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"The Silent One": The (Absent) Voiceless Mother in Recent Narratives by Leslie Pietrzyk and Ellen Slezak
by
Grazyna J. Kozaczka
Reading "The Silent One," a poem by Linda Nemec Foster, one is struck by the aptness of its poetic framing of the mother-daughter discourse to much of the current Polish American fiction authored by women. In "The Silent One," the speaker, a daughter, ostensibly sets out to create a portrait of her mother and to lend a voice to the older woman. However, the first line of Foster's poem—"My mother never told me fairy tales"—poses an interesting question. Why is it that this mother refuses to introduce her daughter to common ethnic traditions embedded in such stories? Could it be the mother's own unease with these texts? After all, the traditional stories often perpetuate women's narratives acceptable in a patriarchal culture. Perhaps, the mother's experience has taught her that passive acceptance of one's lot in life might be preferable to imagining a change which could easily lead to dissatisfaction with her present condition:
She remembered the stories her grandmother told but tried to forget them, always wondering if she wasn't someone else—an untamed firebird covered in jewels, a princess bewitched into marrying the wrong man.1
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But after all it does not matter how much we speculate about the mother's curious behavior, about her strong belief in the power of language that paralyzes her and takes away her ability for self-expression. We will never have the answers to our questions. In "The Silent One," the mother has no voice and she never tells her story. And no matter how well intentioned the daughter-speaker might be, she inadvertently silences and possibly marginalizes her mother by creating a maternal narrative. In this daughter-dominated discourse, the younger woman constructs her mother out of the mother's silences or perceived fears as she situates herself within this mother-daughter dyad. Even though she acknowledges their kinship, she clearly brands her mother as the silent other and asserts her separateness from the mother.
My mother refused to speak the words Of myth, of the small hidden heart Waiting to be discovered. I tried to discover it myself… … My eyes
the same colors as hers, the silent one.2
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In contrast to the silent mother, the daughter's voice is strong; she is the storyteller who searches and discovers. So while the overt subject of "The Silent One" is the mother, it is really the daughter's creation that we see; the mother has no voice, since she is seen only through her daughter's eyes and heard through her daughter's voice. The mother becomes a creation of her own creation.
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The premise of this article is that in the context of many recent texts by Polish American women, mothers do not own their stories, but become characters in their daughters' narratives. Often, the discourse owned by the daughter assigns the position of "Other" to the mother while the child constructs a mother image from facts, memories, fantasies, and omissions as a substitute for a physically or emotionally absent mother. This, then, may lead to a tension among several mother constructs revealed by the narratives.
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This article will focus mainly on texts by Ellen Slezak and Leslie Pietrzyk, although Suzanne Strempek Shea's novels could also provide interesting material for analysis. Both Pietrzyk and Slezak share their Midwestern and working class roots with the poet Linda Nemec Foster whose poem opened this article. They also follow in the footsteps of a Minnesotan, Monika Krawczyk, who, during the 1930s and 1940s, published numerous short stories in popular women's magazines. Her depiction of womanhood, if not the artistic quality of writing, can be compared to the work of Willa Cather. Krawczyk places her Polish immigrant women firmly in the domestic sphere where they realize their calling to nurture the family as they simultaneously acculturate their daughters to the traditional female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while struggling to become Americans. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita H. Gladsky praise Krawczyk for her efforts to "capture the evolution of ethnicity and the particular identity of the ethnic woman … her stories illustrate the ways in which women decide which parts of Polish culture would remain and which would be discarded."3 |
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Leslie Pietrzyk and Ellen Slezak represent the generation of Krawczyk's granddaughters or even great granddaughters for whom ethnic discourse hinges less on descent which suggests heredity and bloodlines, but more on consent with its emphasis on conscious choices made in creating one's identity.4 Most of their characters are fully ethnic women of the third and the fourth generation for whom ethnic identity has been constructed so many times that as Mary Patrice Erdmans suggests in The Grasinski Girls, that it "at most bears only a shadow of a semblance to something from Poland."5 Both Pietrzyk and Slezak, with the exception of Pietrzyk's first novel, Pears on a Willow Tree, seem to be more interested in gender identity and its construction and reconstruction through female relationships, especially mother-daughter relationships.
