The American Dream and Literary Propaganda: The Bread Givers

I did a literary analysis of "The Bread Givers" by Anzia Yezierska. Instead of innocent literary themes and colorful imagery, I found a lot of propaganda about the American Dream.

Here's a photograph from the Lower East Side of New York City, NY. This is where Sara, the main character, grew up.

She also calls the people who live in the suburbs “real Americans,” as if she and those who live in the city are “fake Americans” because they do not live in American suburbia.

Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers investigates the roles of men and women and draws on the differences between the wealthy and the poor when searching for the American Dream. The protagonist, Sara, whose family is poor and lives in New York City, is searching for the American Dream of comfortable living, independence, and education. On pages 209-213 of Bread Givers, Yezierska uses descriptive names, word choice, and pronouns, to depict Sara as an outsider in her college environment due to the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

Off to College

While leaving the poor, Lower East Side of New York City to attend her new college, Sara utilizes descriptive names to present herself as a foreigner traveling to a new land. Comparing herself to an explorer, she states she feels like “Columbus” when he journeys to the “New World” (Yezierska 209). This analogy indicates she is traveling from a foreign land and is seeing and experiencing a different way of life for the first time. Sara often refers to her home as “America” and calls her college environment the “New America” (Yezierska 210). “New America” is similar to the way explorers from Italy, Spain, and England would describe the modern-day United States upon arrival. By describing her new environment as “New America,” she further alienates herself in her college environment. She also calls the people who live in the suburbs “real Americans,” as if she and those who live in the city are “fake Americans” because they do not live in American suburbia (Yezierska 210). Differentiating between “real Americans” and people like herself drives the divide deeper between Sara, representing the poor, and her peers, representing the wealthy.

Additionally, Sara uses names to describe the lifestyle of the poor people from her home versus the lifestyle of the wealthier people in her college town. When comparing the nice, fancy clothes of her classmates to the clothes of the “rich” and “fancy” people from New York, she mentions New York’s “cheap, fancy style Five- and Ten-Cent Store finery” and the “Grand Street richness” to place emphasis on the gaudiness of the wealthy back home in comparison to the clean simplicity of the wealthy at her school (Yezierska 212). The difference between styles of wealth employs the concept of “old money” in Sara’s college town, where people do not need to show off their wealth, and “new money” in New York, where people flaunt the expensive things they buy to suggest they are better off than those around them. Sara also mentions “New York” three times until she starts finding wonder and excitement in the world around her, thus insinuating she does not fit in with her new environment. Once classes begin, Sara takes her seat in class next to a boy who “made [her] think of Morris Limpkin,” her first love (Yezierska 213). By reintroducing Limpkin and choosing a seat next to the boy, Sara reveals she is out of place because she is immediately attracted to the person who reminds her of home. Finally, the commonness and plainness surrounding the name of Sara’s professor, “Smith,” is an exemplification of American suburbia and those who live there (Yezierska 213). Sara utilizes names to admit and describe her foreignness due to the lifestyle gap between the wealthy and the poor.

Life at College

When Sara arrives at her small-town college from New York City, her worldview is expanded beyond the limitations of life in the city to American suburbia. New York City is crowded and the families who fight over “bread and rent,” like Sara’s, are poor (Yezierska 211). However, the “free space and sunshine” and people “not worn with hunger for things” in her new college environment exposes the contrast between her lifestyle in New York City and the lifestyle of those outside of cities (Yezierska 211). The culture shock led to various reactions of wonder and caused her to look at the life and people around her “with a million eyes” (Yezierska 213). Sara’s reaction gives the impression that she is bug-eyed and almost alien-like due to her wonder and excitement at the new life around her. Sara also feels the need to “drink it [the scenery, the beauty] in thirstily,” as if the environment around her is a form of sustenance she has thus far been deprived of in her life (Yezierska 211). Once she starts her classes, she begins referring to her classmates as “these children” and “creature[s] of sunshine” to further emphasize the differences between herself and the children of American suburbia (Yezierska 213). Because of Sara’s foreignness with the spacious, clean and comfortable lifestyle of her college environment, her reactions to the scenery and lives of people around her transform her into a social outcast.

Sara begins adjusting to her peers and continues to emphasize the divide between herself and her classmates through pronouns. Sara, as the narrator, always refers to herself in first- person, and frequently uses the pronoun “I” when talking about herself, such as when she says, “I looked,” “I thought,” and “I wondered” (Yezierska 212-213). Similarly, Sara uses the pronoun “my” when talking about her things, such as when she says, “my seat,” my food,” “my eyes,” “my ghetto years” (Yezierska 209-213). Sara only refers to herself and those around her with “we” one time, when she is hopeful of making friends (Yezierska 213). Yet this hope was met with “a sharp awakening” within her “first hour,” when her colleagues made it clear with their actions that they did not want to be friends with her (Yezierska 213). Sara’s interactions with her peers dissolved into a series of looking at “these children,” observing “their fingernails,” “their hands,” and attending classes “with them” (Yezierska 212-213). Because she is outcasted by the opposite lifestyle, Sara refers to the people in her college town with the pronouns, “they,” “their,” and “these,” rather than “we,” “ours,” or “the.” Her use of they/them/their/these pronouns ultimately creates an otherizing effect of the in-group, consisting of the college town natives, and the out-group, consisting of Sara and others like her, and further emphasizes her foreignness due to the difference in lifestyles caused by the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

Conclusion

Yezierska applies descriptive names, word choice, and pronouns to portray Sara’s contrast and foreignness in her small, wealthy college town. By frequently referencing events of past explorers and people and places from Sara’s life in New York, Yezierska reveals Sara’s foreignness because of the drastic lifestyle differences between the wealthy in American suburbia and the poor in New York. Yezierska’s word choices and phrasing create the image of Sara, full of wonder, excitement, and deprivation, being transformed into a social outcast as she tries to assimilate herself. Finally, Yezierska’s application of I/me/my and they/them/their/these pronouns seals the social and economic divide between Sara and her peers through in-groups, out-groups, and otherizing. Each of these rhetorical techniques serves to disclose and emphasize the social and economic divide Sara experiences in her college environment as a consequence of the gap between New York City’s poor lifestyle and American suburbia’s wealthy lifestyle.