Marriage and the Immigrant Narrative: Anzia Yezierska's Salome Of the Tenements

Anzia Yezierska's 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements ends with a surprising scene of attempted rape. Sonya Vrunsky, the Russian Jewish protagonist, is assaulted in her apartment one night by her ex-husband, the Protestant philanthropist John Manning. She thwarts his attack and, in a disturbing concluding scene, forgives her would-be rapist, recognizing that she loves him: "'After all,' she thought, '. . . He will be to me always Romance. The madness, the daring, the deathless adventure of youth" (184). Sonya's closing words suggest that she sees her ex-husband's attack as a sign of love, but her tendency to harbor affectionate feelings for a man who almost violates her is at odds with the rest of the novel, in which Sonya proves herself to be a hardheaded pragmatist. The ending seems to romanticize rape and rob its heroine of her independence; yet, the novel is a celebration of a wily, tough woman character.

The competing registers of this text—one sentimental, the other hard-edged and pragmatic—cause critics to read the novel as less than successful and hard to categorize. On the one hand, feminist scholars such as Joyce Antler, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Carol Schoen address the importance of Yezierska's representation of the woman immigrant's reality.¹ On the other hand, literary critics (especially men) find her attempts at realism thwarted by her overblown, clumsy prose.² Such censure points to the confusion her novels can cause in any reader, because while she obviously upset the norms of the Victorian domestic romance, she also departed from the masculinist tradition of the Americanization novel. What, then, does the ending really tell us about this immigrant woman character, and what might it say about women immigrant characters in the tradition of American novels?

Yezierska remonstrates against the narrative expectation that, as a woman immigrant writer, she was expected to weave together two plotlines: the immigrant striver story, often written by men, and the sentimental marriage plot, which was a legacy handed down to her from the nineteenth-century genre of women's "sentimental" fiction.³ She condemns marriage and romance as the means by which to achieve success. Instead of marriage, Yezierska introduces the idea that work might be a far more important social ritual, and I want to posit that Yezierska offers this other option for the immigrant woman's survival in America, as well as a new narrative telos in women's fiction. In Yezierska's estimation, the best means to minimize the suffering of the immigrant (or of any American striver) requires the participation and belief in the economic and creative opportunities America has to offer. I will suggest that her heroines, like Sonya, do not find the real America through procreation or love, but through work and education. I will also argue that her work therefore predicts a narrative trend that will become popular in the contemporary time period, in which the drive to Americanize comes at the cost of romantic happiness.

The idea that the woman's narrative is clinched with a wedding is closely tied to the belief, in the larger socio-historical narrative of immigration to the United States, that women immigrants are the repository of the hopes and dreams of the nation. The United States is seen as a land of total freedom and opportunity, and these opportunities extend into the realm of love. Lauren Berlant writes about the popular understanding of the position of immigrant women in America:

[The] immigration discourse is a central technology for the reproduction of patriotic nationalism: not just because the immigrant is seen as without a nation or resources and thus as deserving of pity or contempt, but because the immigrant is defined as someone who desires America. Immigrant women especially are valued for having the courage to grasp freedom. But what is freedom for women? Time [Magazine] defines it . . . as release from patriarchal family...