Breaking the Law: Abjection and Assimilation in Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers
In Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers, the law of the father, as represented by Reb Smolinski and by the Jewish law, dominates the women of the novel and the system in which the text operates. Despite Sara's transgressions of rejecting her father's law, home, and lifestyle, she can be seen as being assumed back into the symbolic order of the father through her supposed acceptance of him into her future home with her husband, Hugo. By looking at this process of Sara's transgression and reassumption again in light of the theories on abjection that Julia Kristeva proposes in Powers of Horror and the ways in which this process of abjection is demonstrated not only in the text but by the text itself, we can see that it is not only the system in which the text operates, but which the text eventually affirms.
According to Kristeva, the abject (or "the stray" [Kristeva 8]) is created and sustained by the boundaries....
To request the entire article, please email dickinsr@colorado.edu.