Family Matters in Greek American Literature - CiteSeerX

Vicky Johnson Gatzouras

Family Matters in Greek American Literature

Doctoral Dissertation

to be publicly discussed in English at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Campus Gräsvik, Room 3248, on February 9 at 10:15,

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Blekinge Institute of Technology School of Technoculture, Humanities and Planning

and Göteborg University

Department of English 2007

i

© 2007 Vicky Johnson Gatzouras Printed by Kaserntryckeriet AB Karlskrona, January 2007 Sweden

For my parents, Georgios and Giannoula,

and my son, Wiktor Georgios

Abstract Gatzouras, Vicky Johnson. Family Matters in Greek American Literature. Blekinge Institute of Technology, School of Technoculture, Humanities and Planning, and Göteborg University, Department of English. February 2007. This study explores the function of family in mediating ethnic identity in five literary texts by American writers of Greek descent: Ariadne Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart (1956), Daphne Athas’s Greece by Prejudice (1962), Elias Kulukundis’s The Feasts of Memory (1967), Nicholas Papandreou’s A Crowded Heart (1996), and Catherine Temma Davidson’s The Priest Fainted (1998). All texts, ranging from fiction to memoir to autobiography, can be seen as examples of the ethnic Bildungsroman that feature the dynamic processes of ethnic self-definition, processes that are also marked by gender issues.

To analyze the complex processes through which family matters shape and influence ethnic identity formation, I specifically refer to the works of Paula M. L. Moya and Satya P. Mohanty. What is most crucial to my discussion of the literary texts is their claim that experience has a cognitive and theoretical component. Their theory of identity formation underscores the possibilities of individual and social agency that I find useful in examining literary representations of Greek American ethnicity.

Family, in its various configurations in the Greek American texts examined in this study, plays a prominent role in the negotiation between the different subject positions that hyphenated individuals occupy. The texts sometimes affirm and sometimes contest the idea that ethnic family promotes individual strength and fosters an ethnic consciousness in the narrators. The protagonists re-claim and/or re-invent their ethnic identities through physical and cognitive journeys to ancestral homes, through re-visions of myths about family and Greece, as well as through re-working of classical Greek myths. In analyzing the emotional and cognitive efforts of the protagonists in constructing an identity through family, this study’s ambition is to contribute to scholarship on family matters in Greek American literature.

Keywords: Greek American literature, ethnic identity, family, ethnic Bildungsroman, gendered identity, experience, social location, journey, myth, politics.

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface ..............................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Greek American Literary Studies: Terms and Contexts............................7

What Is Ethnic Writing?..........................................................................................................7 Greek American Literature and Scholarship......................................................................13 Greek American Studies and Narratives about Greek Americans.................................18 Ethnic Bildungsroman ...............................................................................................................27 Ethnic Authority, Authoring Identities ..............................................................................30

Chapter Two: Grounding Ethnic Identity ..........................................................................37

Theories of Identity................................................................................................................37 Theories of Ethnicity: Perspectives in Anthropology, Sociology, and Literature .......44 Forms of Descent and Consent: New Ethnicity, Symbolic Ethnicity...........................49 Ethnicity and Nationalism ....................................................................................................59 The Family: A Site of Ethnic Identity Formation.............................................................63 The Case of Greek American Family..................................................................................69

Chapter Three: Family and Imaginary Ethnic Homelands in Greece by Prejudice and The Feasts of Memory...................................................................................77

Traveler and Returner, Tourist and “Comer-home”........................................................82 Unearthing Lost Stories.........................................................................................................98

Chapter Four: Family, Greek Myths, and Female Gender Identity in The Octagonal Heart and The Priest Fainted ................................................................................. 115

Family, Myth, and the Mediation of Knowledge ........................................................... 121 Re-visioning Familial Bonds, Re-mything Ancient Stories .......................................... 138

Chapter Five: Family, Politics, and Male Gender Identity in Papandreou’s A Crowded Heart .................................................................................................. 157

Becoming Ethnic through Family Relations................................................................... 163 Learning about Masculinity from Family and Cultural Practices ................................ 170 Masculine Politics and Political Family............................................................................ 178

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 187 Bibliography............................................................................................................................... 201

Acknowledgments The generous support and encouragement of many individuals has been crucial for the completion of this dissertation.

My work on this project has, from its very conception, depended on my supervisor, Professor Danuta Fjellestad, her knowledge, intellectual guidance, and support. Along the way, Professor Fjellestad has provided astute criticism and insightful comments on my drafts that have challenged and helped me form my critical thinking. I am equally thankful to Dr. Elizabeth Kella, my assistant supervisor, for her thorough readings, perceptive criticism, and always encouraging responses to my work. Her inquiries into this project directed my attention to family matters and contributed greatly to shaping this study of Greek American Literature.

I wish to express my sincerest thanks to Professor Karin Hansson and Dr. Keith Comer, whose inspiring teaching and enthusiasm made me want to continue studying literature in the first place. I wish especially to thank them for showing great belief in me and for encouraging me to enter the Ph.D. program.

I am indebted to external readers who carefully read and offered instructive comments. I would like to thank Docent Satu Gröndahl, who acted as a discussant of the entire manuscript and provided sound criticism. I owe special thanks to Professor Orm Øverland, whose perceptive criticism on my theoretical chapters led to many clarifications and last-minute revisions. I would also like to acknowledge the useful advice on individual chapters provided by Dr. Lena Karlsson and Dr. Florina Tufescu. Finally, I send my grateful thoughts to Professor Yiorgos Anagnostu, who has kindly read and responded to portions of the text. I have greatly benefited from Professor Anagnostu’s expertise as concerns new material and research on Greek America.

I am also indebted to the past and present colleagues and participants in the graduate seminars at Blekinge Institute of Technology who have read my work in progress and generously given their advice: Dr. Peter Forsgren, Dr. Michael Davis, Dr. Per Sivefors, Dr. Jakob Winnberg, Dr. Jane Mattisson, and Ingrid Nilsson. They all deserve many thanks. I would also like to warmly acknowledge the presence, insights, and encouragement of Gösta Viberg, Dr. Anna Forsberg-Malm, and Dr. Lissa Holloway-Attaway.

Dr. Åse Nygren, Inger Pettersson, Cecilia Lindhé, Dr. Jessica Enevold, Ulrica Skagert, Maria Engberg, Dr. Maria Estling-Vannestål, and (more recently) Maria Bäcke have been the best kind of doctoral co-fellows and the dearest of friends, excellent critics, and incessant sources of intellectual inspiration and emotional support. Another dear friend who has meant very much to me and to this project is Anna Svensson. I am very fortunate to be part of your spirited company, and extremely grateful to all of you for the ways in which you have nurtured me both personally and professionally throughout the years.

A debt of gratitude is due to Pamela Marston for her excellent language editing of the manuscript. Special thanks go to Frederick Young who, under stressful conditions, kindly took on the work to read my conclusion and suggested language improvements.

I would also like to express my deep appreciation to Ulrika Nilsson, Pelle Gunnarsson, Annacarin Jendland, and Teri Schamp-Bjerede for invaluable administrative and technical assistance, as well as for hearty conversations in the department’s coffee room. The excellent library staff at Blekinge Institute of Technology deserves a special mention. Without their generous help and expertise it would not have been possible to carry out parts of my research.

Numerous people abroad have taken the time to meet with me and guide me through the field of Greek American studies and literary scholarship. I wish to thank Professor Yiorgos Kalogeras at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Professor Karen Van Dyke at Columbia University, Professor Dimitri Gondicas and Professor Edmund Keeley at Princeton University,

and Dr. Martha Klironomos at San Francisco State University, who all provided valuable recommendations at an early stage of my work.

I gratefully acknowledge a grant from the Sweden-America Foundation that enabled me to spend the academic year of 2001-2002 as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Davis. I would like to thank the Cultural Studies Graduate group and the faculty affiliated with the program for their warm welcome and stimulating seminars and discussions. Many of the friendships I formed while I was in Davis, I cherish still today.

I have often been asked if research on ethnic identity also implies “researching myself” and my experiences as a child of Greek immigrants in Sweden. Though I have tried to avoid such identifications in my work, this thesis project on ethnic identity as mediated through family is undeniably also shaped by personal experience. The most personal debts therefore go to my parents, Giannoula and Georgios Gatzouras, who imparted in me, early in life, a strong sense of ethnic identity. My sisters Maria and Nickie Gatzouras deserve innumerable thanks for love, encouragement, and great fun. Other family members that I am indebted to are my in-laws Alva and Bernth Johnson, who have provided support in all conceivable ways throughout the years.

At last, I express my inmost sense of gratitude to the two people closest to me: Thank you, Henric, for your unfailing support and love. And, Wiktor, thank you for all the sweet hugs and kisses that warm my soul. I dedicate this thesis to you and to my parents. It is my hope that you, Wiktor, will come to nurture and take pride in the Greekness of your family. December 2006 Vicky Johnson Gatzouras

Preface Literature is a powerful force in the creation and circulation of images of ethnic identities. It is

also an ideal site from which to explore the cultural, social, and historical variables that influence

the development of individual identity. Such an exploration is central to the five ethnic identity

narratives investigated in this study. All five texts probe how family matters in the process of

ethnic and gender identity formation. In my analyses of Ariadne Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart

(1956), Daphne Athas’s Greece by Prejudice (1962), Elias Kulukundis’s The Feasts of Memory (1967),

Catherine Temma Davidson’s The Priest Fainted (1998), and Nicholas Papandreou’s A Crowded

Heart (1998), as well as in my concluding remarks on a sixth text, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex

(2002), I argue that family functions as an intrinsic but highly complex site of ethnic self-

identification for the “hyphenated” narrators, that is, protagonists of bi- or multiethnic origins.

Referring to the narrators as Greek Americans (they are American-born or American-raised but

of Greek descent), I investigate their efforts at self-definition as well as their experiences of

coming to terms with Greek American identity as represented in the texts. Cognitive theories of

cultural identity and identity formation, ethnicity, and family make up the framework of my

analyses of fictional representations of ethnic identity formation. The descriptive marker “Greek

American” is meant to stress the texts’ thematic concerns with ethnic identity as stemming from

the American-born or American–raised authors’ Greek descent. However, as I will show in what

follows, a consent to see oneself as ethnically Greek is as important as one’s biological descent.

Indeed, the literary texts I study here focus on the complex processes of descent and consent in

shaping what is called Greek American ethnic identity.1 Given this, “Greekness” and

“Americanness” in this dissertation are understood not as given and absolute entities but as

notions whose contents are subject to change.

The Greek American literary texts considered here, all first-person narratives and all

ethnic Bildungsromans, present the formation of ethnic identities as a dynamic and self-conscious

process. This process is largely mediated through interactions with family—with family

structures and family dynamics. The texts’ explorations of the possibilities and limitations of

family in nurturing individual development and fostering ethnic consciousness emphasize the

complexity of identity formation. Family—whether immediate or extended, Greek American or

1 The terms “consent” and “descent” are introduced by Werner Sollors in his attempt to “approach and

question the whole maze of American ethnicity and culture” (Beyond Ethnicity 6). “Descent language,” Sollors explains, “emphasizes our positions as heirs, our hereditary qualities, liabilities, and entitlements; consent language stresses our abilities as mature free agents and ‘architects of our fates’ to choose our spouses, our destinies, and our political systems” (6).

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Greek—provides a rich site of identity construction, but also constitutes a site for a range of

contradictory human feelings. Ethnic identity is experienced by the narrators as, in turn,

enriching (distinguished by joy, pride, and comfort) and painful (characterized by anger,

disappointment, and feelings of confinement).

While the texts contribute to literary representations of family as a site that dynamically

mediates the ethnic, they do so through returns to the ethnic past. These returns are fictionalized

through two key themes/motifs that have come to function as organizing topics for the analyses

in this study. One motif commonly used in Greek American writing is the journey (back) to

retrace ethnic and familial roots in an ancestral homeland. The journey to ethnic homelands

figures, in various but significant ways, in four texts examined in this study: Greece by Prejudice, The

Feasts of Memory, A Crowded Heart, and The Priest Fainted. Another familiar theme in Greek

American literature is the use of classical Greek myths. Both The Octagonal Heart and The Priest

Fainted evoke myths, although in different ways, to mediate knowledge about the ethnic past. In

Middlesex, the return to the ethnic past is metaphorically carried out through the narrative act of

tracing the main protagonist’s chromosomal defect, through three generations, back to ancestral

homelands.

Constructions of Greek American identity have recently met with an increased popular

and critical interest. Two recent events brought the existence of Greek American ethnicity and

culture to the attention of audiences in Sweden and other countries. The first was the release of

the independent film My Big Fat Greek Wedding in 2002. The explosive popularity of Nia

Vardalos’s movie has made the marketability of ethnicity salient. The movie has been both

heralded as an ethnic breakthrough and heavily critiqued for the many clichés it presents in

concerning ethnic Americans, specifically Greek Americans.2 And yet, before My Big Fat Greek

Wedding, no film in American cinematic history had attracted so much interest in representations

of Greek American families and ethnicity.3 The semi-autobiographical story of Toula Portokalos,

2 The New York Times movie reviewer Dave Kehr describes My Big Fat Greek Wedding as “an amiable,

offhanded comedy about ethnic identity and last-chance romance” (23), and Dan Georgakas, who labels My Big Fat Greek Wedding an “ethnic” film, believes its great success is a result of “the cultural vacuum created by the dearth of Hollywood films about European immigrants and their immediate offspring” (“My Big Fat Greek Gripes” 36). It should also be noted that the film has not only generated applause but also criticism. Some reviewers and critics, understandably, point to the clichés about Mediterranean cultures that the movie heaps on its characters, and to its quaint portrayals of intercultural marriages, arguing that this comedy is “far too shallow to reflect the richness of either culture” (Byfield 37). Georgakas writes that the Greek American characters in the film “are at best fifty years out of date” (37), informing the reader that outmarriage, for example, is actually today “the cultural norm as more than seventy percent of all Greek Americans outmarry” (“My Big Fat Greek Gripes” 37).

3 Earlier films like Never on Sunday (1960) and Zorba the Greek (1964) introduced Greece and the Greeks to the American movie-going public (depictions of Greece which, as many have argued, are undoubtedly mythical but nevertheless became such “cultural blockbuster[s]” that non-Greeks “flocked to Greektowns to hear bouzouki, break dishes, and eat Greek food” (Georgakas, “The Greeks in America” 19). Hollywood films which feature American characters of Greek descent include Destination Tokyo (1943), The Glory Brigade (1953), and City Hall (1995). A Dream

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the unmarried daughter of Greek immigrant parents living in Chicago who falls in love with the

non-Greek high-school teacher Ian, broke box office records for romantic comedies.

Interestingly, Vardalos’s modestly budgeted (US$5-million) film had grossed more than US$250

million, within a year of its release, which made it, at the time, the most financially successful

independent film. With the portrayals of Toula (played by the screenwriter herself), the ethnic

Cinderella who undergoes a transformation from a 30-year-old, frumpy girl who helps out at the

family diner to a “radiant Hellenic butterfly,” and her “high-decibel family” (Kehr 23), My Big Fat

Greek Wedding, like the literary texts examined in this study, constructs family as a site where

emotional sentiments about “Greekness” and “Americanness” (including loyalty, pride, anxiety,

comfort, and discomfort) both converge and reside. Whether it is the ethnic theme, the romantic

theme or the comic material (or possibly a combination of all three) which has been most

attractive to movie-goers, Vardalos’s cinematic images of family as a prominent instrument of

identity formation and ethnic continuity for the American-born protagonist can be seen to

generate popular—albeit formulaic—cultural images of Greek America.

A few months after the release of Vardalos’s film, Greek American ethnicity again

received general attention with the hailed publication of Jeffrey Eugenides’s second novel

Middlesex (2002), winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Eugenides’s family saga, narrated

by Cal Stephanides, a Greek American hermaphrodite living in Berlin who traces the story of his

genetic condition and transformation back to his grandparents and their Greek village in Asia

Minor, has been increasingly available in translation. Middlesex has been published in over 30

languages.4 Taken together, these translations have made the novel available to an international

reading audience.

Together with My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Eugenides’s novel provides a forum for public

and critical debate on the constructions of Greek American ethnicity in the twenty-first century.

To these events can also be added a perhaps less known indication of the recent appeal of artistic

productions by Greek Americans, namely the musical Three Brides for Kasos, which is based on one

of the stories included in Kulukundis’s The Feasts of Memory.

The degree of national and international recognition and critical acclaim that these

literary and cultural productions have received indicates in part a slowly evolving interest in

Greek American materials, and in issues of Greek American culture and literature over the past

of Kings (1969), a movie based on the novel of the same name by Harry Marks Petrakis, centers on the immigrant Greek American experience. For a discussion of the problems regarding the ethnic image-making in these movies, see Dan Georgakas’s “My Big Fat Greek Gripes” (2003).

4 Among these languages are: Greek (2003), Spanish (2003), Catalan (2003), Portuguese (2003), Italian (2003), French (2003), Russian (2003), Norwegian (2003), Finnish (2003), Swedish (2004), Danish (2004), Dutch (2004), Polish (2004), Hebrew (2004), Korean (2004), Japanese (2004), Hungarian (2005), and Taiwanese (2006).

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few decades, some of which will be presented in Chapter One. The present dissertation, with its

focus on the role of family within ethnic and gender identity formation, a relatively

undertheorized territory in ethnic and Greek American scholarship, contributes to critical literary

studies of Greek American experience and identity.5 Additionally, the dissertation’s ambition is

to introduce the Swedish literary and academic communities to Greek American (literary) studies,

a field of ethnic scholarly research which, unlike other ethnic American literatures, has been fairly

unexplored and is virtually unknown in Sweden.6 To accomplish these goals, I start in the first

chapter of my study with a discussion of various definitions of “ethnic writing.” I move on to

outline the rise of Greek American literature and scholarship, comment on the status of Greek

American studies, and offer a survey of sociohistorical narratives about Greek Americans as an

ethnic group. I then examine the characteristics of the ethnic Bildungsroman. Since the majority of

the Greek American authors whose works I examine in this dissertation are not widely known,

Chapter One also provides a brief introduction to their lives and literary works. In Chapter Two

I present the theoretical framework—including discussions of the concepts of identity, ethnicity,

nationalism, and family—in which my readings of the literary texts in the subsequent chapters

are grounded. After these two predominantly theory-oriented chapters, I move to discussions of

the literary texts (Chapters Three, Four, and Five).

I begin my readings (which are organized, roughly, chronologically as well as

thematically) in Chapter Three with Daphne Athas’s Greece by Prejudice and Elias Kulukundis’s The

Feast of Memory. These texts explore the journey “home” to an ancestral country, and retrace

ethnic history. Both texts engage with many of the issues central to the function of family in the

process of ethnic identity formation, in surroundings which are both familiar and strange.

In the next chapter (Chapter Four), I explore how classical Greek myths and Greek

family members (particularly mothers) in Ariadne Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart and Catherine

5 Many Chicana writers also explore in their literary creations the formation of female subjectivity through

issues of family, often focusing on grandmother-mother-daughter relations. See, for example, Norman Alarcon’s essay “Making Familia From Scratch: Split Subjectivities in the Work of Helena María Viramontes and Cherríe Moraga.” A lengthier study which discusses, among other influences, those of mothers and grandmothers on female self-development in contemporary Chicana coming-of-age novels is Annie O Eysturoy’s Daughters of Self-creation (1996). Another example of a study which focuses on the role of family in ethnic writings is Camilla Stevens’s Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama (2004).

6 Yiorgos Kalogeras, who compiled the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of Greek American literature in 1985, and a supplement to this bibliography in 1987, presents this literature as “one of the most accomplished Euroamerican literatures” (106). And yet, scholarship on Greek American culture and literature has not been as visible in the U.S. as the academic work pursued on the literary materials of many other European ethnic groups. In fact, the difference in academic visibility and representation is, among other places, conspicuous in the program of the largest annual convention in languages and literatures, the Modern Language Association. There are division and discussion group meetings at the MLA convention with a focus on Anglo-Irish, Italian American, Jewish American, Asian American, Latin American, Black American, and American Indian literatures (examples taken from the 121st MLA Convention program). The combination Greek American, however, does not have an entry in the extensive program of the MLA.

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Temma Davidson’s The Priest Fainted assume a central function in mediating knowledge about

ethnic heritage, genealogy, and identities. Both ethnic Bildungsromans feature, in different ways,

the complex mobilizations of Greek myths, and construct family as an important site of ethnic

gender identification. Whereas Thompson’s narrative from 1956 attends to the question of

identity by mobilizing the traditional form and familiar content of the classical Greek myths,

Davidsons’s text from 1998 re-writes the patriarchal dimensions of classical myths, challenging

prevailing myths and ideals linked to family and traditional gender arrangements. In my reading

of the text, I refer to this imaginative and cognitive process as “re-mything,” an act which signals

that identities are social and political sites open to analysis and revision on the basis of new or

relevant information.

Finally, in Chapter Five, I examine male ethnic identity formation at the intersections of

family, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and politics, in Nicholas Papandreou’s A Crowded Heart.

These variables, I argue, and the ways in which they interrelate, complexly structure the

protagonist’s ethnic and gender identities and experiences. The idea of family in Papandreou’s

novel (primarily understood as male descent) expands, I propose, beyond the private unit and

the extended kin systems seen in some of the other texts that I analyze, comprising yet another

meaning. It incorporates a larger system of relationships, such as the public community

constituting the Greek nation.

The concluding chapter uses Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex as a touchstone to develop the

literary and theoretical discussions about constructions of ethnic and gender identities and family

as a site of identity formation. By outlining the complex interplay of genetic make up and

environment, as well as biology and culture, in the process of ethnic and gender identity

development, Middlesex complicates the configuration of family seen in the texts studied here. It

encourages reflection on the uncertainty of inhabiting, physically and emotionally, the complex

“middle ground” between male and female, Greek and American. The narrative’s engagement

with the history of immigration in the U.S. and the issue of assimilation (which I present in

Chapter Two) offers opportunities to historicize ethnicity and Greek American family

experience. It also offers the opportunity of probing the conspicuous silences in the literary texts

examined in this project about the social, cultural, and historical climate in which they were

steeped.

This study is meant to contribute to literary scholarship on family and ethnicity, both

within the larger field of ethnic studies and within Greek American studies in particular. By

exploring the ways in which ethnicity and gender are imagined and represented, this dissertation

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specifically contributes to discussions about the emotional and cognitive processes involved in

constructing an identity through family.

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Chapter One

Greek American Literary Studies: Terms and Contexts

Crucial to any discussion of ethnicity in literary studies are such questions as what the term

“ethnic” in “ethnic writing” is meant to designate, how to determine the rise of an ethnic group’s

literary investments, and how to approach ethnic literature without rendering it “atypical” or

invisible within the larger canon of American literature. In what follows, I attempt to address

these issues in the framework of Greek American literary studies. I also offer a survey of

research that has been conducted on Greek American literature, and provide a brief overview of

the sociohistorical accounts about Greek Americans, emphasizing this ethnic group’s interaction

with and transition within American society and culture. These narratives constitute important

historical and sociological contexts for the theoretical discussions and the literary analyses that

follow. Finally, I discuss the ethnic Bildungsroman and provide a note of the literary texts and their

authors.

What Is Ethnic Writing?

A growing number of so-called “ethnic” writers have been making their mark on American

literature since the 1950s, and the terrain of American ethnic literatures has expanded

dramatically in the last twenty years. This expansion of the definition of “American literature” to

include ethnic materials is noticed both in university curricula and syllabi, and in the steadily

growing numbers of publications that discuss ethnic artistic contributions to American literature.

A prime example of an anthology “designed to represent more accurately the diversity of

American literature and the US cultural mosaic, past and present” (Grobman 81) is The Heath

Anthology of American Literature (1990). Unlike any other existing anthology of American

Literature, the Heath (as it has come to be known) adopts a multicultural approach, and also

anthologizes European American materials in an attempt to redraw the canon.1

1 The Heath Anthology of American Literature was published in 1990 “under the sponsorship of the

Reconstructing American Literature project (RAL) of the Feminist Press,” a project initiated in the late 1970s (Grobman 81). Paul Lauter, a key person in the publication of the Heath, explains that “it seemed obvious in the late 1960s that most existing curricula, and the textbooks on which they were were [sic!] based, displayed and perpetuated traditional, exclusionary definitions of ‘American Literature’” (180). The function of the anthology form, and more specifically the effects of the creation of The Heath Anthology, Lauter contends, has been “to stake out cultural boundaries different from those previously marked by such terms as American literature” (181). For a

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Ethnic literary studies as a discipline is, undeniably, heterogeneous; it is informed by a

diversity of thematic concerns, theoretical positions, and histories. These different histories

began to be reexamined in the 1970s, along with a reexamination of the homogenization of

Euro-American literature, which had erased much of the cultural diversity contained within the

category Euro-American. Among the most noteworthy texts that first opened a discussion on

European American literatures are the two-volume collection of essays Ethnic Literatures since

1776: The Many Voices of America, by Wolodymyr T. Zyla and Wendell M. Aycock (1978), Ethnic

Perspectives in American Literature: Selected Essays on the European Contribution, edited by Robert J. Di

Pietro and Edward Ifkovic (1983), New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our

Multicultural Literary Heritage, edited by Alpana Sharma Knippling (1996), MultiAmerica: Essays on

Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (1997), edited by Ishmael Reed, and Multilingual America:

Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors (1998).2

Each contribution to these volumes is ethnic-specific, with ethnicity defined here by familial

descent. Together, these works provide an introduction to a great variety of European (and non-

European) ethnic groups and their literary oeuvres,3 even though some European American

ethnic groups remain almost invisible.4 With a few exceptions, this is the case with Greek

American literature, despite a rather substantial body of literary texts.

Focusing on Greek American literary studies, this dissertation raises, inevitably, the

question of the definition of American literature and the relationship between ethnic-specific

canons and the mainstream (however defined) American canon. I do not have to remind the

reader of the heated debates over this issue or of how profoundly the concept of American

literature has been changed in the course of the so-called canon wars. Here I would like to

merely register my concern about finding a critical vocabulary that gives justice to the specificity

of Greek American literature without compromising its place in the broadly understood thorough and critical discussion of the reconstructive purposes of the Heath and its editors’ claims to newness and reinterpretation of “American literature” based on “diversity,” and the significance of the categories of gender, race, and class, see Anders Olsson’s study Managing Diversity: The Anthologization of “American Literature” (2000).

2 These works do not study the literature of immigrants and their descendants as historical source material, a frequent methodological approach, Wolodymyr T. Zyla points out in the Preface to Ethnic Literatures Since 1776, Part 1.

3 Despite these recent publications on European American literatures, it should be noted that in critical histories of American literature, as Danuta Fjellestad pointed out in a 1995 essay, “‘European ethnics’ are almost never mentioned” (133). This is obvious, Fjellestad writes, in a recent critical anthology of American literature like Redefining American Literary History, edited by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (1990). With the exception of The Heath Anthology, contemporary anthologies of American literature do not widely anthologize European American materials.

4 Italian American studies, which has firmly established itself at U.S. universities, is one example of the recent expansion and branching of ethnic studies. Josephine Gattuso Hendin points in her essay “The New World of Italian American Studies” to the richness of the field by discussing seven critical works on Italian Americana from the late 1990s. She also mentions the publication of major anthologies such as Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé’s From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (1991, republished 2001) that have sparked the growth of Italian American studies.

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American literary canon. Thus I share Yiorgos D. Kalogeras’s desire to “to move beyond the

easy paradigms that American critics have extrapolated from a limited number of texts or

literatures such as the Jewish or the Italian-American” (“Greek-American Literature” 259).

Kalogeras, who himself has conducted extensive scholarly work on Greek American literature,

underlines the problems that arise in the act of bringing together all European American

literatures into one single compound, with little room for internal diversity.

Ethnic literary studies draw upon the discourses of sociology and philosophy, and

represent an aesthetic that “merges the political with the imaginative and the culturally-specific

with the cross-cultural” (Grobman 82). Although scholars of ethnic and minority literatures

“have concerned themselves with a number of common issues . . . each field has responded to

the issues differently” (290), observes Henry Louis Gates Jr. While the Greek American texts

under study here share the concerns about ethnic identity with other literary texts, I want to

emphasize their specificity. The governing premise of the present dissertation is that Greek

American narratives construct the process of ethnic and gender identity formation as involving

both self-agency and family in prominent and complex ways.

Given the heterogeneity of ethnic literary studies, what can be seen to characterize

literatures that have habitually but not unproblematically been defined as “ethnic?” What makes

writing ethnic or, to use Gates’s phrase, “ethnically sound” (294)? What are the determining

variables of such literature: voice, language, attitude, or a combination of the three? Or do texts

need to be marked by choice of subject matter to be considered ethnic? What expectations do

we bring to our readings of ethnic texts? In a study of ethnic literature, all of these questions

become important. The discussion that follows will partly emphasize the complexity of these

issues, and partly present some general arguments and standards of evaluation that critics have

advanced in discussions of ethnic literatures and, more specifically, in the scholarship of Greek

American literature. Moreover, I will present my own understanding of ethnic literature with

regard to this study of Greek American texts.

Why is some writing in the U.S. assumed to be ethnic while, for example, Anglo-

American writing is taken to be non-ethnic specific? Sander L. Gilman proposes that writing

“becomes ethnic only after it is permitted to become ethnic” (“Ethnicity-Ethnicities-Literature-

Literatures” 21). To explain this statement, Gilman offers an analogy between ethnic writing and

ethnic identity. Ethnic identity in the United States, he writes, “became accessible only as groups

became acculturated. Once the stigma of ethnic identity (however defined) was removed from

any group, that group could begin to think of itself as ethnically distinct but of course not too

distinct” (21). The process of becoming American and losing one’s “authentic” ethnic status is,

9

of course, a process that occurs on several levels, but what Gilman’s explanation achieves (along

with its ironic implications) is to emphasize the complex process of the creation of ethnic

literatures as well as the politics involved in the construction of an ethnic canon.

Initially the term “ethnic,” Gates reminds us, was used to refer to something “minor,”

implicating something “noncentral to ‘major’ scholarship” (293). Even terminologies such as

“margin-center,” he further argues, “which proved initially enabling in the late 1970s and early

1980s, sometimes served to reinscribe the isolated status of these emerging literatures” (293). But

what happens, Gilman goes on to ask, when an ethnic writer achieves national and international

fame? Is s/he still considered ethnic?5 Let us consider, for example, the state of a novel

discussed in the conclusion of this dissertation, namely, Middlesex. Eugenides’s Pulitzer-Price-

winning novel was described as “deliriously American” in The New York Times Book Review (Laura

Miller). What status does the reviewer ascribe to the novel when she argues that its “patron saint

is Walt Whitman,” the epitome of the American writer? And what status does my choice to

include Eugenides’s novel in a dissertation that explores literary representations of ethnic identity

attribute to the text? There are no easy answers to the intellectual and emotional processes

guiding constructions of both “American” and “ethnic” literature; critical self-reflection is of

crucial strategic importance for a critic such as myself.

The essentialism inherent in ethnic descent is also, Gates shows, conspicuous in

definitions of ethnic literatures. Two widespread models for defining ethnic literatures, he

explains, are by authors, “largely by the ethnic descent of the authors,” and by nation (293).

There are obvious limitations in using biology or nation as the only criteria for defining “ethnic.”

If one measures ethnic by the biological origin of the author, Gates writes, and “Shakespeare, for

example, were found to have had even one African antecedent, he would head the list of authors

in an anthology of African literature” (293). If one instead uses “nation” as the model for

defining ethnic, he proceeds to argue, how does one specify the works of authors such as Henry

James, James Joyce, or Jamaica Kincaid? Another common practise is to focus primarily on the

content of ethnic literature and search for “manifestations of a collective ethnic unconscious”

(Gates 294) or for “the survival of cultural baggage” (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 237). Still others are

more concerned with formal aspects, identifying the issue of genre as an element that demarcates

an ethnic text. Studies focusing on formal concerns and ethnic manifestations as culturally based

5 Kalogeras addresses this question in the essay “Greek-American Literature: Who Needs it?” where he speculates if the explanation to why Greek American writer Elia Kazan has not been considered ethnic lies in the fact that he was an “already accomplished mainstream artist” (136). Also Sollors notes in Beyond Ethnicity that ethnic writers who are not considered parochial, are “simply classified . . . as ‘wholly American’” (243). As an illustration of the limited scope of such ways of defining ethnic literature, Sollors brings up writer Carl Sandburg, a popular ethnic (Illinois-born son of Swedish immigrants) who is often excluded from ethnic definitions because of his very popularity and national fame.

10

practices often raise questions of authenticity. But “all literary traditions are,” as Gates explains,

“to some degree, fictional constructs” that do not necessarily “draw on all (or any)” of the

devices or elements mentioned (294).

A literary critic who has offered a model for designating some texts as ethnic is John M.

Reilly. Reilly suggests that what “we designate ‘ethnic literature’ are the products of authors who

choose to feature the significance of ethnicity in their writing” (4). As opposed to essentialist

definitions of ethnicity as blood, Reilly sees not the origin of the writer as the foremost criterion

for defining ethnic literatures, but instead stresses the literary themes of an author’s work. He

argues that “ethnic literature can only be fully explained by an approach that studies writing as

the expression of the cognitive orientations of the authors” (12). Ethnicity, Reilly concludes, is “a

constant among these orientations, but it is varied and modified by authorial disposition,

assumptions about social and personal relationships, self-image, and assumptions about the way

the natural and social world works” (12). Advancing the significance of the writer’s cognitive and

emotional processes for the literary creation, as well as the relationship between the author and

the social and cultural contexts in which s/he lives, Reilly offers a definition of ethnic literature

which avoids some of the essentialist notions at play in the construction of ethnically based

traditions identified by Gates.

Anthony Julian Tamburri expands on the prominence of ethnicity in ethnic writing and

advances yet another model of defining ethnic literature: “By ethnic literature,” he writes in A

Semiotic of Ethnicity, “I mean that type of writing which deals contextually with customs and

behavioral patterns that the North American mind-set may consider different from what it

perceives as mainstream” (4). Tamburri’s proposition, which appears to bestow ethnic literature

with characteristics of the avant-garde, may be understood by some readers to be a limiting

position, implying that black writers, to give an example, can only write about “black” reality.

The difference, Tamburri then goes on to argue, “may also manifest itself formalistically, i.e., the

writer may not follow what have become accepted norms and conventions of literary creation;

s/he may not produce what the dominant culture considers good literature” (4).6 Further, one of

the many questions that ethnic literature addresses, Tamburri writes, is “the negative stereotyping

of members of ethnic/racial groups which are not part and parcel of the dominant culture” (4).

6 Tamburri’s characterization of ethnic texts as resisting literary conventions stresses a related issue often

invoked in discussions of ethnic literature, namely that of literary quality. Excellence, Gilman writes, is not unimportant: “it is the criterion invoked by those who dismiss ethnicity” (“Ethnicity-Ethnicities-Literature-Literatures” 25). “Those who are stringently opposed to discussions of ethnicity in the study and teaching of literature . . . believe,” Gilman explains, “that the ethnic represents special pleading and demeans the study of ‘real’ literature” (25).

11

What Tamburri’s third characteristic of ethnic literature affirms is the political values or

possibilities incorporated in ethnic literature.

A criterion commonly used to define ethnic writing that figures strongly in debates on

Greek American literature is language. According to Kalogeras, language “remains the most

thorny issue” in identifying Greek American literature (“Greek-American Literature: Who Needs

It?” 130). If English is “the language of Greek American literature,” Kalogeras writes in “Greek-

American Literature: Who Needs It?”, “a large number of Greek texts published in the U.S.

ought to be excluded” (130). Such an exclusion, he goes on to say, “deprives Greek American

literature of its legitimate beginnings” (130); it “relegates to silence a large segment of the first

immigrant generation and justifies scholarly misconceptions concerning the immigrants’ lack of

literary aspiration” (130).7 This is a vital and, as Kalogeras makes clear, consequential theoretical

perspective to take into consideration in any discussion of ethnic literatures. In the process of

labeling texts “ethnic,” or “Greek American,” “the circumstances of textual production and

dissemination within a specific culture,” Kalogeras maintains, “are far more significant” criteria

than is language (“Greek-American Literature: Who Needs It?” 132).

My own understanding of “ethnic literature” occupies a kind of middle ground; it

accounts for the complexity and multiple determiners of ethnicity. It encompasses the ethnic and

cultural origins of the author and the thematic concerns of the text. Undeniably, the ethnic

origin/s of the writers is one factor that brings together the texts—which make up only a very

small selection of a literary production that may be labeled Greek American—examined in this

dissertation. Further, my conception of what makes a literature ethnic is informed by Sollor’s

broad definition of ethnic literature as “works written by, about, or for persons who perceived

themselves, or were perceived by others, as members of ethnic groups, including even nationally

and internationally popular writings by ‘major’ authors and formally intricate” texts (Beyond

Ethnicity 243). It is also guided by Gates’s suggestion to recognize ethnic culture not as “isolated

and uninformed by the ‘dominant’ culture” (299), an understanding of ethnic writing as the

expression of the author’s self-image and assumptions about his/her relations to society and

culture, and a view of ethnicity as complexly influenced by social, political, economic, and

cultural factors.

To understand ethnic literature (in this case Greek American) as a criss-cross of the

ethnic and cultural background of the author and the literary forms and thematics of his/her

7 A recent anthology which aims to recover many important but forgotten texts written in America in other

languages than English is The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000), edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors. The anthology features the poetry collection “Apparent Death” by writer Stratis Haviaras in Greek and in English translation.

12

writing implies that the particular social and cultural contexts in which an ethnic writer lives and

produces as well as his/her individual experiences, have bearing both on the writer’s ethnic

identity and his/her literary text. This position is firmly rooted in Paula M. L. Moya’s and Satya

P. Mohanty’s theoretical conceptions of identities, accounted for in Chapter Two, as “context-

specific ideological constructs” (Moya, Learning from Experience 86), and in their proposition that

personal experience has a “cognitive component” (Mohanty, Literary Theory 205) that may yield

knowledge about the subject and her/his world. In line with these formulations, I believe the

individual social experiences and (ethnic and gender) identities of the writers whose works are

examined in this project centrally inform their literary constructions of Greek American

ethnicity, family, and ethnic identity formation.

