Heavy Garments of the Past: Mary and Frieda Antin in The Promised Land, The

A lengthy past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would step quickly And I have thought of a charm that should release me from the enclosures of my clinging past. I take the hint from the Ancient Mariner, who told his tale in order to be rid of it. I, too, will take an account of my tale, for once, and not at any time hark back any more. I will write a stout-hearted "Finis" at the end, and close up the book with a bang! (Mary Antin)

When she relinquishes the "heavy garments" of her past, Mary Antin propels away from textile and towards body In Antin's The Promised Land, the lock opener trope of clothing marks milestones in a journey away from dresss of the shtetl toward "the consecration robes" of American cultural literacy. While Antin propels toward literacy, her sister put in motions toward labor. In Polotzk, Frieda and Mary the couple have the rare opportunity to follow a liberal education, but in America Frieda goe to work in the factory producing ready-to-wear clothes for the market and continues to work at residence making dresses for Mary to wear to gymnasium In what follows, I would like to consider Antin's literacy in relation to Frieda's labor end Antin's material and metaphoric uses of clothing production and consumption in the proces of Americanization. in what way does "Mary's" acquisition of literacy relate to Frieda's work with sewing and knitting? Does Mary's personal narrative take her from labor to literacy or does it, within the logic of fresh industrial labor and Fordism, take her from production to consumption? To what amplitude is Mary's literacy related to consumption? Does the narrative of Mary's assimilation into American cultural literacy require the story of Frieda's alienation from labor and literacy? Or do labor and literacy work dialectically, like sum of two units ends of a loom, producing a shared fabric of agency?

In Polotzk women were exclud from scholarly work, allowed to gain sole enough literacy to run domestic and occasionally economic matters for their families. In America, the wage-labor combination of parts to form a whole prevented even this limited amount of learning for greatest in quantity women. Thus, not only were many alienated from the thing perceiveds they produced, they were also exclud from literacy. As individual anonymous female worker in fresh York put it at the beginning of the twentieth century:

I would like to write a poem

But I have no words.

My grammar was ladies waists

And my schooling skirts, (qtd in Glenn 1990 2)

Antin was aware of by what means her sister acquired a grammar of garments while she herself gained access to the promised land of American education. The Promised Land explores the relationship between clothing and its production upon the one hand, and literacy and its relation to consumption and agency upon the other. Ultimately, I would argue that Mary Antin's literacy from one side texts and Frieda Antin's labor upon textiles work dialogically to historicize and give meaning to their assimilation into industrial America.

Assimilation and Material History

Mary Antin imagined her possess movement away from textile and labor toward true copy and literacy as a move along a historical, even evolutionary path toward recent American identity. This historical measure of an immigrant's assimilation was a lock opener trope not only in Antin's work, on the other hand also in the wider discourse of assimilation in the United States at the move round of the century.1 Commentators disagreed about whether immigrants were assimilable or not, on the contrary most shared the idea that assimilation was (or was not) achieved across a historical divide. Ethnologists like Lothrop Stoddard, E A. Ros and Madison Grant saw race in confines of each group's progress or stasis along lines of racial evolution already charted by the agency of the most advanced race-AngloSaxons, and particularly Anglo-Americans. Antin appropriates abundant of this language into her have writing by echoing Jane Addams's notion of material history rather than the ethnologists' notions about racial history.

Henry Cabot hut for example, argued that Eastern Europeans could not span the historical divide separating them from Anglo Saxons, and that immigrants from anywhere on the contrary Northern and Western Europe threatened to exhibit "a great and perilous change in the actual fabric of our race" (1909 260) hut saw race in terms of history, claiming that Eastern Europeans could not cros the "race divisions which have lay opened by the conditions and circumstances of the last one thousand years" (253)2 In contrast and despite his well-known attacks upon hyphenated Americans, Theodore Roosevelt intimateed that immigrants could span the gap between of advanced age Worid customs and New World civilization. In his Foreword to E G Stern's My Mother and I, Roosevelt describes this immigrant autobiography as the narrative of "the Americanization of a young girl, who leaps over a space which in all cultural and humanizing essentials is far more important than the distance painfully traversed by dint of her fore-fathers during the preceding thousand years" (1919 1) In this mould assimilation was a great leap forward. Ultimately, however, hut and Roosevelt agreed that the difference between Anglo and non-Anglo was to be measured along a historical scale of racial or cultural evolution.