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The Immigrant Experience

James Nagel

The literature of the United States is, in large measure, a record of an immigrant population adjusting to life in the new land and exploring interaction with people from disparate cultural traditions and languages. No other country in the world had ever welcomed so many people from foreign countries, and no other society had ever attempted to build one nation, with a common political and social ethic, out of citizens from such a wide array of differing backgrounds. The marvel is not that over the decades there were periods of social strife, racial animus, and religious intolerance; the wonder is that these people who hated and waged war against one another in their land of origin somehow managed to live together for mutual benefit in the new world.

More than 30 million people came to the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century, more than doubling the population. The manifestations of this swelling cohort of new citizens were everywhere apparent, as is illustrated by the fact that by 1890 the country had nearly a thousand foreign‐language newspapers. A third of the population of Boston was Irish. New York had twice as many Irish citizens as Dublin. There were more Germans in the city than in Hamburg and more Jews than in Warsaw. This one metropolitan area alone had become the immigration center of the world (Martin 1967: 5). In this period the new arrivals were primarily white people from northern and western Europe. Many of them were English, but the number of Irish moving into the country was nearly equivalent. But the largest incoming group was German, a population so large that entire sections of some of the major American cities became known as “Germantown.” The Irish and Germans had urban backgrounds, and they tended to congregate within the large cities. Scandinavians came in significant relative numbers, but their home populations were so small that their impact was much less impressive than some of the other groups, and they tended to be agrarian folk who settled the farmlands and villages of the Midwest.

In the 1890s, there was a demographic shift in the immigrant populations, as people from eastern and southern Europe flowed into the country, changing the appearance of the urban centers, especially along the Atlantic seaboard. Italians, primarily from southern Italy, took over sections of the major cities, as did Russians, Bohemians, and Hungarians. There was also a difference in domestic structure: Russian and Polish Jews tended to come as entire families, for example, whereas northern Europeans came as individuals. As a rule, Scandinavians came alone and then encouraged relatives and friends to join them a decade or more later, once they had established an economic base.

There were many factors that inspired these multitudes to emigrate to America. Some of those were negative: religious persecution, limited economic opportunity, oppressive social caste traditions, dictatorial centralized governments, and widespread disease, which killed an enormous portion of the European population in the nineteenth century. But there were also positive reasons for people to come to the new country. America had no restrictions on religious practices, nor was there a national church, with its officious hierarchy, as was common in Europe. There were no income taxes, and the fruits of a man’s labor benefited himself and his family. The Homestead Act of 1862 gave 160 acres of land to a family who would live on it for at least five years and improve the property. An American population that was swelling at such an enormous rate needed a gigantic food supply, and this act was part of the effort to provide it. So was the Land Grant Act of the same year, a gift of enormous acreage to states that would inaugurate a college that was devoted, at least in part, to the study of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution provided new economic opportunity to large populations, especially in the years following the Civil War, and enormous numbers of migrants arrived in the major cities in the North, especially Detroit and Chicago.

The American West experienced a somewhat different pattern of social growth, primarily because of the discovery of gold in midcentury. But even after that, the demand for manual labor in building the continental railroad brought in a mass of migrants from Asia, especially from China. Indeed, so many of them arrived in the 1870s that the federal government initiated a new concept, the prohibition of a specified ethnic group. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was centered on California, which had encouraged immigrants from China in the 1840s to work in the mines and on the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Part of the enmity toward them was the result of their tendency to form ethnic enclaves and to resist assimilation into the general population, and some of it was their willingness to work at undesirable jobs for extremely low wages, which depressed the economic standards of other employees as well. The prejudice against Japanese immigrants was of a different sort: they were perceived as being efficient farmers who enjoyed disproportionate success in California agriculture. However, there was no effort to prohibit Japanese immigration into the United States prior to 1914, and their population continued to grow until the inception of World War II in 1941.

The literature of such a heterodox society would inevitably be a disjointed and contradictory record, but there were also central elements of the immigrant experience that welded separate groups into a single society with a shared history. All of the arrivals experienced geographical and cultural dislocation, separation from family and friends, and a frightening beginning in a new world filled with hardship and challenge, deprivation and opportunity, disappointment and satisfaction. In some ways, however, coming to America was an individual experience rather than a mass movement, and the fictional accounts of it recorded unique conflicts.

