Heroine, Reformer, Citizen: Novelistic Conventions in Antin’s The Promised Land

In 1891, when Mary Antin immigrated from Polotsk, Russia, to Boston, “a number of eastern [US] intellectuals” had begun “to argue that the southern and eastern Europeans were not only socially dangerous, but also racially unassimilable” (Higham 40). By the time Antin published her autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), these xenophobic beliefs had gained further political influence in legislative debates.¹ In The Promised Land, Antin challenges contemporary anti-immigration arguments so forcefully that some critics have misread her autobiography as idealizing America and assimilation. Even as she asserts that Russian Jewish immigrants can become valuable US citizens, though, she also represents immigration and naturalization as profoundly unsettling processes.

Antin’s ability to celebrate immigration and critique acculturation at a moment of national anxiety over these issues depends upon her skillful manipulation of literary genres. Michael P. Kramer, among other critics, has noted the significance of the various generic conventions Antin deploys in her autobiography, claiming that she draws on a broader tradition of American autobiographies and essays to represent her Americanization as “unproblematic” (128).² This essay argues that a close attention to Antin’s engagement with fiction helps us to see that while she portrays herself as an Americanized woman, she nonetheless depicts her experience of immigration as fraught with conflict.³ Antin’s turn to multiple genres, including various types of novels, evinces the difficulty of her search for a form that will convey the complexities of her identity, as well as her need to fictionalize her life in order to render it legibly American.

In particular, The Promised Land draws on the productive tension between two popular modes of fiction—sentimentalism and realism—to depict Antin’s development from Russian Jew to patriotic American and immigrant reformer. She modifies both modes and her own history to make them align more closely with one another; as she represents herself, Antin is both a participant in sentimental benevolence and a New Woman in a thickly described modern culture. Her largely unexamined engagement with the conventions of fiction allows her to rewrite familiar genres or modes of fiction that are both interrelated and defined against one another. Thus, Antin’s autobiography offers an illuminating example of how minority writers could revise dominant literary modes so as to make them more inclusive.⁴

Sentimentalism and realism prove important to Antin’s narrative because they sanction her exceptional transformation from a working-class immigrant to a middle-class woman and writer.⁵ Broadly speaking, antebellum sentimental novels center on the reform of an individual’s character. Over the course of such novels, the protagonist’s development of self-control and newfound commitment to the good of her community come to influence her country, and she is rewarded with a loving home.⁶ Though Antin acknowledges that these conventions can prove constraining—because they idealize women’s self-effacement and domesticity—sentimentalism also portrays the female protagonist as absolutely central to its often-patriotic narrative.⁷ The genre validates Antin’s choice to write about her own experiences as a young woman and provides her with language to portray her family’s desire for an American home.

However, to concede the difficulties of attaining a happy, middle-class home, Antin also draws on realism in her representations of city tenements and the social reform organizations that sought to ameliorate tenement life. Realists and their naturalist contemporaries helped establish the urban landscape as a literary subject.⁸ Notably, Antin’s depiction of Boston conveys not only the ghetto’s deprivations but also her own development into a writer who, like many of her contemporaries, chronicles such poverty. Beyond subject matter, The Promised Land shares realism’s aesthetic project, which Amy Kaplan defines as “an enormous act of construction to organize, reform, and control the social world” by representing a particular version of the world as real (Social 10). Specifically, Antin fosters the recognition of working-class immigrants as Americans deserving of the higher quality of life that social reformers sought to provide. Yet while reformers like Jane Addams worked to uplift working-class women by training...