Americanization is a fascinating process that generations of sociologists have attempted to explain. In 1782, a French-American writer proudly praised the country as a
melting pot, with Utopian visions of the emergence of an American “new man”.
However, American history is fraught with clamorous and silent confrontations,
persistent clashes of different cultures, and heated debates about values.
After the ninety-seventies, the desirability of assimilation was challenged. Advocates of pluralism coined the alternative metaphor of a salad bowl, in which cultures mix but maintain their distinct shapes.
In Prospective Immigrants Please Note, Adrienne Rich, a half-Jewish, half-gentile poet, offers a multifaceted interpretation of the Americanization. On one hand,
she warns the immigrants of losing their ethnic traditions. On the other, she
hints at the danger of rejecting assimilation. Ultimately, she expresses a
desire for personal choice and self-determination: an immigrant should be free
to select elements from his home culture and American (in this case, mainly white)
culture. She writes about the same belief using personal experience in Split at the Root: An Essayon Jewish Identity. Prospective Immigrants Please Note
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
Inside, or Outside
Either you will/go through this door/or you will not go through.
Door is a widely used literary symbol, very likely due to the complexity and duality its simple structure unifies: an open door signifies opportunity and acceptance, whereas a closed door symbolizes rejection and disappointment; an opening door is often associated with new adventures, and a closing door usually stands for farewell. In the poem, to “go through this door” means to assimilate, to Americanize, and to blend in. The outside is immigrants’ native culture, and the inside is American (in the context of this poem, white) culture. “Either…or” has the connotation of arbitrariness, suggesting that whether a person successfully Americanizes is judged by others.
The first stanza as a whole implies that the society demands a devotion to American standards from immigrant. The society does not recognize immigrants as complex, autonomous individuals. Immigrants are either embraced as new Americans, or regarded as outsiders. Therefore, should anyone strive to reconcile two sides of the door, incorporating some aspects of Americanness into his cultural background, the society demands him to forfeit one for the other.
This door
metaphor, though written for immigrants, applies to colored people well. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison explores
African Americans’ quest for identity. Morrison presents most people as eager
conformers, shedding their racial identity in order to go through the door. The character Geraldine represents mulatto girls
religiously pursue “white” appearance and manners.
“The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of
nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. Wherever it erupts,
this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; where it
drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies… when they
wear lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick,
and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair” (83).
Funk refers to various natural imperfections of humans: body odor, breath odor, skin crusts, “lips too thick”, “edges of their hair”… For African Americans, “funk” includes their blackness. Geraldine is therefore fighting against her nature, against her African American descent. The words “erupts”, “crusts”, “drips, flowers, or clings” animate the funkiness, as if the girls view it as some kind of stubbornly, indefatigably growing weeds. Their light complexion, white manners, and property have sent them through the door: the society gives them a place above the black people. But they have to cautiously watch what they have attained, and continue the battle against “funk”, totally denying their African American identity.
The Insiders’s Loss
If you go through/ there is always the risk/ of remembering your name.
In the second stanza, “name” represents vernacular. Since language is the agent of culture and traditions, “remembering your name” means the awareness of racial and ethnical identity. “The risk” is the anxiety and fears of any exposure of the nature self.
In the second stanza, “name” represents vernacular. Since language is the agent of culture and traditions, “remembering your name” means the awareness of racial and ethnical identity. “The risk” is the anxiety and fears of any exposure of the nature self.
Jewish Immigrant Family
In Split at the
Root, Adrienne Rich recounts her father’s influence on her. The man is a
second-generation immigrant. When young Adrienne was casting Portia in The Merchant of Venice, he instructed her
to read the word “Jew” with scorn and contempt. She could see there was “a kind
of terrible, bitter bravado” about her father’s instruction, yet she hesitated
at questioning him. It was when she became a college student that she began to
understand her father. One day she bought a dress in a small shop and a Jewish seamstress
came to do alterations for her. She recalls,
“Something about her presence was very powerful and
disturbing to me. After making and pinning up the skirt, she sat back on her
knees, looked up at me, and asked in a hurried whisper: ‘You Jewish?’ Eighteen
years of training in assimilation sprang into the reflex by which I shook my
head, rejecting her, and muttered, ‘No’.”