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Much of the critical interest in the depiction of mother-daughter or mother-child relationships in literature was initiated in the mid to late 1970s by the publication of two seminal works on the subject, namely Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender.6 Chodorow, a psychoanalyst and a professor of sociology, sets out to "investigate the mother-daughter relationship and how women create and recreate this relationship internally,"7 while Rich, looking at her own experiences as a mother, considers the importance of the idea of daughterhood and motherhood in defining women's identity. In Britain, Ann Dally outlines a comprehensive history of motherhood in a book bearing a suggestively postmodern title, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal.8 Crucial to my discussion of the narratives by Slezak and Pietrzyk are the findings of Marianne Hirsch, who building upon ideas of Chodorow and Rich, analyzes mother-daughter relationships in women's fiction, starting with the eighteenth century and carrying it through postmodernism. However, she limits her analysis to selected women authors representing the Western literary traditions, especially English and French, with the addition of two African American texts. In her book, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Hirsch suggests that much of the fiction of the latter part of the twentieth century "is centered almost entirely on the experience of daughters, with mothers no more than objects supporting and underlying their daughters' process of individuation…. It is the woman as daughter who occupies the center of the global reconstruction of subjectivity and subject-object relation."9 The only departure Hirsch sees from this pattern in ethnic fiction occurs specifically in African-American fiction where writers such as Toni Morrison or Alice Walker move away from the strictly daughter discourse into mother discourse. Thus, a question to be asked is whether Polish-American fiction corroborates Marianne Hirsch's vision of women's narratives. Reviewing the literature, it quickly becomes obvious that, with some exceptions, most of the Polish American texts silence maternal voices, privileging daughter discourse while at the same time eliminating most of the male presence.
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Paradoxically the most striking illustration of Hirsch claim comes from the polyphonic narrative by Leslie Pietrzyk. It would seem that her novel, Pears on a Willow Tree, resounds with a multitude of women's voices, both mothers and daughters, as each section is narrated by a different female member of the large Marchewka clan, a device not uncommon in ethnic narratives with Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Tanya Maria Barrientos' Frontera Street, or Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents coming immediately to mind. Yet, already in the novel's second epistolary chapter, Pietrzyk's narrator, Rose, tells her immigrant story of the first year in America through a series of letters written to her illiterate mother who remained in Poland. So not only is the reader's access is limited to the daughter's words, since the mother cannot respond herself, but also the reader is not allowed even a glimpse of the letters that the mother presumably dictated to one of the sons and later, after the son's departure for America, to a parish priest. The reader is only privy to Rose's references to the letters received from Poland. Rose separates herself both from her mother and symbolically from her mother tongue. She writes, "Dearest Matka, you will not understand this easily, so best I tell you quickly. Now my name is Rose" and she continues not by addressing her mother directly but by using a brother as an intermediary, "Stanislaus, reading this letter to Matka, ask her to say my name. She should feel for one moment what it means to be in America, where everything is new and different, even something so little and so grand as a name."10 The silent mother from Foster's poem would surely understand the power of words evoked here by Rose who has just separated herself form her mother by accepting a name that was not the one with which her mother called her to life, with which her mother named her as her own. Rose engages in "othering" of her mother who now has no access or understanding of her daughter's situation as she is physically removed by distance, while at the same time she is even more distant due to cultural and linguistic differences.
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It is interesting that in her subsequent letters, Rose proceeds to describe to her silent parent how she constructs a mother to fulfill her needs as she herself faces motherhood. This mother construct is cobbled together from memories and dreams, "Nights have always been for dreaming, so that is when I dream of you Matka, and everything behind me."11 Pietrzyk's Rose augments her dreams with the memories, but even in these visions from the past, the mother remains silent. Rose recalls their last meeting,
When I went to say good-bye, you were surrounded by chickens, you were tossing out their feed. Neither of us spoke. Only the chickens squawked, as handfuls of food rained down upon them when it was supposed to be just one. These months later, I want to hear your voice, but it's chickens I remember.12
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In her review of Pears on a Willow Tree, Mary Patrice Erdmans stresses the fact that Rose "left her mother and reinvented herself" in America.13 And of course she did that, but at the same time she also reinvented her mother in a continuous process of storytelling to herself, later to her daughters and granddaughters, and even, through letter writing, to her own mother back in Poland. Rose's mother-creation is completed out of prayers, recipes and fairy tales remembered from childhood and now retold to interpret the strange, American reality. Sensory images, especially visual, olfactory, and gustatory, enliven the portrait. This is how Rose describes "a special dinner" for which she chose to roast a duck:
It was supposed to be your duck, Matka, with the sauerkraut and onions in butter. To write the words is to have the taste overwhelm my mouth, my mind, to see you standing in front of the fire on Sunday dinner, to be there next to you wrapped tight in the smells of your cooking.14
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Yet Rose does not follow this cherished recipe, but creates something new, more appropriate for her changed situation since after all she does not identify herself anymore with her mother or the mother's reality. She clearly asserts this opposition between the two of them by reminding her mother of the different rhythm of life "back in your village, Matka."15 So even though loved and imagined, the mother takes on the role of the "other" for Rose. The story of Rose's mother exists only in her daughter's plot which centers on subject creation through the process of separation from her mother. The mother, coming to terms with the loss (to immigration) of her daughter, remains silent in the suffering we can only imagine.
