The Promised Land of Evolution in Mary Antin’s Autobiography

• In Event: Gender and Genre: Power and Proscriptivism of Form in Modern Jewish Poetry and Prose

Abstract

It is widely understood that the title of Mary Antin’s 1912 autobiography, The Promised Land refers to the United States, and thus makes a clear statement in favor of Americanziation. It is just as remarkable, though, that Antin grants the title, “promised land,” one more time at the end of the text—to Darwin's theory of evolution. In this paper I will examine the role that Evolutionism plays in Antin’s autobiographic narrative of a Jewish immigrant. I will argue that Darwinism limns a particular narrative model for immigration and Americanization that complicates the starkly pro-assimilation message commonly taken away from Antin’s autobiography.

To further illuminate this phenomenon, I will consider a foil: Abraham Cahan’s mock immigrant autobiography, The Rise of David Levinsky, which was published within several years of Antin’s Promised Land, and also engages explicitly with theories of evolution. The juxtaposition will help to articulate the significance of gender in the interplay of genre and biological knowledge in Antin’s autobiography. I will give specific attention to how gender determines access to, or acceptance of, biology, a form of knowledge that is particularly concerned with the body. I will also consider the logical tensions of applying a biological theory of evolution, which pertains to species-wide development, within an autobiography, a literary form dedicated to telling the story of an individual life. This paper builds off of scholarship on gender in Jewish American immigrant fiction by emphasizing biological knowledge within these texts as a site to explore and articulate new questions about gendered authority and genre in these works.

Author

• Dory Amalia Fox, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor