The Matter of Identification: Yezierska's Arrogant Beggar and the Gendered Injuries of Class

Anzia Yezierska's early story, "The Lost Beautifulness," movingly depicts the "injuries of class" that afflict Eastern European Jewish immigrants in early twentieth-century New York. The text focuses on Hanneh Hayyeh, a pushcart peddler and laundress whose overriding "ambition" is to "have a white-painted kitchen" like the one in the "old Stuyvesant Square mansion" of Mrs. Preston, whose "fine silks and linens" she has washed for years.¹ Aligned with Hanneh's point of view, imbued with psychic immediacy by incorporating the cadences of Yiddish speech, the story records the affective intensities—the desire and longing, as well as the anger, disillusionment, and grief—produced by the conflict between the beautiful "chimera" (92) of American democracy and the systematic inequities of class. Seduced by domestic intimacy with Mrs. Preston, who assures her that wartime's heightened nationalism "means that everybody in America is going to be with everybody else" (69), Hanneh sees in the women's "friend[ship]" (68), rooted in a surrogated kinship, the equalizing force of cross-class identification and the promise of mobility. Here as elsewhere in Yezierska's oeuvre, this promise is fueled by a visual culture of mass consumption. Hanneh aspires to social inclusion through what Lizabeth Cohen calls "consumer citizenship":² the gendered counterpart to her son's enlistment in the army (an identification signaled in the story's first paragraph), Hanneh's embodiment of consumerist norms of "respectability" constitutes a bid for recognition as a national subject—a means to, in Hanneh's words, "make myself for an American" (68). Repudiating the passion for fancy dress exhibited by contemporary "working girls" and resisting more transient pleasures such as an ice-cream soda or "a moving picture that I'm crazy to see" at the nickelodeon—the site of what Miriam Hansen calls a "proletarian public sphere" for working-class women—Hanneh saves up pennies from "extra washing" to purchase white paint and material for curtains in an effort to "shine . . . up the house" (77), especially the kitchen—which, in its refurbished state, she compares to a "parlor," a space dedicated not to bodily necessity but to domestic display.³ Like Progressive-era reformers who cast their political ambition in maternalist terms, Hanneh's "consumer citizenship" is tied to maternal devotion: the joy of aesthetic expression (she refers to the kitchen as "my painting") and home beautification equate to "the ecstasy of loving service" for her son and constitute an antidote to his class "shame" (67). As she tells her "stoop-shouldered, care-crushed" husband, "I want my Aby to lift up his head in the world. I want him to be able to invite even the President from America to his home and [not] shame himself" (67). In particular, consumer re-embodiment, (especially fixing up the "white kitchen") seems a way to undo the insistent bodily marks of poverty and deflect the dehumanizing (and racializing) gaze of the white elite. Although she is literally starving by the story's end, the text foregrounds throughout Hanneh's psychic hunger for visibility, equating invisibility with social death.

But Hanneh's "dream" (93) of consumer refinement and class progress ruptures, exposing the fault lines of exploitation. The text's field of vision is profoundly structured by class. Mrs. Preston is a kind of home missionary, imparting a desire for beauty and "whiteness" as class and racial "uplift" and preaching a gospel of democracy that seems merely a rationale for working-class sacrifice and service. While "hungry eyed" Hanneh "drank in thirstily" the "cultured elegance of her adored friend" (75), an image of psychic incorporation that signifies Hanneh's identification with Mrs. Preston as class ideal, the latter—although "eager to see" (78) the much-talked-about kitchen and tracking with "keen delight Hanneh Hayyeh's every movement" (75) when she reverentially handles her freshly-washed garments—is entirely blind to the "ravages of worry and hunger" (86) on Hanneh's body when she does without meat and milk to satisfy the price-gouging landlord. Cross-class "intimacy" is one-sided: whereas Hanneh idealizes Mrs...