An Analysis Of Jewish Women's Cultural Identity In Bread Givers

Based on Stuart Hall's Cultural Identity and Diaspora and Spatial Criticism,mainly Mike Crang's Cultural Geography,this thesis aims to explore Mashah and Sara Smolinsky's cultural identity evolution in different spaces in Anzia Yezierska's masterpiece Bread Givers.Hall upholds that cultural identity are flexible with their diasporic experiences and Crang proposes that space infused with cultural and social connotations influences people's thoughts and behavior.By analyzing their different pursuits of cultural identity and their spatial experiences in and out of the Jewish community,especially Sara's moving from Jewish family to the college town and then back to the Jewish ghetto,this essay concludes that Jewish women need to draw on the two often conflicting cultures to strive for their own space and the JewishAmerican identity.Apart from the introduction,the main body of this thesis is divided into three parts.The first chapter focuses on the identity crisis in the family caused by the value clashes: Mashah's American individualist values versus Mother's Jewish collectivistic ideas and Sara's feminist awareness versus Father's patriarchal power.The two choose to escape from home through marriage or education,yet the results diverge.The second chapter illustrates Sara's failed quest for American identity in the college town and the final arousal of her Jewish consciousness.The third chapter deals with her irreconcilable cultural identity and cultural conflicts back in the Jewish community after regaining a sense of belonging.In a nutshell,Mashah's and Sara's cultural identity constructions are hard with the oppression and discrimination from the male-dominated Jewish world and the unacceptance and rootlessness from the American world.