekl, Yezierska's The Bread Givers, and Morrison's The Bluest Eye, is essentially unchanged. Each of the characters in these novels face a conception of American identity that is drawn along racial lines, and the arc of each novel's plot is centered on each character's attempt to transcend their racial otherness to be accepted by American society. In the following analysis, we will first look at the ways racial identity operates in these three novels. Secondly, we will look at Randolph Bourne's essay "Trans-national America" to see how Morrison's desire to avoid racial hierarchy fits into his basic scheme, and how the protagonists of the novels do not.

The crisis at the center of Abraham Cahan's story is presented as a conflict between Jake's ethnic past, his racial otherness in America and his ambition to be, in his words, "a Yankee." Early on in the story, Yekl, in his ambition to be an American, changes his name to Jake, because the name Yekl is associated with a Russian past he is not able to "reconcile with the actualities of his American present." Essentially, one cannot be a Russian Jew and an American, to be an American one needs to repudiate their ethnic past. This crisis gets even further developed when Jake's wife arrives from Russia.

To Jake, his wife is an embodiment of the ethnic identity he wishes to efface. When he first sees her off the boat "his heart had sunk at the sight of his wife's uncouth and un-American appearance." For her part, she looks at Jake in his American garb and sees barely a semblance of the man she married. For Cahan, the process of assimilation and Americanization is a process that destroys one's ethnic identity, and the foil of Jake and Gitl illustrates a sort of before and after picture meant to demonstrate that.

However, as much as Jake would like to believe that he can identify himself as an American, the rest of society still views him as a Jew and a racial "other." Let us consider here Cahan's description of the ghetto: "People of all sorts of antecedents, tastes, habits, inclinations, and speaking all sorts of sub-dialects of the same jargon, thrown pell mell into one social caldron." In the eyes of American society, the variety of backgrounds, the differences in the degree of assimilation, the differences of language, have no bearing. To the American-born, they are all just Jews, a homogeneous group of racial "others."

In Anzia Yezierska's The Bread Givers Sara Smolinsky's ambitions to be American has much in common with Jake's in Yekl. Like Jake, her definition of what it means to be an American is characterized a complete repudiation of her ethnic identity, as it is embodied by her father Rebbe Smolinsky who is described as looking "as if he just stepped out of the bible." In her final act of freedom from her father, Sara's proclamation that she is an American is preceded by an assertion that she is not from the Old World, illustrating that for her, like Yekl, being American means not being Jewish. "I'm not from the old country," she says, "I'm American."

However, when Sara goes off to college, she comes face-to-face with the realization that she "simply didn't belong" she could never be one of those "real American people." In the end she returns to her father, and in that symbolic act, she is also returning to her ethnic identity "whose weight is still upon me." To the American-born, she will always be a Jew, a racial "other."

In Morrison's The Bluest Eye Pecola's desire for blue eyes, to be like Shirley Temple, reveals her contempt for her own racial identity, as well as her desire to be accepted by white America. This ambition is equivalent to Yekl and Sara's ambition to be an American. In her view, to be accepted she must efface her own race and take up a standard of beauty, essentially a standard of acceptance, that is championed by white America.

At the novel's beginning the excerpts from the Dick and Jane reader puts forward a representation of idealized white middle class life, something that Pecola in her desire for blue eyes aspires to.