Anzia Yezierska: Symptoms of Depression
Critical Analysis Paper

        Much of Anzia Yezierska’s work has a large degree of autobiographical element to it. One of the prominent details in her stories are relationship problems stemming from psychological issues. This is seen in Yezierska’s main characters, who are actually extensions of the author herself, along with biographical information from her life. Most of the main characters in Yezierska’s autobiographical fiction exhibit all the symptoms of clinical depression. According to the standard handbook of mental disorders, known as DSM-IV, Yezierska’s character match several of the criteria for “Major Depressive Episodes.”
        The first few lines said by Shenah Pessah, the main character in “Wings” (3-4), match several of the criteria set forth.
        “My heart chokes in me like a prison! I’m dying for a little love and I got nobody- nobody!...But why should they live and enjoy life and why must I only look on how they are happy?... [ said to herself] What is the matter with you? Are you going out of your head? For what is your crying? Who will listen to you? Who gives a care what’s going to become from you?”
        According to the DSM-IV, Shenah is suffering a “Major Depressive Episode” because she is in “a depressed mood most of the day,... as indicated by either subjective report (e.g. feels sad or empty)” and shows a “markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities, most of the day.” She also exhibits “feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt... nearly every day” and has a “diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness.” (327). It is not only Shenah in “Wings” but many of the other characters in Yezierska’s autobiographical fiction that says such things. It is due to this recurrent theme that leads one to believe that it is Yezierska who is suffering from depression.
        Yezierska’s infusion of her characters with elements of her own self was clearly noticed by her reviewers. As Frank Crane wrote in a newspaper article, “she dipped her pen in her heart.” (Schoen, 36). Clearly she wrote from the heart, sometimes drawing criticism on her overly sentimental stories. Yezierska recognized this in herself, explaining through a proxy in one of her later novels, “I only want to take the hurt out of my heart when I write.” (Red Ribbon 61).
        Most of her stories deal with the lives of a Jewish Immigrant women, which is exactly what Yezierska is. Though fact and fiction are intermingled in her works, sometimes it is very difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, as Schoen says. “[I]n many cases her identification with her leading lady was so strong that the sense of autorial detachment is lacking.” (16).
        The significance of a diagnosis of major depression in Yezierska’s characters, and by extension, Yezierska herself, is in the fact that the symptoms of depression will affect social functions. As indicated by the DSM-IV criteria, “The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” (327).
        A review of Yezierska’s life would show that her significant problems were regarding relationships. One of the most prominent relationships that she often put into her work was that of with John Dewey, a prominent scholar and philosopher at the time. The characters patterned after Dewey were given different names and different occupations, but the one constant has always been the budding romance between the educated, upper-class American non-Jew, and a Jewish woman from the ghetto.
        In most of those stories, the “Dewey” character was seen by the main character as her salvation, her way out of her current environment. The “Dewey” character was almost God-like, as seen in melodramatic prose such as, “The god of dreams had arrived and nothing on earth could any longer hold her down.” (“Wings,” 7). The attribution of divine qualities to the “Dewey” character almost certainly carried over to the real John Dewey.
        This is seen by the dysfunction in the sexual component to her real-life relationship with Dewey. Shenah Pessah, the main character in “Wings,” pauses to ask herself, “am I too low to love him?” (7). Rejection of the “Dewey” character is inevitable, typically explained by through divine/mortal allusions. In Red Ribbon on a White Horse, the main character says as she rejects the “Dewey” character, “I had not dreamed that God could become flesh” (113).
        The relationship with the “Dewey” character is paradoxical, for elsewhere, both in her novels and Yezierska’s own life, female independence was a recurring theme. In Jewish life during her time, women were viewed as second-class citizens, primarily by Jewish men. This also extended to the Jewish women who grew up steeped in Jewish tradition. Part of Yezierska’s drive to assimilate into American life comes with the rejection of Jewish tradition: not marrying, living on her own, becoming an educated writer. Yet, in a number of her stories, the main character is driven by a desire to be married with a man, usually a Gentile, for that would be a sure way to leave her tenement life. As Rachel Ravinsky tells herself, “Only a man’s love can save me and make me human again.” (How I Found America, 187).
        The confusion in what Yezierska wrote and what she supposedly believed in cannot be only with the reader. Yezierska herself must have been unsure of her beliefs, “for Yezierska’s own struggle and personality are mirrored in the fictional woman.” (Schoen, 17).
        Yezierska’s rejection of Dewey, both in life and autobiographical fiction, wasn’t solely based on his ‘divine’ status. Barely hinted in her stories, but clearly seen is the parallel between John Dewey and Yezierska’s own father, Bernard Yezierska. Dewey and Bernard shared common traits. Both were scholars and both were significantly older than Yezierska, and both demonstrated a cold rationalism that counteracted Yezierska’s fiery spirit. A “Dewey” character highlighted this contrast, saying “My life has been an evasion of life. I substituted reason for emotion...Without you [the narrator and main character] I’m the dry dust of hopes unrealized-- You are fire, water, sunshine and desire” (Red Ribbon 111-112).
        Henry Scott, of “All I Could Never Be”, is another “Dewey” character, and Yezierska explicitly draws a parallel between Dewey and her own father in the story. She wrote “there was that unworldly look about Henry Scott’s eyes that made her feel her father” (36).