The artistic expressions examined in this study should be read as culture-specific, that is,

as Greek American in America. Yet, in seeking to identify and analyze distinctive ethnic traits

and cultural and symbolic heritages, I am not seeking to establish or justify one single way of

reading this literature. In a similar vein, we cannot, I believe, think of or celebrate one single model

of “Greekness” or “Greek Americanness” since such classifications or categories harbor multiple

meanings. Greek American identity, experience, and culture are nebulous concepts, and for this

reason the use of the term “Greek American” in this dissertation should not be taken to imply a

homogenized or an isolated ethnic group. Rather, it refers to individuals whose lives and choices

share certain common and distinctive features that can be referred to as Greek American. One

of these features is, as my analysis of the literary texts in Chapters Three, Four, and Five show,

the ways in which family, in any of its various constellations, matters in the processes of ethnic

identity formation.

Greek American Literature and Scholarship

Greek American literature is an area of study which is little known in Sweden. For this reason, I

find it important to begin with an overview of what scholars in the field mean when they speak

of Greek American literature, to then situate the literary texts examined in this dissertation in the

context of the body of Greek American literary material, and finally to introduce the studies that

mark the emergence of Greek American literary studies as well as some of the more recent

research conducted in this area.

13

Kalogeras argues that a comprehensive definition of Greek American literature includes

texts written by Greek Americans both in English and in Greek.8 The majority of Greek

immigrant literature, he writes, dates from the early twentieth century, and was not known by the

wider American public. “The language barrier,” Kalogeras contends, “delayed its recognition”

(“Greek-American Literature” 254). Since World War II, however, Greek immigrant writers have

also been writing in English.

As earlier mentioned, a definition of “Greek American literature” which encompasses

material written in English as well as in Greek also allows for the literary aspirations of the first

immigrant generation to be acknowledged. In fact, the “genealogies” of Greek American and, in

Kalogeras’s words, “Greek-in-America” literature coincide in the text The Personal Narrative of the

Sufferings of J. Stephanini a Native of Arta in Greece (1829). Stephanini’s narrative, based on an oral

history recorded and translated into English, may be, in Kalogeras’s words, “the first first-hand

account of a Greek emigrating to the new world” (“Greek-American Literature: An Essay” 102).

Among the earliest Greek American works, Kalogeras also lists Christophorus Plato Castanis’s

The Greek Captive (1845), Konstantinos Kazantzis’s book in Greek, Istoriai tis Patridos mou (1910),

and Demetra Vaka Brown’s many novels and personal narratives. These texts all focus primarily

on the writers’ lives in their homeland, with little emphasis on their immigrant experiences in

America.

Kalogeras claims that Greek American literature is among the “most persistent” (“Greek-

American Literature: An Introduction” 106) ethnic literatures in the U.S. His list includes sixty-

four novels, seventy-two short stories and short story collections, fourteen personal narratives,

and, finally, twenty-two poetry collections. The bibliography offers a brief annotation to each

work, focusing on the theme. These are all works of writers of Greek descent, who reside and

work in the U.S., and who write either in English or in Greek. In 1987 Kalogeras published a

bibliographic supplement to his first compilation, which includes the subsequent literary

production of Greek American writers, and new research into the origins of this body of

literature. All in all, the supplement includes an additional eighty-four Greek American literary

works (some of which have also been given representative status within American literature).9

8 To Kalogeras’s early research on the corpus of Greek American literary texts belong his Ph.D.

dissertation titled “Between Two Worlds: Ethnicity and the Greek-American Writer” (1984), which I discuss in what follows, “Greek-American Literature: An Introduction and an Annotated Bibliography of Personal, Fictional Narratives and Poetry” (1985), and “Greek-American Literature: An Essay and a Bibliographic Supplement (1987).

9 It should be noted that Kalogeras’s 1985 and 1987 bibliographies, as the writer later himself remarked, remain incomplete, since they do not include plays.

14

Despite this substantial body of literature, critical studies of Greek American literature

appeared comparatively late.10 Research on Greek American literature can be said to date from

1970 with the appearance of Michael N. Cutsumbis’s pioneer bibliography, A Bibliographic Guide

to Materials on Greeks in the United States, 1890-1968.11 Alexander Karanikas’ Hellenes and Hellions:

Modern Greek Characters in American Literature (1981) was the next study to address Greek

American literature.12 Valuable as they are, Cutsumbis’s and Karanikas’s bibliographic studies

are, as Kalogeras has emphasized, selective, and reveal confusions and inconsistencies (“Greek-

American Literature: Who Needs It?” 129). For example, Cutsumbis’s guide to “Greek

Americans in Fiction” includes an autobiographical work such as, for example, Ariadne

Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart (1956) but does not mention Daphne Athas’s memoir Greece by

Prejudice (1962) or Elias Kulukundis’s autobiography The Feasts of Memory (1967). In addition, the

writer lists an Armenian American novel with a Greek subject-matter, along with books by

H. M. Petrakis and Maria Vardoulakis (“Greek-American Literature: Who Needs It?” 129).

Similarly, Karanikas’s study deals extensively with the works of Greek immigrant writers such as

Demetra Vaka-Brown while he, without any justification, ignores a more recent immigrant writer

such as Stratis Haviaras.13 In addition, as the subtitle of Karanikas’s book indicates, the study

focuses on the presence of Greek characters in American fiction, thus including not only the

works of Greek Americans but also many other works in which Greek characters figure.

Karanikas’s stated attempt to account for “every piece of American fiction that depicted a

modern Greek character” (Hellenes and Hellions xiv) during a time period of roughly one hundred

fifty years (1825-1975) indicates that the value of his work lies in its encyclopedic character rather

than in the readings of the fictive texts.

These bibliographic works were followed by Kalogeras’s research, which was

groundbreaking for the field of Greek American literary studies. Kalogeras’s doctoral dissertation

“Between Two Worlds: Ethnicity and the Greek-American Writer” (1984), was the first

10 As discussed above, Kalogeras emphasizes the issue of language as one explanation for this delay in

recognition. Yota Batsaki indicates that the social circumstances and debates in America in the time between the two World Wars are partial explanations to why Greek American writers at the time also started writing in English. Newspapers at this specific time, Batsaki writes, “engaged hotly in the debate over ‘Americanization’ by focusing on the twin problems of language and citizenship” (Introduction 625). Greek newspapers, which were at the time “concerned with the issue of representing Greek immigrants as a group to the wider American audience” responded to these debates by using a “bilingual layout” (Introduction 625). This bilingual effort, Botsaki argues, attests as much to a desire for preservation as to a commitment to the process of adaptation.

11 Cutsumbis lists forty-four fictional texts (published between 1917-1968) under the rubric “Greek- Americans in Fiction.” As suggested by this title, the list only contains works that include Greek American characters or thematize Greek Americans.

12 Karanikas also wrote the section on Greek American literature included in Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature (1983).

13 Haviaras’s first novel, When the Tree Sings, “was declared the best first novel of 1979 and was translated into eight languages” (Kalogeras, “Between Two Worlds” 10).

15

thorough and inclusive study to analyze the contribution by writers of Greek background to the

body of American literature. Kalogeras’s attempt in this study is to show “how [the writers’]

artistic sensibilities have been formed by the conjunction of their ethnic heritage and the

particular circumstances of the New World” (iii). The selected texts range from the so-called

personal narrative and the immigrant novel to what Kalogeras calls “fiction of formation” and

the “fiction of spiritual journeys.” With its focus on issues of divided loyalties and cultural

differentiation—the “doubleness” lived by the Greek American protagonists in the narratives

examined—Kalogeras’s dissertation remains a crucial work for its contribution to discussions of

ethnicity, and Greek American literature in particular.

A year later Yiorgos Yiannaris’s Οι Έλληνες μετανάστες και το Ελληνοαμερικάνικο

μυθιστόρημα [Greek Immigrants and the Greek American Novel] (1985) appeared. Written in

Greek and published in Greece, Yiannaris’s study introduces the literary materials of Greek

American writers to a Greek audience. The Greek American texts that Yiannaris discusses

belong to two different categories: the immigrant and the ethnic.14 These narratives make up,

Yiannaris explains, an acclaimed literary genre, which is little known in Greece. Yiannaris

presents a total of twenty-one Greek American writers. Sometimes he offers critical and

extensive analyses of the material, and at other times his readings are cursory and synoptic. As a

result of its inclusive character, the study also takes on a bibliographic status. However, as

Kalogeras has noted, Yiannaris’s study brings back the confusion present in Cutsumbis’s and

Karanikas’s bibliographic works “by including indiscriminately Greek American writers and

Greek characters in American fiction” (“Greek-American Literature: Who Needs It?” 130).

A scholarly study of Greek migrant self-representations, including literary ones, that has

been carried out more recently is Ioanna Laliotou’s “Migrating Greece: Historical Enactments of

Migration in the Culture of the Nation” (1998). Laliotou’s study includes chapters on the

production of popular fiction by Greek migrants in the United States. Her contention in this

study is that “images of migration and migrants have constituted fundamental elements of

different forms of [Greek] self-representation and [Greek] national consciousness” (2). Her study

focuses on “the ways in which the experience of transatlantic labor migration from Greece to the

United States led to the production of dominant images of migrant subjectivity and nationhood

during the first half of the twentieth century” (3). To explore such images, Laliotou analyzes

popular forms of literary representations such as short stories that were published in popular

magazines, newspapers, and, in a few cases, even in literary journals, as well as different types of

narration of migrant-life-stories. As valuable as Laliotou’s discussion of migrant narratives is, it

14 Yiannaris labels the works of later generation Greek Americans as ethnic.

16

should be noted that in her study fictional and biographical materials are treated not so much as

literary representations but as an “indispensable area of historical study” (143).

If the literary expressions of Greek Americans have been little commented upon in

sociological, historical, or critical theory works, references to specifically Greek American poetry

are, as Anastasia Stefanidou’s recent dissertation demonstrates, even more scarce. Stefanidou’s

study, “Ethnic and Diaspora Poets of Greek America” (2001), which examines the poems and

poetic collections of Greek Americans, is the first lengthy work to deal with this literary form

and production, and consequently makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the

literary expressions of Greek Americans, and to the field of Greek American studies.

Stefanidou’s study focuses on the discourse of “home” as evoked in poetry published

since the end of World War II in the U.S. and written either in Greek or in English by what she

defines as “diaspora” and “ethnic” Greek American poets.15 One of the main theses of

Stefanidou’s study is that the diaspora poets’ home imaginings, their filiations and affiliations

with their pre-American homeland, and the different ways through which the poets return to it,

are employed to, as Stefanidou puts it, “establish” (25) their identities. In the case of the diaspora

poets, the concept of home serves to either “affirm and valorize the subject’s uninterrupted

filiation with their pre-American homeland” or “to criticize the ‘home left behind’” in order to

“legitimize” their new, Americanized “position and identity” (25).16 The American-born and

-raised poets, on the other hand, Stefanidou argues, do not experience the same ambivalences as

the diasporic subject. Hence they return to the ancestral home as “ethnic tourists.” This

observation is important for my study, more specifically in Chapter Three, which explores the

physical “returns” of American-born and –raised Greek Americans to their ancestors’ homeland,

focusing on the formation of ethnic identity through family as invoked in Greece by Prejudice and

The Feasts of Memory.

How does the present study relate to the scholarship on Greek American literature

conducted thus far? My study attempts to give a small selection of the literary expressions of

Greek American writers the serious scholarly consideration that they warrant. It is meant as a

contribution to the scholarship on Greek American literature as well as to the endeavors to give

a minority literature representation in the dominant literary culture. Hence my study departs

from where the above-mentioned studies have left off. Since Kalogeras’s dissertation and

15 Stefanidou defines diaspora poets as “those who migrated to America from Greece at some point in

their lives, usually in search of better educational, financial, or professional opportunities” (25). Not unlike Yiannaris, she defines the “American-born and –raised poets” as ethnic (27).

16 Stefanidou’s understanding of “home” in her study also incorporates, to a certain degree, the idea of family. “Home” as a theoretical concept, Stefanidou explains, includes both the private sphere of family as well as referring to “a wider public sphere” (3).

17

Yiannaris’s study, a considerable number of new literary texts by American writers of Greek

descent have appeared. My study examines five contemporary literary productions (in prose),

which span half a century. It offers lengthier and complementary discussions of texts that have

already attracted some attention, and it provides analyses of works that, although extensively

reviewed, have not been the subject of any lengthy scholarly work (A Crowded Heart, The Priest

Fainted, and Middlesex).17 What is more, Moya’s theoretical approach to identity that informs my

study, and which will be presented in detail in Chapter Two, advances ways of understanding

identity as complexly influenced but not determined by the categories of ethnicity, gender, class,

and sexuality without undermining the significance of family and individual agency on the

process of identity formation. Much of the critical discussion that has so far been carried out on

representations of ethnic identities in the literary productions of American writers of Greek

descent read identities and identity formation in the postmodern sense, that is, as dynamic, in

constant flux, and inherently contradictory. Stefanidou’s study is one such example.18 While it

has been useful for my own project to think of multiple ethnic identification as a dynamic

process, the texts explored here do not construct hyphenated ethnic identity exclusively as a

source of ambiguity, rupture, and frustration for the Greek American protagonists. The energy

of contrasting cultures evinced in these narratives, I argue, can also be profoundly enriching.

Greek American Studies and Narratives about Greek Americans

According to Kalogeras, the majority of the literary production of American writers of Greek

descent, including some of the literary works introduced above, had not yet received scholarly

consideration as of 1984 (“Between Two Worlds” 6). Various explanations have been offered for

the relative scarcity of prestigious publications in various scholarly areas of Greek American

studies as opposed to other American ethnic studies. Despite the growth of area and ethnic

studies programs that emerged from the questions raised within the academy by the sixties

movements for social and political change, there is no distinct academic institution or setting

today for studies of Greek American literature, history, anthropology, and folklore.19 The study

17 Recent essays that investigate the expressions of ethnic identity in A Crowded Heart and The Priest Fainted

are Theodora Tsimpouki’s “Bi- or Mono-Culturalism? Contemporary Literary Representations of Greek-American Identity” (2005), and my own work “Negotiating the Hyphen: Ethnic and Female Identity in Catherine T. Davidson’s The Priest Fainted” (2002).

18 Stefanidou concludes her introductory chapter by saying that the constituent parts of Greek American ethnicity, “Greek” and “American,” regardless of the order in which they appear, “go on living in a fermenting tension” (31).

19 The first major scholarly symposium on “The Greek Experience in America,” held in 1976 at the University of Chicago, was the specific occasion during which the question of the relation of Modern Greek and Greek American studies was first presented. Several years and conferences later an attempt to formalize Greek

18

of Greek America, it has further been argued, is complicated by its peculiar relationship to

Modern Greek Studies, a small and interdisciplinary field committed primarily to the study of

Greek society, history, culture, and politics, with which Greek American studies, although not

identical, is often clustered.20 Although departments of Modern Greek studies have served as

provisional institutional homes and forums for discussing Greek American issues, Greek

America does not belong among the association’s principal areas of interest.21 In a recent essay,

Yiorgos Anagnostu argues that the dichotomous relationship between Modern Greek and Greek

American studies, “measured in terms of academic visibility in the United States”

(“Transnational Modern Greek Studies” 2), can be reformed if the field of Modern Greek studies

could change from a nation-centric to a transnational studies perspective. By sustaining a

comparative and transnational analysis, Anagnostu maintains, Modern Greek studies will be able

to “think of Greek worlds relationally” (6), a practice that would generate interesting scholarship

on global manifestations and representations of Greek culture.

In spite of the absence of Greek American studies as a formal subject area in the U.S.

academic setting, Greek America has not ceased to interest scholars. I will, in what follows,

review the scholarly works that have most prominently contributed to making the Greek

American community visible. It is primarily through these works that the Greek experience in

America has gradually gained, and continues to gain, recognition as an area of study and research

(albeit non-institutionalized) among ethnic scholars.

Charles C. Moskos’s (1982) presentation of the scholarship undertaken in Greek

American studies, and Kalogeras’s discussion in “Narrating an Ethnic Group” (1992), provide a

survey of the sociological and historical research that has been done on the Greek presence in

America beginning from the early twentieth century until the 1990s.22 The studies that appeared

American studies was made at a conference held in May 1989 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on “The Greek American Experience.” It was agreed at the conference that in order for Greek American studies to develop, it needed to be differentiated from Modern Greek studies. As a result of the conference, which has been described as the crossing of a major threshold in Greek American studies, a volume of essays was published under the title of New Directions in Greek American Studies (1991), edited by Dan Georgakas and Charles C. Moskos, and a Committee for Greek American Studies was established. Among the Committee’s goals was “to work toward creating a definitive Greek American bibliography, and to establish a newsletter for ongoing communications” (Georgakas and Moskos 11). In addition to these projects the Greek Diaspora Studies Committee (within the MGSA) should be mentioned, whose function is to find ways of integrating “scholarly investigation of the Greek diaspora communities more fully into the Association’s activities” (“The MGSA Bulletin” 6).

20 The Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA) was formed in 1968, but began to be formalized in more structured academic settings in the U.S. in the late 1970s.

21 Modern Greek studies is a university program regularly offered by Centers of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (at Queens College, N.Y., for example) or Hellenic or Classics Departments. Thirty-three such programs exist today at various colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. The focus of these programs, as formulated in “The MGSA Bulletin” (2002), the publication of the Modern Greek Studies Association, is the study of “the language, literature, arts, history, politics, economy and society of modern Greece and its diaspora” (3).

22 Among the earliest scholarly works on the topic to be written in English were “A Study of the Greeks in Chicago” (1909) by Grace Abbott, Greek Immigration to the United States (1911) by Henry Pratt Fairchild, and Greeks in

19

in the decades between 1920 and 1960 in a number of social science journals focused on specific

Greek American communities. In these studies, an important trend become apparent. Since

World War I, Moskos points out, research on Greek Americans “was increasingly the preserve of

ethnic Greeks, whether immigrant or American born” (“Greek American Studies” 25).

In 1964, historian Theodore Saloutos’s book on the social history of Greek Americans

was published. This work has been described as a “watershed event” (Moskos, “Greek American

Studies” 25) that “legitimized a field of studies” (Kalogeras, “Narrating an Ethnic Group” 31).

Issued by the prestigious Harvard University Press, The Greeks in the United States gained a

national reputation, and quickly became a model for historians who conducted research on other

American ethnic groups (Moskos 25). Saloutos continued to publish his research on the social

history of Greek America, some of which was subsequently included in the entry on Greek

Americans in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980).

Since the mid-1960s and Saloutos’s pioneering work, a number of scholars and writers

have shown interest in and written on Greek Americans.23 Given the heightened recognition of

issues relating to ethnicity and race since the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. in the

mid-1960s, when ethnic programs and centers were created at institutions of higher education in

the U.S., this interest is perhaps not surprising. After all, this was the time when, as Ramon A.

Gutierrez writes in “Ethnic Studies: Its Evolution in American Colleges and Universities,”

minority students who “started to arrive in unprecedented numbers on American campuses”

(157) required that “the curriculum reflect their presence” (157). They demanded that the culture

and history of minorities in the U.S. be taught by scholars who themselves were from minority

communities. Moreover, the study of race and ethnicity should “be removed from the

disciplinary homes they had long occupied in departments of sociology and anthropology, where

race and ethnicity were pathologized, problematized, or exoticized” (Gutierrez 158). In 1972,

these sentiments and concerns came together into the Ethnic Heritage Studies Programs Act, an

ethnic studies legislation passed by Congress, which for the first time officially bestowed

importance to ethnicity. Quite obviously, these developments are also reflected in the number of

critical studies which emerged at the time on ethnic groups like the Greek Americans.24

America (1913) by Thomas Burgess. The first two Greek responses to Fairchild’s and Burgess’s accounts of the Greek American presence in the U.S. appeared somewhat later: “Ο ‘Ελληνισμός εν ’Αμερική” (1918) by Seraphim Canoutas and The Greeks in America (1922) by J. P. Xenides. For a discussion of Fairchild, Burgess, Canoutas, and J. P. Xenides, see Kalogeras’s article “Narrating an Ethnic Group” (1992).

23 For some of the topics covered by this literature, see Moskos’s “Greek American Studies,” 26-32. 24 As an example of how the post Civil Rights ethnic revival in the U.S. influenced the appearance of

Greek American communities in the public sphere, Anagnostu examines in his dissertation “Negotiating Identity, Connecting through Culture: Hellenism and Neohellenism in Greek America” (1999) the “renaming of the 1973 inaugural ‘Greek-American’ festival to ‘Greek’ festival in 1974” (18) in Columbus, Ohio. The Columbus Greek Americans who, prior to this period of ethnic reawakening, as Anagnostu was repeatedly told during interviews,

20

Looking back at the 1980s in their introduction to New Directions in Greek American Studies

(1991), Dan Georgakas and Charles C. Moskos attest to a growth of Greek American studies and

scholarship. Moskos’s and Georgakas’s own sociohistorical accounts of the Greek experiences in

America, together with Alice Scourby’s work on the subject, which I will refer to more

extensively in what follows, and in the section “The Case of Greek American Family” in Chapter

Two, are results of this relatively prolific period in Greek American scholarship. To this period

in Greek American scholarship also belong the few scholarly works on the literary productions

of Greek Americans that had, thus far, been undertaken.25

But how do the above-mentioned studies introduce and represent Greek Americans as

individuals, as a social and an ethnic group? There is, of course, not just one but many different

sociohistorical narratives about the Greek Americans. While I am aware of the difficulties

involved in any attempt to give fair representation to a group of people constituted by diverse

individuals, I will nevertheless, in brief, account for how scholars have portrayed Greek

Americans as an ethnic group. I begin with tracing the migratory process of Greeks to America,

and then focus on those aspects that have been identified as important for Greek American

ethnicity (middle class, assimilation, family, religion, ancient Greek culture, patterns of

repatriation, to name a few); these aspects help historicize the literary analyses in this study.

Although Greek immigration to America began in the 1890s, the two main waves of

Greek immigration to the U.S. occurred in the twentieth century. To begin with, 450,000 Greeks

migrated to the U.S. shores. This wave reached its peak in the early 1920s. The great majority of

these immigrants were men from the villages of rural Greece. Their motives for expatriation

were primarily economic, and the immigrants envisioned only a temporary stay in the new

country. The desperate economic situation of their homeland due to political instabilities—

Greece has a long history of foreign domination, wars, dictatorships, and civil war—together

with the hardships of peasant life, drove people to depart to “better places.” In fact, in the 1920s,

the Greek government actually encouraged young men to emigrate, hoping that they would send

back money to help the economy (Scourby, The Greek Americans 26).26 Toward the end of the

first wave of immigration, another 70,000 Greeks entered the U.S. A decline in Greek

“nurtured memories of discrimination in the 1920s” (18), articulated through the renaming of the festival a pride in their ethnic background and projected, publically, “a dual identity, diffusing [the group’s] association among the American public as a radically foreign Other” (18). Further, the organizers’ renaming of the festival, Anagnostu argues, was a conscious move of “cashing in [sic!] the increasing popularity of Greece as an exotic destination for tourists” (18).

25 As opposed to the amount of sociohistorical literature on Greek Americans, literary critical contributions on this topic had, so far, been small in number.

26 For a more thorough discussion on the determining factors of Greek emigration to the United States, see, among other works, Scourby’s The Greek Americans (1984).

21

immigration was brought on by the restrictive immigration legislation of 1924 which was based

on nationality quotas, allowing only 100 Greek immigrants per year.

Once admitted into the U.S. the Greek immigrant would settle close to where relatives or

fellow villagers lived or, more importantly, at a place where he (and, occasionally, she) had been

promised a job. The American West was one major destination of the early Greek immigrants,

where they worked on the railways, or in factories or mines.27 Other major destinations were the

New England mill towns, where the immigrants worked in textile and shoe factories. Large

Northern cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit are

other places where the Greek immigrants settled. Here, they might work in a factory, a

restaurant, a bootblack parlor, on the street as peddler, or in the steel mills. In each of these

cities, the Greek population amounted to at least several thousand by the First World War.

Among these, New York and Chicago became the dominant Greek American cities.

Of course, not all immigrants who came to America during the first periods of mass

migration stayed in the U.S. The “envisaged temporary character of the immigration,” it has been

argued, “was kept up by an ideology of nostos (return to the homeland)” (Batsaki, Introduction

625), and many of the Greek immigrants actually did repatriate. Estimates show that about forty

percent of all Greeks who entered the U.S. before 1930 returned to the homeland after having

accomplished what they had set out to achieve: economic advancement.

The Immigration Act of 1965, which repealed earlier immigration constraints based on

the national-origins system, giving preferential advantage to persons who had close relatives in

the U.S., made it possible for Greeks to immigrate to the U.S. once again. During this second

wave of immigration, about 15,000 new Greeks arrived annually to the country between 1966

and 1971. After that, the figure stabilized at about 9,000 Greek immigrants per year. The

proportion of men and women among these new arrivals differed significantly from the earlier

immigrants. These later immigrants were often married with families upon arrival. Just as in the

past, their emigration was motivated by economic need but also by other reasons. “Social change

in Greece since the Second World War,” Scourby argues, “influenced the importance of

education and altered traditional expectations. Improved communications in the provinces,

towns, and cities sensitized both men and women to alternative options” (The Greek Americans

62). More likely to be better educated, these new immigrants settled down mainly in

metropolitan areas in the new country, going into, among other businesses, food service, sales,

27 The first group of Greeks arrived in the West as strikebreakers, a function that was provided to them by

a padrone, who would provide the immigrant with passage and/or a job and in return would demand mortgage on the immigrant’s property in Greece. For a percentage of all subsequent wages, the padrone would then secure the immigrant’s job.

22

and construction. The Greeks who arrived in the wake of the Greek civil war and during the

dictatorship have also been characterized as possessing “a much more ambivalent attitude

toward their homeland and the issue of ‘return’” (Batsaki, Introduction 626).

Other differences existed between the new arrivals and the earlier immigrants that

sometimes created strained relations between the groups. These new immigrants came to the

U.S. at the time of the Civil Rights Movement or the advent of post Civil Rights ethnic revival,

when Americans had a more tolerant attitude toward foreigners. The immigrants were not under

the same kind of pressure to assimilate as the old immigrants had been, and could, it has been

argued, “afford” to assert their strong sense of “Greekness,” which they infused into the

community. Such reports are in line with Gilman’s claim that writing coming out of a specific

ethnic group can be comfortably labeled as “ethnic” once this ethnicity loses its stigma.

But the truth is that America did not always love its Greeks, as Georgakas has noted. The

immigrant generations of many American ethnic groups which are considered white today,

including the Greeks, occupied a confused racial status in their new country, as I briefly account

for in Chapter Two. Southern and Eastern European immigrants of a century ago did not

receive a cordial reception upon arrival to the U.S. Immigrants from these parts were considered

by most Americans to be “the scum of Europe” and were, consequently, “barred from labor

camps for ‘whites’” (Georgakas, “The Greeks in America” 21). In the West, especially, where the

groups were bigger and consequently more visible, they confronted hostile anti-foreign

sentiments.28 Additionally, it has been argued, the Greeks were often reproached for being

reluctant to participate properly in the project of Americanization, always contemplating an

eventual return to the home country. Yota Batsaki observes that charges were frequently leveled

against the Greeks’ “unwillingness to learn the American language (insisting, for example, that

their wives and children speak Greek) and their neglect of naturalization and the vote”

(“Unfaithful Translation” 59). The hostility toward foreigners experienced by the Greek

immigrants as well as their insistent desire for repatriation has been depicted in several Greek

American texts, most explicitly in Helen Papanikolas’s works. In Middlesex Eugenides also

28 The South Omaha riot in Nebraska in 1909, when a mob stormed through and burned down most of

the Greek quarter in the outskirts of the city of South Omaha driving all the Greeks (which amounted to several thousand) away, is one of the most well-documented anti-Greek assaults, writes Georgakas in “The Greeks in America.” This same year, the Greeks became targets of American hostility toward foreigners in Montana, where mass meetings were held for the purpose of ridding the city of Great Falls of its Greek population. In the South, the early Greeks would often face the extreme racial segregation that Southern racists practiced against blacks and other immigrant groups. Greek strikebreakers’ willingness to work for lower wages, and fear of competition from businesses operated by Greeks who had a reputation of being ambitious and hard-working people, have been offered as partial explanations of these violent incidents.

23

portrays the discrimination that his Greek family experienced as their upward mobility (they

began to look for a house in the suburbs) became apparent.

Generally, ethnic histories have emphasized the experiences of the immigrant

generations in their new country. In an assimilationist mode, social scientists have studied the

formation of ethnic communities, sacred and secular institutions, and the role of these for

immigrants, and then described the transition from poor immigrant living in ethnic

neighborhoods to educated suburban middle-class American citizen. Several sociohistorical

accounts narrate the immigrant Greeks in the U.S. as a church-going and family-oriented people

who take pride in their ethnic origins. Even the American-born generations, these studies report,

maintain affiliations, though in a weakened form, with institutions such as the Greek Orthodox

Church. The texts examined in this dissertation include conspicuously few church-going

activities but emphasize repeatedly, in various but significant ways, family as a complex yet rich

site of ethnic identity formation. Given the representations of family in the narratives as a site of

ethnic identity formation, I give specific attention to the sociohistorical discussions about the

Greek American family as a crucial social institution for preserving traditions and values of

Greek culture among the Greeks of the diaspora in Chapter Two.

Not surprisingly, a nexus of factors has facilitated the formation of the early Greek

communities, and helped create and maintain the strong family cohesion and ethnic

consciousness for which the Greeks in the U.S. have come to be known. The most significant

one, without which early Greek communities would not have been possible, was the presence of

women. As Scourby points out in The Greek Americans (1984)—a book that unlike other

sociohistorical writings about Greek Americans gives the Greek female immigrant a voice—it

was only when women started coming to America that the male immigrant started thinking of

the new country as a permanent home, and a Greek community could be formed. Besides the

beginning of female immigration to the U.S., sacred and secular institutions like the Orthodox

Church, the Greek language press which was notable in America, various voluntary associations,

Greektowns, and Greek schools have been principal in preserving the Greek language,

perpetuating Hellenic patriotism, and a sense of Greek identity, fusing immigrants and their

families together, and helping them to distinguish themselves from other immigrants.29 Another

significant informal institution that functioned exclusively as a gathering place for men after

work was the “kafenion” or coffeehouse. As traditional markers of ethnic identity formation,

29 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Fairchild observed that proportionate to their numbers, the

Greeks published more newspapers than any other nationality in the U.S. The two major Greek-language dailies with national circulation were established in New York. The first one, Άτλαντίς [Atlantis], began as a weekly in 1894 and became daily in 1905. It remained the major Greek newspaper until 1915, when Έθνικός Κήρυκας [The National Herald], a paper with liberal policies, began its publication.

24

these institutions have played a crucial role in the process of forming and maintaining Greek

ethnic communities.

With time, however, a locus of ethnic identification like any of the above-mentioned

institutions may evolve, disappear, or be contested by the younger generations. Various studies

have therefore investigated the continuing impact of these institutions on Greek American life,

as well as their relevance for providing an understanding of “Greekness” among the American-

born generations. For the American-born generations, sociological material has indicated, certain

of the social institutions—the Greek church, the Greek school, and the Greek language—have

not been rendered meaningless. They have instead continued, in different degrees, to function as

vital components of Greek self-image. Studies have shown that though ethnic meaning has taken

new forms among individuals of later generations, it has not wholly disappeared. Today, as

English has gradually replaced Greek as the language spoken at home (a significant index of

assimilation according to sociological studies), Greek-school attendance has declined, and

intermarriages have blurred the once clear ethnic distinctions, Americans of Greek descent still

retain a relatively strong attachment to their ethnic heritage.30 For example, Greek Orthodoxy, it

has recently been maintained, even if “ostensibly weakened, displaced or neglected by second-

generation Greek Americans . . . is still a vibrant and indispensable component of their

understanding of ethnic identity and boundary” (Tsimpouki, “The Multiple Faces of Greek

American Religious Experience” 5).

The literary texts examined in this project make only cursory comments about the Greek

church and school as elements defining collective or individual ethnic consciousness, but

frequently emphasize the Greek language as a marker of ethnic identity, and a vehicle for

expressing a distinct ethnic culture. The narrators’ unfamiliarity with the Greek language in Greece

by Prejudice and The Priest Fainted serves as a point of disruption between the lives of the Greek

American protagonists and their Greek relatives. The relation between ethnic self-image and

knowledge of the ethnic language, as mediated through family, will be discussed in Chapter Two.

Both Athas’s and Davidson’s texts emphasize the centrality of family, either in its immediate or

extended forms, in mediating and reinforcing a sense of ethnicity. As my discussion in Chapter

Three will show, family in Greece by Prejudice is considered responsible for transferring knowledge

of the ethnic language to the younger generation. At the same time, however, the text

emphasizes the painful process of claiming ethnic affiliations when family fails to generate ethnic

meaning.

30 One example of this modification is the substitution of English for Greek in the Liturgy which was

approved by the Clergy Laity Congress in 1970.

25

As previously said, sociological and historical literature has tended to explain the Greek

experience in America in terms of social mobility, a common way of approaching ethnicity and

measuring assimilation. The beginnings of a Greek American middle class can be detected,

Moskos has argued, as early as in the 1920s, when many Greeks started to abandon the mines

and railroads to become store owners. After the 1920s, the first generation increasingly began to

regard the U.S. as their permanent home. They started learning English, becoming naturalized

citizens, moving out from the Greek neighborhoods, and involving themselves in American

affairs. By 1940, as many as half a million Greek immigrants had put down roots in the U.S. In

the 1960s, ethnic histories started to emphasize the high achievement motivation of Greek

immigrants. A study by Bernard C. Rosen from 1959 showed that the desire to succeed among

Greek Americans, compared to white Protestant Americans and a selection of other ethnic

groups in America, was statistically stronger (qtd in Moskos, Greek Americans 111). A decade

later, the 1970 U.S. Census supported the upward social mobility of Greek Americans: among

twenty-four second-generation nationality groups, data showed, Greeks ranked first in

educational attainment and second (after Jews) in income levels.

To sum up, the sociological portraits that emerge from most of the works mentioned

above with regard to the Greek experience in the U.S. can be seen to be framed within the ways

assimilationist theories have explained the social and economic successes of ethnic groups.31

Studies have generally documented the initial poverty, hardships, and xenophobia experienced by

the early immigrants and advanced the subsequent generations as ethnic groups that have

successfully entered American society.32 If Greek Americans follow the above-mentioned model,

they have also been represented as remaining close to their families, communities, and ethnic

identification. The literary expressions of Greek Americans examined here, although informed

by these issues, reveal aspects of family that have been overlooked by many sociohistorical

narratives. As will be discussed in Chapters Three, Four, and Five, the understanding of family

conveyed in these literary texts extends beyond the immediate or even extended family, and the

traditional family ideal is both confirmed and challenged. Family is, in various ways, constructed

as a cultural and social site affected by public landscape. Hence, the role of family for the

protagonists’ ethnic and gender identity formation, I propose, is intensely complicated. As my

31 The recurrent image of Greek Americans as an ethnic group that has done well socially and economically has spurred vibrant discussions among scholars on the issue of political ideology among Greeks in the U.S. The general celebration of the so-called “emborgeoisement” of Greek America that Moskos, among other scholars, has advanced has been problematized by Georgakas. Georgakas, who has investigated the extent of radicalism among Greeks in the American labor movement, has taken issue with the narrative of a Greek American conservatism generally offered by historians and sociologists. See the two historians’ exchanges on the subject in Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 14 (1987).

32 The above-mentioned paradigm has been applied to other European ethnic groups, and more recently to Asian Americans.

26

readings of the literary texts in the subsequent chapters will emphasize, even if family in the

narratives is shown to provide support and nourishment in the formation of the American-born

generations’ ethnic and gender identities, it is just as often constructed as a site that fails to meet

the Greek American narrators’ expectations. Family, the texts show, is thus constructed as a site

for a vast range of human feeling and expression, from joy to encumbrance, from fulfillment to

disappointment.

Ethnic Bildungsroman

The Greek American texts I examine belong to multiple genres: they range from fiction to

memoir to autobiography. If one disregards how these works have been classified or marketed, it

would be possible to read all six texts, to some extent, as personal identity narratives or

autobiographical stories, given that autobiography, once thought of as nonfiction, is conceived of

as a genre also including a fictive impulse. Indeed, Elias Kulukundis’s The Feasts of Memory: A

Journey to A Greek Island and Nicholas Papandreou’s A Crowded Heart exhibit an ambiguity in

regard to genre. Kulukundis’s text allows for no easy description. It has been characterized as a

combination of many genres and related subgenres: “an autobiography, a family memoir, a

history and cartography of the island of Kasos, a book of short stories, and a travel narrative all

in one” (Kalogeras, “The ‘Other Space’ of Greek America” 715). The author himself describes

his book as “an autobiography of everything that did not happen to me” (The Feasts of Memory: A

Journey to A Greek Island vii). Papandreou, whose story unquestionably relies on autobiographical

material, creates a similar uncertainty as to how his text should be perceived. The title under

which the work was originally published in the U.K.—Father Dancing: An Invented Memoir—

together with the author’s remark in his acknowledgements that “Certain members of my family

thought that this book was about them, but when they read it, barely recalled a thing” (A Crowded

Heart), both encourage a reading of A Crowded Heart as fiction, an invented story that only lends

itself the appearance of a true one.

Although several of the Greek American texts studied here are semi-autobiographical, I

treat them primarily as imaginative constructions of ethnic identity formation. More specifically,

whether the authors of these identity narratives are conscious practitioners of the Bildungsroman

or not, their stories, I propose, can be perceived as belonging to that genre. The genre’s affinity

with autobiography has been noted by several critics. Both genres, in their traditional forms,

describe the coming-of-age of an individual, his/her Bildung, and the process of growing into

27

society.33 But as a genre, it has been argued, the Bildungsroman “is well suited for an exploration of

the meaning of ethnicity because it focuses on the relations of a protagonist with the wider

environment” (Japtok 21). In Growing Up Ethnic, Martin Japtok accounts for how ethnic writers

who adopt the genre also transform it. How is this transformation conceived in the Greek

American texts explored in this study?

One of the primary assumptions underlying a Bildungsroman, alternatively known as the

novel of formation or novel of development, is the formation of a coherent self. Traditional

notions of eighteenth-century Bildung imply “an organic unfolding and a harmonious integration

of all aspects of the self” (Bolaki 1). The developmental life journey is traditionally posited as a

movement from one stage to a higher stage, with the aim of achieving growth and maturity. To a

certain degree, the authors whose works I examine adhere to the pattern of the traditional

Bildungsroman. They tell stories of development and focus on the protagonist’s emotional, mental,

and sexual growth. At the same time, they imbue the classic sense of Bildung with new

dimensions. They reformulate notions of linear progress and coherent individual identity. The

process of formation the Greek American narrators undergo is defined by uncertainty,

negotiations, and complexity. Identity formation is emphasized as a painstaking process in these

narratives, one which in a number of ways involves the family.

