Immigrant Bodies and the Politics of Eugenics in Selected Literary Works Written by Contemporary Polish American Authors
Immigrant Bodies and the Politics of Eugenics in Selected Literary Works Written by Contemporary Polish American Authors

Summary/Abstract: The history of the eugenics movement in the United States is strictly inter- woven with the processes of immigration, assimilation and naturalization. Well known are the attempts of American eugenicists (described widely by Alexandra Minna Stern in Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, published in 2005), who combined the Manifest Destiny doctrines of the 1840s with the twentieth century medical and scientific vocabulary in order to im- prove the genes of the American society. One of the results of the prevailing popu- larity of the principles voiced by the followers of the movement, who belonged to the country’s dominant group, was the introduction of strict immigration laws between 1891 and 1924. The eugenicists’ preoccupation and obsession with un- healthy and physically inferior immigrant bodies, which needed to be ‘reshaped’ and ‘purified’ in order to be Americanized, was especially prominent in the literary works of American ethnic writers (Anzia Yezierska, Mary Gordon), who published their short stories and novels at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the discomfort with the immigrant embodied selves also permeates the literary worlds of some of the contemporary Polish American authors. Taking into consid- eration the fact that literary immigrant bodies may be perceived as “repositories of [the newcomers’] cultures [and] serve as the microcosms of the homelands they left behind,”62 the main aim of the present article is to shed some light upon the images of the immigrant bodies in selected works of American authors of Polish descent.

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