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Pietrzyk continues to focus on the daughter narrative in her second novel, A Year and a Day. Here also the mother's physical presence is removed, not by immigration as before, but by a suicidal death which prompts her daughter to embark on a seemingly impossible journey in two opposite directions: into the past to penetrate her mother's silences and secrets and into the future, to construct her womanhood by answering her own question "So who am I supposed to be?"16 And so unfolds the story of Alice, a fifteen-year-old, who over a period of a year comes to terms with her mother's suicide through reinventing both the mother and herself. Alice struggles with the realization that she has not known nor has understood her mother as she remembers that whenever she and her brother asked serious questions, especially about their absent father, they never received answers. "We wanted to know, but asking made Mama turn silent and sad and empty, like a lamp that's been clicked off. And she never answered anyway, not even a tiny hint."17 The same silence has followed the mother's tragic death on the railroad tracks. There has been no suicide note, no explanation, no apology, no reassurance of love.
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To penetrate the silence, Alice becomes convinced that not only can she hear her mother's voice, but also that occasionally she can carry on a conversation with the dead parent such as in the first line of the narrative reminiscent of the Resurrection story—"Mama came back three days after her funeral."18 It is clear from the beginning that this mother returned-from-the-dead is not a ghostly manifestation, but rather a construct put together by a grieving child searching for love and understanding; it also illustrates the tension between the mother remembered and the mother reconstructed. During their first conversation, three days after the funeral, Alice notices that "Her words floated like dandelion seeds, breathy, shadowy whispers-nothing the way she had talked when she was alive, loud and too fast, so I always felt a sentence behind, my ears straining to catch up, not wanting to miss a word she said."19 So there is a different quality to this mother presence. At first, the mother's voice provides Alice with practical, but rather impersonal, guidance about fashion or makeup which could be easily gleaned from women's magazines. The mother's responses are often independent of and unconnected to the daughter's questions. When Alice pleads for advice about her boyfriend, the mother gives her suggestions about hair care. But soon her own reasoning process becomes framed in these mother and daughter dialogues; thus the mother becomes an expression of Alice's internalized values or repeats statements made by other older women and overheard by Alice, "'No,' Mama said. 'You are not having sex. I forbid it'—the sort of thing Becky's mom would say to Becky."20 Gradually as the daughter gathers more information about her mother's past from people who knew her, these conversations get more personal and the mother's voice begins to express the daughter's interpretations of the mother's actions. However, creating a mother's voice does not seem enough to Alice as her need to understand is so strong that it translates into a desire to become her mother by wearing her mother's favorite dress, using her perfume, and putting on her lipstick while marveling about the fit of her own lips into the lipstick groove worn by her mother's lips. So at this point, Alice becomes conflated with her mother construct as if reverting to an earlier stage of development, a stage which Nancy Chodorow would call "pre-oedipal oneness" with her parent. Alice's identification with her imagined mother continues with the unrelenting logic of her reality into her attempted suicide in the same spot where her mother killed herself. And only then when faced with death in front of a speeding train, is Alice able to comprehend the separateness of her own self. "I could say that not hearing Mama's voice when I needed it most was worse than what any train could do to me."21 This is the final moment of individuation for Alice; she is not her mother, and she would not behave like her mother. She finally grasps the meaning of her experiences in a conversation with her friend, Joe, who explains in a true postmodern fashion, "The future's the future, only what we think will happen. But hardly anything happens the way we think. And the past— we make it up afterward."22 Is that not what she has been doing all along? It her grief as an abandoned child, she invented a mother for herself.
