JoAnn Pavletich
Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 81-104

This article exams the writings of Anzia Yezierska, a Jewish immigrant in 1920s America, and focuses on a moment in the history of affect. Yezierska’s writings engage the tensions in early twentieth-century United States culture between a valorized emotional reserve and a denigrated emotional expressivity through the figure of the emotionally intense Jewish female immigrant, and thereby establishes the immigrant woman as an especially important figure in United States culture precisely because of her effusive emotions. This essay finds that while Yezierska’s texts proffer a critique of class and gender relations in America, her writing remains at least partially constrained not only by cultural stereotypes of affect but also by the early twentieth-century utopian doctrine of sympathy as the answer to oppressive and marginalizing political and economic forces.