Rose Cohen and Bella Spewack: The ethnic child speaks to you who never were there

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Muir, Lisa

Richard N. Coe notes that the childhood autobiography is "rarely sentimental" (1984, 10) and distinguishes between the Bildungsroman and the childhood autobiography in the following way. The Bildungsroman for Coe ends with the "positive integration" of the hero into the society "of which he is a member." The childhood autobiography tracks the development of a hero "from a point of non-awareness to a point of total awareness of himself as an individual" (9).While I would call Coe's use of"hero" inaccurate in the case of Cohen and Spewack, his distinction between "positive integration" and "total awareness" becomes crucial. Also important is his assumption that the hero exists in a society "of which he is [already] a member." As I will illustrate, this accommodation into society at large was hardly the case with Cohen and Spewack.

Previously the young nineteenth-century heroine had overcome her troubles while walking alone through the world, vulnerable and without stabilizing adult supervision. In the end she made a success of herself based completely on her own character. Her strength was rewarded for having surmounted every moral challenge life presented her. Cohen and Spewack wipe away such romanticizing of the past with the grim details of their lives and the lives of a larger group. Rather than fashioning oracular parts for themselves, they made it clear that they understood neither their own religious culture nor their new American environment, and their confusions manifest themselves literarily in two ordinary girls burdened with cultural decisions.

Were these women creating some kind of new literary tradition concerning autobiography? Theirs were neither masculine tales of triumph nor vindications of decisions made. They were not instructive, nor did they provide a model for imitation. Least of all, were they conversion narratives (spiritually or culturally). In addition, each woman subordinates her use of I, evenly voicing experience rather than announcing deeds. Unlike Yezierska, who comes through loud and clear in all of her works whether using I or not, with Cohen and Spewack the I becomes a guide. Each challenges her reader to see her as an individual, but in choosing to curtail her presence through her concept of selfhood, she comes to represent the marginalized group she is a part of as well. Consequently, though she may subordinate herself, she elevates the status of the marginalized group as a whole, highlighting it as a "coherent and equivalent people" (Egan 1991, 83).

The manner in which Judith Butler questions the construction of the self proves a useful method for viewing identity construction and selfhood in Cohen and Spewack. Butler calls the I a "transfer point" (1992, 8) where all the positions constituting the subject meet. Butler asks, "What are the institutional histories of subjection and subjectivation that 'position' me here now?" (7). Where, in other words, do the convergences of all these transfer points leave the subject's identity? Identity for Butler is largely externally constructed and formed through the repudiation of what individuals or subjects deem "abject."The individual, according to Butler, deals with an "exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requir[ing] the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet `subjects" but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject" (1993, 3). As subjects, therefore, each of us decides which is abject, what we feel we are not, that which Butler calls the "unlivable" and "uninhabitable" zones of social life, and we use this to circumscribe with safety the subject, which is us. "In this sense, then," argues Butler, "the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all,'inside' the subject as its own founding repudiation" (3). In other words, it is only through knowing the abject that we can repudiate it.