Adrienne Rich
realized that the image of a frightened immigrant, a wandering Jew terrified
her, an American college girl having her skirt hemmed.
“And I was frightened myself,” she wrote, “because she had recognized me.”
Geraldine attests
to Adrienne Rich’s realization. When Geraldine returned home and her son Junior
accuses Pecola of killing the cat, she looks at Pecola and abhors the lowness
of black girls. “You nasty little black bitch. Get
out of my house.” she says (92). The fact that she herself is black generates
no magnanimity, because Pecola is an undesirable reflection of her race. Pecola’s
blackness instigates Geraldine’s insidious contempt and self-denial, as
Geraldine is reminded that she can be ostracized from the “white” middle-class for
her blackness.
Double Consciousness
Things look at you doubly /and you must look back/ and let them happen.
The third stanza, interestingly, describes a kind of double vision: an immigrant’s action is judged by both cultures he is associated with, and he examines himself in two perspectives: an immigrant; an American. This idea is strikingly similar with W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness”, which he states as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”.
The
experience of immigrants parallels that of African Americans with Americanization
being the common direction. Both groups are painfully aware of their difference
from the Anglo-Saxon race and voiceless in the white-dominant society. In the
Bluest Eye, the discrimination and indifference of others throws Pecola into
the conviction that she is hopelessly ugly, so “she
would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes
of other people” (46-47). That all
she would see were others’ eyes implies that Pecola is preoccupied with people’s
views about her. She consents unconditionally to whatever labels the world puts
on her- “you must look back/and let them happen”. The Outsiders' Loss
to maintain your attitudes /to hold your position/ to die bravely
but much will blind you, much will evade you, at what cost who knows?
What complicate
the poet’s argument are stanzas four through six. Fourth and fifth stanzas offer
a romantic depiction of ethnic nationalism: by adhering to traditions and
upholding cultural values, immigrants can live respectably and worthily. However,
the sixth stanza points out that those who refuse to Americanize face costs.
Adrienne Rich
identifies the Jewish defense against non-Jews as a quality required for
survival over generations of persecution. Jews must arm themselves in a world full
of potential slanderers, betrayers, people who “could not understand”. However,
she questions, “What happens when the white gentile
world is softly saying ‘Be more like us and you can almost be one of us?’ What
happens when survival seems to mean dosing off one emotional artery after
another”? She portrays people of Jewish descent who exclusively interact
with their family members, shutting the door at the rich possibilities America
offers. They live in a bland world, laughter restrained, angers curbed, and
tears withheld. They conform to their original culture, and thus surrender the
precious freedom of determining what they want to become. They lack the courage
to break free from chains of ethnicity and choose their paths.
Inside, and Outside
The end of the
poem returns to the central picture of an emotionless door. It is neither
hopeful nor hopeless, neither welcoming nor rejecting.
Since The Bluest Eye precedes Prospective Immigrants Please Note by several decades, it reflects an era with harsher racial climates. Most people were forced to conform to the white-dominant society and adjust to its standards. Furthermore, many immigrants do not share the history of slavery with African Americans, and they do not wear their ethnicity with skin color. Therefore, Morrison mainly aims to celebrate the nature, the root, and “funk”. Adrienne's poem, however, taken as a whole, suggests that people should be free to determine their own ethnicity instead of being categorized into insiders or outsiders by environment. The journey toward self-identification is not painless. As Adrienne Rich writes in Split at the Root, at different times in her life, she wanted to push away one or the other burden of inheritance, to state merely “I am a woman”. Fortunately, in a writing career that spanned over seven decades, she found her own identity: not gentile, not Jewish, but both; a feminist, political activist, and passionate writer.
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