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Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939

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Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939 University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2008 Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939 Laura Patton Samal University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Samal, Laura Patton, "Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2008. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/343 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Laura Patton Samal entitled "Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Mary E. Papke, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Thomas Haddox, Carolyn R. Hodges, Charles Maland Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Laura Patton Samal entitled ―Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939.‖ I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. ____________________________________ Mary E. Papke, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: ______________________________ Thomas Haddox ______________________________ Carolyn R. Hodges ______________________________ Charles Maland Accepted for the Council: ________________________________ Carolyn R. Hodges, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records) Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939 A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Laura Patton Samal May 2008 ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my husband, Sam Samal, to my children, Lucia and Julian Samal, and to the memories of my parents Miriam and Richard Patton, in grateful appreciation for their love, faith, and support, and for being models for me of what is best in humanity. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all of those who helped me complete my Ph. D. in English Literature. I would especially like to thank Dr. Mary Papke for her guidance and encouragement during this process, and for her intelligence, humor, and passion for literature and life, which continue to inspire me. I would also like to thank Dr. Charles Maland for his suggestions and contributions to my dissertation, which were always helpful and enlightening, and so kindly offered, and Dr. Thomas Haddox whose invaluable comments always helped me consider important questions I had overlooked. I would also like to thank Dr. Carolyn Hodges for giving her time to serve on my committee. Finally, I would like to thank my family, whose love has been the major force behind the writing of this dissertation. iv ABSTRACT The novels written by immigrants to the United States during the great wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal a preoccupation with religious ritual as a major means through which they depict the tensions and dynamics at work in the immigration experience and the confrontation with American culture. This dissertation establishes the significance of religious ritual in novels written by immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1939, and delineates the important spiritual, social, and political functions such ritual served by way of its special properties. I argue that immigrant writers used ritual as a powerful hieroglyph by which to comment upon the complex connection between the religious, the ethnic, and the political in the life of the immigrant. The challenges that immigrants faced in their daily lives were ripe to be worked out within the special mechanism of religious ritual. Immigrant life was one of physical hardship, in which the body was debased by racial prejudice, inhumane working conditions, and a squalid living environment, while the voice of the immigrant was often silenced by an inability to speak the dominant language. In addition, the religious immigrant, no matter what religion he or she practiced, confronted a society that challenged preconceived notions of the order of the cosmos and of the ultimate vertical and horizontal obligations of human beings in the world. Thus immigrants faced competing visions of redemption posed by other religions, Americanization, and the pursuit of material success. Immigrant writers continually compress the foregoing concerns into ritual moments in their novels. Ritual, which employs the body as a medium for the expression of religious truth and aesthetically orchestrates physical v movements and expressive use of the Word, conferred dignity on the immigrant body, gave voice to the immigrant soul, provided a context in which the immigrant could experience beauty within a poor and often ugly environment, and challenged the immigrant to choose between conflicting visions of redemption within American society. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE: Ritual Somatics: Purity, Power, and the Immigrant Body .................. 33 CHAPTER TWO: Ritual Space and the Immigrant Quest for Place................................ 84 CHAPTER THREE: Babel in Babylon: Immigrant Ritual and the Question of Language ......................................................................................................................................... 133 CHAPTER FOUR: The Kalon-agathon: Immigrant Ritual and the Politics of Aesthetics ......................................................................................................................................... 202 CHAPTER FIVE: Immigrant Ritual, Immigrant Identity, and Redemptive Hegemony ......................................................................................................................................... 266 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 327 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 339 PRIMARY SOURCES ................................................................................................... 340 SECONDARY SOURCES ............................................................................................. 343 VITA ............................................................................................................................... 352 1 Introduction To enter into the fiction written by immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s is often to encounter scenes like the following: A Norwegian woman on a snow- swept prairie, obsessed with securing last rites for her neighbor, sends her husband to his death in a blizzard in search of a minister; an anguished young Jewish immigrant spends his first Passover in America alone among Gentiles, eating ritually unclean food in a Nebraska boarding house; a lonely Korean exile gazes at the trains rushing in and out of Grand Central Station and remembers the power and grace of his father‘s procession up the steps of a Confucian temple. These moments, taken from the novels of O.E. Rölvaag, Elias Tobenkin, and Younghill Kang, respectively, testify to the importance of religious ritual in the novels of immigrant writers. Again and again in these novels, the ritual moment serves as a special means of throwing the immigrant experience into high relief. Indeed, it becomes, as Werner Sollors says of American literature in general, the ―coded hieroglyph of ethnic group life in the past and ethnic tensions in the present‖ (Literature and Ethnicity 649). This dissertation will establish the significance of religious ritual in novels written by immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1939, and delineate the important spiritual, social, and political functions such ritual served by way of its special properties. I will argue that immigrant writers recognized the problematic nature of religious ritual in American life and used it as a powerful hieroglyph by which to comment upon the complex connection for the immigrant between the religious, the ethnic, and the political in the liminal space of America. 2 In 1988, religious historian Jay Dolan recognized the importance of immigrant religion for the study of American religious history, and called for the use of immigrant
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