English essay!

I don't think this is exactly concise enough, and this is due tomorrow morning. I keep thinking I'm missing something in what I need to say. The assignment is about how space affects identity in the novel, Bread Givers. I'd really appreciate some critique <3

Given a set of characteristics, it is easy to assume multitudes of ideas about a person, like familial background, interests, and even living conditions. People easily can look at someone well off – a celebrity or a man in an expensive suit – and imagine them living in a sizeable home, pretty and well lit with pale brick and two garages. A poor person, like Sara Smolinsky, the main character within the Anzia Yezierska novel, Bread Givers, would be crammed to fit either a crowded street with nothing but a shopping cart filled with trash, or a shoddy, one-bedroom apartment with too many bodies to hold. And, for Sara, the latter is true. Not until she is somewhere clean and nice does she feel like a fulfilled and stable person. Crammed into a tight hole of a house with her siblings, she has little room to herself and even less wealth or freedom compared to the others outside of the dim world around her. As she grows more and more aware of the world and the possibilities before her, she begins to hope for more – for a clean, empty place, for a place just of her own. In the same way others judge space by identity, Sara judges her identity by her space.

In the Smolinsky home on Hester Street, Sara has a loosely defined identity. Barely allowed to work by her mother and eventually having to possibly face marrying for familial benefit as her sisters have, she has little to call her own. The Smolinsky house is small, dirty, and cluttered with junk; organized with occasional leaps in prosperity that attempt to make it pretty. Like this house, Sara’s identity itself is unstable. Sara has stress of her own over the situation, but retains a sense of pride about herself despite her family’s shortcomings: “It used to be my work to go out early… and hunt through ash cans for unburned pieces of coal… But that morning, I had refused to do it any more. It made me feel like a beggar and a thief when anybody saw me” (Yezierska, 7). Even as a child, Sara is self-conscious about her image toward society, and impressed upon by her sisters’ roles. Their father hogs space that could be used to put the family at better ease for his religious studies. Her sister, Bessie, has no room to herself since she is always busy with work, and has settled into quietness and a life as the family’s mule. Mashah tries to beautify everything around her and relies on materialism and selfishness to cope with life, and has the most space out of all the sisters, with places to hang fine clothes and keep clean and new toothbrushes. Fania is more reserved and daydreaming, more concerned with love than money. Yet they all are reduced to lives that are impoverished, loveless, or both, packed into devoid homes that they had not anticipated. Sara does not want this fate for herself, and having grown up in a noisy, tightly-packed house with little room for all the objects and bodies inside, she thirsts for space of her own in the least. She desires more but is rendered unable to have it; she wants an education and a name and life of her own, but in this place where her family lies tightly together like basket straw, she can’t be her own person without taking them with her.

So she leaves, moving into one grey, dreary, dirty hole of a room that she sees as a lifesaver. She is desperate to have it, and to be alone. At first, she is happy about this, claiming, “This door was life. It was air. The bottom starting-point of becoming a person” (159). Her room liberates her from the lack of freedom to pursue her own goals and inevitable sinking under her family’s weight. Soon with this room comes an identity as someone who is always alone. Her insecurities from her younger years begin to creep in on her, revived by her job in the Laundromat and her living conditions, and she begins to think: “I glanced at the boiling pot . . . . I don’t have to share it with anyone . . . . That’s what made it so hateful… Even in our worst poverty we sat around the table, together, like people” (173). She begins to feel lonely and separated from others, because she is alone in her room without company and she is unused to this, as much as she initially wished for it. As much as she tries to break away from her culture, she still grew up within it, and it is still a part of her as America is. Her grey, dingy room divides her from the rest of the world, like one large, dim bubble; and it soon turns into this. The freedom she so longed for in time morphs into a prison, and she longs for family and companionship. To cope, she buries herself into her studies so she can become a person within the world and eventually assimilate better within it.

But when she moves on to college, it fares no better for her. Thinking she has made it to some degree, she tries to fit in with the students around her and fails. She remarks, “Sitting side by side with them through the whole hour, I felt stranger to them than if I had passed them in Hester Street” (214). This only serves to feed her insecurities, making them bloated and fat; how can she be part of the world when it will barely acknowledge her? She only begins to feel more connected to others once she encounters the kindly Professor Edman, who embraces her eagerness to learn. This stirs her hunger for recognition so much that she ultimately seeks to become closer to Mr. Edman, moving into the same apartment as him. She claims, “But even if I had to starve, I had to rent that room. What matter if my body starved as long as my soul would be fed” (227). Sara is so desperate for companionship and validation from other people that she is more than willing to cling to any bit of it that she can get. By any standard, her behavior is desperate and depraved, because she knows little of this man other than that he is her teacher; and, as her teacher, he is supposed to support her learning. She has not gotten this type of validation anywhere else she has been – not on Hester Street, and not in her grimy, grey-mucked room – and so her identity worms itself around college and anyone who will embrace her attempts to better herself because this is all she has to hope for. Space also includes the people within it, the people who the occupant accepts inside, and Sara rushes to fit Mr. Edman into her confines, or herself into his.

Sara finally manages to blossom out of her desperation when she comes into her own place, with enough money under her belt to live comfortably and stably for quite a while. Interestingly, instead of rushing to get a room as she had before as soon as she arrived somewhere new, she dresses herself up first before finding her room. Her reasons stem simply from her suddenly becoming “Sara Smolinksy, from Hester Street, changed into a person” (237). She is still a person even without a space, just by her new appearance, her education and financial security. And when she does go after finding a room, it is a “sunny, airy room” that gives her “a triumphant sense of power” (240-241). Compared to the greyed, dusky, cramped places she started in, where she was miserable and lonesome, this new room is different. The room does not define her. She defines the room. She controls what goes in and comes out, how clean it is, how simple or complicated. For the first time in her life, she is able to make choices and do things her own way with no one’s supervision. Like her sunny, air room, she is happy and clean of worry.

So what will happen to her space, and thus her identity once her ailing father moves in, as presented at the open ending of the novel? How will he affect either of the two? Given his baggage and his ideals that caused the lapse in her identity in the first place, he may very well sully her space in the least, but perhaps not her identity, if she’s moved beyond needing space to validate herself. Throughout the novel, she matures from a desperate, desolate person into a fulfilled and confident one; and something so life-changing as her father moving in may very well not be able to shatter her stability since she’s strengthened so considerably. She was able to forgive her father for his deeds throughout her childhood, and is already putting what scarring was left behind her by taking him in when he needs her. So, since her identity has moved beyond her space, he can clutter her room, but he cannot clutter her sense of self as easily.