If the traditional form of the Bildungsroman predominantly emphasizes “the individual but

may also acknowledge a community,” Japtok writes, “ethnic texts feature community

involvement more prominently, but they also stress individual development” (26). In varying

ways, the texts studied in this dissertation assert that the community, specifically constructed as

family, is as important as the individual. Whether the idea of family involves the traditional

nuclear family idealized as a private haven from a public world with a relatively fixed authority

structure as in The Octagonal Heart, the extended family in the form of Greek cousins, uncles, and

aunts as a site of discomfort as well as belonging in Greece by Prejudice, or the family perceived in

terms of public space or even nation like in A Crowded Heart, these texts expand the personality-

oriented plot of the traditional form, and stress a more social vision of identity formation.

Family, in its various forms and structures, is repeatedly invoked in these Bildungsromans as

primary sites for individual identity formation.

33 The similarities between the autobiographical novel and Bildungsroman in theme and theory, is, among

others, noted by Bonnie Hoover Braendlin in the essay “Bildung in Ethnic Women Writers.” “Viewed theoretically,” Braendlin argues, “the Bildungsroman may be defined as a more or less autobiographical novel, reflecting an author’s desire to universalize personal experience in order to valorize personal identity” (77). In addition, Martin Japtok writes in Growing Up Ethnic (2005), a study of the thematic similarities between a number of African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories, “both autobiography and Bildungsroman, when in the hands of ethnic authors, often thematize ethnicity” (21).

28

If the genre of Bildungsroman can be reconceived in terms of ethnicity, it can also be

reconceived in terms of gender. The form of the Bildungsroman, and most discussions of the

form, Susan Fraiman argues, “have tended to invoke a purposeful youth advancing toward some

clarity and stability of being” (Unbecoming Women ix). The traditional Bildungsroman usually ends

when the male hero reaches adult self-awareness and identity after a series of adventures in the

world.34 However, exploring identity formation in terms of ethnicity, class, gender, time,

geography, and other variables makes it possible to speak of “plural formations” (Fraiman 12).

Three of the six works I investigate further transform the genre’s classical form by depicting the

personal quests and identity developments of female narrators.35 Unlike the genre’s traditional

theme of a male quest with a clear destination, the female novel of development has a completely

different aim. Critics have described it as a form of awakening to limitations. As the female

heroine moves through the steps of her self-seeking journey, the process of growing up is not

the “single path” of the male Bildungsroman but “the endless negotiation of a crossroads”

(Fraiman x). It is therefore, Fraiman argues, “no longer possible to speak of a uniform fiction of

female development” (12-13). My discussions of The Octagonal Heart and The Priest Fainted show

how stories of female identity formation can disperse the traditional model of the Bildungsroman

in very different ways. In The Priest Fainted, the more recent of the two texts examined, the female

narrator’s strategy of re-mything the fates of goddesses from the Greek myths, an act out of

which new subject positions emerge for these female heroines, underwrites a wish to escape the

confining patriarchal traditions and values, and revise the role of women within the nuclear

family unit. As emphasized above, The Octagonal Heart presents no explicit feminist project.

Nevertheless, in a subtle way, the narrative raises questions about authority structures and gender

arrangements implicated in the traditional family ideal by unfolding the generational tensions and

disagreements with regard to old- and new-world values that are acted out between family

members.

Finally, it should be emphasized that the Bildungsromans under study, which are spread

over half a century, cannot routinely be seen to advance an identical Greek American process of

development. For example, the processes of growth and self-realization that feature in The

Octagonal Heart, Greece by Prejudice, and The Feasts of Memory are not as explicitly informed by issues

of gender as are the development processes depicted in the more contemporary texts.

Additionally, at the time when these texts were written, the metaphor that informed debates on

34 The mythical prototype of this form can be found in the Odyssey, specifically in the journeys of father and

son. 35 Along with The Octagonal Heart, Greece by Prejudice, and The Priest Fainted, all works which can be read as

female novels of development, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex makes up a fourth text which further complicates a classic understanding of Bildung, by positing a hermaphrodite as narrator for the story.

29

immigration and ethnicity was still that of the “melting pot” or “Americanization.” Not

surprisingly then, Athas’s narrator in Greece by Prejudice identifies herself as an American when she

travels to Greece, and fails, at least initially, to establish a continuity between her own self-

conception and the self as it is recognized by her Greek kin.

Ethnic Authority, Authoring Identities

As I mentioned in the Preface, literature can be viewed as a laboratory of sorts to explore ethnic

identities. I am not unaware of the fact that choosing ethnicity as a structuring element in my

literary analysis, as well as a principle of selecting the texts to be examined, makes me vulnerable

to accusations of endorsing essentialism. I thus want to remind the reader that I see ethnic

identity formation as complexly, variously, and dynamically formed by both descent (origin or

heritage) and consent (conscious identification with an ethnic group), that is, much in the same

way as Sollors does in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. I want to stress that

a concept such as “Greek American” must necessarily be flexible to be able to embrace

multivalent ways of being and feeling Greek American. It must include the different generations

of Greeks in American or Greek Americans, from those who were born in Greece to those who

were born in the U.S. It must also comprehend the difficulties encountered by the immigrant

generation and the different experiences of those individuals who arrived to the U.S. under

different circumstances and with other agendas than economic prosperity. Finally, it needs to

provide opportunities to investigate the ethnic self-image of later generations Greek Americans,

whose knowledge of the ancestral homeland is limited and who conceive of themselves primarily

as Americans of Greek descent rather than as Greeks in America, not as any less “authentic” or

“real” as those of the first generation. In addition, a Greek American identity must be claimed and

be consented to.

The writers whose books are subject to close examination in this study are Greek

American in various ways. What links all of them is the fact that they belong to middle class, or

even upper middle class, and all of them have academic education. Thus class and education are

homogenizing factors in my selection of the writers. On the other hand, the authors’

generational belonging and their Greek heritage or descent vary. Some belong to the first-, or

second-generation of immigrants, while others to the third.36 Their Greek descent may be on

36 Migration statistics refer to people who have moved from one country to another as first-generation

immigrants. Elias Kulukundis, who is the only author discussed in this study who was raised but not born in the U.S., would thus be considered a first-generation Greek American. However, Kulukundis arrived in the U.S. when

30

both sides of the parents (Ariadne Thompson and Elias Kulukundis) or only on one (Daphne

Athas, Catherine Temma Davidson, Nicholas Papandreou, and Jeffrey Eugenides). Davidson’s

and Eugenides’s mixed ethnic descent also includes Jewish, respectively, Irish ancestry. As

regards consent, the connecting link between the writers and, more importantly, between their

texts, is their preoccupation with ethnicity as being, at one at the same time, self-invented or

consented to and ancestral or inherited.

The question remains: To what degree are the individual ethnic identities and family

histories of the writers, whose artistic works this study explores, crucial to explorations of ethnic

identity formation? While not attempting to explore this issue in its theoretical complexity, my

decision to provide straightforwardly conventional bibliographical information about the

authors, to account for their literary oeuvre, and to list the distinctions they have been awarded,

signals that I do assume a link between the writer’s ethnicity and his/her literary imagination.

Indeed, at times I approach the texts as expressions of the writers’ ethnic self-image. Moreover,

what motivates my decision to provide such biographical information is the fact that apart from

Eugenides, Davidson, and Athas, these authors are not known to the general American reading

public, nor have they received much recognition abroad. I introduce them here in the order in

which their texts are examined in Chapters Three, Four, Five, and in the Conclusion.

Daphne Athas was born in 1923 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a Greek immigrant

father and a New England mother. At the age of fifteen, she moved with her family to Chapel

Hill, North Carolina. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina,

Chapel Hill, and did her graduate studies at the Harvard University School of Education. In the

fifties, she lived and worked in England. Eventually, Athas returned to Chapel Hill, where she

has taught creative writing at UNC-CH since 1968. In the mid 1970s, Athas was Fulbright

Professor of American Literature at the University of Tehran. Her work spans many fields, and

includes the novels The Weather of the Heart (1947), The Fourth World (1956), Entering Ephesus

(1971), Cora (1978), the memoir analyzed in this dissertation Greece by Prejudice (1962), the play Sit

on the Hearth (Ding Dong Bell) (1957), the collection of poetry Crumbs for the Bogeyman (1991), the

short stories “Provender’s Tale” (1961), “The Hitchhiker” (1969), “Work in Progress” (1979),

and numerous essays.

Athas is the recipient of several honors, including two National Endowment of the Arts

Awards. Time magazine included Entering Ephesus on its Ten Best Fiction List in 1971, and the

novel was reprinted as a classic in 1991. Her last novel, Cora, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award

for fiction from the N.C. Literary and Historical Association in 1979. She has been he was merely three years old. It is safe to assume that his experiences as a Greek American are more characteristic of those of the second generation than those of the immigrant one.

31

acknowledged as a Southern writer, and was listed in Contemporary Southern Women Fiction Writers:

An Annotated Bibliography (1995). In the 1997 special issue of Pembroke Magazine, dedicated in

part to Athas, her work is defined as “part of the North Carolina literary heritage” (Parker 7).

Elias Kulukundis, author of The Feasts of Memory, was born in London in 1937, traveled

with his parents to Greece when he was one, and arrived in America at the age of three.

Kulukundis was educated at Phillips Exeter and Harvard, where he studied literature. Today, he

lives in New York City. Coming from a family with a long tradition in shipping—the author is

the grandson of two Kasiot sea captains and the son of a Kasiot shipowner—Kulukundis is a

writer as well as a shipping financier. Aside from his latest work, a libretto for the musical Three

Brides for Kasos mentioned in the Preface, Kulukundis has also written a second memoir, A Taste

of Illusion (also known as The Amorgos Conspiracy). This memoir recounts the writer’s rescue of his

first wife’s father—a cabinet minister of the last democratically elected Greek government before

the Greek junta—from the remote Aegean island of Amorgos, where he was held a prisoner. In

addition to these two memoirs, Kulukundis has published a translation of Both Sides of the Ocean

by the Soviet novelist Viktor Nekrasov. In 1968, Kulukundis founded the George Bennett

Fellowship for unpublished writers.

Athas’s Greece by Prejudice and Kulukundis’s The Feasts of Memory demonstrate how an

ethnic writer might invest personal experience into her/his literature. Both writers made the

journey back to their ancestors’ native country to explore their ethnic heritages. Their

experiences from these journeys are recounted in the two autobiographies examined in Chapter

Three. In 1958, Athas visited Greece for the first time. In spite of her associations with North

Carolina and Southern literature, Athas suggests in an interview how her ethnic heritage informs

her writing: “All my stuff presumes a way of thinking that may not be purely Judeo-Christian,

because I have Mediterranean influences I hardly understood when growing up” (Meares 78).

These influences are clear, to various extents, in Entering Ephesus, Cora, and, more significantly, in

Greece by Prejudice.

Although Kulukundis never lived in Greece, he has said that he feels he grew up in a

Greek world. At the age of twenty-seven, he traveled to the island of Syros to find out more

about his Greek origins, and to write a book about the stories of his family and their Greek

island. In 1967, he published The Feasts of Memory. In 2003 a second edition of The Feasts of Memory

appeared, including a new chapter and a new subtitle: Stories of a Greek Family. On a website, the

author recently described the significance his book has to his extended family in the following

words: “When I wrote the book at age twenty-eight, I was concerned only with understanding

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my life. Now, the passage of time and another generation has given the book a dimension I did

not anticipate” (“A Few Words from the Author”).

Ariadne Thompson’s first book, the memoir The Octagonal Heart, recounts the author’s

childhood memories of the St. Louis suburb where she spent her early summers. Her father

came from Smyrna to the U.S. to work at the World Fair in St Louis. He married Thompson’s

mother and later became the Greek Consul in St Louis. Her grandfather, Reverend Panagiotes

(Peter) Phiambolis, arrived in the U.S. with a mission to found a Greek Orthodox church in

Chicago (1892), and then moved to establish Holy Trinity Church in St. Louis (1906 - 1918). He

was the first Greek Orthodox bishop ordained in America. In addition to this first book,

Thompson’s oeuvre includes a twenty-page-long adaptation of The Octagonal Heart for Reader’s

Digest (1963) with the title “Our Octagonal World,” as well as numerous short stories, which

Thompson wrote for a number of magazines under the pen name of Paz van Matre in the

1950s.37 Some of these stories include: “One Flight Up for Bedlam” (1950), “At Her Age”

(1956), “A Bauble for a Lady” (1956), and “The Meeting” (1956). Thompson has also published

one additional book, the novel Copper Beech (1960).

Catherine Temma Davidson’s debut novel The Priest Fainted, examined in Chapter Four,

is semi-autobiographical. Davidson was born in Los Angeles in 1963, and like her heroine, she is

a Greek-Jewish American. After graduating from Harvard, she made the journey back to Greece.

Upon her return to the U.S., she enrolled in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC.

Out of her first assignment, a novella, grew the main story of The Priest Fainted. “Any ethnicity

that hasn’t been written about in the mainstream,” Davidson has said, “has a slew of stories to

be told,” a comment that may serve as partial explanation to the critical acclaim that Davidson’s

literary debut received (“Alumni Profile”). The Priest Fainted earned the 1998 Stephen Crane

Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was listed in the Los Angeles Times

Best Fiction section. Unlike Greece by Prejudice, The Feasts of Memory and The Octagonal Heart, The

Priest Fainted has been translated into Greek. The translation by Evagelia Kizilou, appeared in

2001 under the title Ιμάμ Μπαΐλντί [Imam Baildi]. Davidson’s earlier literary production includes

mainly poetry, for which she has won numerous distinctions: the Academy of American Poets

award, the Dorothy Daniels Award from PEN, and first prize at the Los Angeles Poetry Festival.

The poetry collection Inheriting the Ocean belongs to these earlier productions.

Nicholas Papandreou, fiction writer, essayist, finance and development consultant,

recently wrote in an essay: “Living abroad, reading the [Greek] poets, I tried to reconstruct the

country [Greece] from a distance. . . . I began to see my own Greece, highly political, full of

37 The author’s family nickname was “Paz” from her family surname Pazmesoglou, and her first husband’s surname was “van Matre.”

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crowds and I started to compose verbal snapshots. Some of them found their proper place in my

first novel” (“On Greek Literature” 2). The novel that Papandreou refers to in this essay is A

Crowded Heart (published with Penguin, UK, in 1996 as Father Dancing: an Invented Memoir)

examined in Chapter Five. As the author’s comment on his fictional Greece implies, the

autobiographical element in this novel is, just like in The Priest Fainted, very clear. Like Alex, the

narrator of the novel, Papandreou was born in California in 1956 to a family of prominent Greek

politicians and academics. His father, Andreas Papandreou, and his grandfather, George

Papandreou, served as prime ministers of Greece. At the age of ten, the author moved with his

family to Greece so his father could embark on a political career. Papandreou spent his teenage

years in Canada, where his family had fled to escape the Greek dictatorship. When the

dictatorship fell in 1974, he did not return to Greece but moved to the U.S. to study economics

at Yale and Princeton, and, eventually, literature at the University of Vermont. Papandreou

writes in both English and Greek, and his short stories have appeared in numerous American,

Canadian, and Greek literary journals. A Crowded Heart was a nominee for the Los Angeles Times

First Fiction Award. The novel is available in Greek translation under the title Δέκa Μύθοι Κaι

Μιa Ιstορίa (“Ten Myths and One Story”), and has also appeared in German (1998) and Arabic

(2001) translations. His second book, Lepti Grammi (“Fine Line”) (1997), is available to date only

in Greek. Papandreou lives in Athens, Greece.

In a fashion similar to Papandreou and Davidson, Jeffrey Eugenides draws freely on his

family history for his second novel, Middlesex, discussed in the Conclusion. The writer assigns his

hometown to his narrator Cal Stephanides; Eugenides was born in Detroit in 1960, and grew up

on the street Middlesex in Grosse Point, Michigan. He is the third son of an American-born

father whose Greek parents emigrated from Asia Minor, and an American mother of Anglo-Irish

descent, which is where Eugenides’s and Cal’s genealogies begin to diverge. But finding material

for a fictional narrative using your own family and ethnic origins, Eugenides has recently implied,

may be just as challenging as it is compelling. Being “only half-Greek,” and having grown up in a

“very Americanized house,” the writer had to research the Greek American immigrant

experience and learn Greek customs to “find out how [his] grandparents had lived long before

[he] was around” (Goldstein 5).

Eugenides studied writing at Brown University with John Hawkes, and received an M.A.

in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. In 1988, Eugenides published

his first short story. The Virgin Suicides (1993) is Eugenides’s celebrated debut novel. His fiction

has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The

Gettysburg Review, and Granta. He has received many awards, including fellowships from the

34

Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writer’s Award,

and the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As

mentioned in the Preface, Middlesex has been translated into over 30 languages, and won the

2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Since 1999, Eugenides has lived in Berlin, Germany, where he

has been a fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American

Academy.

It is evident from the above introductions to the authors that all of them have, in

different ways and to different degrees, invested in their family histories and their Greek ethnic

heritage in their literary productions. Greek family and history, it is clear, have served as sources

of inspiration and self-knowledge in the process of writing the narratives and constructing the

fictive or autobiographical situations and characters in the ethnic Bildungsromans selected for

analysis here. As Eugenides has said in an interview, inserting the family saga into Middlesex,

which in the writer’s words is a book about “reinventing your identity on different levels,”

allowed him “to talk about a range of things and a range of characters and a range of historical

period” (Moorhem). However, there may also be an alternative purpose for choosing to write

about one’s family or finding material for a fictive story within one’s family history, as

Papandreou recently suggested in his contribution to a family symposium in The Threepenny

Review. Commenting on the extensive political and historical records of his family, and the

intensity that surrounded his forefathers, Papandreou remarks that “For too long I was trapped

inside pages written by my forefathers. Maybe I still am. However, I sit down each day and at

least for a few hours I write myself out of their book” (“A Symposium on the Family” 10). With

a focus on representations of ethnic and gender identities, my discussions of the Greek

American narratives in the subsequent chapters will investigate the ways in which family is

shown to have a capacity to inspire and nurture but also cause grievance in the process of

identity formation.

35

36

Chapter Two

Grounding Ethnic Identity

Theories of Identity

Few theoretical concepts have generated as much reflection and intellectual debate as identity. It

is a term that is (largely) intertwined with concepts of race, nation, gender, and ethnicity. Its

evocation for both legitimizing and manifesting the cultural politics of a community of people

and for negotiating a sense of individual (ethnic, racial, national, gendered, etc.) self is intensely

discussed within a variety of disciplinary areas. At the same time, the concept has been subjected

to critique. Indeed, in literature and in cultural studies identity is a topic that continues to be

vigorously debated.1 Much of the debate focuses on the political and epistemological usefulness

of identity categories, and on the utility of identity as a mode of social analysis and activism.

This dissertation investigates the process of ethnic and gender identity formation as

mediated through family, and of the fictive “realities” that identity categories describe in a

selection of Greek American literary texts. The texts construct identities as produced by complex

negotiations among the experiences of ethnicity, class, gender, and sex; they offer divergent

expressions as to how individuals identify both with and against ethnic groups and families.

Identities in these Greek American narratives may be both forced upon the protagonists and

embraced voluntarily. Given that representations of identities as socially constructed, yet

centrally influenced by family matters and genealogy, make up the centre of analysis in this

dissertation project, I present in what follows Paula M. L. Moya’s and Satya P. Mohanty’s

attempts to reconcile what has come to be known as the “essentialist” and “constructivist” (read:

postmodernist) views of identity. Moya’s and Mohanty’s alternative theoretical position on

identity can, in philosophical terms, according to the critics, be characterized as “postpositivist

realist,” and calls for the recognition of concepts such as experience, knowledge, social location,

and agency as productive analytical categories in theorizing identity. This theoretical premise

encourages understandings of ethnic American writing, I argue, as rich sources of insight into the

complex process of identity construction.

1 See Stuart Hall’s “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” (1996), and a special issue of New Literary History

(2000), devoted to the question “Is There Life after Identity Politics?” The essays included in this issue show both a skepticism toward and a confidence in the political utility of categories of identity.

37

The so-called essentialist and constructivist academic discourses on what constitutes

identity differ significantly. The identity-based theoretical movements draw their strength from

powerful narratives of belonging and continuity, narratives which tend to support the idea of

identity as innate and positive. Such an understanding of identity informs the struggle for self-

definition, which has enabled many marginalized groups, such as the African Americans—and

later also female, gay, bisexual, and ethnic communities—to mobilize, conduct oppositional

politics, and assert cultural expression (articulated in, for example, the achievements of the Civil

Rights and Black Power movements). However, claims for specific kinds of social identities and

narratives of belonging have come under attack for supporting an essentialized view of identity

based on sameness. Critics of this position have instead emphasized the unstable and contingent

nature of identities. Two ideas generally inform their identity theories, and have come to be

known as postmodern: that identities are fictitious, fragmented, and contradictory, and that the

relationship between identities and the material world is arbitrary.

Theorists whose work is influenced by a postmodern perspective view cultural and social

identity, in cultural critic Ien Ang’s words, as “the way we represent and narrativize ourselves to

ourselves and to others” (1). As evident from this formulation, postmodernist theories of

identity (racial, ethnic, gender, or other) are, above all, informed by the idea that identities (like all

knowledge) are discursively and socially produced. Accordingly, this “constructivist” approach to

identity, embraced by a vast majority of critics today, challenges the notion of a stable and all-

defining identity grounded in the past or a self that withstands the forces of social interaction. In

“Identity Blues,” Ang criticizes essentialized, “backward-looking conceptions of identity” as “an

effort to find a magical solution to life in a world in which uncertainty is the name of the global

game. . . . a nostalgic harking back to an imagined golden past—embodied in the selective

memory of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’” (6). Instead, the postmodernist association of cultural

identities is “with becoming rather than being, with the confident embrace of the open-

endedness of history and destiny” (Ang 6). This perspective on identity production accounts for

the constructed nature of identity, including ethnic and gender identities, in and through culture.

Social and cultural identities are envisioned as being subject to the continuous “play” of history,

culture, and power. Accordingly, ethnic and gender identities are viewed as inescapably plural

and unstable.2

For both essentialist and postmodernist theorists, one of the crucial issues is that of

experience. The issue of experience has generally been intimately tied to social and intellectual

debates on identity. First evoked by the Civil Rights and feminist movements in the U.S. in the

2 As an example of this conception of identity, see Hall’s essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990).

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1960s and 1970s, experience became a central word for mobilizing a feminist consciousness-

raising, and for explaining what it means to be a racial minority. Activists emphasized the

indissoluble links between women’s and minorities’ identities, their experiences of discrimination

and marginality, and the material and physical realities of their lives.

In theoretical discussions, particularly postmodernist ones, the idea of experience as an

authoritative source for knowledge was later undermined. In an essay entitled “Experience,”

published in 1992, critic Joan Scott calls into question the foundational status that historians

have, traditionally, given to the notion of experience by appealing to experience as

“uncontestable evidence” and “an originary point of explanation” (24) in their accounts. Scott’s

assertion that it “is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted

through experience” (26) comes into conflict with a realist conceptualization of experience as

significant for understanding the formation of social identity. Realist politics of identity, John H.

Zammito contends, involve “claims for recognition and respect based on experience of cultural

and ethnic difference” (295).3

Attempts to speak about social identities—racial, ethnic, gender, or other—by grounding

them in experience have been attacked by Scott and other postmodernist critics, both feminist

and ethnic. Essentialist invocations of identity, they argue, tend to theorize identity as a constant,

as a solid entity with an overwhelming sense of determinateness attached to it, which is

“transferable into all times and all circumstances—identity yields the same results no matter

where or when it is called upon” (Palumbo-Liu 767). Tendencies to view certain individuals

marked by race or gender as “predisposed toward certain actions” that in turn may disclose their

identity (Palumbo-Liu 768) reveal certain practical and theoretical difficulties. Identity, when

invoked, rather than constituting an affirmative force for the individual, can be a normative and

totalizing category.4

Admittedly, the above account of the essentialist and postmodernist discourses on

identity and experience is overly simplified. Postmodernist theory, as many critics have observed

(including Moya) does not constitute a unified critical and intellectual movement. I am aware that

not all critics or theorists who would define themselves as postmodernists, for example, belong

to a single position or work within a theoretical consensus. It is therefore important to say that I

follow Moya in my use and understanding of the “postmodernist” critique of identity as an

3 For a realist critique of Scott’s poststructural “historicism,” see Zammito’s essay “Reading ‘Experience’” (2000).

4 Many postmodernist critics view identity categories (such as “woman,” “lesbian,” “ethnic” or “other”) as suspect, considering them invalid analytical and political categories unless they are uncontestable, transcultural, and transhistorical. Gender critic Judith Butler is troubled by identity categories, which in her words, “tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression” (13-14).

39

opposition or “a corrective” to the “essentialist” one (See her “Introduction: Reclaiming

Identity”).

Commenting on the difficulty of defining postmodernism as a (unified) theoretical

and/or critical position, Moya explains her use of the adjective “postmodernist” as comprising

“a strong epistemological skepticism, a valorization of flux and mobility, and a general suspicion

of, or hostility toward, all normative and/or universalist claims” (“Introduction” 6).5 The

theoretical disbelief in claims of identity, Moya argues, counteracts any attempt to analyze “the

epistemic status and political salience of any given identity” or to “evaluate the possibilities and

limits of different identities” (“Introduction” 7). The consciousness and public “voice” that

women’s, minority, and gay communities obtained during their struggle for self-definition both

emphasize the theoretical and political utility of concepts such as identity and experience. Their

achievements serve as proof of the ways in which identities and experiences can serve as sources

of knowledge that may tell people something pertinent and valuable about who they are.

As a result of the political and theoretical limitations of the positions available for

conceiving cultural identity—the theoretical dyad of essentialism versus postmodernism and,

more specifically, their failure in theorizing the complex connections between experience,

knowledge, social location, agency, and identity—minority critics and scholars Mohanty, Moya,

Michael R. Hamed-García, and others have formulated the theoretical position known as

postpositivist realist. The realist theory of cultural identity, aimed at going beyond the contra-

distinctions between essentialist and constructivist approaches to identity, is introduced and

developed in, among other works, Mohanty’s Literary Theory and the Claims of History (1997), the

anthology Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, edited by Moya and

Hames-García (2000), and Moya’s more recent work Learning from Experience: Minority Identities,

Multicultural Struggles (2002).6 The writers’ shared aim is to foreground an alternative identity

theory, and to contribute to ongoing theoretical discussions regarding the status of experience,

knowledge, and the political and epistemic salience of the concept of identity. This theoretical

alternative provides a complex framework for analyzing constructions of ethnic identity and

identity formation in the selected Greek American texts by taking into consideration factors such

as descent and ethnic heritage, social location, individual agency, and experience, all of which are

5 In a footnote in her essay “Introduction: Reclaiming Identity,” Moya outlines three analytically separable

ways of characterizing postmodernism that, she argues, most critics agree on: “(1) as an aesthetic practice; (2) as a historical stage in the development of late capitalism; and (3) as a theoretical or critical position” (6).

6 As Moya explains, the work of realist critics aims to demonstrate the potential theoretical reach of the realist approach to identity for “literary theory, feminist theory, political philosophy, literary criticism, women’s studies, ethnic studies, or cultural studies” (“Introduction” 15).

40

relevant in mediating the protagonists’ understanding of themselves and knowledge of the world

in which they live.

As explained above, Moya’s theoretical work on identity should be understood as

emerging from the critique of prevailing theoretical (in particular postmodernist) assumptions of

identity. The prevalence of postmodernist thought within the humanities, she argues, “has

created an intellectual atmosphere in which invocations of identity [and] appeals to

experience . . . have been judged to be both theoretically naive and ideologically suspect” (Moya,

Learning from Experience 6). For Moya, whose own theoretical quest is to find the best language

available in order to theorize and analyze Chicana feminist subjectivity and identity, the political

and theoretical limitations of the postmodernist perspective are evident in their delegitimizing of

“all accounts of experience” and their undermining of “all forms of identity politics” (Moya,

Learning from Experience 25). Postmodernist theories denounce the influence that an individual’s

experiences may have on her cultural identity, and they disavow the material effects that the

social categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic status may have on an

individual’s identity. Given the postmodernist position on experience and identity, it is necessary

to find alternative theoretical positions from which to analyze the literary constructions of

identity investigated here. The formation of identity, these texts show, involves family as a

prominent yet not uncomplicated site of ethnicity, and a source of knowledge for the Greek

American protagonist. Additionally, the narratives underscore the relevance of other determining

factors on identity formation, such as ethnic heritage, class, gender, and sexuality, without

understating the significance of individual agency, or the possibility of continuously verifying

identities on the basis of new individual experiences. Moya’s and Mohanty’s theoretical work on

identity, I will proceed to describe, provides ground for analyzing the Greek American

protagonists’ distressing yet affirming experiences of going through the process of ethnic and

gender identity formation.

The realist theory of identity can be explained as an effort to place the concept of

identity together with the categories of experience and knowledge. Conceptualizing identities as

theoretical claims with social, political, and epistemic significance and consequence, realist critics

have undertaken the task to “reevaluate—even to reclaim—identity” (Moya, “Introduction” 2) in

literary and cultural studies. In Moya’s words, “Who we understand ourselves to be will have

consequences for how we experience and understand the world” (“Introduction” 8). Thus, the

most basic claim of the realist theory of identity is that identities are both constructed and real; that

is, “identities are constructed because they are based on interpreted experience and on theories

that explain the social and natural world, but they are also real because they refer outward to

41

causally significant features of the world” (Moya, Learning from Experience 86). In other words,

identities “become intelligible from within specific historical and material contexts” (Learning from

Experience 86). The realist conception of identity as a context-specific construct informs my

readings of the literary texts, especially my analysis of male and ethnic identity in A Crowded

Heart, a story which is set in a political climate characterized by militarism.

Intrinsic to the realist theory of cultural identity is the inextricable link between an

individual’s identity, her experience, and her knowledge. This linkage is based on the

suppositions that an individual’s social location, constituted by the social categories of race, class,

gender, age, religion, nationality, regional origin, and economic status, is “causally relevant for the

experiences she will have and that an individual’s experiences will influence, although not

determine, the formation of her social identity” (Moya, Learning from Experience 87). Unlike other

theories of identity that see the category of experience as determinant or as suspect, realist

theorists of identity view experience as an important organizing principle for theoretical self-

understanding. Hence, realists argue, we can neither afford to unthinkingly embrace nor to

jettison the concept of experience. Experience is a source from which humans glean knowledge

about themselves and about the world in which we live.

According to the realist theory, the relationship between social location, knowledge, and

identity is theoretically mediated through the interpretation of experience.7 The theoretically-

mediated nature of identity which underlies the realist epistemology allows for the possibility of

error and accuracy in interpreting the things that happen to us. The idea of theoretically-

mediated experience, realists contend, implies that one individual’s understanding of the same

situation “may undergo revision over the course of time” (Moya, Learning from Experience 40) and

that “identities both condition and are conditioned by the kinds of interpretations people give to

the experiences they have” (41). Identities then cannot be (and are not) self-evident. They are, in

Moya’s words, subject to “a continual process of verification that takes place over the course of

an individual’s life through her interaction with the society she lives in” (41). As a result of this

process, identities can be both contested and changed.

By conceptualizing identities not as simply products of structures of power and

discourse, but as structures that are in part consciously chosen, Moya’s theory of identity

underlines the affirmative possibilities of identity at the same time as it stresses individual agency.

Cultural identities, Moya argues, “are not only and always ‘wounded attachments’”

(“Introduction” 8); they “can also be enabling, enlightening, and enriching structures of

7 It should be noted that Moya and Mohanty’s identity theory reflects materialist social thought. For

example, the theoretical claim that “knowledge is produced not in isolation from the world but through engagement with it” (Moya, Learning from Experience 62) is generally recognized as materialist.

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attachment and feeling” (8), assumed for complex individual reasons. The texts investigated here

are full of moments that posit identities as socially influenced as well as deliberately created and

chosen by the Greek American narrators.

The realist conception of identity, it seems to me, allows for asking particular questions

about identity and identity formation that are not possible within the essentialist and

constructivist approaches. In Learning from Experience, Moya applies her theoretical framework to

the study of the texts and lived identities of minorities in the U.S., more specifically those of

Chicana/os, to show the interpretive alternatives offered by the realist discourse on identity. I

find her complex theory of identity and identity formation compelling as an approach to the

Greek American literary configurations of ethnic identities studied in this dissertation because it

does not lose sight of why and in what ways identities—especially ethnic identities—matter.

Indeed, the appeal of Moya’s theoretical vision of identity for my readings is that it stresses the

composite interrelations among the categories that make up an individual’s social location—

ethnicity, race, gender, social class, and sexuality—thus allowing me to account for the complex

process of identity formation presented in the literary works. Moya’s vision informs my analyses

of Greek American identities as constructed while at the same time allowing for opportunities to

investigate how these identities are fictionally constructed. It allows for an exploration of the

sense in which these identities can be conceptualized as “real,” and how they can be grounded in

family and individual experience without being uniformly determined by them. However, I want

to emphasize that my use of Moya’s theoretical conception of identity should not be seen as an

attempt to draw a parallel between the history of Greek Americans in the U.S. and the historical

specificity and minority status of Chicano/as. The two ethnic groups have distinct immigrant

histories as well as distinct current socio-economic experiences.

Finally, it should be noted that thinkers from other intellectual traditions than the one to

which Moya belongs have made important contributions to ideas about knowledge, experience,

consciousness, and empowerment. One minority group that has developed critical social theories

and thought and furthered interpretative frameworks that show interesting similarities with some

of Moya’s theoretical concerns is that of African American women. Since the 1980s, Black

women intellectuals have developed a Black feminist politics of empowerment. The experiences

of African American women, experiences of particular forms of oppression, and the domains of

power that constrain Black women have all received considerable scholarly attention. A crucial

feature of Black feminist thought is the theoretical assumption that experience provides

knowledge. The knowledge gained from intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and

sexuality, it has been argued, provides the stimulus for empowerment.

43

What characterizes the interpretive frameworks and epistemological stances of Black

feminist thought is its insight concerning empowerment, more specifically, how Black women’s

lived experiences and their knowledge about social location can foster group empowerment and

activism within the context of social injustice. Black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins aims

to contribute to the development of what she refers to as Black feminist thought as critical social

theory in her book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

(2000), in which she draws on the thoughts and work produced by a wide range of African

American women scholars and activists. Though Collins is attentive to the fact that there are

individual responses to common challenges, the central questions of Black Feminist Thought are

those facing U.S. Black women as a group. There are interesting similarities between Collins’s

and Moya’s theoretical works, since both are projects of social justice. Yet there is an important

point of divergence between the two theorists. Whereas Collins’s emphasis lies on investigating a

collective Black women’s identity and standpoint, underlining their potential as catalysts for social

change, Moya’s work, with its specific focus on the epistemic and political salience of the

concept of identity, provides a theoretical framework for thinking about individual experiences

and processes of identity formation. However, as I have discussed earlier, Moya’s theoretical

formulations of identity also include a social component. Her identity theory accounts for the

collective (the ethnic community) as a significant source of influence on and knowledge about

the process of individual identity formation. The social aspects of Moya’s identity theory

combined with the social vision of identity characteristic of the ethnic Bildungsroman create

productive analytical frameworks for the literary analysis of this study.

Theories of Ethnicity: Perspectives in Anthropology, Sociology, and

Literature

In Chapter One I provided an overview of various definitions of ethnic writing, and discussed

the ethnic Bildungsroman and the Greek Americans as an ethnic group. In the account that

follows, I offer complementary discussions to the “ethnic” by focusing on some of the critical

attention paid to issues of ethnicity and ethnic identity due to the growth of the numbers of

individuals and populations of mixed ancestry and cultural heritages in the U.S. The diversity of

discussions that have emerged in recent years within a variety of academic disciplines attests to

the complexity of the concept of “ethnicity.”8 I give here an overview of various discussions of

8 The collection Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (1996), edited by Werner Sollors, makes available

some of the most influential and frequently cited discussions of the concept of ethnicity and related topics such as race, migration, and assimilation, to name a few.

44

ethnicity, and outline the relations between ethnicity, whiteness, and nationalism in order to

emphasize how these concepts relate to the broader concept of identity. Since identities are, in

Moya’s formulation, fundamentally about social relations, and since social categories—such as

ethnicity, nationality, and gender—have, as the selected literary texts illustrate, material effects on

the protagonists’ experiences and how they perceive themselves and their families, the discussion

that follows is meant to function as a theoretical base and context for the investigation of the

literary constructions of identities conducted in the subsequent chapters. Because the texts

configure family as a dynamic site of ethnic identity formation, this chapter concludes with a

discussion of family as a sociological entity, offering examples of how sociological conceptions

of family and family life inform the literary readings as well as how the literary texts complicate

traditional family ideals.

Before I introduce, generically, the various theoretical strands of ethnicity in

anthropology, sociology, and the role this concept has played in literary studies, I wish to stress

the recent origins of the term “ethnic.”9 Historian David R. Roediger notes in Working Toward

Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White the striking absence of a language of ethnicity in

the early twentieth century. At the time, he explains, no terminology existed to describe the

status of new immigrants who arrived from eastern and southern Europe as “ethnic” rather than

“racial” (18).10 The word “ethnic,” as an adjective and a noun, gained strong currency only in the

1970s, not least through Michael Novak’s manifesto of the “new ethnicity”.11 Despite the

frequency with which the term has been used since, lexicographers, as Wilbur Zelinsky argues,

have not devoted much thought to the question. According to the dictionary Merriam-Webster

Online, a standard lexical definition of “ethnic” is: “relating to large groups of people classed

according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or

background,” for example, “ethnic minorities” or “ethnic enclaves.”

9 Although the use of the term “ethnic”—from the Greek εθνικ-ός, heathen, and έθνος, nation—is rather

old, the word made its entry into the Oxford English Dictionary first in 1961. 10 In Working Toward Whiteness Roediger provides a discussion as to the language of “ethnicity” and

“ethnic,” and their histories. He offers two possible explanations for the absence of an “ethnic” language in the early twentieth century. The first one has to do with (at least partly) the way “race” functioned to distribute the right to full citizenship. The new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were considered to be a different racial type from the northern Europeans who preceded them, and they were thus subjected to scrutiny and exclusion. Another explanation for the absent ethnic, Roediger writes, “is that a term doing some of the intellectual and cultural work later done by ‘ethnic’ was ‘new immigrant’ itself, a category that was remarkable for its ability to describe simultaneously the simple fact of recent arrival and the ways in which those recently arriving were singled out as racially different” (19). The section on “Whiteness, Ethnicity and the Category of Race” later in this chapter provides a more comprehensive account of the racial history of whiteness.