For example, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen was an atypical immigrant when he came from Norway holding a college degree in 1869, and his literary works generated themes that diverged from the established pattern of success based on working hard and moving steadily upward in the social spectrum. After a year of additional university study, Boyesen began a career teaching in major colleges, first at Cornell and later at Columbia, where he became a widely influential figure in American letters. His best fiction is also somewhat unusual in that it often deals with aristocratic immigrants who fail to find suitable status in the New World. “The Man Who Lost His Name” (1876), for example, is an account of Halfdan Bjork, who was something of a dilettante in Norway, hanging about the university without making serious progress toward passing his examinations, but his social skills were excellent, as were his musical gifts. When he arrives in New York, he is totally out of his element until he meets a friend from home who assists him in getting a position teaching piano lessons. His employer has problems pronouncing his name, however, and she changes it to Daniel Birch, an act that has the psychological impact of diminishing his sense of identity. In due course he falls in love with the eldest of his pupils and expresses his love for her. She is horrified and rejects him instantly. He flees to Norway only to find that he no longer fits into that society either, having been transformed during his several years in America. He returns to New York and dies in the street looking up longingly at the window of his beloved.

However lugubrious this conclusion, the action introduces a counter‐plot to the standard immigrant account of inevitable success. In Boyesen’s fiction, protagonists often come from the upper crust of Scandinavian culture and experience failure in the United States, where their polished manners, multilingual social skills, and elegant bearing fail to sustain them. Also of interest is the theme of cultural displacement in which the protagonist not only loses standing in society but, in the change of his name, becomes no one. “The Man Who Lost His Name” is a good example of that plotline, as is a related later story, “My Lost Self” (1894).

One of the most important immigration novels in American literature has been almost entirely absent from literary history, largely because it was originally published in Norwegian. That fact brings to the fore a significant issue for scholars: an enormous body of fiction written by Americans was not originally printed in English. At the end of the nineteenth century, virtually every major city in the country had publishing houses in foreign languages, and a majority of the newspapers in Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis, to name only a few metropolitan areas, were written in such lexicons. Since a majority of the population was German, rather than English, that was to be expected, but relatively few of these works have made it into the record of American letters even though they presented a crucial record of life in a distant country, the motivation for emigration to the United States, the adventurous journey across a vast ocean, and arrival in a new country. The experience of cultural dislocation, language acquisition, and a confusing body of customs, laws, and social patterns are all the more gripping when rendered in the language of the country of origin. These works are fundamentally part of the literature of the United States: they were written in America, published there, and read by people who spent the rest of their lives there (Øverland 2007: 190–191).

So it is with Drude Krog Janson’s A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, published in Minneapolis in 1888, which constitutes not only a direct account of immigration but also the crucial theme of a woman who desires an independent professional and economic life. A central focus is on her emotional commitment to another woman rather than to a traditional heterosexual marriage. Historically, Janson’s immigrant novel may well be the first openly lesbian work in the nation’s literature, and its conclusion projects the establishment of a “Boston marriage,” a committed domestic arrangement between two women. In the final scene the protagonist, Astrid Holm, is being ordained as a minister in the Unitarian church, and she and Helene will soon move to Denver.

As a work of immigration, A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter is particularly rich in its portrait of life in the country of origin, a matter of some significance since, as was the case with Boyesen’s story, this novel presents the unusual situation of a socially prominent family in Norway who decline in status when they arrive in America. The father of the protagonist was a wealthy and respected merchant in Kristiania (which became known as Oslo in 1925). But he makes unwise financial investments and loses everything, and when his wife dies he decides to go to America, bringing his family over as soon as he becomes established. When he arrives, speaking only Norwegian, he discovers that finding a suitable business position will not be possible, and the only viable option is to open a saloon in Minneapolis catering to the Norwegian population on the south side of the city. The bar becomes a success, and he sends for his children and a faithful family servant, Annie, who quickly book passage.

But the plot concerning the protagonist, Astrid Holm, is more dynamic and reveals a richly complex pattern of action thematically centered on the idea of individual freedom. It begins with Astrid at age 14 discovering her mother’s costumes in the attic and dreaming of becoming an actress. That desire is heightened when she sees Henrik Ibsen’s The Feast of Solhoug, and it continues in America until she actually gets a role in a play and realizes that she has little talent. Her command of English is limited, and the local Norwegian audience is often crude, intoxicated, and impatient with high culture. She then becomes engaged to a lawyer, Mr. Smith, another immigrant from Norway who has been in America much longer and has fully assimilated. But there is no emotional chemistry between them, and she ultimately terminates the relationship. In the end, she decides to become a minister. Because the Lutheran church will not ordain women, she studies in a Unitarian seminary and is ordained in Chicago.