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So in Pietrzyk's novel the absent and silent mother is given a voice by her daughter, but of course this voice expresses the daughter's issues, not the mother's issues. Alice's mother is the silent other throughout the narrative, and she only exists in her daughter's story. Alice constructs a mother-character, through the tension between what she perceived as facts about her dead mother and her wishes for a perfect supportive mother. Yet to create her own womanhood, she has to reject not only the real mother but also the mother construct built so painstakingly during her year of mourning. The mother's own narrative exists on the peripheries, and it will never be told. Just like Rose's mother's sorrow has no voice, Alice's mother's despair, which led to her suicide, also remains unexplained because the maternal plot is suppressed. She will forever be the unnatural mother who abandons her children and who forces them to question their own worth.
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It is quite significant that in Ellen Slezak's novel, All These Girls (2004), the tragic death of a mother also provides an occasion for the narrative's origin. The novel begins with Melissa Golden's funeral which brings together three women representing three generations: Candy, Melissa's teenage daughter; Elizabeth Branningan, Melissa's half-sister; and Gloria Derlinski, their aunt. Melissa, a recovering alcoholic, has died tragically in a car accident caused by a speeding driver. The complicated plot of this novel leads the three women brought together by death to a journey not only of self-creation, but also of re-imagining of the silent Melissa. Each of the women constructs her own story through a version of Melissa's story. Consequently, Elizabeth considers the influence of her own (and Melissa's) alcoholic and absent mother, as well as her involvement in Melissa's pregnancy and very difficult delivery, on her own fear of commitment and motherhood, while Gloria confronts her conflicted understanding of the place of sexuality within her strong religious devotion and her role in committing Melissa to a rehab. Not surprisingly, Candy, the character most affected by her mother's death, assumes the crucial role in re-creation of Melissa; thus again a daughter discourse focuses on the story of an absent and voiceless mother. And as Slezak's novel develops the daughter's plot, the mother will never break her silence.
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Candy's grief at the loss of her mother manifests itself in anger at Elizabeth who, she feels, has betrayed both her and her mother by leaving them after twelve years of struggle with Melissa's alcoholism. She resents Elizabeth for never acknowledging the fact of Melissa's recovery and her five years of sobriety. Quite conscious that her mother never blamed Elizabeth nor Gloria for giving up on her, Candy is not afraid to assign blame: "They were her only family, but they hadn't helped her mom the way they should have. Elizabeth hadn't helped her at all. Her mom hadn't seen it in that way, but Candy wasn't afraid to say it was so. Moving in with Glo or Elizabeth would be a betrayal of her mom."23 It seems that Candy almost consciously changes her mother's story to create a person she needs at that particular moment. To counteract her knowledge that for the first twelve years of her life, her mother chose drinking instead of her daughter, she desperately needs to believe that she was a wanted and loved child. She rejects the possibility that her mother might have opted for an abortion were it not for Elizabeth's convictions and support. Like Alice in Pietrzyk's A Year and a Day, Candy realizes that there is very little she really knows about her mother. "She looked at her T-shirt, imagining her mom as one of the skeleton heads in the stands watching her play [basketball]. She should know if her mother liked the dead. What other simple stuff didn't she know about her mom?"24 As a result of this realization, she begins to re-construct her mother for the first time as someone separate from herself, "Since her mom died, she'd had these moments when she felt as if she were separate from her own breath and bones."25
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Slezak appears to be preoccupied with the concept of an absent or silent mother since in her short story collection, Last Year's Jesus, in seven out of ten texts, a child, most often a daughter, has to come to terms with a mother absent either physically due to death or abandonment or absent emotionally because of total involvement with another child who is sick or dying. The most comprehensive treatment of the latter plot variation can be seen in the novella "Head, Heart, Legs or Arms." The narrative, set in 1967 during the bloody race riots in Detroit, chronicles about eighty days of the life of an eleven year old, Mona Palazolla, a middle child whose older sibling, Rose, prepares for college while her younger sister, DeeDee, lays in the hospital, slowly dying of cancer. As Mona witnesses the world around her disintegrate, she longs for reassurance through physical connection to her mother, " she felt desperate to cuddle next to her mother, to hold on to her so tightly she'd feel her bone-to-bone, to feel her mother's lips at her ear, and to hear her mother say, 'You're right, Mona. Everything will be fine. It really will.'"26 Mona, just like Alice and Candy, still longs for what Nancy Chodorow calls "the sense of oneness"27 with her mother, a very physical oneness, which she tries to achieve in a rare moment when her mother is actually in the house and not in the hospital staying with sick DeeDee. "Mona stood next to her [mother] and dried the dishes, purposely bumping into her every now and then just to feel her, until finally her mother wrung out her dishrag and bent down to look at Mona closely. 'Are you feeling okay, Mona? You're awfully wobbly this morning.'"28
