The Adolescent Self-Fashioning of Mary Antin

Introduction: Fashioning the Self¹

The year 2012 marked the centennial anniversary of the publication of Mary Antin’s autobiography-cum-paean to America, The Promised Land.² The text, divided into two parts, narrates Antin’s self-proclaimed conversion from an oppressed Russian Jewish subject into a patriotic, educated English-speaking American citizen.³ At the time of its first appearance, much of the American public greeted her glowing tale of successful Americanization warmly, landing The Promised Land on the national best-seller list in both 1912 and 1913.⁴ The Journal of Education saw The Promised Land as proof positive that public education worked. After all, the system had turned a poor Yiddish-speaking immigrant into a fine American writer.⁵Life magazine declared The Promised Land to be “good medicine for excessive anti-Jewish antipathy.”⁶ And multiple publications lauded The Promised Land for providing insight into the experience of the immigrant, for demonstrating the immigrant to be worthy of America, and for bespeaking a promising future for the country.⁷The Promised Land was received as more than a single woman’s autobiography. Rather, published at a time of increasing xenophobia and anti-immigration agitation, Antin’s text demonstrated that onetime immigrants could become loyal, literate, and law-abiding citizens. Theodore Roosevelt, then on his third presidential campaign, even solicited Antin to stump on his behalf, which she did,⁸ and her photograph would go on to find a place in Roosevelt’s autobiography.⁹

Although The Promised Land no longer wields a popular readership, the work remains a touchstone among scholars of Jewish and ethnic American literature. Antin’s model of obstacle-free Americanization, not surprisingly, has received critical attention from scholars who investigate her various modes of literary self-fashioning. How, researchers ask, does Antin present herself in this eminently public text? The assumption is that Antin’s autobiography models Greenblattian self-fashioning; it is a text that acts “as a manifestation of the concrete behavior of its particular author, as itself the expression of the codes by which behavior is shaped, and as a reflection upon these codes.”¹⁰ In Antin’s case, this assumption is compounded by a second: that something has been lost in the creation of the autobiography. What elements of herself, scholars ask, does Antin purposefully obscure in order to present a palatable, consumable image of the Jewish immigrant? Comparing the manuscript to the published version of The Promised Land, Keren McGinity has declared Antin “a woman on a mission” who “intentionally omit[ted] material . . . [to construct] an identity for herself that would be attractive to a predominantly patriarchal Gentile country.”¹¹ Similarly, Alvin Rosenfeld has identified Mary Antin as having created the model of the American Jewish autobiography with her self-presentation as a liberated, secular intellectual.¹² In a less complimentary vein, the American author Ludwig Lewisohn and critic Sarah Blacher Cohen have respectively admonished Antin for fashioning an autobiographical self that suppresses her connection to her Jewish identity.¹³ Concerned more with the codes of racial self-fashioning, Linda Joyce Brown has recently argued that Antin’s autobiography is an attempt to establish her identity as a white woman, showing that Antin “constructs the process of assimilation as an act of claiming a position as a white American.”¹⁴ Mary Dearborn and Magdalena Zaborowska have added to the literature by demonstrating how Antin’s gendered perspective impinges on her techniques of “working out an American ‘socialized’ identity.”¹⁵ Finally, Hana Wirth-Nesher and Steven Kellman have shown that The Promised Land may be conceived as a model of linguistic self-fashioning, whereby Antin asserts her American identity through her facility with English.¹⁶ Wirth-Nesher labels the effort as a form of “linguistic passing, where erasure of Hebrew and Yiddish would be [Antin’s] submission to the nativist pressures and linguistic policies and practices of her day.”¹⁷ As these scholarly analyses make clear, Antin’s autobiography can be read to reveal a variety of anxieties and personal identity politics that are superficially subsumed in the narration of her seamless integration into the American...