Of special interest beyond these plot developments is the background portrait of Norwegian immigrants, who see America as a place to begin a new life, as both Glasrud (1963) and Wingerd (2010) have discussed. In historical terms, Norway had been ruled by Denmark for three centuries, during which the language of education and literature in the country became a form of Danish. After Norway gained its freedom in the early years of the nineteenth century, Sweden took control of the country from 1814 to 1905, the period during which the entire novel takes place. Economic and educational opportunities were limited for all but the aristocratic class, and nearly half of the population of Norway came to America, hence the Scandinavian section of many of the major cities of the United States.

As August Holm contemplates leaving Kristiania, he thinks “it’s the only way out. Over there I can still have a rosy future. Here all paths are closed.” Astrid also has idealistic conceptions about the promise of the New World: “In America she would begin to live again, and she dreamed of endless sun‐lit plains where people were happy, where all could follow a call, and where no one treated others harshly because of prejudice” (Janson 2002: 17, 23). It is not unusual that the Holm family should follow the massive stream of Norwegians to the Midwest, where the majority of them settled. Although that immigrant population eventually became agrarian, initially they congregated in sections of large cities such as Boston, Chicago, and Minneapolis, creating newspapers and publishing houses in their own language. In Minnesota, they established their own churches and schools conducted in their own language, and for many years St. Olaf College held classes exclusively in Norwegian.

The Holms move into an ethnically comfortable section of Minneapolis when they arrive, and all of the people they see on a daily basis speak their language and think of themselves as being Norwegian. However, compared to their elegant home in Kristiania, living in an apartment above a saloon is a major social humiliation, one Astrid never fully accepts. Even her father finds it difficult to reconcile his sense of himself with his new status. He feels that “it was a disgrace that he, a well‐bred gentleman, the scion of an old patrician family, should sink as low as to become a dispenser of alcoholic beverages” (Janson 2002: 32). His daughter’s situation is, at first, equally negative. During the summer of 1879, when she is 18, Astrid considers suicide, but the ensuing events present more positive alternatives as she realizes she must take control of her own life. Her ultimate decision to become a minister is influenced by a Norwegian of enormous international stature, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, a poet, dramatist, fiction writer, and lecturer who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1903. In 1881 he was in the United States lecturing against traditional ideas of religion and advocating a more humane creed that stressed affection and kindness rather than damnation and punishment. In particular, he regarded Jesus Christ as a human being who advocated love for everyone and special care for the oppressed in society. His religious views were much more in accord with Unitarianism than with Lutheranism, especially that practiced by the conservative state church of Norway.

A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter offered many appeals to an international readership, beginning with the scenes in Europe and the motivation for coming to America, and the book went through many printings, although it was not translated into English until 2002. The novel was among the very first to capture the full experience of immigration, including the cultural dislocation and problems with language that initially circumscribed the Scandinavian role in the economy, which led many of them to turn to farming to make a living. But Astrid’s quest also included elements that were startling to a nineteenth‐century audience, including the desire of a woman for an independent career, her intention of becoming the pastor of a church, her rejection of the standard social conventions, and her love for another woman and intention to establish a lifetime domestic relationship with her. All of these matters combine to make Janson’s first novel one of the most important documents in the fiction of immigration.

It is clear that the waves of immigrants coming across the Atlantic at the turn of the century contributed much to the national literature, some ethnic groups more than others. As Molly Crumpton Winter points out in American Narratives, in the period from 1890 to 1915 roughly 10 million people came to American from eastern and southern Europe, and a third of them were Jewish. As a group, they were to have a disproportionately important impact on fiction, contributing hundreds of stories and novels about their experience. Many of them left Russia to escape the discriminatory taxes imposed on their race, an oppressive regulation that was only the first of a series of ethnically inequitable measures that included restrictions on education, employment, and even location. Jews in Russia were eventually limited to living within defined areas, the Pale of Settlement, where anti‐Semitic riots and government pogroms were initiated in 1881, prompting the mass exodus to America (Winter 2007: 31).