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But Mona's mother, even though ever present in the girl's consciousness, only has guest appearances in her daughter's discourse. The framework of the story forces the mother to be mostly silent, recognized by Mona only in a fleeting expression on her sister's face, or as an impersonal type if not to say, stereotype, of a mother caring for a terminally ill child. It becomes clearly evident when Mona searches for her mother at a party organized by the hospital staff for the families of their small patients. As Mona looks at the crowd, "Most women reminded her of the things she noticed about her mother whenever she saw her at the beginning or end of the day—shoulders drooping, scuffed up shoes with worn-down heels, lipstick bitten off, hair dry with gray roots showing."29 Thus the mother in her suffering loses her identity; she is not an individual anymore but almost a stock character to Mona. In the process of subject-formation through the loss of innocence and a separation from her mother, Mona casts her mother in the role of the silent other. Slezak's novella does not foreground maternal discourse where the mother could voice the tragedy of caring for a dying child. She is silent about her suffering while her second daughter, Mona, identifies the mother's inadequacies in failing to respond to the needs of her other two children. Mona is still too close to the discovery of her mother's otherness to be able to construct for herself a supportive mother figure so she continues to imagine her mother from before DeeDee's illness.
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"Head, Heart, Legs and Arms" is not the only text by Slezak that materializes Marianne Hirsch's idea that "the stories of mothers are the plots of sons and daughters."30 For example, in the short story "By Heart," the plot of the silent, because absent, mother is created by her thirteen-year old son, Joey. Even though Slezak, as in most of her fiction, uses a third person narrator, there is no doubt that she creates Joey's plot. His mother's abandonment of the boy has been precipitated by the death of her younger daughter. The mother disappears four days after the daughter's funeral and only a day after she and Joey clear away little Allison's belongings. After several days of waiting for his mother in an empty Detroit apartment, the boy finally reaches for help to his father who lives in Chicago with his new wife. As the story progresses, so does the conflict between Joey and his cold, sterile, and rule-driven stepmother who desperately wants to control every aspect of life around her. As a means of survival, the boy continuously recreates his mother, hoping for her return as a savior; but as the time progresses, he begins to understand that he "would relinquish another bit of his true story."31 Joe sees his mother as a spunky, courageous woman whom life dealt some lousy cards. After a divorce from Joey's father, she drifts from job to job, has another child out of wedlock, and barely survives on child support and factory job earnings. This is a precarious existence, and while Joey admires her beauty and determination, he fails to understand her act of desperation when she abandons him and disappears after her daughter's death.
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As a young adolescent male, he situates himself in a paradoxical situation of simultaneously searching for his mother's protection and also framing himself as his mother's protector. He warns her about the dangers of their neighborhood at night; and after his sister's death, he is desperate to find a way to help alleviate his mother's suffering. "He thought maybe fresh air would help him think of what to do, of how to somehow save his mother from this grief that had downed her."32 And of course he fails to come up with any viable ideas. The mother leaves. Was it despair over the fact that she could not save her daughter from death that drives her to abandon the living child or was it something else? The reader does not know and Joey does not know; his mother is silent, absent. Is she even his mother anymore, or has she become a stranger, an "other." After a three months stay with his father "he hadn't lost hope that his mother would return, but he was no longer certain he'd run into her arms when she did."33
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It would be unfair to say that Slezak and Pietrzyk completely discount maternal plots. Pietrzyk certainly engages in maternal discourse in her complex narrative, Pears in a Willow Tree, which centers on an interaction between the maternal and the daughterly while Slezak explores maternal narratives in a couple of short stories such as "Patch" or "Here in the Car City," both from her collection Last Year's Jesus. The second of the two stories mentioned above is particularly interesting because of an innovative application of the "mother-construct" concept. It appears that for Slezak, children are not the only ones engaged in creating a mother-construct. In "Here in the Car City," she offers an important variation on invention of motherhood. Lodzia Szczotka, a character in this story, is a Polish immigrant living in one of Detroit's dilapidated neighborhoods. She ekes out a precarious existence, hustling and covering up her alcoholism. Although she has lost custody of her two small daughters who have been placed in foster care, she creates an elaborate story to fulfill her need for acceptance and approval. In this self-narrative, she becomes a loving and caring mother who provides for the welfare of her children by surrendering her own aspirations. She casts herself in a role, which in her perception corresponds with the society's ideal of a self-sacrificing mother. Lodzia retells her story when she shares the photographs of her daughters with CeAnn, the owner of the rooming house where she lives. In this narrative told in broken English, her daughters have stayed "[i]n Poland, with my mother. I came here to make money to bring them over. It's better here. Too hard in Poland. I was a doctor there, but my license is no good here, they say. Here I have to take classes at the university to get licensed. So I do that and I work and soon I'll send for them all."34 "I had to leave them to help them."35 Lodzia denies abandoning her daughters by reinventing herself into what she considers to be an ideal, self-sacrificing mother and enhances her self-esteem by presenting herself as a professional woman thus conforming to the societal pressures and perceptions of status which probably contributed to her alcoholism in the first place. In "Here in the Car City," the mother's voice is not silenced, not marginalized although the woman herself is marginalized by the social system. Lodzia tells her story in the way she wants to believe it.
