Trauma and Event in Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts
Abstract
Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts (1920) is a collection of short
stories set in New York City’s Lower East Side district and portrays
Jewish working class women as they experience the problems of urban
poverty and immigration as trauma. This article analyzes Hungry
Hearts as a short story cycle in light of trauma theories and argues that
Yezierska’s protagonists suffer from what Maria Root calls “insidious
trauma”. Therefore, it holds that the dialectic of fragmentation and
cohesion in the short story cycle form conflates with the insidious trauma
of Yezierska’s protagonists. From this perspective, the article claims
that the narrative logic of Yezierska’s work illustrates the inevitable
continuity of insidious trauma because the stories follow a sequence
of gradually aging protagonists. However, Yezierska also offers an
alternative by creating two evental moments of intergenerational
interaction in her last two stories. Drawing from Alain Badiou’s
concept of the “event” and Dominick LaCapra’s trauma theory, this
article argues that such moments function as departures from the initial
narrative logic and let the characters reformulate their futures.
Keywords
Anzia Yezierska, Short Story Cycle, American Short Story, Trauma, Event
References
- Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Continuum, 2009.
- ---. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Verso, 2002.
- Batker, Carol. “Literary Reformers: Crossing Class and Ethnic Boundaries in Jewish Women’s Fiction of the 1920s.” MELUS, vol. 25, no.1, Spring 2000, pp. 81-104.
- Bistoen, Gregory; Stijn Vanheule; Stef Craps. “Badiou’s Theory of the Event and the Politics of Trauma Recovery.” Theory & Psychology, vol.24, no.6, 2014, pp. 830-851.
- Brown, Laura S. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 100-112.
- Campos Ferraras, Rebeca. “Whitening Domestic Spaces: Enacting Female Roles in Anzia Yezierska’s The Lost Beautifulness.” The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies, vol.26, 2019, pp. 9-26.
- Caruth, Cathy. Introduction. Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 3-12.
- Trauma and Event in Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts 156 Craps, Stef and Gert Buelens. “Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels.” Studies in the Novel, Vol. 40, no.1&2, 2008, pp. 1-12.
- Di Nicola, Vincenzo and Drozdstoj Stoyanov. Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience. Springer, 2021.
- Dunn, Maggie and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Twayne, 1995.