Trauma and Event in Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts

Yıl 2022, Sayı: 57, 135 - 158, 14.06.2023

Sinem Yazıcıoğlu Yazıcıoğlu

Öz

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.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Anzia Yezierska, Short Story Cycle, American Short Story, Trauma, Event

Kaynakça

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