11 According to Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity (1986), the first usage recorded of the term “ethnic” is in an 1953 essay by David Reisman. However, Sollors points out, in the article Reisman uses the word “without any self-consciousness and without a hint of semantic innovation” (23). Trying to trace the origins of the word, Sollors found the apparently first occurrences of “ethnicity” in W. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City Series, a well-known community study of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which started appearing in 1941.

45

Theorists from various disciplines, however, have produced much thought and writing

on the meanings and dynamics of the concept of ethnicity. Marcus Banks’s Ethnicity:

Anthropological Constructions (1996) outlines two traditional anthropological takes on ethnicity: the

primordialist and instrumentalist theories.12 The primordialist position, a biologically based theory,

asserts ethnicity as a permanent and essential condition, basic to human self-definition. In other

words, expressions of ethnicity, according to the primordialist theory, “fulfill the human

psychological need for identity” (Thompson, Theories of Ethnicity 11). The instrumentalist position,

on the other hand, has tried to demonstrate ethnicity as an artifact “created by individuals or

groups to bring together a group of people for some common purpose” (Banks 39). While these

theoretical approaches long served as the basis for much of the work on ethnicity in the field of

anthropology, more recent theories, Banks argues, acknowledge the intellectual limitations of

earlier theories and problematize “their apparent determination to distil some form of pure,

abstract, essence of ethnicity which could then be analysed” (43). These more recent approaches

have examined the relationship between ethnicity, class, gender, and nationhood,13 noting that

ethnic groups in a society do not exist as isomorphs, with each being structurally similar.14 These

non-universalist theories instead emphasize the existence of multiple human kinds, and locate

the roots of significant human differences in social forces.

This reorientation in anthropological views of ethnicity as social organization, generated

by Fredrik Barth’s influential work Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), had already established

itself in the other social sciences, Richard H. Thompson argues in Theories of Ethnicity: A Critical

Appraisal (1989). Whereas the general status of primordialism as a theory of ethnic relations and

race was also prominent among sociologists, an account of ethnicity based on a view of ethnic

nature as socially determined gradually developed and challenged the notion that relations among

groups of people in a society are the result of biological tendencies. One such classic, socially

12 Banks’s book gives a good overview of the major anthropological approaches to ethnicity, and introduces much of the significant literature and leading theorists. As examples of the primordialist position, Banks suggests anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s edited collection Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) and Soviet anthropologist Yulian Bromley, whose expression of ethnicity in “The Term Ethnos and Its Definition” is “so strongly resilient that it persists through generations” (Banks 18). As illustrative examples of demonstrations of ethnicity as political or instrumental, Banks proposes the so-called Manchester school’s study of the peoples of Africa, and anthropologist Abner Cohen’s classic study Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (1969).

13 An illuminating example of this is social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s work Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (1993).

14 See, for example, Brackette F. Williams’s “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain” (1989). Further, it is interesting to note that some anthropologists today adopt an extreme position on this issue, and assert that “the term ethnicity should be dropped altogether as a cross-culturally useful analytic term . . . [and be] restricted to describing and analysing what it does best, namely, an important form of social differentiation in the United States” (Blu 227). More recently, historian David Hollinger argued for the need to take a step toward a “postethnic” perspective. A postethnic perspective, Hollinger explains, “favors voluntary over involuntary affiliations”; moreover, it “resists the grounding of knowledge and moral values in blood and history” (3). It is a perspective that “builds upon a cosmopolitan element within the multiculturalist movement and cuts against its equally prominent pluralist element” (3).

46

based theory that cannot be overlooked in a study of the process of ethnic identification among

individuals of bi-cultural histories is assimilationism. The social means of becoming “American,”

as defined by theories of assimilationism, will be surveyed later in this chapter.

To the outline of the sociological perspectives of ethnicity given above, I would like to

add a more recent theoretical strand of ethnicity within the discipline of sociology, as

characterized by the work of sociologists like Thompson. In Theories of Ethnicity, Thompson

presents this “social” theory by way of his own fieldwork in Toronto’s Chinese community in

1977, emphasizing the particular context in which an ethnic group lives and sees the assertion of,

in this case, Chinese ethnicity as “complexly determined by economic, political, and cultural

factors” (12). Thompson describes such newer “social” theories as follows:

“social” theories of ethnicity . . . explain ethnic behavior by social, rather than

biological, forces. These theories differ from the biological theories in that they

regard human nature, at least those aspects of human nature such as ethnicity,

not as largely fixed by evolution, but as changeable. Unlike biological theories,

social theories argue that ethnic groups are made, not born. (12-13)

The kind of social ethnicity theory presented by Thompson can be seen to challenge one of the

criteria for my selection of Greek American texts in this study, namely the authors’ Greek

descent. I wish therefore to again emphasize that my use of the term “ethnic” in this study does

not exclusively rest on descent, which would be to understand ethnicity in purist terms. As I

accounted for in Chapter One, the literary texts’ shared thematic concerns with Greek American

ethnicity are also the result of the way these authors have conceptualized their personal ethnic

experiences, experiences which, to evoke Moya’s and Mohanty’s words, are components that

may yield knowledge about the writer and his/her relation to the world in which s/he lives. The

cognitive aspect of an ethnic (or any other social) experience and identity may also inform, I

believe, the authors’ emotional as well as literary investments.

Along with the various anthropological and sociological discussions of ethnicity sketched

out above, theorists and writers from other academic disciplines have offered additional

understandings of ethnicity. In the humanities, there has been an intense fascination with

ethnicity as a category since the debates in the U.S. in the 1960s “about the advantages and

disadvantages of particularism and universalism in reading, writing, and teaching” (Gilman 20).

This fascination, Sander L. Gilman explains, was just as much about the sociological theory of

the melting pot as about “literature’s role in providing a medium for the expression and analysis

of specific types of particularism” (20). Sollors is a prime example of a scholar whose work

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stands as proof of the recent interest in thinking about ethnicity as an analytical category with

which to approach literatures, and who has emphasized the inability of the traditional

sociological literature on ethnicity to accommodate the contributions of ethnic writers.15

Sollors issues a warning against viewing ethnicity as an ahistorical essence. As mentioned

in Chapter One, in Beyond Ethnicity (1986), Sollors relies on and develops a terminology of

descent and consent which, he argues, solves the conflict between “contractual and hereditary,

self-made and ancestral, definitions of American identity” (5-6), and which allows him to

“approach and question the whole maze of American ethnicity and culture” (6). Consent and

descent are terms, Sollors explains, that are “relatively neutral though by no means natural” (6).

In the introduction to The Invention of Ethnicity (1989), Sollors further develops his argument

about how identities are constructed and consented to. He argues that, ethnicity, like nationalism,

is a modern phenomenon that can be productively discussed as an “invention” (xi). Viewing

ethnicity as a modern self-conscious construct rather than an eternal and static force, Sollors

maintains, “may enrich our understanding of the ethnic phenomenon as well as of specific texts”

(xv). Sollors explains the implications of a view of ethnicity as an invention for literature by

invoking anthropologist Michael Fischer’s argument that what “the newer works [of American

literature] bring home forcefully is . . . the paradoxical sense that ethnicity is something

reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation and by each individual” (195). Fischer’s

contention is relevant to this study, which focuses on texts that span several decades. The older

texts examined in this study offer constructions of ethnic identity which evoke both essentialist

and constructivist views of ethnicity. Additionally, whereas all works give expression to

generational differences with regard to Greek ethnic values and traditions in the new world, a

few of the more recent narratives challenge the idea of family and traditional ideals of family life.

Sollors’s examination of the active contribution of literature “to the emergence and

maintenance of communities by reverberation and of ethnic distinctions” (xiv), and his thinking

of ethnicity as “a perspective onto psychological, historical, social, and cultural forces”

(“Introduction: The Invention of Ethnicity” xx), have established him as a prominent figure in

the field of ethnic literary studies. What I find most appealing about Sollor’s constructivist

approach to ethnicity for my own work on Greek American texts and ethnic identities is his

proposition that adopting an understanding of ethnicity as a self-conscious construct does not

imply that, for example, ethnic consciousness or ethnic conflicts “thereby appear less ‘real’

simply because they may be based on an ‘invention’” (xv). At this point, Sollors’s thinking of

ethnicity, although largely guided by postmodern discourses of invention, is not altogether at

15 Sollors’s Beyond Ethnicity (1986) and the volume The Invention of Ethnicity (1989) that he has edited account for the increasing relevance of the term ethnicity in the humanities.

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odds with a realist account of identity as both constructed and “real.” His act of referring to

ethnicity as “real,” thus making it, in a realist sense of the word, refer outward to the world,

charges ethnicity with the ability to “provide us knowledge about the world” (Mohanty 230).

Ethnicity, like any other critical concept in literary studies, generates a series of

definitions. It is “a concept (or set of contradictory and interlocking concepts) that enables

literary scholars to reflect on how they and their culture tell stories,” argues Gilman (26). For the

texts discussed here, the attraction of ethnicity as an analytical and theoretical tool lies in its

focus on culture without excluding other categories such as history, gender, class, language,

geographical location, and family in the construction of identity. The term allows for a

conceptualizing of group experience (the subject of many social and anthropological studies of

ethnicity) as well as individual experience.

Individual ethnic nuances and specificities are at the center of all the works selected for

analysis in this study. These representations stress that there are many histories of how

individuals with multi-ethnic origins and allegiances identify themselves and how they inherit,

relate to, and manifest their multiple cultures and identities. For example, for the American-born

narrators in the texts examined, Greek American ethnicity is not parallel to or a reflection of the

immigrant consciousness or experience. To these individuals who were born and/or raised in the

U.S., who may or may not speak the language of their parents or grandparents, and who see

themselves as Americans of Greek descent rather than as Greeks in America, ethnicity is more a

matter of choice than of descent. This is not to imply, however, that descent and familial roots

do not matter to the Greek American narrators. In addition to the idea that ethnicity depends on

any given individual’s active self-understanding, these narratives emphasize family—understood

in this dissertation not exclusively in terms of genealogy but as a social and cultural site—as a

vital and dynamic force that influences (but does not determine) the complex process of ethnic

self-identification. It is this combination of individual choice and the influence of social and

cultural variables on the formation of ethnic identity which marks the texts discussed here.

Forms of Descent and Consent: New Ethnicity, Symbolic Ethnicity

The affirmation of and growth of interest in ethnic descent can be seen as a function of the

acquired whiteness of certain ethnic groups in the U.S. Matthew Frye Jacobson and Roediger, for

instance, emphasize the centrality of race to the long process by which “new immigrants” from

southern and eastern Europe became “white ethnics.” As they historicize a shifting perception of

racial difference among white populations from the late 1880s, and the beginning of the mass

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arrivals of new immigrants, to the 1940s, more specifically to World War II, Jacobson and

Roediger also point to the complex and problematic relation between race and ethnicity.16

Whiteness, Jacobson writes, was at this time being fractured “into a hierarchy of plural and

scientifically determined white races” (7). The eugenics movement and its ideology, which

emerged at the end of the 1890s, entailed a belief that the new populations would reproduce the

future America. Conceptualizing the U.S. as a national family (Collins, “It’s All in the Family”

75), eugenic philosophies set the entire discussion of the immigration question in terms of

“desirable” versus “useless” races (Jacobson 78), and aimed to influence immigration policies to

screen potential citizens in terms of inherent biological qualities.

The restrictive immigration law of 1924, which “quickly reduced the threat posed by

inferior white races to the body politic” (Jacobson 95), marks the beginning of a redrawing of

racial lines.17 The perceived racial distinctions within the white immigrant community started

losing their salience in social thought, especially when “questions pertaining to slavery or

expansion took center stage” (Jacobson 44).18 According to both popular and scientific

discourse, the racial characteristics of new immigrants would “pass away” as a result of time and

education; the descendants of Irishmen, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and others raised in the

United States would not differ significantly from other Americans. The ideal of the melting pot

and the anticipation that all immigrants, independent of origin and culture, would eventually

become Americans was now formulated in the social theory known as assimilation.19 First

articulated in the 1920s by Robert Park, the ethos of assimilation, which has also been known as

the Americanizing (or monocultural) paradigm, has been framed by the larger story of the need

16 A difference between Jacobson’s and Roediger’s approaches to white ethnic history and its relation to

the concept of race should be registered here. Jacobson’s and Roediger’s books are different in the sense that the first one describes legislative and intellectual arenas as the key sites in which racial transformation take place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roediger’s study of racism in the development of a white working class, on the other hand, emphasizes that “countless quotidian activities informed popular and expert understandings of the race of new immigrants, as well as new immigrant understandings of race” (8). Moreover, according to Jacobson, the adoption of the term ethnicity to replace race as “a category of historical experience for European and some Near Eastern immigrants” (110) was both urgent and decisive. By contrast, Roediger’s discussion shows that the process by which ethnicity fully replaced race to demarcate nation-races from color-races was slow. For this reason, Roediger’s adopts the term “inbetween” to convey the ambiguity and uncertainty of the immigrants’ racial status. The new immigrants were “inbetween peoples,” their experiences often existed “between nonwhiteness and full inclusion as whites” (13).

17 The Johnson Act dramatically decreased the flow of new immigrant populations. The quota system that was written into the Act was based on 2 percent of each group’s population according to the 1890 census. For immigrants from Greece, for example, the probable effect of the new quotas was 100 immigrants per year as opposed to a number of 3063 under the current law. See Jacobson’s chart on page 84.

18 Whiteness, Jacobson claims, depended upon a series of contrasts. White groups were “remade and granted the scientific stamp of authenticity as the unitary Caucasian race” partly through revised immigration policy in the 1920s and partly “in response to a new racial alchemy generated by African American migrations to the North and West” (8).

19 Assimilation, as defined by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is “the process whereby a minority group gradually adopts the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture” (Fourth Edition).

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to make the country politically and culturally homogenous. It has, in other words, been defined

by the need for ethnic groups to forget their ethnic memories, disavow their cultural traits, and

adapt to the larger society. As late as 1964 Milton M. Gordon’s influential sociological study of

race and ethnicity in the U.S. emphasized the continued dominance of the assimilation paradigm,

concluding that Anglo conformity has best represented American assimilation history.

The dominant national identity narratives of post First World War America were

enduring influences, Yiorgos Anagnostu argues, in the assimilative politics of an organization

such as AHEPA (American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association). In the essay “Forget

the Past, Remember the Ancestors! Modernity, ‘Whiteness,’ American Hellenism, and the

Politics of Memory in Early Greek America,” Anagnostu provides an acute discussion of how, in

line with the “authoritarian dictates of American assimilationism” (25), AHEPA admonished the

early Greek immigrants to forget the ethnic past in their quest for national belonging. “A politics

of memory,” Anagnostu argues, “was instrumental for AHEPA’s inclusion in the racialized

nation” (26). According to AHEPA’s ideology, ethnic memories did not conform to the

construction of an “American Hellenic” identity.

As new immigrants, including the Greeks, assimilated to whiteness, the new racial

arrangement, which would come to dominate the American political culture and popular

consciousness between the late 1920s and the late 1940s, was based on a color-line of white and

black. Gradually, a culture-based notion of ethnicity replaced racial distinctions among European

immigrant groups such as Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, Greeks, and a host of others. As the “new

immigrants” became “white ethnics,” the social theory of assimilation could be sustained. In fact,

the “saga of European immigration,” Jacobson reminds us, “has long been held up as proof of

the openness of American society, the benign and absorptive powers of American capitalism,

and the robust health of American democracy” (12).

By the end of the twentieth century the authors, whose texts I examine in this study,

could take whiteness for granted. Indeed, apart from Middlesex, the texts are remarkably silent

about the complex historical processes which resulted in Greek immigrants becoming white. It

could be argued, though, that in A Crowded Heart the concern with whiteness erupts as the

protagonist worries about his physical resemblance (or lack of it) to the “natives” of Greece.

Greek Americans’ historical “achievement” of whiteness and their apparently successful

assimilation raise theoretical questions about defining ethnicity. What is the role of ethnicity and

ethnic identity for Greek Americans? How can contemporary ethnicity among Greek Americans

be understood? In the 1970s, new research on, and new theories of, ethnicity, most often

referred to as “new ethnicity” developed, which emphasized the ethnic sentiments of the

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presumed assimilated white European Americans.20 According to Gordon’s assimilation model,

these ethnic groups had gone through at least the first “stages” that individuals pass in the course

of adapting to a new society: “cultural assimilation,” commonly referred to as acculturation, and

“structural assimilation.” Acculturation “occurs when the various cultural threads of the ethnic

and mainstream cultures become intermeshed” (McAdoo 11). It implies “learning the language,

values, and other modes of cultural discourse that predominate in the ‘host’ society” (Thompson

79). Structural assimilation, on the other hand, is completed when individuals and groups have

“entered the host society’s institutions—its schools, factories, political organizations, and the

like—and achieved ‘large-scale’ entrance into the cliques and clubs of the dominant group”

(Thompson 81).21 Even though the “theoretical and ideological primacy of assimilation

continues to influence the articulation of ethnic (and racial) group incorporation” (Williams-

León and Nakashima 7), critics who have examined the ethnicity of Americans who have

descended from European immigrants show that “irreversible, straight-line assimilation and

dissipation of ethnicity have not been the sole reality” (7). Rather, “the maintenance and

reemergence of ethnicity,” it is argued, “transgress assimilation in important ways” (7).22

In the last thirty years theories of ethnicity have challenged, and continue to challenge,

the assumptions of a linear, one-way road to assimilation for immigrant nationalities with their

successive generations. Such theories show that ethnic groups “still have cultural cohesion in

America” (Novak 318) and that individuals of mixed-heritage claim multiple ethnic identities. As

early as in 1938, immigration historian Marcus Lee Hansen provided “the grounding for a model

capable of looking at ethnicity in America in a different way than . . . the dominant assimilationist

thesis” (Kivisto 5). In his, by now, classic essay ”The Problem of the Third Generation

Immigrant,” Hansen disputes the theory that ethnicity would inevitably erode with each

succeeding generation. One of the most significant and oft-quoted claims in this essay is

Hansen’s contention that what the second generation wishes to forget, the third generation

desires to remember. The uncomfortable dual position into which the children of the immigrants

are born—“Whereas in the schoolroom they were too foreign, at home they were too American”

(Hansen 204)—is solved, Hansen explains, “by escape” (204). If the second generation “wanted

to forget” (204) and “wanted to lose as many of the evidences of foreign origin as they could

20 The new ethnicity wave gave birth to what is usually referred to as the ethic of “cultural pluralism.” 21 Gordon’s organicist assimilation model is made up of seven “stages.” Other types of assimilation,

outlined by Gordon, that naturally follow the first two stages include marital assimilation, “identificational” assimilation, and civic assimilation.

22 The prevalence of assimilation theories, Williams-León and Nakashima argue in their study on mixed heritage Asian-Americans, has reassessed “the notion of multiracial Asian Americans as an indicator of assimilation and racial erasure” (7).

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shuffle off” (204), the third generation shows a “curiosity [which] is projected back into the

family beginnings” (207).

The most significant contributions of Hansen’s essay are its recognition of the variability

of ethnicity and its “sensitivity to the situationally-conditioned character of ethnicity” (Kivisto 7).

The texts examined in this study reflect a variability of ethnicity, a variability that can be found

on an individual as well as on a generational level. However, generational differences, the

narratives show, are much more dynamic, complex, and varied than what Hansen’s neat

generational model of a second generation escape and a third generation return allows for.

Nevertheless, Hansen’s contention underscores why it is crucial to explore literary constructions

of ethnic families, their differences and dynamics, also along generational lines.

Hansen’s thesis has been taken to be “a precursor to the discussions of ‘the ethnic

revival,’ ‘emergent ethnicity,’ ‘the new ethnicity,’ ‘symbolic ethnicity,’ and similar concepts,”

notes Peter Kivisto (7), some of which will be discussed in what follows. The “new ethnicity”

discussion was introduced with Michael Novak’s influential work The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics:

Politics and Culture in the Seventies. In 1972, when Novak’s book appeared, “ethnic” was considered

by many to be a word implying impurity.23 Novak’s book points to a revived ethnic

consciousness, and an emergence of a new political and intellectual movement in the 1970s. This

new ethnicity, which became the term under which Novak and others conceptualized this

renewed ethnic assertion, was a movement of self-knowledge on the part of individuals of the

third and fourth generation of southern and eastern European immigrants in the United States.

Individuals from these ethnic groups, Novak writes in the second edition of his influential book

Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in American Life (1996), grew tired of the rhetoric and

ideology of the melting pot that was prevalent in American society during most of the twentieth

century. They grew restless at not finding their identities “mirrored, objectified, rendered

accessible to intelligent criticism and confirmed” in American social structures and institutions,

education, and literature (Novak 352).24 This “growing sense of discomfort with the sense of

identity one is supposed to have—universalist, ‘melted,’ ‘like everyone else’” (Novak 347), and

the process of homogenization—of “a coercive sameness, a dreary standardization” (Novak

270)—known as “Americanization,” gave rise to a new ethnic politics. It was a movement,

Novak explains, imbued with feelings of new possibilities and creativity, of hope and liberation.

23 As late as in 1996, when the second edition of Novak’s book appeared, the use of the word “ethnic,”

Novak writes, “makes many people anxious” (345). 24 When Novak uses the term “ethnics,” he speaks “mainly of the descendants of the immigrants of

southern and eastern Europe” (55): Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs. He includes also Armenians, Lebanese, Slovenes, Ruthenians, Croats, Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Estonians, Russians, Spaniards, and the Portuguese.

53

Although this “Bible” of the “ethnic revival,” as Novak’s book has been described, was written

decades ago, the “move toward reclaimed otherness,” Jacobson explains, “has become more

common in recent years, in part in response to group-based social policies like affirmative

action” (7).

According to Novak, the new ethnicity “recognizes that every human being is ‘rooted’”

(xviii). It is “a form of historical consciousness. Who are you? What history do you come from? And

where next? These are its questions” (xlii).25 The same queries have in fact informed Novak’s

personal process of ethnic identification. His background and cultural origin, as Slovak, Catholic,

and lower-middle-class, seems more and more important for his understanding of himself as

ethnic, the writer confesses.

The concerns of new ethnicity, as described by Novak, implicate family as the ethnic site

supreme. “Ethnicity,” he argues, “is not a matter of genetics; it is a matter of cultural

transmission, from family to child” (xlii). In fact, Novak’s confidence in the potentials of the

institution of family, as viewed by ethnics, also permeates his image of a political system, which,

he explains, makes it possible to live in a genuinely pluralistic way. The future political and social

organization that he envisions and advocates, which is characterized by integration rather than a

pressure toward uniformity, is based on family and neighborhood. Ethnic conceptions of family

and neighborhood, “given a new flexibility and governmental support” (325), Novak argues, can

ground a new form of social politics.

The type of family that informs Novak’s vision is not the small nuclear family but the

large, extended family that, he explains, ethnics seem to value. As the texts examined in this

25 Hall has written on the topic of new ethnicity not in relation to European Americans but within a

different context—the black subject and black experience in Britain. According to Hall in “New Ethnicities” black cultural politics has recently “enter[ed] a new phase” (164). Attempting to characterize this shift in the politics of representation regarding the black subject, Hall anticipates “a renewed contestation over the meaning of the term ‘ethnicity’ itself” (168). We are beginning to think about “how to represent a noncoercive and a more diverse conception of ethnicity, to set against the embattled, hegemonic conception of ‘Englishness’ which, under Thatcherism, stabilizes so much of the dominant political and cultural discourses” (169). Following this, the cultural construction of new ethnic identities that we are beginning to see, Hall argues, is “the beginning of a positive conception of the ethnicity of the margins, of the periphery. That is to say, a recognition that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being contained by that position as ‘ethnic artists’ or film-makers. We are all, in that sense, ethnically located” (169-170). It is the recognition that “our ethnic identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are” (170) that urged critics within the U.S. academia in the 1970s to come up with new conceptions of ethnicity predicated on diversity to represent European Americans. At the same time as critics have hailed the new ethnicity wave, however, criticism has also been forwarded against the origins and ideology of the theory. Thompson outlines this critique in Theories of Ethnicity. The first part of the critique is based on the argument that the new ethnicity is a “theoretical alternative born out of the crisis of assimilationism itself” (79). To paraphrase Thompson, as a result of the failure of assimilationism to explain the persistence of racial stratification in the U.S., the new ethnicity appeared to deflect interest in racial issues. The second part of the criticism is the contention that the revival of European American ethnicity is “largely a response to the black protest movement of the 1960s [and] the state’s subsequent definition and legitimation of that movement as an ethnic movement” (93). In other words, the new ethnicity is viewed as an attempt to “cash in” on the “success” of black organization.

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dissertation construct family as an intricate web of extended relatives, Novak’s idea of family

could be considered relevant to my investigation of the role of family for ethnic identity

formation. However, Novak perceives family as an unproblematically ethnic unit. His idea of

ethnic family seems to be imbued with an understanding of ethnicity as instinctive and natural.

The literary texts examined in this study do emphasize the significance of family for ethnicity but

they also underline the importance of individual choice in the process of forming an ethnic

identity.

The number of texts discussing the ethnicity of white Americans of European descent

that have emerged since the publication of Novak’s book suggests that the theories of new

ethnicity continue to attract interest.26 In the introduction to the second edition of his book,

Novak extends his discussion on how and why ethnicity has become a prominent issue in

American politics. In his critique of the new multiculturalism, he points to “one of [its]

anomalies,” namely, “that not all ethnic groups need apply. Just as they were excluded before the

early 1970s, the ethnics from Southern and Eastern Europe are again today given no place in

curricula about ‘diversity’” (xvi). As true as Novak’s observations in this matter may be, his work,

along with other literature of the ethnic revival of the 1970s, has been harshly critiqued.

According to Jacobson, studies that stress a renewed interest in ethnicity among European

immigrants do not take account of racial changeability in their narratives of the historical

grievances of non-Nordic immigrants in America. The tendency of such studies, he argues, was

to drag “the regime of Nordic-supremacism into the present” (276). In doing so, writers of the

ethnic revival generally “disavow ‘whiteness’ in favor of group narratives that measured their

distance from the WASP mainstream” (275). The inclination to disclaim responsibility for white

privilege in the twentieth-century is also obvious in Novak’s treatment of the ethnic revival. At

the same time as the whiteness of ethnics such as Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs of the

second, third, and fourth generations is beyond question in Novak’s book, one of its peculiar

structuring logics, Jacobson shows, is that these ethnic groups are not really white, and as a

consequence, they do not share the same social standing as white Anglo-Saxons. The white

offspring of the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe are born, Novak argues, “outside

what, in America, is considered the intellectual mainstream—and thus privy to neither power nor

status nor intellectual voice” (63). Novak’s claim is not nearly so self-evident today. Aside

perhaps from those of Jewish descent, Americans of eastern and southern European extraction

neither identify themselves nor qualify as racial minorities in the contemporary U.S. Quite

simply, they see themselves—and are seen—as white.

26 For studies on European American ethnicity, see Waters (1991), Alba (1990), Gedmintas (1989), Gans (1979), Yancey et al. (1976), Yinger (1981).

55

A critique of propositions of an ethnic revival, contemporary with the publication of The

Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, was formulated by Herbert J. Gans. In the essay “Symbolic

Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America” (1979), Gans voices his

discomfort with new ethnicity theories, and with postulates that America was experiencing a

renewed interest in ethnicity. The evidence he has seen does not, he argues, convince him that an

ethnic revival is in fact emerging (429). Acculturation and assimilation are still continuing, Gans

maintains. But if anything is occurring, Gans suggests, it is “a new kind of ethnic involvement”

(425) among third- and fourth-generation European ethnics that emphasizes a “concern with

identity” (425). Gans proposes the term “symbolic ethnicity” for this new form of ethnic

behavior and affiliation, to differentiate it from how ethnic identity is viewed by earlier

generations. The third generation, Gans maintains, “has grown up without assigned roles or

groups that anchor ethnicity” (435). This has two important consequences for ethnic meaning.

Given the degree of assimilation among the third generation, people are less interested in ethnic

organizations, cultural practices or group networks and relationships. Instead, they are looking

for pragmatic (albeit, at points, nostalgic) ways of expressing their ethnic affiliations, and refrain

from ethnic behavior that causes conflict with other, more highly valued, identities, and activities.

This form of ethnicity consequently involves freedom of choice.

Thus, one of Gans’s main arguments in “Symbolic Ethnicity” is that today’s young

ethnics are finding new ways of feeling and being ethnics (432). This contention leads Gans to

raise the important question of what happens when ethnic identity is neither prescribed from the

outside nor “beset with major social and economic costs” (444). What are then the dominant

ways of being ethnic for whites? Gans contends that when ethnicity loses its instrumental

function in people’s lives, their ethnic behavior often involves the use of symbols. However, the

symbols that third-generation individuals use to express their identity differ significantly, Gans

argues, from the ethnic cultures and organizations of the first- and second-generation ethnics.

I agree with Gans’s proposition that the meaning of ethnicity differs from one generation

to the next. Several of the texts I analyze show that ethnic affiliations, and the feeling of being

ethnic, have different meanings for different generations. I also find his argument that the

symbolic ethnicity of the American-born generations involves a freedom of choice useful for my

readings of the literary texts. His emphasis on individual agency, along other variables, in the

making of any given individual’s ethnic identity is, as I have discussed before, also central to

Moya’s identity theory.

However, Gans’s propositions are not unproblematic. In the ethnographic study

“Negotiating Identity, Connecting through Culture: Hellenism and Neohellenism in Greek

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America,” Georgios Anagnostu points to one of the problems arising from the paradigm of

symbolic ethnicity as formulated by Gans. The theory of symbolic ethnicity, Anagnostu argues,

assumes a simplistic duality of how cultures operate. It propounds an “authentic” versus a

“symbolic” element in the construction of ethnic identification. On the one hand, it associates

ethnicity “with structural constraints and limitations” (27), while on the other, it poses symbolic

ethnicity as a more “commodified” but also more “prosaic” (Gans 439) form of ethnic

identification.

The term “symbolic ethnicity,” Gans suggests, does the work of helping immigrants and

their descendants to sustain an illusion of “authentic” ethnic cohesion while assimilation

continues to take place. This implied hierarchy between a “symbolic” and an “authentic” element

in the construction of ethnic identification or culture—a dualism that a realist framework of

identity, as previously discussed, reconciles by insisting on a nonarbitrary relation between the

notion of a “real” and a “constructed” identity—points to a dissatisfying incongruity in the

theorization of symbolic ethnicity. The question of an “authentic” element in ethnic identity

formation emerges as important in the texts that I analyze, especially in The Feasts of Memory and

in Greece by Prejudice, which exhibit both essentialist and constructionist conceptualizations of

ethnicity. As my readings of the works highlight in Chapter Three, the narrators’ journeys to the

places of their ethnic origins are initiated by a desire to recapture the true history of the island, or

alternatively, to find authentic Greek culture. However, this search for something authentic or

absolute (in whatever form) is not placed against something more symbolic in the process of

developing an ethnic consciousness and identity. Rather, the texts show how an ethnicity that

may be largely “symbolic,” to refer to Gans’s terms, can also be authentic. In other words, the

process of identity formation in the literary texts is imagined as being intricately imbued by

tensions and negotiations between both “authentic” and “symbolic” elements.27

I believe that the generational differences with regards to ethnicity as Gans presents them

are useful as general starting points for my study of representations of Greek American ethnic

identity. I also consider, in line with Anagnostu, that symbolic ethnicity is useful as it calls

attention to the process of identity construction at the level of the individual (“Negotiating

Identity” 28). However, Gans’s theory of symbolic ethnicity does not provide the complex

theoretical account of ethnicity that I need to explore the texts in question, which represent

ethnic identity formation as a self-conscious process which is profoundly and complexly

27 Aware of the problematic nature of the term “authentic,” I wish to emphasize that I use it here in

Moya’s sense of the word. A realist theory of identity, Moya argues, allows for the possibility to speak about an authentic experience or identity in a substantive way without necessarily running the risk of normalizing or projecting that experience or identity onto all the different individuals that may be represented under such signifiers as “women,” or “ethnics.”

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mediated by family. Gans’s account of symbolic ethnicity grants the family only minor

importance in determining ethnicity, choosing instead to bestow greater authority on “public”

institutions.

Scholars have offered many terms and models which are useful for conceptualizing the

so-called adaptation of white European immigrants to the mainstream U.S. culture. Whereas

some have found Gans’s concept of symbolic ethnicity useful since it fits a straight-line or

assimilationist theory, others have been inspired by Novak’s and his successors’ new ethnicity

theory. As my discussion of Gans’s theory of symbolic ethnicity aimed to show, there are

difficulties with the general theoretical postulates of white ethnicity. Much too often,

propositions and models of ethnicity and ethnic adaptation uphold homogeneity. In other words,

they are not attentive to individual differences and group specificities, which, I argue, are crucial

to account for in any discussion on ethnicity, whether new, white or other. This problem has

frequently been the result of the static nature of these proposed models and theories, which do

not allow for much complexity and ambiguity. The inability to account for ethnic varieties has

repeatedly been made obvious by critics who, for example, have professed that as white ethnic

groups scatter in suburbs and become secure members of middle (even upper-middle) class

America, they will ultimately lose their ethnic identities and fuse into a single Euro-American

mass. As more recent sociological and anthropological studies of Greek American communities

have shown, however, these theoretical formulations are not wholly representative of the cultural

formations of immigrants from southern Europe, their children and grandchildren. The Greek

Americans, often portrayed as successfully assimilated politically and economically, remain to

significant degrees, these studies affirm, culturally ethnic.

Social narratives which emphasize the importance of ethnic identity to second- and third-

generation Greek Americans as well are crucial to my readings of the literary texts, since they

complicate traditional stories of assimilation. The representations of Greek Americans in the

ethnic Bildungsromans examined here show a continuing emotional and intellectual affiliation with

ethnic culture and identity. As my analyses foreground, the Greek American protagonists retain

an enduring interest in their ethnic heritage, and exhibit a growing need to establish a sense of

ethnic belonging. Though they are involved in negotiations between viewing themselves as either

American or Greek American, constantly reconciling family ethnicity and individual

understandings of their multiple ethnic belonging, ultimately the protagonists reveal an allegiance

with ethnicity.

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Ethnicity and Nationalism

Nations and nationalism, Benedict Anderson writes in his classic book on nationalism, Imagined

Communities (1983), are modern “cultural artefacts of a particular kind” (4), “inventions of

[people’s] imaginations” (141) that, among other things, serve the purpose of arousing strong

attachments in a community, seducing people to make sacrifices or become martyrs.28 In The

Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), and Nationalism (2001),

Anthony Smith has suggested that nationalism is a developed form of ethnicity, in that it

frequently arises out of a context of pre-existing ethnic ties and sentiments and out of popular

ethnic traditions. A sense of ethnicity and ethnic symbols and institutions must be created as part

of the process of constructing a nation-state and a philosophy of nationalism, the critic contends.

The role of the past, of history, in nationalism, according to Smith, is essential. Smith’s

approach to the origins of nationalism, that he calls “ethno-symbolic,” underlines the particular

importance of myths of origin and descent as cultural components of ethnicity. For ethno-

symbolists, “what gives nationalism its power are the myths, memories, traditions, and symbols

of ethnic heritages and the ways in which a popular living past has been, and can be, rediscovered

and reinterpreted by modern nationalist intelligentsias” (Myths and Memories 9). These elements

“constitute the primary definers of the separate existence and character of particular ethnies

[ethnic communities]” (Myths and Memories 15), many of which can be found “alongside, or

within, nations” (Nationalism 14).29 Smith’s emphasis on the particular role of myths, symbols,

memories, traditions, and sentiments as cultural resources for “enter[ing] and understand[ing] the

‘inner worlds’ of ethnicity and nationalism” (Nationalism 57) is important to this study, since the

literary texts used here emphasize beliefs in shared ethnic myths.

Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach to nationalism accounts for the powerful affective

dimensions of nationalism, as it explains the profound emotional appeal that nationalism can

28 Anderson’s analysis of nationalism and model of imagination have not only been widely praised but also

challenged, among other things, for being theoretically inconsistent. In the preface to his 1991 edition, Anderson himself apologizes for the book’s “idiosyncratic method and preoccupations” (xii), and in this revised edition, the writer attempts to correct the theoretical weaknesses of some of his arguments. For critiques of Anderson’s analysis of nationalism and his model of imagination, see, for example, P. A. Silverstein’s “The Kabyl Myth: Colonization and the Production of Ethnicity” (2002) and Brian Keith Axel’s essay “Poverty of the Imagination” (2003).

29 Smith explains that ethnie, “with its looser organization, is the more generic concept and the nation is the more specific” (Nationalism 14). In some cases, he argues, a nation originates from a pre-existing ethnie, although there is no simple, linear progression. In an ethno-symbolic approach, the rise of nations and nationalism are “placed within a framework of earlier collective cultural identities, and especially of ethnic communities or ethnies” (Nationalism 58). From one angle, it is possible to regard nations as “specialized (territorialized, politicized, mass-public, etc) forms of ethnie; from another angle, nations and ethnies are both forms of collective cultural identity that may coexist or compete with each other, with several ethnies often residing within the boundaries of the political community of the nation” (58).

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have.30 An ethno-symbolic analysis of nationalism takes into account the pre-existing cultures

and ethnic ties of the nations that emerged in the modern epoch, and offers a historical and/or

sociological understanding of its popular roots and an explanation for “the continuing emotional

attachments of so many people to their ethnic communities and nations, and for their capacity

for fanatical terrorism and self-sacrifice on their behalf” (Nationalism 59). The sacrifices that the

personal and cultural attachments to a nation can arouse can be exemplified by the fact that

some 45,000 Greek immigrants went back to Greece to fight in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13

(Moskos, Greek Americans 31) and at least 40,000 enlisted in the Greek army during the First

World War, ready to die for the Greek nation (Georgakas, “The Greeks in America” 22).