These eastern Europeans who migrated in the last third of the nineteenth century had a much more difficult time adapting to their new culture than did the earlier arrivals from the west. The depth of these difficulties, the appalling poverty and starvation that invested their first years in the urban centers, were first brought to public awareness in a startling volume by a Danish writer, Jacob Riis, whose How the Other Half Lives (1890) shocked the American population in a way unmatched by any previous volume. A work of photographic journalism, rather than fiction, the book nevertheless became a bestseller in the 1890s and captured a place in history by calling attention to the new phenomenon of inner‐city life on the lower east side of Manhattan. Its dramatic impact was due in large measure to over 40 gripping photographs that presented the details of the squalid physical environment of the crowded tenements new arrivals inhabited and the sense of hopeless resignation and moral decay that invested the lives of even the children. The implication was that the problems of these people were the responsibility of not only themselves but of society at large, which shared a common humanity with the least of its citizens. As a result, various philanthropic organizations were initiated in which volunteer workers attempted to alleviate the most devastating conditions of the poor of the city, including providing food, improved housing to relieve congestion, and basic training for employment in a highly competitive economic system. The shocking realism of the pictures and the essays delineating the daily lives of the new arrivals, especially the Russian Jews, changed the thinking of the American public about the role society at large should play in the amelioration of urban poverty, and the impact on politics, economic policies, and social organizations made a permanent transformation of the laws and customs of the United States.

However, the first important fiction about eastern European Jews in New York did not paint so negative a portrait of life for immigrants as did Riis. Abraham Cahan lived in New York, where in addition to writing fiction in English he also edited The Jewish Daily Forward, the leading Yiddish newspaper in the world. In his Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), Yekl Podkovnik is eager to assimilate into “Yankee” society, and he quickly changes his name to Jake, attempts to learn English, and finds employment in the garment industry. Although he arrives in Boston, where he lives for his first year in America, he moves to New York and joins the legions of Russian Jews working and living on the lower east side of Manhattan. He is poor, as are his neighbors and friends, but he survives, and his wages gradually increase to the point that he can afford passage for his wife and child, who eventually join him in the city. By that time he has become accustomed to American standards of dress and behavior, and his rustic wife strikes him as unacceptably backward and “foreign,” so he divorces her, hoping to wed a Polish immigrant who has adopted more of the social trappings of the new country. At that juncture, the short novel ends.

What is notable about the book is not the plot but the picture of immigrants at work and at play in a rapidly transforming population that simultaneously embraces the economic opportunities of America and the familiar customs of the old country, especially its music, dances, and language. Indeed, the novel is a tour de force of dialect in the tradition of local color fiction. As was common in that popular mode, the omniscient narrator speaks in the cultivated language of the educated classes while the Jewish characters talk to one another in a delightful amalgam of Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew, and English. When Jake’s wife arrives, he discusses her with Mamie, another employee in the factory, who prefers to speak English. Jake advises her to stick to Yiddish so that his wife will not think they do not want her to know what they are discussing. Mamie replies, “Vot d’I care vot she t’inks? She’s your vife, ain’ it? Vell, she mus’ know ev’ryting. Dot’s right! A husband dass n’t hide not’ink from his vife” (Cahan 1896: 50). His wife’s difficulties with the language is part of why he decides to divorce her, along with her shabby clothing, her old‐fashioned wig, and her insistence on observing the customs of Jewish Russia. But in this novel, no one starves to death, no one is beaten or forced into prostitution in order to survive. It is a much more benign presentation of immigrant life than what was customary, and it is aligned much more with the prevalent realism than with the naturalistic fictional portraits that became popular at the turn of the century.

Perhaps the most dramatically powerful of such fiction was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, serialized in 1905 and published by Doubleday as a volume a year later. Although Sinclair was born into a comfortable family in Baltimore and enjoyed the benefits of having wealthy grandparents, he personally explored the deprivation of immigrants struggling to survive in the meatpacking industry in Chicago, working in disguise to understand the full impact of such a life. He brought the knowledge of his experiment to his most sensational novel. In terms of subject, it covers three basic areas drawn together by a central protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, a hapless arrival from Lithuania who comes to Chicago to start a new life for his family. Thematically, the secondary effects of his experience dominate the early part of the novel, as eastern Europeans celebrate a wedding in traditional terms, as indicated not only by the ceremony but by the music and dances. But once married, Jurgis struggles to support his family. He eventually takes a job in meatpacking, which leads to a vivid and horrifying exposé of the filth and corruption inherent in the industry on the South Side of Chicago. In typical naturalistic terms, the action then gives way to a political harangue as narration is replaced by exposition with long passages on the evils of capitalism and its “wage slavery” and the promise of socialism as a bromide for humanity. The plot largely collapses in this section as any further development of Jurgis as a character is arrested when he finds employment as a hotel porter and the narrator observes that he will be in that position the rest of his life. There is little for him to do in the final third of the novel but serve as an audience as a series of eloquent speakers give him learned discourses on social economics. The section on the septic environment in the meatpacking plants generated the greatest response from the American public, and the massive outcry led to the establishment of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and a bureau that later became known as the Food and Drug Administration.

Mary Antin provided the counter‐narrative to The Jungle in her famous autobiographical account entitled The Promised Land (1912). Escaping Russia with her Jewish family, she arrived in Boston at the age of 13. Once in the United States, she protests against very little but takes advantage of a spectrum of opportunities afforded her and all the other new immigrants. She starts her book early in the process, however, graphically portraying the hardships of life in Russia, the limitations imposed on the Jews, the oppressive poverty, the hopelessness and despair of her ethnic community. Of special interest are the hardships of a Russian village, where poverty, illness, and lack of opportunity were the accepted norm. It is a severe portrait that makes patently evident that whatever difficulties her family encounters when they arrive in the United States, they enjoy vastly more possibilities for economic and personal prosperity than they could ever have had in their native country. They have a harsh journey to Boston, and the family finds the process of acculturation challenging and, sometimes, disheartening. As was the case with countless other immigrants, they have difficulty in acquiring English rapidly enough to function in society, and their clothing and general appearance emphasize their “foreign” status. Her father struggles to succeed in a series of businesses, perpetually failing, and her older sister is forced to work at a menial job to help support the family.

Nonetheless, despite their comparative poverty, the family emphasizes education for young Mary, and she takes full advantage of free public education, lending libraries, lectures, newspapers, and social conversation to become an outstanding student from her elementary grades through the exclusive Boston Latin School to her entrance to Barnard College, where the account of her life ends. Her progressive sense of becoming fully “American” is celebrative, and she marvels at the freedoms and opportunities available to her. Throughout, the emphasis on rigorous education is foremost in her life, as it was for other Jewish immigrants. Indeed, despite the linguistic and economic challenges encountered by new arrivals, and the ethnic quotas limiting their access to colleges across the country, by 1910 a quarter of all medical students in the United States were Jews, even though they composed less than one percent of the population. Unlike their former status in European countries, where they were forbidden to acquire anything beyond the most rudimentary education, in America Jewish women also streamed into the universities, many of them taking degrees in education (Winter 2007: 32).

Antin’s book quickly became a bestseller and remained one for many decades, despite criticism of its positive portrait of the process of assimilation. Indeed, her account records very little resistance to throwing off the vestiges of Russian language and culture and adopting the English language and the customs and traditions of the United States. The greatest hero she can imagine is George Washington. Some of that enthusiasm may be attributable to the brutal life of Jews in Russia and memories of what was odious about their lives there, but Mary goes further by rejecting her religious training in Judaism and nearly every manifestation of its prescription for secular life. In a crucial scene, she eats ham at a dinner in Boston, externalizing the rejection of her earlier enculturation. The emphasis is on her new personal freedom and acceptance into society. The overall structure of her book is thus one of movement from hardship in Russia to the challenges of arrival in Boston to her nearly complete integration into the mainstream of a new society. Her account suggests the personal qualities required in making the journey: intellectual and economic discipline, hard work, determination, and personal conduct that is beyond reproach. She becomes the feminine embodiment of the standard plot of Horatio Alger’s popular novels, which promoted the idea that pluck and luck, honesty, and hard work would inevitably lead to success in American society.

The negative reaction to Antin’s autobiography tended to emphasize her acceptance of the “melting pot” concept of acculturation and the almost eager rejection of her religion and Russian cultural traditions. Her critics pointed out that she did not seem to advocate any form of cultural pluralism, although most American immigrants, even those most intent on rapidly becoming accepted by their new society, retained aspects of their country of origin, celebrating holidays in the traditional ways, for example, and preserving their language. As evidence of this tendency at the turn of the century, there were newspapers in New York City in well over a hundred languages, a situation that persisted throughout the twentieth century. In truth, American assimilation never demanded the complete eradication of all aspects of country of origin; rather, it required the acquisition of the linguistic and social skills necessary to function in the multicultural society of America along with the knowledge and capabilities to participate in a free‐enterprise economy. Even as she rejoices at her success in the Boston educational system, for example, Antin’s family continues to celebrate the traditional rituals that unite them in a locus of values and mutual devotion.