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It seems fair to conclude that in the texts by both Pietrzyk and Slezak, maternal discourse is for the most part suppressed in favor of daughter-discourse and, on rare occasions, son-discourse. The children are entrusted with the creation of the mother-narratives, which of course seem to be more representative of the children themselves than the mothers. Mothers, cast as "other," remain voiceless and are often absent, their stories marginalized. We might consider why it is so. One possible and simple answer could be that the experience of "daughterhood" or "son-hood" is universal while the opportunity to parent is not; thus writing from the point of view of a child seems more natural. Likewise, a child writing her mother's story encounters numerous difficulties identified by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born, "It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my own story I am telling, my version of the past. If she were to write her own story other landscapes would be revealed."36 It is also possible that both Pietrzyk and Slezak identify the creation of self, the movement from being an object to asserting the position of a subject, as an important theme to explore. And in the process of individuation, they understand that the child must turn away from a parent and possibly even turn against the parent. Othering of the mother might be an integral part of a rite of passage.
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When considering specifically recent Polish American fiction authored by Ellen Slezak and Leslie Pietrzyk, the material suggests that the maternal narratives which often illustrate women's plots created within the confines of a patriarchal society have to be suppressed or rewritten so that a new ethnic woman can emerge—a woman less tied to the working class family model with its dependence on a male. It seems that Polish American fiction provides examples of yet another layer of "othering," this time from within the family unit itself, and specifically from within the mother-daughter dyad. It is possible that this is a stage necessary in the development of a particular ethnic literary discourse, yet it is sad that we are missing so many stories—so many maternal narratives.
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1Linda Nemec Foster, "The Silent One," in The Amber Necklace from Gdansk: Poems (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 13 (lines 8-12).
2Foster, "The Silent One," lines 22-31.
3Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita H. Gladsky, Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 105.
4Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5-6.
5Mary Patrice Erdmans, The Grasinski Girls (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), 62.
6Adrienne C. Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
7Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, vii.
8Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal (New York: Schocken Books, 1983).
9Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 135-36.
10Leslie Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 9.
11Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, 11.
12Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, 11.
13Mary Patrice Erdmans, book review of Pears on the Willow Tree (from a typescript sent to the author in October 2001), 1.
14Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, 14.
15Pietrzyk, Pears on a Willow Tree, 17.
16Leslie Pietrzyk, A Year and a Day (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 12.
17Pietrzyk, A Year and a Day, 11.
18Pietrzyk, A Year and a Day, 1.
19Pietrzyk, A Year and a Day, 2.
20Pietrzyk, A Year and a Day, 85.
21Pietrzyk, A Year and a Day, 167.
22Pietrzyk, A Year and a Day, 316.
23Ellen Slezak, All These Girls (New York: Hyperion, 2004), 8.
24Slezak, All These Girls, 277.
25Slezak, All These Girls, 333-34.
26Ellen Slezak, Last Year's Jesus (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 225.
27Slezak, Last Year's Jesus, 109.
28Slezak, Last Year's Jesus, 211.
29Slezak, Last Year's Jesus, 231.
30Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 4.
31Slezak, Last Year's Jesus, 139.
32Slezak, Last Year's Jesus, 136.
33Slezak, Last Year's Jesus, 137.
34Slezak, Last Year's Jesus, 83.
35Slezak, Last Year's Jesus, 91.
36Rich, Of Woman Born, 221. |
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