But how applicable is the theory of continuing emotional support for a nation with

regard to post-1924 Greek Americans? To what extent and in what form (if any) do the

American-born generations relate to the Greek nation? According to Smith in Myths and

Memories,

In the case of collective cultural identities, such as ethnies and nations, later

generations carry shared memories of what they consider to be ‘their’ past, of the

experiences of earlier generations of the same collectivity, and so of a distinctive

ethno-history. Indeed, their ethnicity is defined, first of all, by a collective belief

in common origins and descent, however fictive, and thereafter by shared

historical memories associated with specific territory which they regard as their

‘homeland.’ On this basis arises a shared culture, often a common language or

customs or religion, the product of the common historical experiences that give

rise to shared memories. (208)

Smith makes two important points here that have relevance for this study: the belief in

common origins and collective memories as central for the identity of a whole community, and

its members’ individual ethnic experiences. Smith’s proposition of a community’s understanding

of itself as “ancestrally related, culturally distinct, and linked to a particular historic homeland”

(Myths and Memories 14) informs my analysis of The Octagonal Heart. Thompson’s autobiography

explicitly shows how an ethnic community that consists of as small a unit as a family promotes

and fosters its distinguishing (cultural and historical) qualities to the younger generation through

constant references to the ancient Greek myths. Athas’s, Kulukundis’s, and Davidson’s texts

30 This question has also been addressed by Anderson, whose theory of the origins and spread of nationalism is allied to a form of postmodernist constructionism. In Smith’s view, Anderson “fails to explain . . . how the possibility of imagining the nation turns into the moral imperative of a mass dying for the nation, and why imagined print communities should become prime candidates for nationhood and mass self-sacrifice” (Myths and Memories 8).

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evoke myths of common origin as well, emphasizing their significance for the protagonists’

formation of an ethnic identity.

Smith’s theoretical propositions of collective cultural identities serve to describe the

variety of nationalism known as diaspora nationalism. Diaspora nationalism is defined by Smith

as residing in the “rich memories of golden ages of saints and heroes, their stark symbols of

trauma and suffering, and their potent popular myths of glorious restoration in their age-old

homelands” (19). The myth of a “golden age” as part of the shared memories of a community

and the roots of a unique identity is particularly obvious in The Octagonal Heart. In the novel The

Priest Fainted myths are also shown to provide vital foci of identity formation, both ethnic and

gendered. If the process of ethnic identity formation of the American-born protagonists in these

works is, at least in part, characterized by a belief in a shared ethnic history and heritage, often

transmitted by their families, it is also complicated by their personal connection with the past and

their individual reflections and interpretation of this connection. These intricate relations

between the collective and the individual components of ethnicity also define the identity

formation of the young protagonist in A Crowded Heart.

However, Papandreou’s novel emphasizes additional varieties of ethnic attachments. The

act of returning to a homeland depicted in A Crowded Heart, as opposed to the returns to a

country of ancestral origins seen in Greece by Prejudice, The Feasts of Memory, and The Priest Fainted, is

initiated on grounds other than a wish to seek out ethnic heritage. The repatriation of

Papandreou’s family could be investigated as a response to nationalism. The father’s decision to

repatriate with his family to Greece, I argue, is generated by a belief in a collective ethnic history

as much as by the father’s national belonging and his Greek identity. The father’s vision of a

democratic Greece, which can be seen to make up a particular type of an ethnic myth, is potent

and persistent enough to uphold national sentiments and inspire the act of repatriation.

Not surprisingly, the concept of diaspora nationalism has been found particularly useful

in thinking about Greek communities abroad and their identities.31 Greeks, like Jews and

Armenians, Smith writes, “after their subordination to others and emigration or expulsion from

their original homelands, became diaspora ethno-religious communities cultivating the particular

virtues and aptitudes of their traditions” (Myths and Memories 213). The presence of a philosophy

of nationalism in the Greek diasporic communities is also documented in various historical

narratives about Greek America. Ethnic institutions such as the Greek American press and

schools, the Orthodox Church, and various Greek American associations have been emphasized

31 The Greeks and the Armenians, “for whom restoration of the homeland and commonwealth have been

central,” Smith writes, are two peoples that, together with the Jews, constitute “the archetypal diaspora peoples” (Myths and Memories 212).

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as critical factors of group formation and the persistence of ethnic identity and pride in cultural

heritage in the communities.

Quite recently, scholars have examined the current state of the Greek diaspora with

regard to their relation to Greece, specifically with the issue of identity construction in focus.

The notion of the Greek diaspora as a culturally coherent community held together by a

common language, culture, and identity, critics have argued, emanates from the Greek state’s

perception of what constitutes “Greekness.” In a recent article on the website Greekworks.com,

“On Not Speaking Greek: Whose Diaspora Is It Anyway?”, Stelios Vasilakis offers an interesting

discussion of the attitudes in Greece’s engagement with the diaspora, particularly with Greek

diasporic communities in the U.S. and Australia. By employing postcolonial concepts such as

“center” and “periphery,” Vasilakis highlights the power relation between Greece and its

diasporic communities in the “battle for the soul of the Greek diasporic communities.” Greece,

Vasilakis contends in his discussion, takes on an active role in controlling, even defining, ethnic

identity and its content regarding “Greekness.” Despite declarations from the center that they

are prepared to view diasporic communities as cultural entities that are subject to change, “the

notion of Greekness emanates from what Greece considers and defines as certain absolute and

exclusive ideas of ethnicity and authenticity” (Vasilakis).

It is problematic, in Vasilakis’s opinion, that Greek communities construct their identities

“by means of a strong connection to the homeland, which determines the elements that define

Greekness.” Inspired by Ien Ang’s theoretical discussion of the ways in which disparate Chinese

diasporic communities attempt to define themselves, Vasilakis emphasizes the significance of

Greek diasporic communities defining and constructing their own identities. This identity

construction, he writes and refers to Ang’s theoretical perspective, should not be motivated by

the desire to seek “an identity related to a homeland that will impart strong cultural, historical,

and racial roots to the diasporic community.” Nor should it be characterized by the impulse to

seek “an identity that imparts cultural roots to the diasporic community but at the same time

remains autonomous from a homeland.” Rather, Vasilakis argues and invokes the concept of

“double consciousness,” a definition of “Greekness” in diasporic communities must be more

dynamic, and “defy a fixed racial, linguistic, and cultural content.” It is now time, the critic urges

in his conclusion, for Greece as well as the Greek diasporic communities not just to begin giving

attention to particular forms of Greekness which are characterized by “intercultural encounters”

but to also begin supporting the scholarly analyses of the processes so fundamental to the Greek

diaspora.

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In all of the literary texts examined here, intercultural encounters and clashes are

significant factors in shaping the particular ethnic identities and hyphenated experiences of the

Greek American protagonists. The other central variable which influences the negotiations

between the protagonists’ disparate experiences as well as transmitting to the younger

generations the myths and symbols—in which, according to Smith, so much of the national

sentiments and ethnic identities of communities reside—is family, the topic of the coming

section.

The Family: A Site of Ethnic Identity Formation

The sociological investigations into family presented in this chapter are meant to function as a

backdrop to the literary analyses that follow in Chapters Three, Four, and Five. In a fashion

similar to the theoretical discussions on identity and ethnicity provided earlier in this chapter,

these sociological family studies are intended to engage in a dialogue with the literary texts

examined in this dissertation. Considering some of the positive sentiments that, traditionally, the

concept of family engenders in people (it yields a promise of warmth, unconditional love,

harmony, and a sense of embeddedness in a larger community), the amount of research that has

been conducted on the institution of the family and the ideals and images surrounding it within a

variety of social science disciplines is not surprising.32 My intention here is not to present an

exhaustive account of all of the orientations—sociological, anthropological, historical, and

psychological—of the institution of the family. Rather, I evoke a small selection of texts and

research material in order to indicate the basic lines of argument. The focus is on studies that

take up the issue of family as a site of ethnic identity formation and language acquisition.

To begin: how to define a family? The dictionary Merriam-Webster Online states that family

is “the basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents rearing their children,” but it

also states that the word is used to refer to “any of various social units differing from but

regarded as equivalent to the traditional family,” such as a single-parent family. Family is basically

understood to mean a group of individuals related by blood or marriage. The image of family

that people have since childhood been exposed to through media, books, and school, is that of a

32 Reports on the study of family from cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary perspectives can be found in

Journal of Comparative Family Studies, International Journal of Sociology of the Family, and Journal of Family Issues (the last journal is sponsored by the U.S. National Council on Family Relations). All three journals serve as forums on current research, theories, and analyses of family life. They provide valuable research material on family interactions, marriage, and a wide variety of other issues relating to family. In spite of the broad orientation of these journals, my search for articles presenting research on ethnic identity formation among second- and third-generation children in America in relation to interactions with family, or even family language development among these generations, yielded few results.

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middle-class, racially homogenous, and heterosexual nuclear unit with a specific authority

structure and a traditional division of labor. It comprises of a breadwinning father, a

homemaking mother, and their biological children.

In the 1950s, leading family theorists in the social sciences saw the family as a central and

effective organizing institution that filled particular social needs. It was expected to socialize the

young, regulate sexual activity and procreation, and provide emotional sustenance to its members

as well as a haven from the outside world (Baca Zinn and Eitzen 25).33 However, in the late

1960s and early 1970s, a time when accepted methodologies and theoretical orientations in the

disciplines of sociology and history were undergoing revision, the conception of family as the

basis of social organization began to be reassessed. Scholarship on families emphasized just as

often the oppressively restrictive aspects of traditional family life, and the fissures and tensions

that intimate emotional relationships may create.

Gradually, a politics of the family emerged which took into consideration the range of

variation in as well as exceptions to the traditional family form, and viewed the institution of

family as interacting with other social institutions, including economic structures, politics,

education, and religion. As a result, a non-traditional and more complex understanding of family

developed, which emphasizes not so much the particular set of people that make up the family

unit, Betty G. Farrell writes in Family: The Making of an Idea, an Institution, and a Controversy in

American Culture, but “the quality of relationships that bind them together” (3). Such a definition

of family is grounded in the understanding that families are “institutions we make, yet they are in

no small part also constructed by cultural myths and social forces beyond any individual’s

control” (Farrell 4).

Researchers of the family also started to pay attention to the fact that no definition of

family fits the reality of all cultural groups. The conventional family model, they argue, does not

represent how people in most societies live. According to Maxine Baca Zinn and D. Stanley

Eitzen, in 2002 only seven percent of households in the U.S. conformed to the conventional

family form of a married couple with children in which only the father worked (13). Foster

families, stepparent families, interracial families, transnational families, single-parent families,

extended or multigenerational families, one-sex families, and several other variations of family

constellations, many of which are likely to be formed outside of marriage, outnumber and

challenge the model of the typical American family. For a long time, these other types of families

were not given any serious social or scholarly attention.

33 See Maxine Baca Zinn and D. Stanley Eitzen’s Diversity in Families for a discussion that challenges these

and other commonly held myths about families in society.

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Recent family studies also trace the diversity of family structures, showing how factors of

race, ethnicity, class, and gender influence the form and dynamics of family life. In Diversity in

Families Baca Zinn and Eitzen account for some of the new research that has been conducted on

racial minority families and families of different ethnicities. By investigating (social and

economic) systems of racial control, recent scholarship shows the flaws in old conceptions of

minority families of Mexican origin or Chicano and African American families as being

disorganized and unstable. Scholars have found that people can create meaningful and workable

families even under hostile and disadvantageous conditions.34 In fact, for many minority groups

in the U.S., family has functioned as a source of strength, as well as of cultural and political

resistance, to the social discriminations experienced. For example, the Chicano movement, Moya

explains in Learning from Experience, “fostered the development of a cultural nationalist discourse

that emphasized the importance of the family in the project of cultural survival” (46).

Additionally, studies on European immigrant families have recently challenged

assumptions about old world family patterns as obstacles to successful adjustment in the New

World. Family systems, it has been proven, were indispensable in the settlement and adjustment

of the European immigrants. The family played a central role in the recruitment of workers to

the new industrial society, and provided a home environment characterized by stability and

strong cultural traditions (Baca Zinn and Eitzen 76).

Mindel, Habenstein, and Wright’s volume, Ethnic Families in America: Patterns and

Variations (1988), makes an important contribution to the analysis of American immigrant and

ethnic families. This anthology of essays gives recognition to a wide variety of ethnically and

culturally diverse families within the U.S., including Greek American families, and examines the

function of ethnicity as a determinant of family histories, structures, and lifestyles. I will review

George A. Kourvetaris’s analysis of the Greek American family later in this discussion, but at

this point I wish only briefly to comment on the idea of family presented in the volume. It

becomes clear that the type of family that lies at the heart of investigation is the traditional

nuclear family, and the network of kin relationships that make up the extended family.35

34 In Black Feminist Thought, Collins argues that the imagined traditional family ideal is problematic for

African American women, especially the idea of a public/private binary. The assumed split between the public sphere and paid employment and the private sphere of unpaid family work, Collins explains, has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, Black women worked in agriculture in the South without pay. Even today, if one assumes the gender ideology embedded in the public/private binary (that is, real men work and real women take care of the family), Black women who also work outside the home and work for pay, thus competing with men, are deemed less “feminine” (47).

35 There is little variation in the way that Ethnic Families in America presents the ethnic groups included for discussion. The essays begin with a brief delineation of the specific ethnic group’s historical background, then discuss the ethnically diverse families either in terms of different generations or traditional themes such as national character, family life, marital life, the role of women in the various ethnic communities, economic status, and religion, and conclude with a section dealing with patterns of change and adaptation of the ethnic group in question.

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Although the volume’s object of study is the patterned differences based on national, cultural,

religious, and racial identification in American ethnic families, the majority of essays do not

investigate how such variations may also produce a diversity of familial relationships within each

ethnic group. Except for a brief discussion of the polygamous family among the Mormons, other

potential variations to family constellations are conspicuously absent from the volume.

A volume which gives greater emphasis to the significance of family and ethnicity in the

process of identification within ethnically diverse families, and represents a variation also in

terms of the family institution, is Family Ethnicity: Strength in Diversity (1993), edited by Harriette

Pipes McAdoo. The theoretical argument that informs the anthology is that our ethnicity, our

“sense of who we are, what we are, and what direction our lives will take” comes from our

experiences of growing up within the confines, “the security and insecurity” of the family (3).36

For McAdoo and the other contributors to the volume, implicit in the concept of “family

ethnicity” “is the sum total of our ancestry and cultural dimensions as families collectively

identify the core of their beings” (ix). The concept of family ethnicity comprises a “diversity

[which] goes beyond social classes, racial groupings, regional differences, and even countries of

origin” (ix), and the volume emphasizes the differences minority families experience in coming

to and/or living in the U.S. This diversity also extends to the types of family that the essays

examine. Although the texts included in the anthology employ a conventional understanding of

family in terms of genealogy, some of the ethnic minority families examined (specifically those of

Puerto Ricans and Afro-Americans) are characterized by one-parent households, the majority of

which are female-headed.

The relations between genealogy and ethnic identification implied in Family Ethnicity

inform the Bildungsromans that I study. The changes that the protagonists undergo with regard to

personal growth and ethnic and gender self-identification centrally involve the family. The texts

also construct family in terms of lineage and genealogy. However, whereas the prevailing tone as

regards genealogy in Family Ethnicity is celebratory, aside from the brief comment on the

“insecure” aspects of family life, family in the narratives examined here comprises more than the

proverbial safe haven for the Greek American individual, a site where a sense of ethnicity is

mediated in uncomplicated ways. Along with the traditional meanings and sentiments attached to

family life, the idea of family as a source of repressive conformity is also invoked in the texts.

They provide numerous examples of generational interests and expectations with regards to

36 McAdoo’s emphasis on the significance of family for ethnic identification as theorized in the term

“family ethnicity,” and as described in the above quote, relates in interesting ways to Novak’s understanding of family as a vital force in the lives of many ethnics in the U.S., and his contention that the world is “mediated to human persons through language and culture, that is, through ethnic belonging” (229).

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ethnic identity formation, and show how families can, to use Farrell’s formulation, “house both

our highest hopes and our greatest disappointments” (15). Thus McAdoo’s concept of family

ethnicity, though a potentially fruitful analytical model in approaching the texts under study in

this dissertation, fails to pay appropriate attention to the conflicts and pressures that family may

also engender. If it is “within our families that we first celebrate our ethnicity” (x-xi), as McAdoo

maintains, it is equally true to claim that it is within the family that ethnicity may be first

experienced as a source of grief and pain.

More recent studies on family account for a more complex identity formation process

than Family Ethnicity by showing that a sense of ethnicity is seldom determined by parents or a

family alone. Rather, the development of identities in individuals, such research emphasizes, is

more than the result of a simple reception of what is transmitted from parents.37 The

“socialization process of identity in the children of immigrants” consists of “two integral,

mutually influential parts” (Cheng and Kuo 464). On the one hand, members of the social group,

such as family members or other kin, are considered active agents in transmitting cultural and

ethnic information as part of the development of the children’s identity and, on the other,

children themselves interpret this information and participate in the construction of identity. In

line with Moya’s theory of identity, this perspective takes into consideration both the social

components of identity formation and the capacities and active roles of individual agents in

constructing identities. The combination of the social and the individual influence in the process

of identity construction is also, as earlier discussed, a defining characteristics of the ethnic

Bildungsromans examined in this study.

Family research also reports that the ways in which families influence ethnic identity

formation among second- and later-generation immigrant children are not identical. Not all

families choose to take an interest and active role in this process, and if they do, the ways in

which they express ethnicity or interpret the meaning of their culture to their children vary. Some

studies speculate on the potential influence exerted by such variables as birth order, number of

siblings, or even gender on the development of children’s identity. Still other studies show that a

host of complex mechanisms imposed by society at large may inform children’s ethnic identity

development. Though the findings of any of these studies are inconclusive, taken together they

suggest a dynamic of ethnicity identification which occurs in interaction with family.

A crucial yet up to this point unmentioned aspect of ethnic identity formation in relation

to interactive family dynamics is ethnic language development. Ethnic language, more specifically

37 Traditional socialization theories have been criticized for conceptualizing the process of ethnic identity

formation as well as ethnic language acquisition as following a top-down direction, that is, it is transformed from parents to children.

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the ability to use an ethnic language, it has been argued, serves to stimulate ethnic affiliation. It

facilitates communications and interactions with kin and ethnic individuals, and with kin in the

country of origin as well as outside it. Research emphasizes that families of the immigrant

generation are often interested in attempting to preserve their ethnic cultures, including their

languages, in their children. However, just as often, parental expectations or pressure to preserve

ethnic heritage, it is shown, may cause conflicts between the first and the second generation.

With later generations, the process of establishing ethnic affiliations is further compounded by

the facts that the ambition of the parents to teach the ethnic language and their children’s

motivation to learn to speak it may be weakened as a result of acculturation processes.

The positive role of ethnic language learning in the process of developing a sense of

ethnicity among adolescent populations with immigrant backgrounds in the U.S. has been

documented in several studies. Yet the relationship between language and ethnic identity is a

contested matter. A 2000 study which empirically investigates the relationship between family

structure, language, and ethnic identity among second generation Chinese American children

reports contradictory associations of language and ethnic affiliation. Simon H. Cheng and Wen

H. Kuo’s findings suggest that the acquisition of ethnic language and ethnic identity formation

among minority children are two parallel developmental processes. Second-generation Chinese

Americans, their analyses show, learn the Chinese language at a young age because the parents

use the ethnic language to communicate in the family, but “may begin to develop a stronger

sense of ethnic identity and connect this identity with their possession of ethnic cultural

knowledge” (477) first when they grow older. In other words, the path of identity formation is

marked by constant negotiations between the children and the environments they encounter and

interact with both within and outside of family (such as school, communities, and other social

environments). The dynamics involved in family language development and the significance of

language as a marker of ethnic identity are thematized in several of the Bildungsromans analyzed

here. The texts both confirm and complicate what Cheng and Kuo’s study brings attention to,

namely, that family language development, like ethnic identity formation, is not a

straightforward, uniform process. Although the texts show that families are in constant

interaction with the world around, they are not constructed as merely products of social forces

within society. As I show in my readings of Greece by Prejudice and The Priest Fainted in Chapters

Three and Four, the narratives place great significance on the role of family for ethnic language

acquisition at the same time as they grant the individual agency to influence the process of

his/her language development.

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So far, the overview of the sociological literature and research on the family provided

here has been selective and generic. In the discussion that follows, I focus specifically on

sociohistorical studies about the Greek immigrant and the Greek American family. I attempt to

trace some of the general consensus and differences in the various accounts of the family

patterns of the Greeks in the U.S.

The Case of Greek American Family

The Greeks in the U.S. are generally known as an ethnic group that displays a high degree of

family cohesion and holds kinship relationships that extend beyond the immediate family and

across generations. The unit of family as a significant social institution (alongside the Greek

Orthodox Church) responsible for preserving the traditions, faith, language, and ideals of Greek

culture among the Greeks of the diaspora has been discussed in various sociohistorical accounts.

The discussion of Greek immigrant and Greek American family below will draw from studies

done by Theodore Saloutos, Charles C. Moskos, and Alice Scourby, referred to in Chapter One,

and from Kourvetaris’s aforementioned analysis of the Greek American family in Ethnic Families

in America (1988).

The research on Greek Americans describes the first-generation Greek family as a stable,

integrated unit isolated (at least at an initial stage) from the influences of the dominant culture

(Scourby, The Greek Americans 123).38 The family patterns of the immigrants in the New World, it

is argued, were shaped mainly by the Old World culture. A few key ingredients of the old family

ways are compactness in terms of family ties, patriarchal family ideology, a high degree of family

esteem, and strict parental discipline, as well as its concern with socializing the children into

Greek culture and ethnicity. Prevalent among these early Greeks was also the outlook on

marriage and family as everlasting responsibilities. Marriage was considered as a union of two

families, not just two independent individuals. At the time, and despite the scarcity of Greek

immigrant women, few married outside of the ethnic and religious group. Mr. Athas, the Greek

immigrant father of the protagonist of Daphne Athas’s Greece by Prejudice, marries outside of his

ethnic and religious group. His wife, mother of the protagonist, we learn, is a New England

Protestant woman. Whereas the text provides several opportunities to analyze the narrator’s

38 The first-generation Greek family, Kourvetaris explains, “includes both the early Greek immigrants

(1900-1920s) and late Greek immigrants (1950s to the present)” (83). In referring to these families, the writer reminds us, it is necessary to consider the sociocultural and economic conditions in Greece as well as in America at the time of early and late Greek immigration. On some of the differences between the early and late first-generation Greek families, see Kourvetaris’s analysis on pages 89-90. For studies on the role of family in Greek society, see Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece (1991), edited by Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis.

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experiences during her journey to Greece and her relationship with her ethnic kin as being

grounded in the particulars of her bi-ethnic background, it provides no single comment as to

how a marriage outside of the ethnic community may have shaped the experiences of her

immigrant father. It was not uncommon, Saloutos explains in his study of the Greeks in the U.S.,

that those immigrants who married outside of the ethnic group were socially stigmatized.

As mentioned above, the first-generation Greek family has been defined as uniformly

male-dominated, with structural differences in sex roles and decision-making processes. Fathers

had responsibility for the welfare of the family and mothers for raising children and protecting

the family from external criticism. The mother’s status was considered inferior to that of her

husband’s (Scourby, The Greek Americans 122). The image of the Greek immigrant family as a

closely regulated patriarchal unit that pervades the literature on Greek American family life is

challenged by Kourvetaris, who argues that an analysis of the traditional role differentiation in

the Greek family must entail “a network of complementary roles rather than strict differentiation

on the basis of widely held beliefs of male-dominated (instrumental) versus female-subordinate

(expressive) roles” (86). Pointing to the discrepancy between what he calls the “ideal” and “real”

aspects of the prevailing societal and cultural conception of the father/husband as the head and

figure of the family that exercises authority, and the mother/wife as the submissive but good-

natured partner in charge of the private domain (87), Kourvetaris suggests that the structure of

authority relations in Greek immigrant family life is not unequivocal. In reality the father’s

authority, Kourvetaris proposes, was conditioned by his ability to be “a good provider for his

family, a compassionate husband, and an understanding father” (86). Additionally, in the private

and more informal family setting, the roles of men and women could change considerably; in

some instances, Kourvetaris writes, “the Greek wife and mother was the most dominant figure

in the Greek immigrant family. Her presence and influence was felt not only in the family but

also in larger ethnic community affairs” (87).

As much as Kourvetaris’s comments on gender complementarity, patriarchy and the

dominant Greek wife and mother are forwarded to counteract standard sociological and

historical versions of the early Greek immigrant family, his analysis does not provide anything

conspicuously new to the topic. His discussion of early Greek immigrant family politics evokes

stereotypical images of ethnic women whose work is still very much constrained to the domain

of family, to domestic routines such as household management, childrearing, and kin- or

community-keeping. What, really, were the opportunities of immigrant women in “more private

family setting[s]” (87) to transform the constraints placed on them by the prevailing societal

cultural norms that Kourvetaris speaks of? Though Kourvetaris raises the possibility of a

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different story by emphasizing the issue of gender, his analysis does not show a feminist- or

gender-conscious perspective on his material.39 I attempt to bring such a perspective to my

analysis of Ariadne Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart and its representation of the roles of

immigrant mothers and fathers. The family portrayed by Thompson lives out the traditional

family ideal, with firmly set authority structures and a separation of work and family life. Though

there are certain moments in the text that can be examined in line with the variation in gender

roles that Kourvetaris emphasizes in his essay, the narrative repeatedly constructs mothers as

responsible for the ethnic identity formation of their American-born children, an obligation

which fathers take no active part in. If the immigrant mothers in Thompson’s narrative are at

times depicted, to use Kourvetaris’s phrase, as the “dominant figures” in the family, their control

is restricted to family matters that concern the children and the household. Even the immigrant

mother’s ambition for career and personal fulfillment, The Octagonal Heart shows, lies not in her

own hands but in the hands of her husband.

The second-generation Greek family or Greek American family is defined as “that social

unit in which both parents are American-born of Greek extraction or mixed parenthood (one

parent Greek from Greece and the other either non-Greek or American-born Greek)”

(Kourvetaris 90-91). Generally, this Greek American family has been characterized as

transitional, which implies that it partakes of and raises its children both within the Greek ethnic

subculture and within mainstream American culture and society (Kourvetaris 91).40 Being raised

in a hybrid environment and in a society significantly influenced by the ideology of the melting

pot, it is a common phenomenon that individuals of the second generation are torn between two

ways of life. According to several Greek American scholars, the frustrating and perplexing

experiences of living between two distinct worlds faced by the second generation of Greeks

could result in identity crises and generational conflicts.

Whereas ethnicity is presented as the single most important characteristic of the first-

generation Greek family’s sense of identity, religion, it is argued, is a significant venue through

which second-generation individuals define their Greek ethnicity. The interest in and support of

the Greek Orthodox Church and religion that the second-generation maintains is, however, in

39 The practices and accomplishments that Kourvetaris’s study ascribes to immigrant women are configured in rather traditional ways within patriarchal settings like the family, the church, and the ethnic community. In fact, it is only among the post-World War II Greek immigrants, studies have reported, that women were likely to also have paid employment outside the home as well as bringing up children and taking care of the household.

40 As a result of assimilative processes at work, there was not only one type of family life-style available among second-generation Greeks. Some (atypical) families would completely abandon the traditional Greek way of life, and change their names and religion to assimilate the values of American culture, while others would be tied to the ethnic community and adopt what they perceived to be an ethnic Greek life-style. Yet other families displayed norms and values of a “hybrid” nature. Literature on the second-generation Greek Americans shows that this last type of family was more representative of the majority.

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significant ways different from that of the older generation. Religion was firmly entrenched in

the lives of the first-generation immigrants, who organized and sustained the Greek church. This

taken-for-granted attitude did not pertain to the second and third generations. As the literary

works investigated in the chapters that follow affirm, the American-born generations show little

interest in religion and the church. The importance of the Greek Orthodox Church in the

narratives under study is very marginal. The church is conspicuously absent from the narratives,

and church-going activities occur very infrequently. At best, the narrator may attend a funeral

and take part in a liturgy to celebrate Easter, as Daphne does in Greece by Prejudice, or visit the

ethnic community church in the company of a family member, as seen in Eugenides’s Middlesex.

Not even in Davidson’s novel The Priest Fainted, a title which could suggest a religious theme, is

religion presented as an important factor in the narrator’s process of ethnic identity construction.

“The priest fainted,” the reader learns in one of the novel’s final chapters, is the translation of

“imam baildi,” the name of a Greek dish with origins from Turkey.

If religion plays a minor role in the identity formation of the narrators in the texts

examined here, language, my analyses show, takes on greater significance in the process of ethnic

identification. Sociological studies about Greek Americans show that language makes up an

integral part of the self-image of the second generation.41 This generation was brought up

speaking Greek at home, even if the language used was limited by a vocabulary dictated by what

was required in day-to-day living. Though a declining use and knowledge of the ethnic language

within the second and third generations has been documented (according to sociologists, a

significant index of assimilation), ethnicity is still for these generations identified with language.

Like the first generation, second-generation families have been said to share an ethos

which emphasizes the cohesiveness of the family. Intermarriage, typically viewed as a threat to

the very fabric of family life, has therefore not been the norm among the second-generation

Greek Americans. Second-generation parents, like those of the first-generation, would frequently

admonish their children to marry Greeks. Nevertheless, studies indicate, the mixed marriage rate

in the case of the Greeks is continuously increasing across generations. As suggested in the

hyphenated adjectival phrase, the Greek American family unit may very well consist of ethnically

mixed parenthood.

The reported differences regarding issues of ethnicity and family structure are signs of

generational transformations which are also observed within the third generation. Greek

Americans of the third generation have been characterized as being more “status- and class-

conscious,” not “ethnic conscious” (Kourvetaris 98). According to Moskos, third-generation

41 See Alice Scourby, “Three Generations of Greek Americans: A Study in Ethnicity” (1982).

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Greek Americans have weak commitments to the ancestral culture (Greek Americans 148). They

consider themselves primarily American, intermarriage is in some communities the norm rather

than the exception, and their attachments to ethnic institutions such as the Greek church and

school are considerably weakened. Their ethnicity, Moskos, Kourvetaris, and others postulate, is

not primarily a matter of cultural transmission. It instead directly depends on their voluntary

participation in Greek American institutional life. The vestiges of ethnic social behavior that

remain are principally symbolic in nature, and pertain specifically to Greek religion and aspects

of Greek culture such as cuisine, music, and dance (Kourvetaris 96). In other words, Greek

American scholars have shown that maintaining a sense of Greek ethnicity for the third- and

subsequent generations of Greek Americans is a matter of conscious selection and consent.

Even the family institution, studies show, has been challenged by the American-born

Greeks of the younger generations. These studies report a weakening, erosion even, of family ties

among the third and subsequent generations of Greek Americans. By the third generation,

Kourvetaris maintains, “there is a significant decrease in Greek ethnic identification (as measured

by language and Greek family norms), but some vestiges of ethnic social behavior remain” (96).

These changes, it is shown, are the result of many factors. The phase of cultural conflict

between, for instance, old-world values and their American manifestations is one factor that has

had an impact on the role of the family institution. Others include the phases of accommodation

and socio-psychological adjustment, the pressures from American society at large to assimilate,

and later, the ethnic revival of the 1960s and 70s that created an interest in ethnic culture among

the third-generation Greek Americans.

Additional research on Greek American family life and its past and present situations in

the old and the new countries was recently published in Greek American Families: Traditions and

Transformations (1999), edited by Sam J. Tsemberis, Harry J. Psomiades, and Anna Karpathakis.

The material includes historical, sociological, and anthropological research as well as clinical

analysis on Greek American family life, thus making significant interdisciplinary contributions to

research on Greek America at a stage in the acculturation process of Greek Americans which, it

is claimed in the volume’s introduction, will challenge the identity of Greek Americans. The

volume addresses issues of assimilation, interethnic marriages, and religious faith as well as

gender and sexual identities in relation to later-generation Greek American families, raising

opportunities for speculating about the future of Greek American families. One of its

conclusions is that Greek American family structures equally reflect the conditions of American

life and the maintenance of tradition. Another conclusion is that Greek Americans appear to

follow a pattern of blending into the dominant American culture similar to that of many

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northern European white ethnic groups. In my readings of the literary texts I will draw on a few

of the discussions included in the volume, and comment more explicitly on some of the issues

raised.

Historical and sociological accounts about Greek American families do not generally

discuss the effects of gender (or class or sexuality, for that matter) on Greek American family

experiences. An exception is Scourby’s The Greek Americans, in which the critic presents an

explicitly gender-inflected discussion of the authority structures of Greek American family life.

Scourby’s book more comprehensively investigates the structure of authority relations in Greek

family life as a result of a patriarchal value system than do earlier studies. Traditional role

expectations, Scourby writes, “continue to be the norm for the Greek male and female across

generations” (131), problematizing earlier narratives of a generally increasing mode of

egalitarianism within Greek American families of the second and third generations.42 That

vestiges of patriarchy still persist in Greek family life is, among other things, obvious in Greek

American attitudes regarding the treatment of sons and daughters. A survey shows that even

American-born parents would frequently give preferential treatment to male children. Whereas a

son was encouraged to achieve independence, it was not uncommon that a daughter’s ambition

for achievement was limited. Relational systems that are perpetuated from generation to

generation have to be seen within the patriarchal framework of Greek life, Scourby maintains.

However, though she brings to light the dominant authority relations and gender-role norms

within the Greek American family, Scourby does not offer an extensive analysis of the

patriarchal paradigms that her study identifies. Instead, the contribution of her study lies in

providing a gender-informed perspective on the sociohistorical narratives about Greek American

family life.

Yet another scholar who has called attention to the troubling silence about gender in

studies of Greek Americans and the rarity of women’s accounts in Greek immigrant success

stories is Phyllis Pease Chock. In her 1995 essay “‘The Self-Made Woman’: Gender and the

Success Story in Greek-American Family Histories,” Chock points out that immigrant success

stories—told in family and community settings but also in scholarly works, in curricula, in mass

media, and elsewhere—reproduce problematic gender hierarchies.43 Stories of immigrant

economic success reiterate, Chock states, “national mythic themes of rebirth, of opportunity, and

of nationality” (239). The writer thus refers to the cultural practices of telling and retelling stories

42 See Moskos’s discussion in Greek Americans: Struggle and Success, pages 93-94. 43 An interesting question that emerges in the context of Chock’s observations about the gendered nature

of ethnic storytelling is whether the patriarchy that she identifies is “Greek” or “American.” Unfortunately, Chock does not offer any comments on this issue.

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of ethnic success as “‛naturalization’ storytelling” (239). Since the available narratives, Chock

writes, are male-inflected—they are about a male immigrant, who actively transforms himself

into an American—they “naturalize” the gender of the immigrant/citizen. So, while scholarly

studies of Greek Americans depict men, Chock argues, “as building businesses, churches,

newspapers, and political and civic organizations” (241), only passing references are made to

women’s experiences and successes as citizens in the new country. Their accounts, if they exist,

follow as supplementary to the stories of immigrant men. Because of women’s virtual absence as

protagonists, Chock writes, such stories imply that “women are less assuredly successes and

American” (239).44 Certain moments in Papandreou’s narrative A Crowded Heart can be read in

terms of the male success story, in which there is marginal or no space for women. One such

moment is when the narrator learns the reason for his grandparents’ separation. His grandfather,

a renowned politician in Greece, had asked his wife for a divorce in a letter since their marriage,

he felt, held him back in his political ambitions. Though this story is not an ethnic success story,

it nevertheless portrays woman as an obstacle to the male’s success.

At this juncture I feel it is necessary to openly address the old question of the relation

between literary (imaginative) texts and sociohistorical studies. While I in no way view literature

as “mirroring” or “reproducing” reality, I believe that literature can yield important information

about social and historical reality. Thus the literary representations of Greek American family

provide a strong basis for exploring a range of questions with regard to ethnic identity formation,

including ethnic language development. In addition, the texts raise several of the issues

implicated in sociological discussions of ethnic family structures, such as generational changes

and adjustments that have taken place in terms of family patterns (including structural

differences in sex roles). Further, they explore the ways family dynamics influence the process of

identity construction, and write the complexity of ethnicity on the family relationships,

experiences, and conflicts depicted. Some of these experiences are related to the challenges

ethnic families face as later generations become further acculturated, culturally and structurally,

into American society as well as to larger societal movements.

However, there are important differences between sociohistorical accounts and literary

representations. Sociological and historical studies of family often deal with family experiences in

general or homogenizing terms. They record, study, and classify data, samples, and facts,

focusing on the abstract social structures that shape family life. Moreover, sociohistorical

44 The data that Chock supports her argument with consists of stories told mainly by middle-class Greek

American women in the 1960s who were daughters of immigrants, but also stories told by a few men who were sons of immigrant mothers. The dilemma that Chock’s female storytellers faced as they told their stories was that they had to find a language in which to speak about their mothers and themselves. There were simply “no terms in which people could speak about women as actors” (240).

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analyses emphasize almost exclusively the forms of family which are representative for the whole

ethnic group. With a few exceptions, this is also true for the sociological and historical accounts

about Greek American family. By contrast, the literary texts and the representations of family

that they evoke do not assume a uniform structure. One of the most powerful and exciting

qualities of literary representations is that they may evoke a traditional definition of family at the

same time as they also elaborate it, and stretch it to comprise affiliations or ideals not commonly

associated with the nuclear family unit. In other words, the literary texts sustain contradiction,

exhibit complexity, and privilege ambiguity. They also encompass affective functions. They

appeal to our emotions and touch upon our personal experiences and expectations of families

and family life, challenging us to examine the familiarity of families.

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Chapter Three

Family and Imaginary Ethnic Homelands in Greece by Prejudice

and The Feasts of Memory

I was family. But I was more than that. I was family from

across the ocean. I was stranger family. I was unGreek

family. In me, to them, lay mysteries covered over by my

silence. I was as mysterious as an idiot or a child before he

can speak.

—Daphne Athas, Greece by Prejudice

The only Greece I could believe in was the Greece I knew.

Greece was downstairs in our house in Rye, as I sat by the

banister on the second floor, watching the people in our

living room, listening to their babel of words and laughter.

Greece was downstairs on a Sunday night, while upstairs, in

America, I answered questions in my workbook before

going to bed.

—Elias Kulukundis, The Feasts of Memory: A Journey to a Greek

Island

The idea of travel, of “going out into the world,” is common in most forms and genres of

literature, including the genre of the Bildungsroman. Typically, in the Bildungsroman, the

protagonist’s coming of age implies a movement in society and in the world, and is characterized

by experiences that in cognitive terms present opportunities to develop and revise an

understanding of self and society. In the ethnic Bildungsroman the movement toward a new

conception of self or identity may be mediated through the unit of family, as the texts examined

in this chapter show. Daphne Athas’s Greece by Prejudice (1962) and Elias Kulukundis’s The Feasts

of Memory: A Journey to a Greek Island (1967) depict the physical travels of two, one American-born

and the other American-raised, Greek Americans to the homeland of their ethnic families,

emphasizing, I argue, a social vision of ethnic identity formation.