In the final analysis, the development of the knowledge and social skills necessary for economic success in America did not require, and certainly did not “demand,” the complete obliteration of cultural background. Even if they wanted to, it would not have been possible for new arrivals to erase all aspects of their past, for linguistic patterns and accents, philosophical and religious assumptions, and personal habits of mind are so ingrained in youth that they are forever subtly influential in the conduct of every human life. Many immigrants celebrated their unique ethnic and national traditions, rather than hiding them, taking advantage of their “cultural capital” of special knowledge to establish a foothold in American society. An example of this concept would be the success of German brewmasters, for they thrived in the beer industry around the globe. Similarly, an emphasis on education and intellectual life made Jewish immigrants prominent members of the professional classes in many parts of the world. Mary Antin is certainly part of that tradition and very much aware of the value of her heritage. Indeed, in her later book They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914), she presents an argument for seeing immigrants as a respected segment of the American population and an indispensable resource for economic and cultural advancement as a society.

A woman destined to introduce a new perspective to American literature, Edith Maude Eaton, was born in England in 1865 to a British father and a Chinese mother. In 1873 the family moved to Montreal where the young girl worked at a series of jobs before finally developing a fledgling career as a journalist covering the burgeoning Asian community in the city. In 1898 she moved to San Francisco for a few years, then to Seattle, and finally to Boston, where she continued to write newspaper accounts of recent immigrants. It was there that she transformed her approach to her material from journalism to fiction. Although she wrote for newspapers under her own name, she wrote fiction as “Sui Sin Far,” and in this capacity she holds the distinction of being the first writer to publish fiction in English about Chinese immigrants in America. Her stories, originally written between 1896 and 1912, appeared as Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), and their narrative skill, intriguing characters, and dramatic situations were presented in a linguistic lexicon at once socially charming and psychologically penetrating. In the title story, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is portrayed as a wise and loving wife with an uncertain mastery of her adopted language who cleverly manipulates her husband as well as her neighbors and friends. She does so not out of greed or personal gain but because she cares deeply about their happiness and believes, absolutely, that it is she who best perceives the road to a just and satisfying life for all concerned. Her kindness and innovative solutions to the social and romantic problems of her friends posed a new kind of ethnic character to an American audience, one it was not manifestly prepared to accept.

The west coast of the United States welcomed an enormous population of Chinese men into the workforce in the period from 1852 to 1882, primarily to work in the gold mines or on the transcontinental railroad. When that project was finished in 1869, tens of thousands of these laborers returned to the coastal cities seeking employment and housing, and their wives and families began arriving to join them in sections of the major cities that became known as Chinatowns. The rapid influx of such an enormous population bred panic among many white Californians and led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which essentially restricted admission just to students and wealthy businessmen. These are the dominant characters portrayed in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and they live not only in Chinatown but also in more affluent neighborhoods, where their interactions with European families provide the conflicts, misunderstandings, and dramatic conclusions for a series of intriguing tales. In general, they demonstrate that ethnic prejudice and racial stereotypes can be overcome by compassionate attempts to understand other cultures, and people of good will and decency ultimately prevail in establishing an accepting multicultural community.

The stories in the volume cover a spectrum of standard issues in the lives of immigrants, from language acquisition to cultural duality and ethnic discrimination, and they are presented with a deft implementation of fictional techniques. In “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” the protagonist intervenes in a traditional arranged marriage to allow a young woman to wed the man she loves, an American idea. Meanwhile Mr. Spring Fragrance is proud of his wife’s rapid acculturation, and he is certain that “there are no more American words for her learning” (Sui Sin Far 1912: 1). But he also worries for a time that his wife may reject her own marriage, since it was arranged by their parents, but she proclaims that her love will be strong for “ten thousand times ten thousand years.” In the same letter, she protests gently against the treatment of Chinese immigrants, especially those detained on Angel Island, the west coast analogue of Ellis Island in New York Harbor: “And murmur no more because your honored elder brother, on a visit to this country, is detained under the roof‐tree of this great Government instead of under your own humble roof” (Sui Sin Far 1912: 6). In general, however, the story portrays an integration into American society, with success in business, language skills, and a basic understanding of customs and laws. The motif of Angel Island detention is depicted in its most tragic dimension in “In the Land of the Free,” in which a small boy, born in China, is kept on the island for 10 months awaiting clearance, at the end of which he rejects his own mother.

