紀要論文

紀要論文

text

言語文化研究. 2010, 36, p. 85-102

日本語

text

2010-03

【言語文化専攻編】

This study is an attempt to unravel social messages in Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), the first English novel by the Jewish writer Abraham Cahan. In opposition to the prevailing ideas of total assimilation, Cahan proposed to view immigrants from the Old World as a heterogeneous“ hodgepodge.” The novel’s working-class protagonist changes his name from the Jewish“ Yekl” to“ Jake” and boasts of having become a real“ Yankee.” However, Jake’s failure becomes apparent when we focus on the clumsy way in which he handles the English language as well as his excessive self-consciousness and pre-occupation with being a male. For Jake, acquiring manhood is the shortest and surest way to becoming an American. Ironically enough, such thinking prevents the renewal of his self because it only bolsters the old, patriarchal ways of thinking that had been part of him from his days in Russia. Thus, by recounting Jake’s miserable life with his newly-arrived Jewish wife Gitl, a marriage that ends eventually in divorce, Cahan suggests the impossibility of the assimilation of the Jewish people. Nevertheless, we should remember that the author portrays immigration in a positive light as well by depicting Gitl’s remarriage with a modest Jewish worker who cannot adapt to the gender standards of either Russia or America. Through such endings, Cahan most eloquently expressed his progressive stance in terms of gender and ethnicity.

10.18910/7241

application/pdf

日本語

2010-03

36

85

102

https://hdl.handle.net/11094/7241

10.18910/7241

https://doi.org/10.18910/7241