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Although Athas’s story of her encounters with her pre-American fatherland has been

defined as a non-fictional memoir, and Kulukundis’s book has been said to enfold an even more

extensive list of genres—autobiography, family memoir, and short stories, to name a few—the

most conspicuous genre characteristic of the two texts is that they are travel narratives. The

affinity between autobiographical and memoir-type writing is pointed out by Patrick Holland and

Graham Huggan.1 Indeed, the travelers in Greece by Prejudice and The Feasts of Memory are “selves in

transit” (14), to use Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan’s term. However, unlike travel

narratives, these texts do not present the selves “writ large in [their] alien surroundings” (Holland

and Huggan 12). Instead, the surroundings are both familiar and strange; the narrators are part of

them through ethnic bloodlines at the same time as these surroundings are alien to their

American selves. Given the composite circumstances that frame Daphne’s and Elias’s travels, the

narratives call into question unilateral approaches to travel as a leisurely, entertaining, and exotic

activity. As Yiorgos D. Kalogeras proposes in the essay “The ‘Other Space’ of Greek America”

(1998), Athas’s and Kulukundis’s narrators can be defined as “ethnic travelers,” that is, travelers

“who arrived not in a foreign country but in what they considered to be their ancestral

motherland” (703).2

Following Kalogeras’s suggestion, in this chapter I approach Athas’s and Kulukundis’s

narrators, Daphne and Elias, as ethnic travelers who, due to their genealogical affiliations with

Greece, cannot be neutral observers of the places they visit.3 However, whereas Kalogeras’s

analysis of these works primarily concentrates on the “sites of resistance” (703) that emerge as a

result of the ethnic travelers’ assumptions about their Greek ethnicity and the “orientalizing

discourse” (703) through which they respond to their expectations of modern Greek culture and

society, my reading emphasizes Daphne’s and Elias’s travels as movements with cognitive

potential, profoundly saturated with questions of family and familial history. Although the

circumstances framing the journeys unfolded in the two texts are different—Daphne travels to

Greece to become a travel companion of her father, and Elias sets out on his journey with the

design to write a book about the diasporic history of his Greek immigrant family and their native

1 Travel writing, Holland and Huggan argue, is a “hybrid” literary genre that “straddles categories and

disciplines” (8). It is a form that “freely mixes fact and fable, anecdote and analysis” (9). 2 In his essay, Kalogeras refers to travelers who returned to Greece and wrote of their experiences as

“ethnic travelers.” The ethnic traveler that Kalogeras attempts to discuss “practises, to an extent, ethnic tourism as defined by Pierre L. van den Berghe and Charles F. Keyes” (722). However, whereas Berghe and Keyes identify “the cultural exoticism of the local population and its artifacts” (344) as the principal attraction for the ethnic traveler, Kalogeras explains that his essay “shifts the emphasis to the process of mediation” (722).

3 The return to roots of later generation Greek Americans in the form of “ethnic tourists” is also discussed by Anastasia Stefanidou in her dissertation “Ethnic and Diaspora Poets of Greek America” (2001). Stefanidou examines how in Greek American poetry, the narrating “I” assumes the role of the tourist “while they often try to ignore the discrepancies between their predetermined ideas of Greekness and their experience of lived reality” (226). I will return to Stefanidou’s argument in my analysis of Greece by Prejudice.

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island—both travels can be seen as instances of re-tracing and claiming ethnic origins and as

movements into family history and ethnic self-definition. This interest in a so-called origin, my

analysis will show, is not to be understood as a return to roots but as a coming-to-terms with

ethnicity. What propels the narrators is a wish to learn more about their ancestor’s homelands

and their personal ethnic origins. It is, in other words, a cognitive process that allows them to

continually develop, invent, and revise their ethnic self-identity, not a process that seeks to

establish an ethnic identity that is firmly fixed in an ancestral or immigrant past.

The narrators’ attempts to establish genealogical connections to an ethnic past and their

identity formation, I argue, are mediated through family, both in its immediate and extended

forms. In Greece by Prejudice family is comprised of the narrators’ immediate family, and more

specifically her Greek immigrant father with whom she travels, but eventually stretches beyond

this unit to include distant Greek ethnic kin in the form of cousins, aunts, and uncles. This

stretch from immediate family to extended kinship, Athas illustrates, involves tensions that issue

from ideas about family as blood ties with specific social obligations. These tensions result in,

among other things, contradictory identity positions which accommodate a range of meanings, as

the epigraph to this chapter suggests. As a result of these tensions, family in Greece by Prejudice

constitutes a site of both inhibiting and fulfilling intimate relationships. Initially, family is the

object of the narrator’s criticism, but gradually it becomes a fertile site of ethnic self-

identification. Family in The Feasts of Memory is also defined in terms of bloodlines. It is a kin-

oriented unit but in Kulukundis’s portrayal, Greek uncles are given more representational space

than the aunts. Elias’s intellectual project of writing a book about the diasporic history of his

family, and his process of coming to terms with his ethnic heritage, relies on family. His access to

his family past and ethnic origin is limited to relatives’ memories, which are fragmented and

sometimes conflicting. Thus Elias’s quest for ethnic self-fulfillment through family, I show,

involves difficulties which the narrator attempts to solve by, first, “unearthing” familial stories

and memories and, then, imaginatively reconstructing them.

The process of reconstructing memories and, thereby, homelands, is the subject of

Salman Rushdie’s “Imaginary Homelands” (1982). The focus of Rushdie’s essay is on writers

who are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in their societies. Rushdie’s observations

about writers in the between-world condition can be read in fruitful ways, I propose, together

with Kalogeras’s definition of the ethnic traveler. In Rushdie’s words, for those who “writ[e]

from a kind of double perspective” (19), the attempt to fictionally portray a homeland is

inevitably imbued with “profound uncertainties” (10). Accounting for the complexities involved

in his own attempt to recreate the homeland he had left as a young man, Rushdie writes:

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It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are

haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back even at the

risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do

so in the knowledge . . . that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably

means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost;

that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible

ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (10)

The ethnic travelers in the books that I discuss in this chapter and the figures that Rushdie has in

mind in his essay are different for all kinds of historical, cultural, and political reasons.

Nevertheless, Rushdie’s observations about the construction of memories and fiction of things

lost implied in the concept of “imaginary homelands” are productive for analyzing the ethnic

Bildungsromans examined here. The ethnic travelers in Athas’s and Kulukundis’s texts set out to

discover authentic Greece, but they wind up creating imaginary versions of their ancestral

homelands, “Greeces of the mind.” As I proposed above, Kulukundis’s project of recreating a

place of ethnic origin and his family’s stories relies upon both the fragmentary truths of memory

and on imaginative creation. When all the layers of stories that make up Elias’s past have been

unearthed and investigated, it is necessary, the narrator says, to “join . . . facts together, bringing

them to bear” (95) on one’s theories of the past. Athas’s story is also informed by the idea of

constructing an imaginary homeland in an effort to claim a lost place. Hence, neither Greece by

Prejudice nor The Feasts of Memory present complacent returns to the ethnic past. Alongside the

potentially positive cultural and familial encounters experienced by the narrators, the texts also

accentuate the painful interventions, ambiguities, and challenges involved in their confrontations

with their ‘other’ culture and kin—the “stranger family” that they know and belong to only

remotely.

Drawing on the work of Paula M. L. Moya, who sees experience as an important

organizing principle for theoretical self-understanding, and theorizes the connections between

experience, identity, and knowledge, this chapter also examines the protagonists’ hyphenated

experiences and identities as Greek and American, family and strangers, insiders and outsiders,

all of which have urgency for their formation of a sense of ethnicity. The complexities that

inform the narrator’s ethnic hyphenation are also inflected by the particulars of class and gender.

Though the issue of gender is not the object of explicit reflection in these texts, it informs the

narratives in significant ways. Greece by Prejudice, for example, represents family as a gendered

institution and a site where paternal authority is enacted. Daphne’s encounters while in Greece

and her affiliations with her Greek kin are strongly influenced by her father’s views of

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contemporary Greece and its people. The Feasts of Memory, I will show in my reading of the book,

also depicts how gender systems organize social and familial life.

A discussion of place is significant for my textual analyses, not necessarily because the

site of travel in the literary works is Greece but because, as Susan L. Roberson writes in her

introduction to Defining Travel, there is a correlation between “the kind of place or position one

occupies and one’s sense of self” (xvii). In addition, “[r]elations to place . . . make up part of the

baggage that the traveler carries” (xiv). What Roberson reflects upon is both the importance of

geographical place as well as the significance of the traveler’s social location, in terms of social

class, to travel. The relationship between place and social location is at the center of Greece by

Prejudice. Daphne’s understanding of her ethnic heritage, her Greek family, and her own ethnic

identity is shaped by her physical journey to Greece as well as by her position in Greece as a

Greek American. Kulukundis’s narrative also investigates a notion of “place” informed by both

issues of class and geography. But place in these texts takes on yet another meaning. For the

narrators, the Greek “home” does not merely invoke the immediate familial and ethnic roots.

For Daphne, Greece is also the location of mythical ancestors and the cradle of western culture

and democracy. For Elias, the Greek island of his ancestors is a less utopian “place”; it is a site of

exilic national history. So the narrators’ “Greekness,” one could argue, emerges as a function of

the historical and mythical aspects of their ideas of Greece and “Greekness.”

Finally, a note on terminology: writers and critics who deal with travel narratives make

distinctions between the connotations of the terms “travel” and “journey.”4 Although

discussions about differences and possible overlaps between the terms are important, for all

practical purposes the terms “travel” and “journey” function equally well as analytical terms to

describe the type of movement that the narratives present, and will be used interchangeably in

this chapter.5 In Athas’s and Kulukundis’s texts these two terms define a specifically physical

movement to a place of ethnic origin that denotes a passage from one place to another and/or

from one stage to another, and that signifies personal growth and change regardless of whether

4 Citing Paul Fussell, Dean MacCannell, and Baudrillard, Roberson argues that many writers define travel

“in ways familiar to many and in ways that tend to universalize travel around models of pleasure and escape” (xiii). Not all writers and critics would, however, subscribe to such a narrow definition of travel and/or journey. Recently, travel has also emerged as a crucial theoretical category (Said, Clifford, Kaplan). Edward Said, for example, has introduced the concept of “traveling theories.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said writes: “Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel—from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another. Cultural and intellectual life,” the critic explains, “are usually nourished and often sustained by this circulation of ideas” (226). This movement of ideas and theories, he clarifies, “whether it takes the form of acknowledged or unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation . . . is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity” (226). Said then goes on to specify the various movements possible, outlining the stages “common to the way any theory or idea travels” (226).

5 Many writers and critics use the terms interchangeably. This is true for the essays included in the volume edited by Roberson, in which even the term “voyage” is occasionally used as synonymous with “journey” and “travel.”

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or not the traveler returns to the place from where s/he initially sets out. In other words, the act

of traveling in Greece by Prejudice and The Feasts of Memory entails a cognitive process, one which

allows the narrators to develop an ethnic identity and rethink their affiliations with their ethnic

homelands and families.

Traveler and Returner, Tourist and “Comer-home”

Greece by Prejudice tells the story of the Greek American writer and narrator Daphne’s first journey

to her father’s native land, Greece. The year is 1958. Daphne, who is at the time working in

London, receives a note from her father: “Come down here. I am folding the flag of Greece”

(13). She first boards a boat, then a train, to travel to Greece and become his travel companion.

Daphne’s first impressions of Greece as her train approaches Athens suggest the constant

oppositions that will continue to inform her experiences of her ancestral homeland. Oppositions

such as tourist or, to use Athas’s term, “comer-home,” stranger and family, pure and impure, and

Greek and American, are reiterated throughout the narrative, and influence Daphne’s coming to

terms with her Greek identity. The narrator’s process of identity formation entails moments of

personal development and transformation, significantly mediated by the relations between travel,

family, experience, and knowledge.

Daphne’s initial responses to her ancestors’ homeland evoke a mythologized image of

the country of her ethnic roots, and bring to mind a traveler’s romance with a place. As the

Acropolis and its marble temple, the Parthenon, rise before her eyes, shining in the glittering sun

“like the bleached bones of the ancients” (11), Daphne is “frenzied with excitement” (15). The

temple is “definite, silent, matter-of-fact. It is not a matter of wonder at all” (11), and “in present

time” (11). But it also is “the same temple the ancients knew. It’s the same sun, the same breath

of wind” (11-12).6 In her euphoric observations of the Acropolis, the elements of time and space

merge:

Across sat the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, and the Temple of Nike luminating,

bonelike, shedding the rays of the sun . . . on the wild crowned rock nose of the

world. They secured all vision. The jagged fragments of the rock columns cast a

6 A romantic conception of Greece can be found in the travel accounts included in Greece: True Stories (2000), edited by Larry Habegger, Sean O’Reilly, and Brian Alexander. “For those of us in the Western world, Greece is a lodestone, a wellspring, an idea as grand and compelling and romantic as the Iliad and the Odyssey” (xiii), the editors write. “[W]ho could not want to ‘return home’ to the cradle of democracy, to the source of our political and moral philosophies, to the land that established the foundations of our civilization and spawned the myths that for centuries have provided us an intellectual and emotional compass?” (xiii), they add and go on: “It is a legacy that cannot be ignored, and a force that pulls us to visit this hallowed land, if for no other reason than to walk in the paths of gods and heroes who preceded us” (xiii).

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blinding spell both delicate and fierce. Yet they seemed shockingly familiar. They

were not dead. The sun, the air, the moon, and the rain had bleached them fresh

each day. Bones they are, but present-time bones. (19)

The use of the metaphor of “bones” in this eulogizing passage of the past glories of Classical

Greece is noteworthy, as are Daphne’s comments on the Parthenon as being “not dead,” but

“familiar,” and as belonging to “present-time.” It is tempting to see in her use of the metaphor

of bones an allusion to ancestral bones and family, which condenses time and fuses the temporal

with the spatial. Daphne’s remark on the familiarity of her encounter with the ruins suggests her

connection with this ancient site through ethnic descent and through the stories of the place that

she had heard while growing up in a Greek American family. The mythical yet familiar aspects of

her experiences of the temple signal both the movement of time and the materializing of space

as significant factors for ethnic identity formation.

Daphne, the ethnic traveler, occupies the “ambiguous role of the middleperson,” to use

Kalogeras’s words (“The ‘Other Space’ of Greek America” 722) in Greece. She has, as Kalogeras

argues, not arrived in a foreign country but in a place and culture that she belongs to through

ethnic descent. Daphne’s observations when visiting Rhodes and Crete emphasize this in-

between position that defines the “middleperson.” She feels as though she is

floating over the landscape, compared with sitting down in the midst of it, being

dug in. . . . We floated like wraiths making contact, as tourists will, meaningless

wanderers, with those aspects of the outward face of the country out of which

they create meaning. We knew no one. Yet everyone knew us for the tourists we

were. (160-61)

“It was useless for me,” she goes on, “to tell them: ‘I know you. You are my relatives. You are

Greeks too. I even understand your jokes.’ For they would not have believed me. And so I

settled easily into my dissembling role” (161). By taking on a deceptive appearance, Daphne does

not need to deal with her contradictory experiences of feeling like “a traveler” and “a returner,”

of being “a tourist and a comer-home all simultaneously” (25). Being “caught between two

cultures” (169) her experiences and positions merge and blur, disguise and reveal, just like the

Greek and the American of her hyphenated identity. “[P]laying two roles at once” (169), she

says, implies “freedom” (161) as well as “penalty” (169). It is, as Daphne describes it, “a double-

barreled effect” (25).

The doubleness of Daphne’s experiences has been commented upon by Fred Chappell.

In “Daphne Athas: To Be (and Not To Be) Greek,” an essay included in the 1997 special issue

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of Pembroke Magazine published in honor of Athas, Chappell writes that Greece by Prejudice is “a

book about double experience” (30). “Everything that happens to the narrator,” Chappell

observes, “is unexpected, usually unpredictable, nothing like what she had pictured beforehand.

Yet in the instants the events take place, they seem already known—seen but unforeseen, and yet

pre-seen” (30). Alongside the specificity of Daphne’s double experiences there is also in Athas’s

text, Chappell notes, an experience that “almost all of us can share”:

The doubleness of the narrator of Greece by Prejudice is not unique. Most of us may

experience the same feelings, whatever our genetic heritage, in our encounter

with Greece, whether it takes place on the spot or only in the pages of Homer

and Hesiod, Aesop and Anacreon. This is because that one great culture to some

extent, however faint, underlies our own personal lives. Aware of it or not,

pleased by it or not, most Americans and Europeans are non-Greek by accident

of birth, but Greek—by prejudice. (32)

In Chappell’s analysis, Daphne’s encounters equal any westerner’s experiences as a result of the

common Greek cultural heritage of the West. Chappell’s remark in the passage quoted above can

be seen to “naturalize” Daphne’s experiences of her ancient heritage, and to dilute the

particularity of her ethnic origin.

Daphne’s seemingly contradictory experiences of Greece and her ethnicity spring, I

argue, from a double perspective characteristic of individuals who are, in Rushdie’s words, “at

one and the same time insiders and outsiders” (19). Having to mediate bi-ethnic and bi-cultural

affiliations, Daphne’s identity is, to borrow Rushdie’s expression, “at once plural and partial”

(15). She is an “American” (13), she declares in the second chapter of the book but corrects

herself instantly: “Half American and half Greek” (13). Daphne’s belonging to two cultures gives

her a double vision which makes things seem as familiar as they seem strange. Sometimes she, to

use Rushdie’s phrase, “straddle[s] two cultures” and, at other times, she “fall[s] between two

stools” (15). Though this ground may be ambiguous and shifting it is not, Rushdie explains, “an

infertile territory . . . to occupy” (15). Instead, the experiences that emanate from this “territory”

involve knowledge, and provide new perspectives with which to approach reality. This idea, I will

show, centrally informs Daphne’s travel experiences, allowing her to gradually reveal the blind

spots of her vision.

Daphne’s comments about her “half American” and “half Greek” identity imply that

Greece by Prejudice is not merely recounting the sights and sites of Greece, in spite of the narrator’s

definition of herself as a tourist. Her visit in Greece is an act of inquisitiveness about her ethnic

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heritage and an attempt to figure out her ethnicity. “I was traveling in the history of my own

blood” (75), Daphne says at one point in the narrative, a reflection that stresses that her journey

into family history is also a journey into self-definition. The “blood” image, which iterates

throughout the book, together with the metaphor of bones mentioned above, invokes an

essentialist view of ethnicity as grounded in genealogy and history (familial and national), in “the

burdens of blood” embodied in the pillars of the Parthenon temple, which is waiting to be re-

claimed.

But Daphne’s essentialist reflections and her sense of belonging to something ancient

through blood and bones also reveal an obsession with the historical specificity of her

experiences, which evoke feelings of imprisonment, of violence, of enforced ethnicity and of an

imposed past. These haunting emotions become clear as Daphne reflects on why she rushed to

see the Acropolis when she arrived in Athens:

I did not stop to wonder why I was rushing pell-mell to the ruins of the

Acropolis, moneyless, mapless, sleepless, hotel-less, and Daddy-less. I carved the

Parthenon in soap in the fourth grade. I spelled it at the age of seven. I had never

been myself without the Parthenon and that was because I had heard of it. That

was the whiteness of my obsession that afternoon. (17)

A few pages later Daphne again points to her inability to escape, ignore or avoid the past: “that

Parthenon always looms. Whatever direction I took it haunted me. I could not get away from its

columns, arrogant in their humility and their clarity. I could not get away from the great roar of

the wind moaning through them. I could not get away from its beauty” (22).

Daphne’s reference to ethnic history in terms of “burden” and “haunting,” and her

remark that she was “the product of twenty-five centuries of wonder, of layered culture” but

“could not have the pure story, for [she] read of it through impurities of history” (17) can be

understood as referring to her own historical “impurity” as a hyphenated American.7 Although

7 The view of hyphenation as an “impure” condition can be traced in President Theodore Roosevelt’s

speeches at the beginning of the 20th century. “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” Roosevelt announced in a speech before the Knights of Columbus on October 12, 1915, and went on to say: “When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. . . . The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin . . . would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country.” For Roosevelt, a “naturalized,” good American is the immigrant who, once he (Roosevelt refers to immigrants by using the pronoun “he”) reaches the U.S., should give his undivided loyalty to the nation, and break all ties of allegiance with his homeland.

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Daphne herself belongs to the generation of Greek Americans who could, in the second half of

the twentieth century, most probably take whiteness for granted, her comment reminds us that

the process by which certain immigrants, including the Greeks, acquired their white status in the

U.S. was slow (see my discussion in Chapter Two). As new racial arrangements came to

dominate the American political culture in the wake of the restrictive immigration law of 1924,

the descendants of Greeks, among other immigrant groups, would with time, it was said, become

indistinguishable from “pure” or “proper” Americans. Whether Athas’s narrator does (or does

not) become such a “proper” American, Daphne’s description of her relationship to the

Parthenon may be read as signaling an awareness of her hyphenated ethnic history.

Daphne’s awareness of the essentialism implied in her views of history and ethnicity also

allows her to reflect on the laughable and nonsensical aspects of her obsession with the

Parthenon. The belief that she is not herself “without [her] history,” “without the Parthenon”

(17), she realizes, conveys “a pathetic and awesome view of oneself” (17). “Ostensibly,” she goes

on, “I should have been too bowed by these burdens of blood and culture even to run, let alone

to have traveled a continent to get to it. But I was not. As far as I was concerned Athena’s

temple was sitting there waiting for me” (17-18). Daphne’s critical reflections on her “ecstatically

ignorant” (18) behavior and her knowledge of the interferences of history, its cracks and

“impurities,” also reveal a constructivist view of ethnicity. As the story proceeds, the incessant

paradoxes and self-contradictions that frame Daphne’s experiences in Greece and her identity

formation (not least through family as I will soon demonstrate), force the protagonist to

reconsider her desire for experiencing “pure” Greek culture. Daphne’s gradual reconsiderations

of her experiences can be seen in the light of Moya’s claim that identities “are subject to multiple

determinations and to a continual process of verification” (Learning from Experience 41). Identities

may undergo revisions over the course of an individual’s life. The major source of this revision is

Daphne’s trip to Greece, which provides her with opportunities to gain knowledge about her

ethnic heritage, to grow emotionally, and, eventually, to question her assumptions about her

Greek ancestors and their country.

When Daphne arrives in Greece, her ideas of the country appear more constructed and

imaginary than real. Like her father, she repeatedly pays homage to the great thinkers’ miraculous

engineering feats of Ancient Greece, and speaks admiringly of the legendary achievements of

Nestor, the great warrior of Homer’s Odyssey, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and other heroic

figures. These imaginary versions of Greece show an interesting parallel with the “Hellenic ideal”

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(Herzfeld 3), proclaimed at the time of Greece’s independence from the Turkish rule in 1821.8

The vision of “Hellas,” it has been argued, is related to the ambitions to resurrect Greek ancient

culture and the wish to enhance the emergent nation-state and its modern culture as ancestral to

Europe. The Hellenist vision included “the achievements of the ancient Greeks in knowledge,

morality, and art, summed up in one evocative word. . . . This unique nation-state would

represent the ultimate achievement of the Hellenic ideal and, as such, would lead all Europe to

the highest levels of culture yet known” (Herzfeld 3).9 In Greece by Prejudice this Hellenist ideology

becomes explicit in the reverence for the ancient Hellenes that Mr. Athas and Daphne express.

By contrast, Daphne’s and her father’s fascination for the Classical Greeks and their

culture is nowhere to be found in their comments on contemporary Greece. The continuation

between past and present that Daphne eloquently argues for in her portrayal of the Parthenon as

a temple which still breathes, still lives, is not expressed in her conceptions of Greece. In

present-day Greece, the historical grandeur is lost, and the Hellenist ideal remains but a vision.

The country fails to meet her expectations of a classical antiquity, as do its people, who neither

drink their retsina from “a golden goblet” nor walk “upon mosaic” (99). The Greeks of today,

her father informs her, are merely embarrassing and superstitious; in his eyes they are “[c]ountry

bumpkins” who “cross themselves to eat” (30). It is clear that both Daphne and her father resort

to idealizing images of the “former grandeur” (98) of ancestral Greece and their forebears,

feeding on imaginary versions of the ancestral homeland.

The narrative sets up recurring contrasts between what is nobly ancient Greek and what

is simply peasant, what is considered developed and what is backward. These juxtapositions are

evidence of what Kalogeras calls the “orientalization of Greece” (“The ‘Other Space’ of Greek

America” 702). The orientalizing discourse of the Western traveler, whose ties to the U.S.,

according to Kalogeras, bestow him/her with a sense of cultural empowerement (721), becomes

especially evident when Daphne visits Hora, her father’s native village. Daphne’s sojourn in

Hora is depicted as a regression in time, and here Athas’s book evokes a familiar narrative

known from discourses of imperialism and colonialism. Daphne is the temporary visitor, the

“quester” (167) who also takes on the role of studying the villagers, “these archaic Greeks” (215),

and their customs. “There was something self-deprecatory in having to admit that one’s

ancestors were so much smarter and richer than oneselves” (99), she reasons without

8 Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld writes that the goal of the Greek people in this historical moment “was far more ambitious than freedom alone, for they proclaimed the resurrection of an ancient vision” (3). That vision was “Hellas.” In the legitimation of the new nation-state, he explains, “[f]oreigners as well as Greeks, politicians as well as scholars helped launch Greek folklore research on the path along which it was to travel for decades to come” (7). Greeks “used their folklore to validate both their national identity and their cultural status as Europeans” (11).

9 The process by which the Greek nation was granted legitimization can be seen to be in line with Benedict Anderson’s analysis of imagining modern nations, briefly referred to in Chapter Two.

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understandning her own self as part of that collective whole and culture that she scrutinizes and

critiques. With such remarks the narrative emphasizes some kind of belated existence, bringing

attention to social power relations and issues of cultural hegemony. As the title of Athas’s

memoir makes plain, this is a story of Greece by Prejudice. Daphne, the “well-learned” (178), “the

treated one, the protected one” (245), is a traveler of privilege, freedom, and education. Her

privileged status in Greece can be seen to be grounded in the particulars of her Greek American

family: her New England Yankee mother, “descendant of a Revolutionary War general, Joseph

Spencer” (26) and, her Greek immigrant father, whose socioeconomic mobility in the U.S.

bestows on him and his daughter a sense of power and an exclusive position among their Greek

kin. Following this, “Greece by Privilege” could be just as appropriate a title for Athas’s

narrative.

Discussing the perpetuation of the ambiguous relationship of the Greek American who

returns to an ancestral country of origin with his/her ethnic culture, Stefanidou observes that the

Greek American poets’ “view of their ethnic culture becomes quite static and past-oriented, if

not ahistorical,” since it is predicated upon “fragmentary, highly mythologized, or romantically

idealized versions of Greekness” (194). The same can be argued for several of the protagonists in

the texts analyzed in this dissertation, whose affiliations with their ethnic culture are predicated

on mythological images and ideals of Greece and “Greekness.” The effort (and failure) to

establish bonds with an ethnic homeland and its culture by creating “imaginary homelands” or

“Greeces of the mind” also informs Athas’s and Kulukundis’ narratives.

In her study of Greek American poetry, Stefanidou additionally discusses language,

Orthodox religion, tradition, national history, and familial past as important parameters of

ethnicity and genealogical (dis)continuity. I find her comments on familial past as “a significant

constitutive factor in [the poets’] ethnic self consciousness” (213) useful for my reading of

Athas’s and Kulukundis’s ethnic Bildungsromans. According to Stefanidou, “cultural and historical

identification with their family not only affirms the Greek American poets’ ethnicity but also

ensures their legitimate and secure place in the family’s genealogy” (218). What these writers

express as significant for their sense of ethnicity, she explains, is “participation in the production

of familial history and memory” (219). Whereas participation in the making of family history and

memory is imperative for Kulukundis’s narrator who, as my analysis of the text will make clear,

does so by documenting his family’s and their island’s history, Athas, at least initially, does not

want to acquaint herself with her Greek relatives, whom she perceives through the prejudiced

eyes of her father as uneducated peasants. Family in Athas’s text, in both its immediate and

extended forms, is configured, I argue, as a fertile but complicated site of fostering and

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mediating ethnicity. The mediation of an ethnic continuity through family in Greece by Prejudice, I

will proceed to show, is presented as a contradictory yet cognitive process that is also marked by

gender issues.

The prejudices predicated in the title of Athas’s work on Greece and the Greeks are

conveyed to Daphne by her father, a fact that makes family in Greece by Prejudice a highly

ambiguous source of knowledge about ethnicity already from the start. Daphne’s opinionated

father repeatedly refers to their “Greekness” as stretching back to an ancient heritage, thus

marking their difference from the present Greeks who are simply pale imitations of their

distinguished forebears. “Provincial” Greeks have nothing to pit against the “dawn people, the

first of the civilized” (101). These ancients “were the shadowed great upon whom all the legends

of the world have focused” (102).

Hora, the native village of Daphne’s father, “signifies both the comedown and the

immutability of Greek civilization” (44) to her. This place offers, evidently, little to be proud of.

The only honorable detail about Hora is that it is the site of the origin of Homeric Nestor, which

the narrator is careful to repeatedly emphasize. As for her own ethnic affiliation with Hora,

Daphne would rather forget it. On her first visit to the village, she chooses to stay with her

father in a cottage in a vineyard, eight kilometers from the village. Out there, Daphne explains,

they did not have to “put up with their [relatives’] primeval curiosity” (52). Instead, they “had

maintained a position of independence to be free to pick and choose those relatives [they] liked”

(103). Greek family, these remarks imply, equals obligations for Daphne, obligations that she is

either ignorant of or that she does not want to perform. Conveniently located in the cottage she

can, like her father, maintain an aloof distance from any relatives who may want to lay claim on

her. Her opposition arises both from her class position as well as her uncritical acceptance of her

father’s opinions of Greece and their Greek relatives.

The language of cultural hegemony typical of Mr. Athas can be seen to evoke power

issues that involve generational and gendered relations. Family in this text is also presented as a

locus of paternal authority. Though Mr. Athas has not visited his homeland for forty years, his

vision and views of contemporary Greece and the Greeks strongly dictate his daughter’s

encounters and interactions while in Greece. He dismisses their customs laughingly and speaks

with contempt and disrespect of his Greek sister who is, in his eyes, “just an ignorant cuss” (54).

Paternally and matter-of-factly he will inform Daphne: “Now you see. Now you see Greece”

(55). Although Daphne views herself as being an independent woman, she absorbs her father’s

patriarchal views, readily conforming within his definitions and experiences. She repeats her

father’s imperialist judgments, and she identifies with his commentary. The Greek identity that

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Daphne has envisioned and inherited from her father is a static one; it is grounded in an idea of

an ancient legacy of Greek excellence, nobility, and intellectual achievement. However, upon

meeting her present-day Greek relatives, she feels deceived. Not a single one of them fully and

uniformly embodies what she takes to be the authentic elements of “Greekness.” She is seeking

for the descendants of the ancient Hellenes, and fails to see, at least initially, that “No culture

remains totally unaltered” (Herzfeld 3).

What Daphne initially also fails to reflect on is that her idea of “Greekness” is gendered

as male. It is her father’s, Nestor’s and other male heroes’ type of “Greekness.” Unlike the

protagonist in The Priest Fainted, who, as I will show in Chapter Four, re-myths the fates of Greek

goddesses and heroines in an attempt to contest the traditional myths’ assignment of female

positions within the family, Daphne makes no reference to any female mythical figures. Athas’s

text can consequently be understood to make a silent comment on women’s education, which, I

argue, makes it possible to read Greece by Prejudice as a pre-feminist text. Daphne’s idea of

“Greekness,” which refers exclusively to the lives and feats of male heroes, suggests that

women’s education is gendered. In my view, Daphne herself is proof of the idea that women are

traditionally trained to think in terms of male heroes. The end of the book, however, shows how

Daphne’s gradual questioning of her contemptuous understandings of Greek ethnicity also

involves the process of freeing herself from patriarchal views. Through her re-claimed

relationship to her female family, and especially to her Greek cousin Martha, Daphne’s notion of

“Greekness” is slowly regendered. Greek identity is made to encompass her new knowledge of

Greece and of herself as mediated through her new family, which, I argue, initiates a journey to a

female point-of-view.

Daphne’s initial unwillingness and failure to identify with her Greek family is not merely

grounded in patriarchal conceptions of “Greekness” and imaginary views of Greece. The cultural

and emotional estrangement that Daphne experiences in Greece is, at least partly, also the result

of Daphne’s unfamiliarity with the Greek language, which is presented as an “implacable barrier”

(48) between her Greek family and herself. During her meeting with her father’s sister, Daphne’s

ignorance of Greek disrupts any affiliation and communication with the Greek side of her

family. Her aunt displays “paroxysms of grief” (54) at the fact that she cannot communicate with

her niece. “What a tragedy!” she exclaims, “One of my own family!” (54) and turning to her

brother she goes on: “What have you done! Why does she not know Greek?” (54). Daphne,

unable to understand why her aunt is crying, feels “disconnected from her” (55). “In her

language,” she observes, “I was dead. Or deaf and dumb, dead to the world” (55). Whereas

Daphne’s aunt’s accusation stresses a belief in the role of family for fostering a sense of ethnic

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belonging through, in this case, knowledge of the Greek language, Daphne’s reflections indicate

how intrinsic acquisition of the ethnic language is to identity formation and perception. Her

experiences emphasize how potentially unstable the process of identity formation may be as a

result of not knowing the ethnic language.

Family language development is not a uniform process, as the study on language

acquisition and ethnic identity formation among adolescents with immigrant background,

referred to in Chapter Two, reports. Since families interact continuously with other social

environments, several forces influence the identity formation of its members. Daphne’s father,

we learn, did make an attempt to teach his children Greek when they were young. Staging

different situations to his children, he managed to teach them manners and a few Greek phrases

associated with good behavior, such as “Thank you,” “Come in” or “Please pass me the butter.”

In college, however, most of the children’s proficiency in Greek had “vanished,” along with their

“desire to learn Greek” (25). “But after all,” the narrator remarks, “we were Americans, so what

did we care? We didn’t even believe we had Greek blood in our veins. It might as well have been

Pepsi-Cola” (25).

If Daphne was too young at the time to appreciate or reflect on the significance of

language as a marker of ethnic identity, Daphne Athas, the writer, is highly conscious of the

pertinence of Greek language for her self-identification as Greek American. Throughout Greece by

Prejudice, Athas inserts Greek words in the notation system of the English language, an act which,

I propose, works to signal her ethnic cultural knowledge, unify her different ethnic experiences,

and reveal her allegiances to more than one culture. Like the second-generation individuals in the

language study earlier referred to, Daphne develops both a knowledge of Greek and a stronger

sense of ethnic identity in her interactions and affiliation with Greek family.

The primacy of family in reinforcing an ethnic self-image to the hyphenated individual as

Daphne’s aunt believes, is further complicated by the contradiction implied in the phrase

“stranger family,” quoted in the epigraph to this chapter. The “strange, febrile situation” (47)

that is created whenever the protagonist and her Greek kin are close is also the outcome of her

specific position as a family member that is “as strange to them as a Martian” (47). “They wanted

to touch me, to feel me,” Daphne remarks, “as one would some animal or unknown creature

from another planet” (47). The animal metaphor is, interestingly enough, frequently used in the

story to signify Daphne’s feelings of being estranged from and at the same time bound by

genealogy to her ethnic culture and family: “I became a monkey myself to the Greeks. I could

not pass incognito. I was a ‘foreigner’” (31). Even when Daphne returns to Hora for a second

visit on her own and chooses to stay in the home of her Greek relatives, the uncertainties about

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Daphne’s identity and position among these people continue to abound. Though her relatives

greet her with “raptures of enthusiasm” (177), and in their company she now feels great intimacy

and familiarity, she remains “a magnificent mystery” (178) to these people and “a strange animal”

(177), “family” (215) but “unGreek family” (215). Daphne’s “new” kin are equally compelled to

elaborate on the meaning of family and consider Daphne’s position among them: “You are not

xéni, are you? You are not a stranger?,” they ask and offer an answer themselves, “No you are of

us. You are ours. Étsi den eíne? [Is it not so?]” (215). The paradoxes and complications revealed in

the quandaries about Daphne’s role as family, and the continuous play between the different

identities that she is assigned, signal that family makes up a highly complicated locus of ethnic

identity formation.

The journey as quest, which functions frequently in literature as a metaphor of growth,

change, and cognition, is, as earlier mentioned, also invoked in Greece by Prejudice. Journalist

Margaret Parsons describes the book as “a dual odyssey vividly reporting on one level the

physical with its sights, sounds and smells and sensuous impressions and on the other a

succession of luminous philosophical observations on the soul of Greece.” Parsons’s review

highlights the kind of universal experiences of Greece that correspond strongly with writer

Henry Miller’s famous account of the country as a place where “God’s magic is still at work”

(84). But Parsons’s reference to Daphne’s journey to Greece as an “odyssey,” I suggest, has

richer implications than the reviewer allows. An identification of Daphne’s journey with the

Homeric Odyssey is, to some extent, viable since, as Malkin points out, the Odyssey “echoes return

stories of all kinds” (9). The return story is notable in Athas’s narrative. Like Homer’s epic hero,

Daphne is also attempting to come “home,” although not in the sense of returning to one’s

island kingdom and a familiar reality but of arriving to one’s ancestral history, and through that

to one’s personal history and ethnic roots. Thus, the voyage that Daphne is making is not the

traditional epic one, nor is it a hero’s journey. An odyssey intimates a voyage filled with

adventure and fraught with hardship, but as compared to the perils encountered by Odysseus in

his ten-year attempt to return to Ithaca, the nature of Daphne’s “adventure” (13) is quite

different. It is true that part of her voyage is an exterior one; much of what she encounters in

Greece takes place on a concretely physical level. She visits the Acropolis with its temples, her

father’s native village and her Greek relatives, survives a typhoon, attends a funeral and so on.

But Daphne’s most profound encounters in this ethnic Bildungsroman pertain to an inner voyage,

which takes place side by side with the outer one, and entails personal development and

transformation.