Some of the stories focus on issues with complex racial outcomes. In “The Wisdom of the New,” Wau Sankwei comes to America with his wife and son, seeking a fortune for his family. He is eager to assimilate and insists that his son acquire an American education. His wife, Pau Lin, detests her new society, resists the language, and rejects Christianity. Rather than allow her child to become integrated into this foreign world, she poisons him. Sankwei understands her motivation and refuses to punish her in any way. Indeed, he prepares for their permanent return to China. A mother’s murder of her child is the most dramatic cultural statement of resistance in the entire volume, but there are numerous indications that it is not easy to adopt a foreign set of values. In “Its Wavering Image,” for example, a young woman, Pan, was born to a Chinese father and a white mother, thus incorporating two ethnic traditions. Her mother died before the story begins, so her father’s culture has the greatest influence on her. She falls in love with a white journalist, Mark Carson, but she ultimately rejects him and embraces her Asian racial identity. In “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” a young wife is confronted by the complexity of a mixed marriage, especially when she is expected to embrace women’s suffrage and become a socialist. This plot continues in “Her Chinese Husband,” in which Liu is killed by the Chinese community for having a white wife. Perhaps the acculturation theme is best presented in “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” in which a young woman staunchly resists assimilation, disliking the language and the clothing of her new culture, and her husband is brought to a realization of the difficulties his wife experiences in adopting the language and social patterns of a new society.

Near the end of the pre‐World War I era, Willa Cather’s early fiction returned to more traditional concerns. Although she moved as a child from Virginia to Nebraska, she was not from a foreign country but lived among many people who were, thus learning about their conflicting languages and traditions. Her stories and novels resonate with the legacy of the pioneer experience on the prairies, especially in the lives of first‐ and second‐generation immigrants. These characters, of Bohemian, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Russian, Czech, German, and Danish backgrounds, find community in their common fight for survival against the harsh winters and scorching summers on the plains of Nebraska, and they establish their individuality and their souls in family and the arts. In “The Bohemian Girl,” first published in McClure’s Magazine in 1912, a young Norwegian man, Nils Ericson, returns to the Nebraska prairie to retrieve the Bohemian sweetheart of his youth, Clara Vavrika, only to find that she has married his brother. His mother still observes some of the customs of the old country, baking bread and knitting, and her strict Lutheran traditions still guide her household. But the family of the Vavrikas is very different, for they love music. The father plays the violin and Clara the piano, and when Nils visits them he brings his flute so they can enjoy the songs from the old country. Although she is married, Nils and Clara are clearly made for each other, and the story ends with her running off with him to start a new life together overseas, for he is employed by a Norwegian shipping company and travels throughout Europe. Ethnicity helps define the appearance of these characters, the Scandinavians all being blonde, the Bohemians of dark complexion, and it suggests their basic philosophical orientation. Nils has escaped the laconic tone of his family by traveling for 12 years, thus becoming a citizen of the world, and he cares little for traditional values. The broad nationalities of the settlers are nowhere more evident than at a barn party that draws all of them together. The diverse ethnic backgrounds are evident in the food, the music, and the dances, and the women chatter away in four languages.

Cather used the same setting for O Pioneers! (1913), her novel about a Swedish immigrant family and its androgynous eldest daughter, Alexandra Bergson. The central plot deals with gender issues as a woman displays intelligence, strength, and resolve in running a successful farming enterprise and the young man she loves is persistently described in images associated with femininity: Carl Linstrum is delicate and sensitive, not the strong and resolute personality required to thrive on the prairie. This gender inversion is consistent with the New Woman theme that became popular in the 1890s, and the reversal of a standard masculine plot is the most remarkable feature of the novel.

Related to it, however, are the challenges faced by second‐generation immigrants, who strive to prosper in the new land, forming families and communities that supported initiatives to adapt new methods of farming and caring for the land. Alexandra’s father, John, is ill suited to pioneer life, and her brothers are antagonistic to her innovative approaches to agriculture. Lou is so disorganized that he devotes his hours to odd jobs while his wheat is ready for harvesting. Oscar is locked in a pattern of tradition, doing every task the hardest way, oblivious to the benefits that his sister has brought to managing the property. It is Alexandra who has the strength and intelligence to prevail, and she regards the prairie in Transcendental terms as a spiritual entity linking her to the elemental forces of nature. The novel thus presents a revision of the pioneer myth of a male protagonist who marshals the power to subdue the land; Alexandra is a strong Swedish woman, to be sure, but she lives in harmony with nature, as part of its cyclical rhythms, an approach she learned from her Norwegian neighbor, Crazy Ivar. Financially, professionally, and personally, she succeeds in establishing a thriving agrarian enterprise, and having done so she can move on toward an emotionally fulfilling marriage to Carl in the conclusion.

