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

The history of the eugenics movement in the United States is strictly interwoven
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 improve
the genes of the American society. One of the results of the prevailing popularity
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 unhealthy
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 consideration
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.