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The relations between the process of individual cognition and travel experiences as

mediated through family are emphasized early on in the narrative with the content of the letter

that Mr. Athas sends to his daughter, right before she travels to Hora to join him: “Life is trial

and error; if you don’t like where you are, then try another place. Life is not stationary (comes

from stasis, static). No idea or place or concept is stasis. Bad habits come from considering that

ideas are static” (42). Given Mr. Athas’s firm notion of “Greekness” as grounded in a glorious

past, it is seemingly paradoxical and parodical that these words should come from him. For all

that, his statement has pertinence to Daphne’s ideas of Greece as a place where “all objects

present a static face” (20). What seemed to bear the promise of something stable and well-

defined from some distance slowly begins to be unmasked with Daphne’s new experience of

living with her Greek family in Hora. Her gradual affiliation with this family compels her to

review the notion of an ideal, male “Greekness” that her imaginary preconceptions of Greece

and its people were based on, and to reconsider the type of “Greekness” that they embody and

that she initially spurned. Her experiences with this new family become, in Moya’s view,

“source[s] of real knowledge” (Learning from Experience 27) for Daphne. From her experiences she

gains an understanding of the divide between the Greece of her mind and the reality that she

encountered. As she gets to know her Greek family and her own self better, she can no longer

sustain illusions based on the heroes of Greek mythology. “The color of these people was like

rocks and sand, like sun-riven grass, like figs faintly bleached and ripe” (30), an observation that

forces Daphne to begin to see that if “no Greek ever shone gold,” it was only “proof of their

mortality” (30). Daphne’s new knowledge of the world around her compels her to re-evaluate

her feelings and attachments as well as her ethnic identity, troubling an essentialist notion of

“Greekness” as a mere product of historical and genealogical structures.10

About one-third into the narrative Daphne reveals that she “was growing curious” (103)

about her Greek family: “Having been protected from being swamped by them, I now felt a

desire to know them. I imagined them unfolding like leaves before me and twining around my

consciousness” (103). At this moment, Daphne starts to disconnect herself from her father’s

influence, which is implied in her reference above to the act of being “protected.” Had they not

come to Hora, Daphne wonders, “To visit the birthplace of Daddy, and to re-engage ourselves

10 Roberson points out that, “[a]t least since Telemachus left home to get word of Odysseus, travel and the acquisition of knowledge have been associated” (xix). What is interesting to consider regarding the relation between travel and knowledge is, as Roberson further points out, “what use the traveler . . . make[s] of that knowledge” (xx), and, by extension, how the traveler employs the power that follows any acquisition of knowledge. If, for example, “[w]hat Telemachus learned, that his father’s return was close at hand, empowered him when he returned to assert his will over his mother and to contest the presence of the suitors in his home” (xix), Daphne employs the power that comes with the knowledge that she gains quite differently. She starts questioning and modifying her prejudices about Greek village culture and her Greek relatives. What I wish to emphasize with this comparison is that there is a fine, but extremely important, line between the ways of using knowledge to exercise power.

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in the bloodstream of the family” (103)? “The importance of lineage has dropped away in

America,” she argues, but “Not so in Greece. Family is all, beyond love and hate” (103).

Daphne’s return to Hora makes her suddenly esteem Greek family relations. The family that she

had earlier felt disconnected from now functions as a rich locus of ethnic identity formation for

Daphne. “[A]lienated from English” (112), and stuttering to express herself in Greek to them,

she finds that “Greek common talk is the most ancient poetry in all the world. Most elegant,

most elegiac, most noble, it was taught to me,” she writes, “by peasants who had no idea of the

mammoth culture that it had spawned” (113). Daphne’s affiliation with these “peasants”

challenges her to shift paradigms. The “only people in the world who were real” (121) are now

her Greek relatives and their lives. By contrast, the lives of the ancients can only be imagined:

they are “dustily dead” (102), and live only “by virtue of Homer” (102), or “in the page of a

book” (103).

All at once, the title of Athas’s memoir takes on an additional dimension, and Greece by

Prejudice can be read to suggest not just the predispositions that the narrator inherits from her

father and approaches Greece with, but also the complexity that underlies the cognitive process

of a hyphenated protagonist who tries to reconnect with her roots and make sense of her bi-

cultural experiences and identity without, in the end, canceling out any of the particularities of

her identity. Throughout the book, different conjunctures feature between Daphne’s

“Greekness” and “Americanness,” between her position as a stranger and a member of the same

family, conceptions that, in the protagonist’s words, “could not contain the other” (122). At

some points, Daphne’s Greek heritage is more central and her American identity peripheral, and

at other moments, this hierarchy is inverted. The narrative signals a continuous play between the

sources of Daphne’s identity, and thus offers no systematic or definitive answers about ethnicity

or identity. The narrative technique of tossing the reader between certitude and doubtfulness

concerning Daphne’s feelings and attachments is particularly potent as Greece by Prejudice, though

a first-person narrative, does not narrate the writer’s firsthand experiences as they occur. The

retelling and the reassessment of the experiences that influence the changes that Daphne has

undergone and the formation of her identity is done by the narrator’s older self. The remoteness

of the traveler from the visited scene at the point of documentation allows Athas, the writer, to

be reflective about her journey, to present the prejudices with which she approached Greece and

to tear them down.

One event will, however, eventually bring matters to a head for Daphne, and settle some

of the indeterminacies of Daphne’s position as Greek or American, family or stranger. The

evening after Daphne’s second arrival to Hora, a storm hits the village, and develops into a

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typhoon. An insistent anguish which sounds like “writhing gods, . . . like a tape recording of the

tormented in Hades” (182) rushes towards the village, and everyone starts panicking. At this

dramatic moment, Daphne’s “Anglo-Saxon half” (182) damns “[t]hese Mediterranean things”

(184) for their ignorance, resenting them “for their emotionalism, for their lack of quiet thought

and scientific procedure. If it were English or Americans,” she thinks instantly, “we would know

what it was” (184). This remark sets up a difference between the rational attitude of knowing

that the storm is a typhoon and the “lack of quiet thought and scientific procedure” (184) of the

villagers, and momentarily reinforces Daphne’s American identity. And yet, in spite of the

fatalism of her Greek family and their shouts, Daphne cannot leave them. “They were human”

(185), she says. “I would rather die with their ignorance than live alone with my knowledge. This

is how it was ignominious” (185), she explains and holds hands with her relatives, a decision

which accentuates her position as “a stranger, in limbo” (189).

The paradoxes and contradictions of Daphne’s experiences of her ancestral homeland as

an ethnic traveler places her, Kalogeras argues, “in the position of the ethnographer who

observes and unilaterally records her subject of study” (“The ‘Other Space’ of Greek America”

711). Indeed, to a certain degree, Daphne acts like an ethnographer, as Kalogeras observes. As a

matter of fact, it is a role assigned to her by a relative at the funeral of Ioannis Athanasopoulos,

father of her cousin Martha and the oldest member of Daphne’s Greek family, who was killed by

the typhoon. “Watch everything. Look at everything” (205), the younger relative Ioannis urges

her. “You will see how the vláhi [peasants] live. Then come back, and write everything you see

down on your machine” (205).

Ioannis’s directions may seem simple enough, but Daphne’s role as ethnographer in

Hora is complicated by her self-perception, earlier in the narrative, as a “quester,” whose

“method is to look and laugh” (167). The position of quester, with all its associations with the

Knight’s famous search for the Holy Grail, and the peculiar mode of inquiry that Daphne

associates with this occupation (“to look and laugh”), are fundamentally different from the

systematic study and recording of human cultures associated with ethnography. This becomes

clear the day of the funeral of “Barba” [Uncle] Ioannis. Although Daphne never met the

deceased relative she is family, she is told, and her presence among the mourning ensemble is

demanded. It “was demanded of me that I be witness,” she reasons. “It was not demanded that I

be griever or mourner” (215). However, as Daphne sits in a chair to observe, with curiosity, the

incomprehensible and ceremonial procedure, her first reaction is not to examine but to laugh at

the women’s singing screams. If Ioannis, or even Daphne, believes that she can be an

unobtrusive observer, her response signals how difficult it is to sustain such as stance.

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Daphne’s presence among the mourning ensemble does not remain unnoticed. Although

Daphne does not take an active part in the grieving ceremony, her presence has an effect on the

group’s behavior. Her cousin Martha, for example, keeps an eye on her, making sure that she is

doing well. She explains to the other women that Daphne “must be told what to do” (216).

Martha’s act of surveying her “unGreek” cousin signals that Daphne’s position among the

funeral attendants is “double sided, for both the visitor and the visited view each other and

contribute to the construction of new identities” (Roberson xviii). This “double sided” effect

applies to most of Daphne’s encounters and experiences while in Greece, which do not form a

coherent story. The arbitrariness that informs her different positions and identities, although at

times conflicting, is a highly dynamic one, which is best understood comparatively. Daphne’s

mediation between different roles and ethnic affiliations, the narrative affirms, is partially

imposed and sustained by herself and partially by her Greek relatives.

My analysis of Daphne’s experiences at the mourning ritual is meant to show that the

position of ethnographer is full of tensions, ambiguities, and movements between engagement

and “impartial” observation. Although the ritual is an alienating experience for Daphne, she

eventually engages in the act of mourning. A breaking point for the narrator is when the wailing

and the music in the room seize her. “It took me along” (216), she reveals, “Tears came welling

to my eyes” (216), and in the funeral procession her position is directly after the immediate

family, who “is supposed to follow the coffin first” (236). Her sense of belonging to a family for

emotional reasons and through blood-lines becomes more important than the intellectual

superiority that she believes herself to possess. The feeling of grief and loss that Daphne shares

with her Greek family, the narrative emphasizes, is a cognitive and bond-creating experience.

What remains of the narrative depicts how Daphne starts to express feelings of

belonging to her Greek family. We witness how Hora, if only temporarily, to again refer to

Roberson, “explodes the standard dichotomy between travel and home” (xiv), and becomes, to

use James Clifford’s words, a site of “dwelling-in-traveling” (36). The typhoon has surpassed

cultural boundaries, and Daphne participates in the activities as a member of the village

community. Having survived the cultural confrontations and the catastrophe, and experienced

the generous and hearty hospitality of her relatives, their unbounded love and affection for her,

Daphne admits that now, “I do not think I am so very different” (245). “Love had come up over

me with the typhoon,” she exclaims, “it had risen about me ever and ever increasingly. . . . I had

the gush of love like a disease. I felt them mine as they claimed I was theirs, all born of holding

hands in a typhoon” (245). Although a curious simile, the resemblance that Daphne’s figure of

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speech expresses between love for her relatives and a disease indicates the painful and enriching

experience of claiming family and developing an ethnic self-consciousness.

Entrenched now into their lives, and having been claimed as their daughter, Daphne

becomes remorseful. “In that winter of Greece,” she remarks,

with the snow on the ground, I suffered from guilt. Should not I, who had

money in the bank, hand it over at once to the proud starvelings who offer me a

cut of their raw eggplant to munch? If I am theirs, are they not mine?. . . . I

would have despised them once and thought: “I am not that. I am different.”

(244)

These reflections, which voice guilt but also mark Daphne’s development, driving her to pose

the critical question “Who was I to be their god?” (246), suggest that ambiguities and

uncertainties still endure. Any neat hierarchies between family and stranger, between Greek and

American are in the end obscured because identities, Greece by Prejudice once again reminds us, are

complex matters. They are, as Moya points out, constructs that enable us to make sense of our

experiences.

The text’s final chapter does not present things as being any easier. Daphne will continue

to be “unGreek family,” an American cousin of Greek descent. Her journey of self-discovery is a

process that has entailed knowledge about her imaginary ethnic homeland, and allowed her to

eventually figure things out for herself. It is a process which has also made her aware of the

dynamic nature of her hyphenated identity. Thus, as Daphne is preparing to depart from Hora,

“now [her] own town” (278), and eventually also Greece, the text depicts a narrator that moves

from being a passive witness and critical quester to becoming a vital participant in the festivities

around Greek Easter that transform the whole town, including her. Concluding with a note on

how the villager’s religious icons, regardless of the damage done by the typhoon, “will always

sing” (284), Athas’s ethnic Bildungsroman does not merely depict a Daphne that takes pride in her

ethnic heritage and embraces her hyphenated experience. The book’s final words give a sense of

a Greek cultural triumph, which engages a community of individuals. This time it is not the

temple of Parthenon or the mythical figure of Nestor that feature as the icons of this ultimate

triumph and pride but the local people, her Greek family and their customs.

By claiming ethnic family and history, Daphne succeeds in bringing together the

contradictory aspects of her ethnic identity and experiences. At least momentarily, she is

enriched by her experiences, comfortable in her bi-ethnic identity. But how long will Daphne’s

ethnic sentiment persist? How will she consolidate the views from the different worlds that she

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inhabits once she has returned to America? Will she be comfortable in her hyphenated identity?

Perhaps she will. Her reply to her father’s question what she had seen in Hora—“I saw

everything” (284)—evokes, of course, a variety of possibilities. In my reading, the “having seen

everything” refers to the cognitive process of Daphne’s journey, which entails the act of

reflecting on and revising her condescending presuppositions of the ancestral homeland and its

people, and her embrace of an ethnic, Greek American identity.

Unearthing Lost Stories

Elias Kulukundis promotes his autobiography The Feasts of Memory: A Journey to a Greek Island

(1967) with the intriguing statement that “People who are familiar with Kasos and its stories will

protest that everything did not happen the way I say. They are right. I make no claim to

‘objective truth.’ On the contrary, I believe for everyone there is a different Kasos. This one is

mine. If it does not square with someone else’s, I make no apology” (vii).11 The “Kasos” that

Kulukundis refers to here is the Aegean island and homeland of his Greek ancestors, and the

destination of the journey implied in the title of his book. But as Kulukundis’s remark signals,

the narrator’s description of the island is but one of many possible representations. It is, to

recapitulate the main idea imbued in Rushdie’s concept of imaginary homelands, the Kasos of

Kulukundis’s mind, “a lost home in . . . the mists of lost time” (Rushdie 9).

Like Athas’s narrative, Kulukundis’s text recounts a Greek American’s journey to an

ancestral place of origin.12 As opposed to Daphne, who ends up in Greece by invitation from her

father, Elias’s journey to Kasos displays a definite plan, purpose, and pattern of traveling, which

entails reversing the diasporic trails of his ancestors in an attempt to recreate and document the

exilic history of their island. This physical movement, I show in my analysis of Kulukundis’s

ethnic Bildungsroman, involves the family, which comprises parents, uncles, and other Greek

relatives, as a site for generating not just memories and stories of the past but also meaning to

the traveler’s sense of ethnicity. But fragmentary stories and memories alone do not satisfy

Elias’s intellectual project and his systematic search for truth and facts, which compels him to

find other creative methods to reconstruct the history of his ancestral island and of his own

ethnic self. The narrator creates a narrative that satisfies his quest for truth, an aspect of

Kulukundis’s text which seems to add an extra dimension to Rushdie’s concept of imaginary

11 The reading of The Feasts of Memory presented in this chapter is based on the first edition of the book

from 1967. The 2003 reprint will be briefly discussed towards the end of the chapter. 12 A great deal of creative writing about Greek America, Kalogeras points out, appeared in the sixties, and

“Athas’s book marks,” he writes, “the beginning of an intense interest among Greek American intellectuals in their ethnicity” (“The ‘Other Space’ of Greek America” 715).

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homelands. Elias’s process of ethnic identity formation which, I argue, is connected with the act

of imagining stories and histories of the past, is thus informed by a constructivist approach to

ethnicity and, more specifically, by Moya’s contention that identities are assumed or chosen for

highly subjective reasons. They “both condition and are conditioned by individuals’

interpretations of their experiences” (“Introduction” 18).

Early on in The Feast of Memory, Elias notes that Kasos is a place where neither he nor his

parents have ever lived; “Only my grandparents,” the narrator relates, “were native Kasiots” (7).

What follows is an account of the diasporic history of his family. As sea captains, his

grandfathers emigrated with their families to Syros in 1899 and then travelled to London at the

turn of the century. In 1939 his parents extended their emigration to America and Rye, New

York, where they settled down. In a gigantic house that reminds Elias of the mansion in

Fitzgerald’s “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” his “Greek childhood began” (9). In this “relic of a

lost America” (9) he was taught the Greek language, history, and religion. As for “real Greece,”

(11) he knew nothing of it and saw it first in 1954 when his parents, fifteen years after their

outward voyage, re-crossed the ocean to make one of many return journeys to Syros, the island

of their birth. His arrival in Syros awakens Elias’s interest and curiosity, and he wants to see and

know more of Greece. “In my journey to the past,” he explains, “I had reached only a way-

station” (13). From this vantage point, “another journey extended outward” (14), one that would

take him farther “back” to Kasos, the island his grandparents had once emigrated from, to write

a book about the history of the island and of his family.

But another ten years pass before Elias, at the age of twenty-seven, “make[s] the journey

to its end” (14), to Kasos, in order to recover the histories of a Greek island and its people,

whose experiences of exile go back a long time. The narrator reflects:

It is a familiar story in a Greek life. Exile is a Greek experience, and there is even

a Greek word for it which does not exist in other languages. It is xenitia, which is

not exactly exile because it can be self-imposed, and not estrangement because

there is no spiritual estrangement. Xenitia is simply the loss of the native land. . . .

Despite this sense of exile which haunts him to the grave, the Greek is ever

journeying, especially the islander, who is hemmed in only by the horizon. (8-9)

Depicted against the experience of this Greek xenitia, Elias’s initiation to his ancestral homeland

advances a different history of movement. His journeying, as opposed to the emigration of his

grandparents and parents, is not the collective diasporic experience of “the loss of the native

land” (9). “[M]y journey back,” the narrator says about his earliest experience of journeying to

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Greece, “was different. I had no memory of Syros, no image of a native island, of a villa with a

red gabled roof and groves of olive, orange, and lemon trees. . . . When I awoke to memory,

Syros was beyond me” (9). What Elias implies in this passage is that he has no old connections

to keep up, long for, or remember, that he is “separated from [his] past” (35). Yet his project to

unearth and document the history of his family and their island denotes an inauguration of new

attachments to the ethnic homeland and histories of his forefathers, as does Athas’s text. Elias’s

attempt to reconcile the conflicting images and stories “between a Greece that had been and a

Greece that was” (12), between his ethnic past and present identity as a Greek American, is

expressly framed by family and their memories of the place and of historical events.

Kulukundis’s narrator, who is an ardent researcher, desires to find out more about his

personal ethnic origins, and wants to write a book about his family history and the history of his

ancestral island. Led on by his curiosity to discover more about the Greek side of his bi-ethnicity,

and compelled by the belief that within the fragmented memories and stories of his family and

their island he will find ethnic meaning, Elias travels to a remote island hitherto unknown to

him. By becoming familiar with the island he never knew, he hopes to learn more about his

family and, by extension, his own ethnicity. In this spiritual journey, Elias restores links to his

pre-American past by unearthing the bizarre ancestral tales and histories of the island, and

memories of past events. Thus, in contrast to Athas’s memoir, there is little reflection in

Kulukundis’s book on Elias’s American identity. It is only through the references to exile and the

information about Elias’s childhood experiences as a Greek American boy in the epigraph to this

chapter that his American identity is suggested.

Elias’s “guide and mentor” in his “journey of discovery” (15) into the past is Uncle

George, the eldest of his father’s brothers, who knows the way but has not visited the island

since 1910. In the summer of 1964 he sets out with Elias for Kasos to help him “unravel stories

[Elias] had been hearing all [his] life, stories of events which had taken place on Kasos in [his]

grandparents’ time and earlier” (15). However, the venture of unpacking and unraveling the past,

of digging out and assembling the missing accounts in the histories of the narrator’s family or the

stories of his ancestors’ island, is intricate. Upon arrival to Kasos, and to the house in which

Uncle George and three of his brothers were born, they learn from Aphrodite, the old woman

who long ago was the children’s nurse, that the old Kasos does not exist any more. “[W]hat you

expect to find here I do not know” (29), Aphrodite says to “[her] nephew from America” (31)

with his tape-recorder ready at hand to catch every word she says. “Whatever it is, you won’t find

it, and next week when the ship comes from Crete again and stops here on her way toward

Rhodes, you’ll sail away again” (29), she protests, because “there is no Kasos here. . . . [I]f you

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had come to Kasos sixty years ago, you would have found it” (31). Aphrodite’s reflections reveal

feelings of nostalgia; the Kasos she once knew is gone and nothing or nobody can ever re-claim

it, not even Elias. From Elias’s point of view, however, the stories and the facts are still out

there, waiting to be unearthed.

How, then, do you write a book about “a poor forsaken island” (29) that is nothing but

an “abandoned rock with its roofs fallen in and its houses empty” (31), a place to which you

apparently have “arrived too late” (32)? Historical research and writings, relatives who lived and

still live on the island, and their memories as well as old letters and photographs are all possible

sources that help Elias come closer to the historicity of Kasos and the lives of the Kasiots. More

significant, though, are the joint efforts of family members to unravel the threads and

connections of past events. This is illustrated in a chapter titled “The Way to Phry” where the

focal point of speculation is a picture of Eleni, Elias’s grandmother, dressed in black and keeping

vigil, sitting directly behind a coffin. The mystery to be solved here is whom Eleni is mourning.

Is Uncle George right in inferring that the person in the coffin is Virginia, Eleni’s sister, who had

been poisoned in Alexandria, or does his memory fail him: “If that were the photograph taken in

Alexandria in 1898, where was Uncle-Doctor and his fiancée? And where was Captain Elias, who

should have been sitting beside his wife, keeping the vigil with her?” (93-94). The “uncertainties”

(94) around the picture abound, and the questions are answered only when a second photograph

surfaces “on a new tide of old letters” (94). All of a sudden, “details emerged from the first

photo [they] hadn’t seen before” (95), and Aphrodite reckons that the corpse in the picture does

not belong to a woman but to a boy.

According to Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, an image is “encoded with meaning in

its creation or production; it is further encoded when it is placed in a given setting or context. It

is then decoded by viewers when it is consumed by them” (56). The photograph incident in The

Feasts of Memory is informed by the process by which viewers decode the meaning of a

photograph. The “mistakes of a fallible memory” (10), to use Rushdie’s words, are resolved

through an active and collective process of negotiation, a process which, according to Sturken

and Cartwright, can be thought of as “a kind of bargaining over meaning that takes place among

viewer, image, and context” (57). In the act of examining the two pictures of the mysterious

sleeper in Kulukundis’s Bildungsroman, this process of trade is obvious. A meaning can be

overridden, and “misconception giv[e] way to truth” (95), the book shows, when several viewers

participate in the act of interpreting the photograph and the specific context in which it was

produced. The act of undoing the mystery of the sleeping face in the two pictures is one in

which the whole family participates. In a collective effort, Elias’s relatives identify the “cradled

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face” (93) in the casket as belonging to Basil, Uncle George’s brother, who died from a brain

tumor at a young age.

Knowledge of family history as well as knowledge of their island’s bitter experiences of

exile, the texts shows, is crucial to the ethnic traveler’s concept of self.13 “The island is like me,

and the island’s life is like my life” (35), the second chapter begins, making an analogy between

the exilic history of Kasos and the narrator’s own hyphenated experiences, as well as

emphasizing the connection between place and self-development. In the section that follows, the

story of Elias’s separation from his past prefigures the island’s long separation from Greece. Cut

off from his national and familial histories and stories, Elias’s exile is one from knowledge and

roots, which compels the author to identify his early life with the life of the island. His “enduring

xenitia” (223), he makes clear in the subsequent chapter on the history of Kasos, is not unrelated

to the island’s “everlasting exile” (211). Exiled from his ethnic roots, Elias can be seen to arrive

at the solution of an imaginary construction of home or place.

The parallels drawn between the individual experience and the collective experience of

xenitia are suggested not only by way of how the story is plotted but also through specific

phrasings. Expressions such as “[w]hen I awoke to memory, Syros was beyond me” (9) and

“[t]he only Greece I could believe in was the Greece I knew” (10) are iterated in the second

chapter on Kasos’s history: “When the island awoke to memory, it knew nothing of its former

life” (35), and “[t]he only Greece it could believe in was the Greece it knew” (35). Kulukundis’s

repetition of specific words and phrasings creates an equation between the narrator and the

place, the “I” and the island. They convey not only a connection between chapters but also serve

to place Elias in the genealogy of his family. The phrases “[t]he only Greece I could believe in

was the Greece I knew” and “[t]he only Greece it could believe in was the Greece it knew” also

raise epistemological issues by equating knowledge and belief, the rational with the irrational.

Beliefs or myths, this equation implies, are just as useful as the act of cognition for creating

ethnic meaning and constructing an identity, an idea which relates to Rushdie’s conception of

imagination as a precious tool with which to construct or re-claim a lost homeland.

Any writer who writes about his homeland from the outside, Rushdie contends in

“Imaginary Homelands,” is “obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have

13 Kulukundis provides an exhaustive explanation of the island’s exilic history. A few comments might be

useful for any reader who is not familiar with it. “Since the founding of the Byzantine Empire in 330 A.D.,” the author explains, Kasos “was ruled by Arabs, Venetians, Turks, Russians, Turks again, and finally Italians” (36), a comment which points to the island’s colonial history. During this time, “Her children began to abandon her, sailing off into xenitia” (212). “In 1912, the population of Kasos,” Kulukundis explains “was 7,000; in 1944, it was 900” (219). Kasos did not become Greek until 1948. Together with the other islands of the Dodecanese, the island was the last to be redeemed. “Though there are 1,650 Kasiots on Kasos today,” Kulukundis goes on to explain, referring to the year when his autobiography was being completed, “there are over ten thousand living in xenitia” (212).

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been irretrievably lost” (11).14 The challenges that Rushdie identifies when attempting to write a

book about his homeland on the basis of fragmentary memories inform The Feasts of Memory.

When there are no more letters or photographs “stuffed into silverware and crockery” (27) to

discover, and no older relative, no “muse [to sing] to [him] of Kasos” (31), to provide him with

the framework that he needs to explore the meaning of his ethnicity, Elias is forced to find other

methods of venturing into his ethnic past. As the title of the autobiography suggests, there is also

a Bacchanal celebration involved in Elias’s process of figuring out his ethnic history, which

challenges his initial understanding of his ethnicity as something fixed that was waiting to be

uncovered, dug out from the narratives of his ancestral past. In order to bring the past and the

future into closer contact with each other, the narrator constructs his own stories of his

ancestors and their island. When he does not know what must have been said and done in the

stories that have been handed on to him from his family, the narrator forwards his own solutions

and reconciliations. Elias assembles what he knows of the island, “adding something here and

there, until some pattern of the island must emerge, like the mosaics made of smooth black and

white pebbles on the floors of island courtyards” (15).15 The self-conscious act of fabrication

that Elias engages in is in line with his perceptive comment that identities are not impervious to

time and travel, a remark that emphasizes a constructivist view of identity and ethnic identity

formation.

Kulukundis’s book shows that the process of recovering lost origins is in essential ways

informed by imaginary constructions. To rephrase Rushdie, when we are not capable of re-

claiming the thing which is lost, we create fictions. Elias’s project of unearthing, of digging up

the tales of his family and of their island, of doing the research to successfully complete his

book, can also be seen to imply a distortion of origin and truth. Elias’s project is apparently also

one of twisting the stories and, metaphorically, wrenching them from their location, from their

origin, to settle any unresolved mysteries and, more importantly, I argue, to associate with his

ethnic and family history in more personally meaningful ways. The speculative, made-up stories

and, consequently, the Kasos of the mind that he creates, can be analyzed as acts that are central

to the narrator’s formation of a sense of ethnicity, identity, and attachments with an ethnic past

as a Greek American, who will, once his project is completed and once his Greek ethnic identity

has been figured out, make the journey back to the U.S.

14 Although Rushdie refers principally to Anglo-Indian writers, his observation about constructing

memories and fiction of things lost can be applied to most writers whose literary projects deal with or are defined by the between-world condition that his essay articulates.

15 This narrative method is not exclusive to Athas’s memoir and Kulukundis’s autobiography. It is found in many “ethnic autobiographies.” Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) are two such examples.

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However, the process of creating fictions is, as Rushdie points out, “simultaneously

honourable and suspect” (10). Elias’s “imaginative truths” (10) can be seen to give him a sense

of liberation and empowerment. He is the ardent researcher, and he, like Athas’s female narrator,

can choose to deal with only the aspects of his ethnic history that he feels comfortable with. His

curiosity extends only to the memories and stories that fit his project and feed his imagination.

This becomes obvious with Elias’s inquiry into the meaning of his family name. Elias, curious of

why they “ever came by . . . a name” (61) that is “just as bizarre in Greek” (63) as in any other

language, and does not even fall into the categories that Greek surnames usually fall into, is

determined to investigate the issue further. He follows up various promising leads, interviewing

relatives, teachers, and other people who might be able to provide the necessary information as

to where the name Kulukundis derives from. It turns out, however, that the theories are many,

and that this time it will be quite impossible for Elias to simply “join facts together.” A professor

who once tried to explain the origins of Kasiot names declared that Kulukundis derives from the

same stem as Kolokotronis, a hero of the Greek revolution. This theory, Elias explains, did not

amuse his family, since kolo is the “posterior region of the body” (63). Another explanation given

is that one of their ancestors earned the epithet “coolie,” an unskilled and cheaply employed

laborer or porter in and from the Far East, which later became Kulukundis. From his Uncle

Manuel, who cautions him that he is “an historian with a flavor,” Elias learns that the name is

Egyptian and means “the one to whom all things come” (67). Uncle George presents yet a

different explanation to the name’s origin: kuluki, he explains, means “little dog” in the Kasiot

dialect. But none of the theories offered satisfies Elias’s researching mind, a fact that compels

Uncle Manuel to exclaim: “You scholars are too demanding with your evidence. If the facts

don’t give you a theory by themselves, you must help them a little, with your imagination. Even

your Uncle George gives his theory a little push” (69). And so Elias, inspired by the methods

employed by his uncles, sets his imagination free. When he travels to the region of the Kulukuna

Mountains in Crete to verify his theory that Kulukundis is a place name, he is not “unwilling to

give a theory a little push” (73). [A]s long as it is my theory,” he remarks, “I’ll push it like a

coolie” (73). But knowing that his theory must remain a speculation, Elias imagines that a

nephew of his own may finally solve the mystery sometime in the future. Perhaps, he says, one

of these nephews will find that “we are Arabs” and the other will perhaps discover that their

forefathers came from an opposite direction, “sailing eastward” (76). “But Hellenic pride,” he

reveals, “makes me hope that neither of these answers will be true. I like to think that there have

been Kulukundis’ in the Aegean as long as there have been Greeks” (76). No other thought

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satisfies Elias’s query so much or is so powerful as the one that his family’s origins are ultimately

Greek.

What are then the structuring principles of Kulukundis’s patchwork of independent

stories, of facts and made-up theories? An ethnic traveler’s ambition to unearth links between

the history of his ancestors and his own ethnic history is, as mentioned above, one significant

unifying component in the text. Moreover, what Elias’s persistent research into and imagined

“truths” about his ancestral past affirm is that the histories of the narrator’s family have a great

significance for the inquiring Elias. The continuation of familial history and ethnic past is

emphasized both in Elias’s research into his family name as well as his vision that future

generations of the Kulukundis family will be compelled to carry on the exploration. His wish that

these future relatives will come to an answer that ensures the Kulukundis’ Greek origins can be

explained by William Boelhower’s argument that one’s family name is a story of origins that

generates ethnic meaning. Boelhower writes that “The foundations of ethnicity are based on the

genealogical elaboration of the story behind one’s name, one’s family name” (81). “By

discovering the self implicit in the surname,” Boelhower further contends, “one produces an

ethnic seeing and understands himself as a social, an ethnic, subject” (81).16

The centrality of the diasporic histories of the narrator’s family for an understanding of

his Greek American hyphenated identity is repeatedly invoked in the narrative. Several of the

instances have already been discussed, but one is particularly important in stressing the relevance

of family history for generating ethnic pride and attachment. It appears toward the end of

Kulukundis’s book, in the chapter that relates the events that led to the moment when the Greek

flag came to fly over Kasos. In a triumphant tone similar to the one identified in Athas’s final

chapter, Elias announces that the “battle for the Dodecanese was ultimately fought out, not only

by Greek and British commandos entering the islands in the waning days of the war, but by

Dodecanesian-Americans—shopkeepers, tradesmen, and professionals—in New York City”

(219). The pride in Elias’s statement refers to the Greeks of the diaspora, especially his family,

and is a direct reflection on the American side of his hyphenated identity. These expatriated

islanders that made up a significant part of the Greek population once vanished into xenitia, and

“formed a group [the Dodecanesean National Council] which was eventually to agitate for the

Enosis of the Dodecanese” (219) with Greece, were hyphenated Greek Americans. Elias’s family

belonged to this group of expatriates who fought for the union and had a dream fulfilled. Sitting

in the office of one of the leaders for the Council, on Manhattan, Elias is shown a photograph

taken at the dinner held in 1943 “to celebrate the Italian surrender and to proclaim—prematurely

16 The significance of family naming for genealogical continuity is also observed by Stefanidou in her study of Greek American poetry.

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but inevitably—the Enosis” (223). At a table, among other Kasiots, Elias sees his mother and

father, “looking not much older than I am today” (223). But there is more than pride and

rejoicing involved in such a discovery. “There is some sadness” (223) in the realization that on

the night his parents “drove into New York City to this banquet of their ancestral island, I [Elias]

was at home by the golf course in Rye.” It took him twenty more years before he himself

departed into “that world unknown” and saw “the Greek flag over Kasos (223).

The final chapter of The Feasts of Memory again brings attention to the processes of

pushing theories and constructing fictions of things lost. A year after Elias’s return to New York,

the reader learns, the narrator sends the earlier chapters of his book to his Uncle George in

Pireus in Athens for comments. Reading his nephew’s text, Uncle George perceives that “certain

facts have been completely changed” (234). “Perhaps,” he goes on, “it was my fault in not having

described everything carefully,” and he proceeds to repeat one of the stories, making clear how

Elias’s version is at fault. “So what I have written,” Elias admits, “is wrong” (236). Meditating on

the mistakes he has made, he understands that “As the truth is revealed, it reveals the mischief of

the mind” (236). Knowing the source of the mistakes and what corrections need to be made, one

would think that Elias would revise his text. But he chooses not to, declaring that “[a]s the truth

is finally uncovered, the layers above it are revealed, layers accreted in the decades following the

events. Though we know all the stories in their entirety,” he reflects, “we do not know how they

may have changed” (237). After all,

Prior to Uncle George’s memory, no verification can be made. . . . and

Aphrodite—the only other surviving narrator—is so perfected in mythopoeia,

she can no longer distinguish fact from myth. The facts themselves lie beyond

memory. Somewhere beneath this growth of decades, like the original seeds from

which plants have grown to renew themselves each year, the facts are lost in the

rocky bed of Kasos, irrelevant to the stories that have grown from them. (237)

Since facts, as Elias perceives, are eventually irretrievable, surpassing any prospect of being

sustained through memory, the partial nature and fragmentation of memories seems, to use

Rushdie’s words, “so evocative” (12) for him. The “shards of memory” that may acquire “greater

status, greater resonance, because they were remains” (Rushdie 12), become clear in Elias’s

decision not to attempt to reconstruct the fragments of that which has been, to again use

Rushdie’s words, “irretrievably lost” (11). Stories (like identities), Elias understands, do not stop

being negotiated, fashioned even, in order to continuously be told. And if the “original seeds”

are lost on Kasos, the stories that “grow from them” may be gathered at some other place, as in

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Kulukundis’s book. In this way, “the journey never will be over” (238). “Since there is no arrival

or departure . . . no beginning and no journey’s end, since we are doomed to sail the sea

interminably between the past and future, I can leave the journey,” Elias muses, “only in a way-

station” (238).

Indeed, there is no end to Kulukundis’s journey to his ethnic past, and thirty-six years

after the publication of The Feast of Memory the writer returns to the stories of his family in a new,

revised edition. Kulukundis’s revision of his original story is not substantial—the writer has cut

out a few anachronisms, and added a chapter—but the 2003 edition exhibits two important

features that I will comment on here. The first one is the insertion of photographs. Fifteen

different photographs and one drawing are reproduced in the text, predominantly photographs

of people directly identified in the text such as Aphrodite, Uncle George, Kulukundis’s father,

and the sleeping boy in the casket, mentioned earlier in this chapter. They are all black-and white

images and, except for the two photographs of Basil lying in a coffin, there is no definitive

indication within the text of the history of each photograph. Occasionally, the photographer’s

name is included. Despite the seemingly random presence of the photographs in Kulukundis’s

revised text, the act of including them raises issues of documentation. Theorists of photography

have rendered the popular notion of photography as a process of reproducing reality as

problematic. And yet, photographs assume, in popular opinion, a strong representational status.

What is the presence of photographs within Kulukundis’s text meant to assert, if anything? Do

the reproductions of family pictures in the reprint constitute a clear sign that we are reading an

autobiography? If so, do they function as disclaimers to the writer’s warning in the preface to the

first edition of his book that his representation of Kasos and its stories may be somewhat

fictional, that he makes “no claim to ‘objective truth’” (vii)? Several possibilities exist. I would

like to consider some of them in the light of a famous instance of photography within

autobiography, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982).

In a fashion similar to the “arbitrariness” of Kulukundis’s text, mentioned in the

beginning of this chapter with regard to genre, Ondaatje’s autobiography also has an intertextual

character, interweaving photographs, excerpts from poems, conversations, personal memories,

and sociohistorical documents.17 Whereas the young Kulukundis remarks that what comes

closest to describing his work is “an autobiography of everything that did not happen to [him],

and “make[s] no apology” (vii) for presenting a Kasos which may not correspond with anybody

else’s, the older writer, it seems, is willing to let a scholar “settl[e] the question” (The Feasts of

Memory: A Journey to a Greek Island ix) as to the nature and form of his book. In his preface to the

17 According to John Thieme “the numerous modes of discourse” that are juxtaposed within Ondaatje’s “discontinuous narrative” signal “the arbitrariness of generic classification” (41).

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new edition, Kulukundis gives his consent to the labels that Kalogeras attached to the book in

the 1998 essay quoted from earlier in this chapter: autobiography, family memoir, history and

cartography of the island of Kasos, book of short stories, and travel narrative “all in one” (“The

‘Other Space’ of Greek America” 715). Whereas the first edition of the text “meditates on its

own origin” (715), to use Kalogeras’s words, the second edition offers no self-reflexive comment

about the insertion of photographs and their effect on the form of the text. Is it because

Kulukundis is aware of the similarities that autobiography shares with photography: their

arbitrariness with regards to the referentiality? Just as autobiographies are artificial

representations of lives, so are photographs manufactured images? Or, is it because the writer

understands photography as documentary evidence? These questions are, of course, impossible

to answer, but considering the fact that Kulukundis’s 2003 edition is post-Running in the Family

and post many of the sophisticated theoretical discussions on photography, the first suggestion

would seem more probable.

What can, however, be examined is the resemblances between Ondaatje’s and

Kulukundis’s books with regards to the use of photographs as well as the process of developing

a sense of self or claiming an identity through writing about family. The photographs in Running

in the Family “are often enigmatic and symbolic” (124), notes Timothy Dow Adams. The

“metaphoric use of photographs” (121) in Ondaatje’s book, Adams argues, is linked to the

writer’s resolution to write about his family. Adams observes that Running in the Family

foregrounds two purposes for Ondaatje’s wish to return to Sri Lanka: resemblance and identity.