        Now the continual rejection of the “Dewey” characters gain another psychological basis, in the infamous “Medea” connection Sigmund Freud proposed. As with Freud’s Oedipus Complex theory, the initiation of a romantic relationship with a parental figure arises from the subconscious.
        The actual consummation of such a relationship would be considered taboo, as Yezierska’s daughter, Louise Henriksen, suggested in an interview, “it [a sexual relationship with Dewey] was also to her as unthinkable as incest.”
        Aside from the parallels with “Dewey” characters, Yezierska’s father also shows up more directly in her autobiographical fiction, often times as a tyrannical Jewish patriarch. In “Wings,” the father figure is Shenah’s Uncle, who demands that she remain with him to help maintain his household. Yezierska’s father required that of his family as well, since as a Talmudic scholar, he was exempt from working and running the household.
        Yezierska’s own relationship with her father is most closely drawn in Bread Givers. “Yezierska recreated the lives of her large family” (Shapiro), down to the fact that the father, Reb Smolinsky was also a Talmudic scholar. The youngest daughter in the family, Sara, becomes enraged as she sees her older sisters pushed into marriages with Jewish men. Reb also continually disparaged his daughters, “remembering the littlest fault of each” of his daughters (Bread Givers, 65). Sara develops a brief infatuation with a young teacher, but he is rejected because he lacked the “ripened understanding that older men could give” (Bread Givers, 231), which goes back to the desire for a father figure.
        Schoen sees the clear psychological underpinnings in Breadgivers in her critical impressions. “Sara’s struggles to make her own way are understandable here as they were not in Yezierska’s previous fictions, for the rage against the father provides a psychological basis that on one hand supplies the incredible energy and fixedness that marks her progress, but on the other hand also accentuates the peculiar childishness of many of her actions” (Schoen, 71). While one may argue that Sara may simply be a fictional construct, one that does not come out of Yezierska, Schoen refutes that later in the same critical analysis as she writes, “when the main character became a woman, Yezierska’s need to justify her own life forced her to identify too closely with the fictional self” (Schoen, 75).
        Yezierska herself is known for having a series of nervous breakdowns. In 1930, she was admitted into the New England Sanitarium and Hospital, after the dissolution of a friendship with Zona Gale. “The pattern of their relationship suggests that the inevitable occurred: Yezierska invested too much in her hope that Gale could ‘save’ her, and Gale could not live up to her expectations” (Dearborn, 153).
        Yezierska describes herself two years later, in a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “I came here [to Arlington, Vermont] a wreck in mind and body, unable to sleep, unable to digest the simplest food.”
        Again, this statement matches the DSM-IV criteria for depression in terms of a “decrease... in appetite” and “insomnia” (327). Again, she drove her friends away, and reviewers turned against her, tired of her repetitive plots. “[T]he vitality and fervor [in her stories] revealed themselves as no more than neurotic desperation. Her fascination with the gulf separating the immigrant from native-born America turned into an obsession” (Dearborn, 158).
        Yezierska’s relationship problems cannot be attributed solely to her relationship with her father and her failed romance with John Dewey. One would be remiss to overlook Yezierska’s Jewish identity when looking at her mental health.
        Psychological research has been done with Jewish people, focusing on their Jewish identity as a major factor. The research yields results that can help in the analysis of Yezierska and her Jewish main characters. “A study by Fernando (1975) found that depressed Jews were less religious than nondepressed Jews. Sarnoff (1951) found that Jews who are high on internalized antisemitism tend to be ‘insecure, chronically anxious individuals’ (p. 214)” (Langman, 655).
        Yezierska’s characters rarely show much religiosity in her stories, ostensibly as a rejection of old traditions in the pursuit of assimilation. The research cited above adds a different nuance to the absence of religion, lending further credence to the idea that Yezierska’s non-religious Jews were depressed. Yezierska herself did not adhere to her Jewish faith. “[S]he had developed an enduring interest in Christian Science...She dabbled in all manners of mystical sidelines, attending the lectures of Krishnamurti, for instance, and reading and re-reading such spiritualist favorites as The Little Locksmith and Charles Morgan’s The Fountain” (Dearborn 153).
        Being Jewish does not necessitate following the Jewish faith, so one cannot say Yezierska was not Jewish. She was raised in the Jewish culture and the traits of Jews were infused within her. So Yezierska still is a Jew so psychological research on Jews still applies to her. For instance, in further research, by Sanua (1992), “Jews, however, tend to have higher rates of neuroses such as mood and anxiety disorders [compared to non-Jews]... manic-depressive psychosis is more common in Jews.” This only supports the likelihood of Yezierska having psychological problems.
        Aside from her nervous breakdowns and her admittance to a sanitarium, Yezierska traveled to Europe once in 1923, intending to visit with Havelock Ellis, as told to Ferris Greenslet in a letter. Ellis was a renowned expert on abnormal sexuality. Whether they met or not is not known. This could be construed as Yezierska’s implicit acceptance of her emotional and mental issues.
        In the final analysis of Yezierska’s autobiographical fiction and the facts about her life, it is clear that Yezierska at the very least, is suffering from severe depression, which greatly affected her ability to form and maintain relationships. Her characters showed this, since they were an extension of herself.

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