Around them is a burgeoning immigrant population. The Bergsons are Swedish, as is Mrs. Lee, who thinks always of the old country, baking Swedish pastries for Alexandra. The prairie farmlands host a rich social tapestry: Ivar is Norwegian, Marie Tovesky Bohemian, Barney Finn Irish. Many of the scenes at the center of the novel take place around a French church devoted to Saint Agnes, the patron saint of young girls who wish to marry. In this rural community of cooperation and mutual interdependence, characters move easily from one locus of nationality to another, and European biases of social stratification have given way to the practical values of religious and ethnic tolerance and mutual respect. The Nebraska setting, where life is a struggle for mere survival, contributes to the efficacy of this primal diversity, a key background element to the success of a heterogeneous frontier society.

American fiction about immigration is a uniquely vibrant and important body of literature, unmatched by any other country in the world. No other nation has ever seen so many new arrivals flooding into its society, and no other literary tradition has such a rich focus on the migration of families. For the people who came to America in the nineteenth century, in almost every case it was the most important thing they ever experienced. Nothing else they ever encountered proved to be so dramatically transformative, calling into question their core values, customs, and even their religions. The fiction produced by the adventure and hardships of coming to the continent, and the intricate social and linguistic adjustments that were required of virtually everyone who came, constitutes an extraordinarily rich body of work at the center of the national cultural legacy, and it deserves to be fully recognized and widely studied by all students of American literature.

References

  1. Antin, M. (1912). The Promised Land. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
  2. Antin, M. (1914). They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
  3. Boyesen, H. (1876). “The Man Who Lost His Name.” Scribner’s Magazine, 12(6): 808–826.
  4. Boyesen, H. (1894). “My Lost Self.” Literary and Social Silhouettes. New York: Harper & Brothers, pp. 194–204.
  5. Cahan, A. (1896). Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. New York: D. Appleton and Company.
  6. Cather, W. (1912). “The Bohemian Girl.” McClure’s Magazine, 39(4): 421–443.
  7. Cather, W. (1913). O Pioneers! Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
  8. Glasrud, C. (1963). Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. Northfield, MN: The Norwegian‐American Historical Association.
  9. Janson, D. (2002). A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, ed. O. Øverland, trans. G. Thorson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  10. Martin, J. (1967). Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865–1914. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
  11. Øverland, O. (2007). “Recovering an Unrecognized Novel – Discovering American Literature.” In Intercultural America, ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, pp. 187–207.
  12. Riis, J. (1890). How the Other Half Lives. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
  13. Sinclair, U. (1912). The Jungle. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page.
  14. Sui Sin Far (1912). Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg.
  15. Wingerd, M. (2010). North Country: The Making of Minnesota. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  16. Winter, M. (2007). American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Further Reading

  1. Bayor, R. (2014). Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Describes how immigrants traveled to the United States, how they were processed on Ellis Island, and how they adapted to a new culture.
  2. Carens, J. (2013). The Ethics of Immigration. New York: Oxford University Press. Explores the theory of citizenship and social membership.
  3. Daniels, R. (2002). Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: Perennial. A history of immigration with an emphasis on ethnic issues, especially for minority groups.
  4. Dinnerstein, L. (2009). Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration. New York: Columbia University Press. A discussion of restrictive laws and ethnic conflict in the immigrant populations from 1492 to the present.
  5. Fine, D. (1977). The City, the Immigrant, and American Fiction, 1880–1920. London: Scarecrow Press. An excellent discussion with special emphasis on the American immigrant novel, Jewish literature, and the works of Abraham Cahan.
  6. Johnson, K. (2007). Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws. New York: New York University Press. An argument for reform to allow open borders for all who wish to come to the United States, with an emphasis on the economic benefits of immigration.
  7. Nagel, J. (2014). Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Explores issues of ethnicity and culture in the lives of immigrants in Louisiana in the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on people of mixed race.
  8. Sollors, W. (1986). Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Discusses the complexity of ethnicity in a culture in which groups not only coexist but intermingle and overlap.
  9. Wellauer, M. (1985). German Immigration to America in the Nineteenth Century: A Genealogist’s Guide. Milwaukee, WI: Roots International. Basically, a handbook for tracing family histories, although the commentary explains much about the motivation for Germans to come to America.

SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 25 (NATURALISM); CHAPTER 26 (SOCIAL PROTEST FICTION).