The first purpose is related to the desire to, as the title suggests, “come to understand in his

father’s legends [his] own tendencies toward self-destruction” (121-22), and the second is

connected to the need to “claim allegiance with [his] father while maintaining [his] own sense of

self” (125). The use of photographs in the second version of The Feasts of Memory does not seem

to have the deliberate metaphorical function that the photographs in Running in the Family appear

to have. They were inserted long after the original story was written down, and the purpose of

their presence is therefore, I believe, more straightforward: to illustrate the text.

Like Ondaatje’s autobiography, Kulukundis’s text emphasizes the need to establish

resemblance and identification with ancestry. This is made clear through the second feature of

the 2003 edition: the change of subtitle from “A Journey to a Greek Island” to “Stories of a

Greek Family.” The new title signals a change in focus which, I propose, strengthens my analysis

in this chapter of the pertinence of family history for Elias’s research project as well as his

process of ethnic identity formation. In the preface to the revised edition, Kulukundis frames his

change of subtitles with an anecdote, which further accentuates the role of family stories for

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identification. Recently, the writer‘s young nephew gave the book to his fiancée as an

engagement present, an act which in Kulukundis’s interpretation was meant to impart knowledge

about the nephew’s origins. “When I wrote the book at age twenty-eight,” the older Kulukundis

remarks, “I was concerned only with understanding my life. Now, the passage of time and the

advent of another generation has given the book a dimension I did not anticipate” (ix).

Kulukundis’s reflection as well as his anecdote grant the narrative, I suggest, relevance as a family

memoir.

The writer’s investment in his lineage and ancestry is not merely reflected in the revised

subtitle but also in a new chapter, entitled “Vacations Afloat.” The source of the chapter’s title

and content is a short memoir by Uncle Manuel, a fact which I read as emphasizing the

communal nature of the process of writing a life as well as the process of developing a sense of

ethnic identity. The new chapter includes additional material about Kulukundis’s grandfather,

Captain Elias, and his shipping experiences from sail to steam, as well as providing a portrait of

one of his sons, Manuel, who in the first edition of the text was, in Kulukundis’s words,

“overshadowed . . . by his elder brother George” (x). Besides providing the older writer with an

opportunity to dwell on family history, Kulukundis’s account of Grandfather Elias and Uncle

Manuel serves the purpose of giving expression to the relevance of ancestry for self-

representation by pointing to his spiritual relationship with his grandfather through their mutual

love of opera. The likenesses between Kulukundis’s grandfather and himself are again

foregrounded later in the chapter, when Kulukundis relates his own first investment in the

shipping business. Approaching the bank for financial support to purchase two tankers, he

decides to put in eleven percent in the deal, which, he is careful to point out, is “exactly the size

of [his] grandfather’s stake in his first steamship” (135). Kulukundis’s observations about his

resemblance to his grandfather signal a concern with family identification.

In the reprint is an extended version of the genealogical map found in the 1967 edition,

which further accentuates Kulukundis’s claim to an ethnic inheritance and ancestry. Unlike the

family tree provided in the first edition, the more recent one includes the names of spouses and

the names of the individuals belonging to the generation succeeding that of the writer’s and the

publication of the first edition of his book.

Besides all of the generic possibilities mentioned above, Kulukundis’s text, I argue, can

also be classified as an ethnic Bildungsroman. Despite the use of photographs in the second edition

of The Feasts of Memory, the term or genre that I have chosen to assign to the text in my reading of

it is still appropriate. If anything, the act of claiming allegiance with family in the process of self-

presentation and deriving material and inspiration to a new chapter from a family member’s

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memoir, together with the extended family tree, all stand as proof of a social vision of identity

formation, a feature deemed characteristic of the genre of ethnic Bildungsroman.

To return to the first version of The Feasts of Memory, if the book shows how Elias can

consider giving a theory “a little push,” twisting the ancestral tales, what is the commentary of

Kulukundis’s text on the issue of authority and the power relations between, to again use

Kalogeras’s words, “observer and observed” (“The ‘Other Space’ of Greek America” 715)? This

question urges a discussion of (and compels further questions about) the kinship and/or

difference between Athas’s and Kulukundis’s ethnic Bildungsromans. What affinities and

differences are there between Daphne and Elias as ethnic travelers? How do their experiences of

traveling to an ancestral homeland diverge, and in what respects do they resemble one another?

A comparison of the texts brings to light that Daphne and Elias share an interest in finding out

more about their ancestors’ homeland and histories, although the travelers employ different

means and choose different settings for fulfilling their pursuits. Whereas Daphne, in her initial

quest for authentic “Greekness,” visits Acropolis and the Parthenon, the epitome of ancient

Greek culture, Elias’s researching impulse leads him to a remote and forsaken island of the

Aegean. Yet, in their undertakings, it is interesting to note, both narrators are impelled to a

discovery of the “real,” in some form. Elias wants to see the “real Greece” (Kulukundis 11), and

Daphne finds her Greek relatives to be “the only people in the world who were real” (Athas

121). Whatever this “real” refers to—whether the place or the people—it is pursued in different

ways. As argued previously in this chapter, in Athas’s travel account the power relations between

Greek and American, between backward and developed, between “observer and observed,”

stand out strikingly. In Kulukundis’s work any such power relations are, as Kalogeras notes,

“ironically undermined” (715) already in the preface to the book with the narrator’s strong

declaration that he makes no pretense of relating objective truths. So, the “real,” both Daphne

and Elias come to understand, although at different points in their journeys, cannot be found

and claimed. Hence, both texts suggest that the processes of arriving at knowledge and at an

understanding of an ethnic self are intimately connected through experiences of travel.

Like Daphne in Greece by Prejudice, Kulukundis’s protagonist does not critically reflect on

the gender power relations that inform the narrative. Despite its failure to offer any explicit

reflections on gender issues, Athas’s text shows that the narrator’s experiences are causally

related to the social category of gender. Daphne’s travel experiences eventually compel her to

undermine paternal authority and re-gender “Greekness.” Elias’s journey to his ancestors’ island

is also marked by issues of gender, although the text does not elaborate on them. Such moments

in the text are when the writer tells of the island’s long shipping history or relates the Kasiot

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customs of arranged marriages, which suggest some very traditional gender distinctions. In

addition, by casting only male travelers—Uncle George, Elias’s cousin and Elias himself, not to

mention the numerous sea captains and sailors that a “thalassocracy, a society dominated by the

sea” (153), like Kasos produced—the narrative depicts travel as the privileged terrain of the

adventure-seeking male, thus repeating the traditional Odyssean journey and the familiar clichés

about gender roles. Women, as Nurse Aphrodite’s destiny makes explicit, are excluded from the

activities of travel. Their space is the island and not the sea, the home and not the ship.18 While

the Kasiot sons and grandsons acquired status according to “the place [he] had won in the

shipping life of the island” (153), the daughters were praised according to their virtuousness and

ranked according to their dowries, a kind of gender differentiation that seemed natural at the

time. And gender systems, the narrative confirms, continue to organize social life. Though

Aphrodite, albeit mythopoetic, is granted a role in knowledge-making in the narrative, it is the

male researcher who, in the end, holds the privileged position and maintains control over the

type of knowledge that eventually makes it into his book.

The issue of gender is also implicit, as briefly suggested at the beginning of my discussion

of Kulukundis’s text, in the different processes of travel that the two texts depict. Whereas

Daphne, in her journey, often seems to fall into events that lie outside of her control—the

typhoon that wrecks her father’s native village and the death and funeral of her Greek relative

are only two examples—Kulukundis’s narrator has a definite travel plan. When things do not fall

into his pattern of traveling, he patches stories together, creating fictions to make up for the

fragmentary explanations and truths offered by memories. In this respect, Daphne and Elias can

be viewed as two reflections or mirror images of each other. In contrast to Daphne’s unsettling

experiences, Elias settles things. The intellectual’s voice, the researcher’s and, at some points, the

historiographer’s wish to follow the conventions of traditional sciences is strong in The Feasts of

Memory.

By retaining focus on specific histories and experiences of movement, Kulukundis’s

narrative can be seen to “normaliz[e] male experiences” (Clifford 258). This is a critique that

James Clifford and various other critics of travel have directed to theoretical accounts of

diaspora, an issue which, I believe, is significant to address in analyses of literary texts that

feature different types of travels. The text that I will examine in the next chapter (Chapter Four),

Davidson’s The Priest Fainted, which shifts the emphasis onto yet another female traveler, also

prompts careful consideration of issues of gender and their influence on the formation of an

18 This is emphasized by the fact that “[h]ouses in Kasos were owned maternally” (57), and so whereas “a

first son inherited all his father’s ancestral property, . . . a first daughter would inherit all her mother’s ancestral property” (57). This code, though unwritten, “had the force of law” (57).

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ethnic identity. When studied side by side with Kulukundis’s book, Davidson’s text draws

attention to some interesting distinctions concerning the ways in which a female versus a male

traveler establishes connections and continuity between a familial past and a personal present

and, in the process, figures out his/her Greek American identity. I will return to the issue of

gender, and address what these distinctions are, in my discussion of Davidson’s novel in Chapter

Four.

Elias’s journey to his ancestor’s Kasos is framed by an opening chapter titled “Arrival”

and a concluding one called “Departure,” reversing the order, interestingly enough, of the actual

course of Elias’s travel. As Elias and Uncle George are about to leave Kasos, Aphrodite

pronounces her farewells in the same words as she had voiced her premonitions when they first

arrived on the island: “So you came back to Kasos, came back to my Eleni’s house? And just as I

said, you’re ready to sail away again on the next ship. What do you want with Kasos, you and

your nephews. Tomorrow you’ll sail away, and I’ll never see you again. After you go, I’ll be left

alone” (229). Aphrodite’s remark is poignant and draws attention to questions such as what Elias

wanted with Kasos and its stories. Why did he make the journey all the way out to a remote and

“ruined island” (229)? What knowledge and experiences has he acquired from this journey? The

answers appear to be, at this point, quite obvious. The contingency of family history and ethnic

identity, articulated in Kulukundis’s narrative through a hyphenated individual’s undertaking of a

journey to an ancestral homeland, has great relevance for the traveler’s process of constructing

ethnic meaning. This relation is underlined throughout The Feasts of Memory and comes out

particularly strongly in Elias’s reflections when his journey has come full circle and he is back in

New York. Listening to an old Kasiot woman and Uncle George converse about the customs of

the island, telling stories that he is now familiar with, Elias remarks that “childhood was [now]

over. There were no more unknown stories for me, no more mysterious words” (240). This

comment, which signals the completion of Elias’s research project and his adventure, indicates

that the chapter headings “Arrival” and “Departure” that frame Elias’s journey do not allude to

the actual geographical passage but to a kind of movement, a transformation that pertains to the

traveler’s mind. This movement, I have argued, is intimately related to the knowledge about his

family’s past and his own self-development that his journey and experiences have issued. Elias’s

comment in the above quotation suggests that he has amended, at least for the time being, his

ignorance of his ancestral past and satisfied his curiosity for knowledge, both of which initiated

his journey in the first place. Thus, Elias’s journey to Kasos, the story seems to be implying, is an

“Arrival” at knowledge, and his leaving, the end of the story confirms, a “Departure” to a

different sense of ethnic identity. Achieving, through journeying and knowledge, a connection

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between the diasporic displacements of his family and his own traveling experiences—either

through true or imagined facts—he settles his Greek American identity, and writes the story of

“everything that did not happen to [him]” (vii).

To sum up, Greece by Prejudice and The Feasts of Memory explore the frustrations and

challenges that the ethnic travelers encounter and the cognitive processes they undergo as they

set out on their journeys to imaginary ethnic homelands. The reality that these travelers are

confronted with is either disconcerting to the traveler who wants Greece to conform to her

idealized preconceptions, as in Athas’s book, or lost and beyond the possibility of being

recaptured, as in Kulukundis’s text. But travel, both ethnic Bildungsromans show, has

“transgressive potential” (Holland and Huggan 4). As Daphne and Elias eventually accept the

impossibility of arriving at any fixed truths, they find other ways of generating meaning in the

process of forming their ethnic identities. In both texts, this process is, to varying degrees and in

different ways, mediated through family, both in its immediate and extended forms. For Daphne,

Greek family, which was initially the object of her criticism and ridicule, gradually becomes a

fertile site of ethnic self-identification. Elias, on the other hand, associates with his ethnic history

and explores his sense of ethnicity by an act of unearthing and imaginatively recreating the

fragmented memories and stories of his family and their Greek island.

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Chapter Four

Family, Greek Myths, and Female Gender Identity in The

Octagonal Heart and The Priest Fainted

We had never read American nursery rhymes,

but instead were given books of Greek mythology, and I felt

truly that I was a goddess atop Mount Olympus, monitoring

the destiny of the mere mortals beneath.

—Ariadne Thompson, The Octagonal Heart

A Greek Myth: There Is Only One Way to Tell This Story.

—Catherine Temma Davidson, The Priest Fainted

Throughout time, myths have helped us to understand our lives by connecting us to a wider

community. Myths give expression to our shared imaginings, dreams, desires, and fears, help us

understand human relationships, and satisfy our need for coherence and grounding in a historical

past. The significance of myths to identity is pointed out by, among other scholars, Christine

Downing, “We need . . . myths through which we can see who we are and what we might

become” (The Goddess 2), she argues, stressing the social and psychological aspects of myths. The

idea of myths as enabling stories, particularly as rich sources for interpreting our experiences and

nurturing our identities, informs the two ethnic Bildungsromans that will be examined in this

chapter: Ariadne Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart (1956) and Catherine Temma Davidson’s The

Priest Fainted (1998).

Out of the body of stories created by different cultures and societies to which the word

“myths” is commonly applied, the classical Greek myths have been granted special importance in

the West.1 Greek myths, it is argued, offer a wealth of archetypal narratives and patterns of

1 Theorists and writers have shown that myth can be considered in different ways and along a variety of

theoretical lines. Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) presents a theory of myth related to the principles and techniques of literary criticism, more specifically, what he calls “archetypal criticism.” For a survey of the modern theories of myth from disciplines such as theology, comparative religion, anthropology, sociology, psychology, classics, and folklore, to name a few, see Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (1984), edited by Alan Dundes. A complementary work to Dundes’s selection of theories is Milton Scarborough’s more recent Myth and Modernity: Postcritical Reflections (1994). Scarborough investigates the crises of myth within modernity, and focuses on the logical, ontological, and epistemological implications of myth.

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thought out of which Western tradition has developed. Not surprisingly, an interest in classical

myths is to be found in much twentieth century literature. James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, is

considered “the most generally known mythological work” (White 30). Thomas Mann’s fiction is

also preoccupied with myths, as are Eliot’s and Yeats’s literary productions, to name only a few.

These writers have often deployed classical mythology as an instance of dramatic effect or

literary components in isolation in their works. In a book like James Joyce’s Ulysses, mythology

has been used, among other things, as a matter of structure. In Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart

(1956) and Davidson’s The Priest Fainted (1998) Greek mythology has a different function. The

writers primarily invoke the Greek mythic world, as will become evident in this chapter, to

inform the developing gendered consciousness and ethnic identities of the American-born

protagonists.

The 1970s critiques of Eurocentric assumptions about literature and the feminist critique

of structures of patriarchy in Western culture stimulated new critical responses and approaches

to literature, including the study of myths in literature. Such critiques were spawned by a number

of texts which appeared in the mid-twentieth century and accounted for the “timeless truth” of

archetypes and myths, among these Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and

Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). One response to the “universal” dimension of

myths as interpreted by Campbell and Frye has been the re-examination of classical myths in

literature. A scholarly enterprise, fueled by feminist interests in the 1980s and 1990s, has been to

re-visit and re-write classical myths with the aim to yield fresh and more inclusive interpretations.

Christine Downing’s The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (1989) and the collection of

essays The Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time (1994) that

she edited, Carol P. Christ’s Rebirth of the Goddess (1997), and Barbara Weir Huber’s Transforming

Psyche (1999) are just a few examples of studies that can be seen to have emerged from feminist

scholars’ general efforts, in the last twenty-five years or so, to recover from the past the cultural

and religious images that allow for the expression of female identity and being in the world. The

renewed interest in the transformative character of myth, and its power to engender new

mythmaking, is also suggested by the Canongate Books’s initiation in 2005 of a new Myths

series. Two of the first three titles published in the series—The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

and Weight by Jeanette Winterson—offer adaptations/variations on some of the most well-

known Greek myths, bringing mythological figures such as Penelope, Atlas, and Heracles into

the twenty-first century.2

2 The Myths series was initiated by Canongate in partnership with a dozen other European publishers.

Initially, eleven writers were asked to retell a myth as part of the Myth series project. Other writers will eventually be added to this group, each of whom will choose a different myth to re-write, using a different approach.

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Myths also make up a significant subject or theme in contemporary ethnic minority

literatures of the U.S. The inscription of myths in ethnic texts, in contrast to the use of myths in

so-called mainstream literature, most often serves different functions and takes on different

expressions. In ethnic literature, myths are often employed to shape literary forms as well as

contribute to the definition of the artist/writer and his/her ethnic experience. Leslie Marmon

Silko and Maxine Hong Kingston are two examples of writers who perceive themselves as

belonging to an ethnic minority and/or as writing from an ethnic perspective, and who use the

myths of their cultures as vital components in their writing and as expressions of their ethnicity.3

Other writers/theorists appropriate the myths of their cultures for political ends. A notable

example is Chicana feminist theorists’ attempts, from the 1970s on, to recuperate the myth of

Malinche with the aim of revaluing her figure as one of empowering womanhood and a symbolic

mother of mestizaje.4

The use of myths to express an ethnic experience and identity is also present in Greek

American literature. However, as a result of the transcultural dynamic of the ancient Greek

heritage, Greek American writers have to deal with different parameters if they want to attend to

issues of ethnic identity through the world of Greek myths in their narratives. The preoccupation

with classical myths in texts such as Thompson’s and Davidson’s is meant to emphasize the

specific links between the stories of the mythical deities and the construction of a proud sense of

ethnic and gendered difference.5

In my analyses of the two ethnic Bildungsromans I demonstrate how the two female

American-born narrators of Greek heritage draw from ancient Greek myths to understand and

interpret their experiences and develop knowledge about their ethnic heritage, genealogy, and

identities, a process which, in fundamental ways, is informed by family matters. Family in The

Octagonal Heart and The Priest Fainted, I show, assumes a central function in mediating the

knowledge the two narrators develop about their Greek American and gender identities and the

world in which they live. In exploring the meaning and function of the ancient Greek myths in

Thompson’s and Davidson’s texts, I endorse the view that myths are stories that embody the

ideals and beliefs of a community, and help to confront us with the communal dimensions of

3 Reclaiming forgotten and silenced stories, ethnic minority writers tend nowadays to bestow on them an aura of myth. This narrative strategy is especially conspicuous among female ethnic writers, as Lena Karlsson claims.

4 For a discussion of the historical figure of Malinche (or Malintzin), see Norma Alarcón’s essay “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object” (1983). See also Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1991).

5 A Greek ethnic writer’s interest in the myths of his ethnic culture is also evident in Theodor Kallifatides’s oeuvre. Kallifatides, who lives in Sweden and publishes extensively in Swedish, often employs Greek myths or the stories of Greek mythological figures in his writing. In his most recent novel, and as indicated by the work’s Swedish title, Herakles, the writer deals with one of the most heroic figures of Greek mythology. Kallifatides’s story of Herakles, the writer explains in an interview, serves as ground or motive for writing about his own family, and more specifically his mother.

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our personal stories and experiences. The communal aspect of myths embraces, I argue, the

component of family—family in the large sense, of nation, society, kindred, but also of the

domestic scenes of childhood invoked in The Octagonal Heart—and its pertinence to ethnicity.

Thompson’s and Davidson’s literary works respond to their specific historical moment

and to a specific conceptualization of the self. As a result the texts, which differ in character and

tone, evoke the classical myths in two distinct ways. Thompson’s narrative from 1956 attends to

the question of identity by mobilizing the traditional form and familiar content of the classical

Greek myths. Repeatedly evoked and referred to by Greek family, the classical myths are central

for her conceptualization of the world around her and of herself as a Greek American child, as

the epigraph from Thompson with which I begin this chapter indicates. Davidson’s novel from

1998, on the other hand, shows that when myths do not reflect or offer ways of making sense of

our experiences and identities, it is possible to make up new variations and stories. Davidson’s

narrator re-writes the patriarchal dimensions of traditional myths by putting the gods and

goddesses in modern garbs and situations, a creative and cognitive process which allows her to

interpret her experiences as an ethnic person and a woman.

An explanation for the differences in the way the narratives evoke the Greek myths as

well as the urgency with which they pose issues of ethnicity, identity, and gender can be found in

the framework of the texts’ different times of production. The time period between 1956 and

1998 in the U.S. saw some important political and social developments such as, for example, the

feminist movement in the late 1960s and 70s and the revival of an interest in ethnicity in the

1970s, which in the decades to follow gave rise to a great number of critical and theoretical

literature on these issues, some of which were discussed in Chapter Two. In light of these critical

debates, the obvious differences that the texts exhibit in their explorations of ethnic and

gendered identity formation as significantly mediated through family are not surprising.

Thompson’s text, for example, shows what the sociological research literature on Greek

Americans, referred to in Chapter Two, has noted about the family patterns of the first- and, to a

certain extent, second-generation of Greek immigrants in the U.S. Predominantly shaped by Old

World values and traditions, Greek families of the first generation display clear-cut gender roles.

Men assume the breadwinning role, and women are domestic caretakers whose duties include, as

Thompson’s portrayals of mothers affirm, responsibility for the children. The Priest Fainted, on

the other hand, shows an awareness of institutionalized (social and cultural) patterns of gender

differentiation, and problematizes prevailing myths and ideals linked to family and traditional

gender arrangements. This becomes particularly evident in the narrator’s need to re-invent the

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familiar stories of Greek antiquity to create a sense of ethnic identity and gender identity, an

imaginative act which I refer to as “re-mything.”

The Priest Fainted can be examined in the light of the renaissance of re-writing myths

earlier mentioned. The narrator’s process of re-mything the stories of Greek goddesses, I

propose, has two major functions, which are not easily separated: it highlights the classical myths’

underlying patriarchal ideologies, and it raises questions about the traditional family ideal and the

role of women—mothers and daughters—within the nuclear family unit. As my readings will

demonstrate, the novel presents us with several engaging feminist re-writings of the traditional

Greek myths, suggesting how myth might be plied for feminist or other potentially politically

charged ends. Challenged to find “other ways into the past, other routes” (9), the narrator

inscribes alternative, more woman-centered, modes of being into the patriarchal stories. By

adding another dimension to the meaning of myth, she destabilizes the seeming fixity of the

novel’s initial inscription that “there is only one way to tell a Greek myth.” Davidson’s revisionist

tour around the old Greek tales uncovers the silences about the experiences of the goddesses in

many modern versions of the ancient myths. With some creativity and imagination, the narrator

reverses docile and patient mythical princesses and goddesses to women who do not “giv[e] way

to gods” (41). She resurrects the weeping goddesses, jealous wives, and nagging mothers and

presents them as women who “rule [their] own fate[s]” (175). These transformed heroines and

their stories can be seen to act as keys to doors behind which family issues reside.

This chapter pays particular attention to the ways in which family matters in the process

of identity formation in The Octagonal Heart and The Priest Fainted. Both texts construct family as

an important site of ethnic and gender identification, and articulate the intergenerational tensions

and interferences but also the strengths and challenges involved in the process of identity

formation. Both texts also invoke a traditional family type including a mother, a father, and

biological children, one which sustains close affiliations with extended kin, grandparents, aunts,

uncles, and cousins. In spite of these similarities, family matters in each text crystallize

differently. As earlier argued, family in Thompson’s Bildungsroman displays, to borrow Patricia

Hill Collins’s phrase, a “fixed sexual division of labor” and assumes “the separation of work and

family” (“It’s All in the Family” 62-63). Given such firmly set authority structures, mothers in

The Octagonal Heart are imagined, I will show, as sources of knowledge about Greek heritage, and

as responsible for the transmission of ethnic culture to the children, an engagement with which

fathers remain conspicuously uninvolved. The Priest Fainted also accentuates the centrality of the

life stories of a Greek American mother and a Greek grandmother for nurturing the narrator’s

developing ethnic identity. In contrast to the family ideals that feature in The Octagonal Heart,

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Davidson’s text challenges the authority structures and gender arrangements implicated in the

traditional family ideal. Through a series of re-writings of the classical myths, Davidson’s text

attempts, I argue, to revise an “organic” view of family with traditional structures and positions.

Some revised myths contest traditional assignments of women’s positions within the family;

others challenge the nuclear family unit by emphasizing the situation of Olympian goddesses

living in dysfunctional or single-parent families.

The challenges that the re-mythings in The Priest Fainted pose to traditional conceptions

of the family unit and assignments of women’s position within the structures of family life serve,

I propose, to impart knowledge about identity formation, thus enabling the narrator to revision

her own Greek American gender identity. In the course of this chapter I will therefore refer to

Satya P. Mohanty’s discussion of identity as theoretically constructed. Let me repeat that

Mohanty’s theoretical argument about cultural identity—which corresponds in significant ways

to Paula M. L. Moya’s formulation of identity that this study draws from—points to the relation

between experience and identity, maintaining that experience has “a cognitive component”

(Literary Theory 205). Experience, the critic claims, is a source of knowledge that can be seen as

grounding a social identity. But experiences, he goes on, do not have some type of self-evident

meaning or authenticity. They are in part “theoretical affairs” (208); they are socially constructed,

mediated by social visions, values, narratives, paradigms, and even ideologies that refer beyond

the individual. Mohanty’s cognitivist conception of experience allows for the possibility of

evaluating experiences in relation to the subject and his world as either “true” or “false,”

legitimate or illegitimate. On the basis of such an understanding of experience, it is possible to

construct a theory of social or cultural identity, Mohanty argues, in which identities are

theoretical constructions which “enable us to read the world in specific ways” (216).

Mohanty’s emphasis on the theoretically constructed nature of identities is, in my view,

appealing, as it does not render identities unreal and unreliable, as suggested by many

postsmodernist critics. It is an identity theory which endorses a conception of experience as an

authoritative source of knowledge—experiences can tell people something valuable and

pertinent about who they are—which is open to analysis and revision. In addition, Mohanty’s

theoretical propositions underline, in ways relevant to this study, that identities are fundamentally

about social relations. The Octagonal Heart and The Priest Fainted, along with the other texts

examined in this study, unfold the process of identity formation as complexly mediated through

family relations. Family, in these texts, is constructed as a product of social forces within the

larger society, and it is in interaction with the outside world that family is shown to influence

individual ethnic and gender identity formation.

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Family, Myth, and the Mediation of Knowledge

The Octagonal Heart presents Ariadne Thompson’s recollections of her childhood summers spent

in the elaborate octagonal house on her aunt’s and uncle’s estate in Webster Groves, a suburb of

St. Louis. Interlaced with myths and stories of Greek heroes, the narrative of young Ariadne—a

child of Greek parentage born and raised in America—evokes the question of the role of ancient

Greek heritage for self-knowledge, and of family for the mediation of ethnic meaning and the

conceptualization of an ethnic identity. The opening sentence of Thompson’s Bildungsroman

reads: “When we were children, we used to spend our summers and all of our holidays at my

aunt’s house, which was called Parnassus after the ancient mountain of the Muses, according to

Greek mythology” (11). This sentence makes explicit that Thompson’s narrator is born into the

world of ancient myths; she is interwoven with them through her mind. She dwells in a house

named after the abode of the nine Muses, where she is surrounded by the mythological and

historical spirits of Greek antiquity. Her two siblings—Artemis and Pericles—and four older

cousins—Aphrodite, Achilles, Demosthenes, and Aristotle—all, herself included, bear the names

of great ancient goddesses, heroes, historical personages, and philosophers. This initial

information establishes the function of family in imparting to the American-born generation a

knowledge of their Greek ethnic roots, preeminently mediated through Greek myths.

Examining a text in which the theme of ethnicity figures strongly, it is perhaps valuable

at this stage to address, if only briefly, the American historio-cultural context Thompson’s story

is set in. Such information will throw some light on the national concerns about immigration,

ethnicity, and assimilation that were at issue when the writer grew up, as well as indicate how her

immigrant Greek family may have responded to these concerns. The narrative is set in the period

before and after World War I, a time when a drive for cultural homogeneity in the U.S. was on

the national agenda. As footnoted in Chapter Three, in his speeches to the nation President

Roosevelt repeatedly announces the undesirability of hyphenation. In the 1920s, the urgency of

Americanization was also reflected in sociological work, which began articulating the ideology of

assimilation. It was argued by assimilationist sociologists that in a modern social organization

there was no place for ethnic sentiments. Despite this assimilationist ideology, ethnic sentiments

in the octagonal house, Thompson shows, remained strong. At the same time, the urgency to

assimilate did not leave the household unaffected. As I will later show, “Americanness” was

appealing to the younger generation, a fact that gave rise to intergenerational tensions as well as

emphasizing old world ideas about gender relations within the family unit.

During the same period, the U.S. government made radical changes in immigration

policy. As mentioned in Chapter Two, the Congress passed a series of restrictive immigration

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legislations, introducing quotas for each nationality. In 1924 immigration was limited to 165 000

annually, and in 1927 the nationality quota was revised to two per cent of each nationality’s

representation in the 1920 census, a law which remained in effect through 1965. Thus, in 1956,

when Thompson’s narrative of a Greek American girl’s reminiscences of her childhood was

published, national-origin quotas were still in practice, and Greek immigration had declined

substantially. It is interesting to note, however, that Thompson’s text is conspicuously silent

about these policy changes. There is no indication in the book that the new immigration

legislation was a matter of concern to the family. But then their experiences in America did not

correspond with those of the average immigrant. Their social status singled them out in many

ways, which made claiming ethnic difference a matter of privilege.

The role of family in mediating knowledge about Greek culture to the American-born

generation and fostering a Greek ethnic identity becomes clear as the narrator recalls with

nostalgia the “lovely, lost days at Parnassus” (59). The type of family that Thompson’s narrative

depicts is a traditional one held together by emotional bonds of love and caring as well as a

common ethnic heritage. It is a kin-oriented family, and the extended family is portrayed as the

heart of social life. The close extended family kinship system that Greeks uphold in the U.S.,

according to the sociohistorical studies earlier discussed, is present in the dwellings of Parnassus

where the narrator’s aunt, uncle, their four children, a grandfather, and a former governess to the

children all live. During summers and holidays, the family extends to include the narrator, her

parents and siblings. However, preserving an intact family unit in the U.S. with strong

affiliations, Thompson’s narrative affirms, is not merely custom or significant for social reasons.

Family matters, the text shows, as a source of Greek customs, myths, and ethnic identity. It

functions to preserve cultural pride and values, propagate ethnicity, and foster in the American-

born generation an ethnic identity.

In a collection of essays, Greek American Families: Traditions and Transformations (1999),

edited by Sam J. Tsemberis et al, researchers from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and

psychology examine Greek American family life. It is generally agreed among these researchers

that the general structure of traditional Greek families—upheld by first-generation Greek

Americans—is one, to quote Tsemberis, “based on a patriarchal system of governance” (“Greek

American Families” 206). A traditional family structure implies that the mother is “entrusted

with the care of the children and the maintenance of the Greek language, customs and values.

The father is typically uninvolved in domestic matters and concerns himself primarily with

responsibility for the family’s economic stability” (208). These observations emphasize that in

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Greek immigrant society family life was perceived as a woman’s province and the focal point of

her abiding concern.

In the light of the discussion of family presented in Chapter Two, the patriarchal

structure of the Greek immigrant family, as accounted for by family theorists, does not appear to

be much unlike the traditional gender authority of the family institution of the 1950s in the U.S.

The distinctiveness of the first-generation Greek American family, aside from its concerns with

matters of ethnic affiliation, is instead to be found in some of the norms and customs that

regulate family life. One of these is the “deeply binding lateral kinships” (Tsemberis, “Greek

American Families” 206), including those with godparents, in-laws, and other relatives. This

extended kinship system, studies show, fills two specific social needs: it offers both “emotional

and economic support” (206). Another major difference between the early Greek American

family and that of the “outside” society is the limited opportunity, especially for daughters, for

legitimate courting (207).

The extended family relations, the strictly defined sex roles and obligations of Greek

immigrant parents, and, as I will demonstrate later in this chapter, the cultural norms that

regulate marriage in the first-generation Greek immigrant family, all figure in The Octagonal Heart.

Mothers, in Thompson’s text, have a principal responsibility for child raising and the

perpetuation of culture and ethnicity in the household. Fathers are “spurious in [their] devotion”

(89) and operate best in their capacity as financial providers. However, even if Thompson

constructs Greek family as a unit which conforms to the gendered division of labour

characteristic of the traditional family, it would be overly simplistic to believe that one form or set

of relations characterizes the Greek family structure, as researchers are also careful to point out.

Families, social history shows, vary in their economic, political, and cultural conditions.

Additionally, the social categories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality produce varities

of family relationships and experiences. Different contexts and structures define and organize

families, including American ones. Critical formulations on American family and kinship systems

that, inversely, posit a “liberated” equalitarian household as the Anglo norm have therefore

recently been challenged. Feminist research suggests that these formulations are ultimately

excessively simplified, arguing that such households still impose undue restrictions on women.

Inequality, feminist anthropologists such as Sylvia Yanagisako, Carol Delaney, and others show,

is still embedded in the cultural system of American family life and kinship.6

The context that defines Ariadne’s family and their experiences is that of their ethnic

origins. From early childhood, the narrator’s family has ensured that the Greek myths permeate

6 See Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (1995), edited by Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney.

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her consciousness. What does it mean for Ariadne, and her siblings and cousins, to grow up with

the Greek pantheon? What specific meaning does family, more specifically mothers, ascribe to

the stories of Greek antiquity, and what functions do the myths take on for the narrator’s

developing identity as a Greek American? These questions, Thompson’s text suggests, are

interlinked. Myths in The Octagonal Heart are employed as models for cognition and behavior;

evoked to bestow a great deal of amusement, they function to encourage and secure ethnic

continuation in the American-born generation.

Folklorist Lauri Honko writes in “The Problem of Defining Myth” that, generally

speaking, myths “offer both a cognitive basis for and practical models of behaviour” (51).7 The

idea of myths as models for cognition and for behavior, extensively discussed by theorists of

myth, is evident throughout Thompson’s narrative. For every situation, it seems, Ariadne’s

mother has a Greek myth to evoke. This myth makes up the “language” with which the

immediate world around the children is explained. For example, having climbed the staircase that

leads to the cupola of the house, a place that Ariadne’s mother had forbidden the children to

visit alone because of the dizzying heights, the child remembers the story of Phaethon, son of

Helios. Phaethon, her mother had reminded them, “had insisted on driving the sun’s chariot

against the better judgment of the gods. As a result the horses had dashed furiously away,

frightening the constellations as they madly raced uncontrolled up and down the heavens . . . and

Phaethon was cast down from the sky” (16). What the mother’s storytelling indicates is a

domestication and “familiarization” of Greek myths that, it seems, is necessary for myths to

work as cognitive examples. By drawing upon the Phaethon myth, the mother evokes a parallel

between the child and Phaethon and between herself as parent and Helios. Listening to her story,

the child can make the connections necessary to understand the situation that the mother tries to

illustrate by using the figures and plots of Greek myths. By making classical Greek myths

domestic and part of family life, the mother maintains the relevance of ethnic history for identity.

Another instance when the mother’s role in perpetuating ethnic origins and the

explanatory and educational value of the activities of the gods and heroes are emphasized is

when the children are given a lesson in etymology. Teaching the children the origin of the word

“tantalize,” Ariadne’s mother relates the story of Tantalus who “cooked his son and served the

body at a banquet” (194), and was consequently cast down to Hades by the gods where he was

“forever to remain standing up to his neck in water which would recede when he tried to drink

and surrounded by food which was snatched away when he attempted to eat” (194). Evidently,

these stories are evoked to provide some of the material and knowledge about ethnic heritage

7 Honko’s essay provides an overview of twentieth century definitions and theories of myth.

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with which the narrator and her siblings construct their ethnic identities. “We had never read

American nursery rhymes” (17), the narrator explains. We “were given books of Greek

mythology” (17), and we knew the stories “as some children know Mother Goose” (136). “I

suppose Mama felt,” she goes on to say, “and I think she was right, that stories of Greek

mythology had a greater educational value than stories of ‘Miss Muffet’ or ‘Mary, Mary, Quite

Contrary.’ And, indeed, we found Mother Goose rather dull fare after some of the escapades of

the gods and goddesses” (137). In Ariadne’s comparisons, American nursery rhymes and

rhyming rebuses entertain while Greek myths serve to educate.

Family in The Octagonal Heart actively mediates the children’s experiences of the world

immediately around them through their cultural heritage, which takes many different guises in

this quiet suburb of St. Louis, some of which, for the reader at least, carry comical overtones.

Not only is Auntie’s and Uncle’s Saint Bernard dog named Hercules, but young Ariadne plays

the game of trying to associate the qualities of each relative with those of his or her classical

namesake. There is no doubt, the narrator remarks, that her cousin Aristotle, who is studying

law, possesses the qualities of the first Aristotle, “whom we knew to have been called Seeker

After Truth” (30). Whenever he tries to settle the disputes amongst the younger children he

tends to add “a Greek explanation to his rulings”; moreover, he “embroider[s] his sternest

judgements with the teachings of Socrates or the precepts of Plato” (33). This talent, we are told,

has the power of changing her aunt’s expression of distress to pleasure. In a similar manner,

Ariadne associates her lovesick cousin Aphrodite with “Aphrodite of the myths, who, when

separated from Adonis, caused the world to grow bleak and cold, but while with him, the birds

to sing and the flowers to bloom” (202). Cousin Achilles’s correspondence with his mythical

counterpart is unmistakable. Achilles himself insisted that, like the great warrior of Homer’s Iliad

who was dipped into the River Styx and made invulnerable, he is “impregnable except in the heel

by which he had been held” (48). At times, Ariadne’s associations are stretched to absurdity and

remind the reader of a child’s wild imagination: Did Uncle Themistocles ever drink bull’s blood

like Themistocles the Statesman had done, as her mother had told the story?

The game of making the heroes and heroines of Greek antiquity familiar to the children

in order to conjure a vivid sense of unique history in them continues on weekends, when all of

Ariadne’s Greek family and kin members gather in the octagonal house. On these occasions,

children as well as grown-ups imaginatively reconstruct the mythic past by dressing up in

costumes and feasting like their Olympian or historic ancestors. At these activities, even fathers

take on an active role and position in the process of establishing a sense of ethnicity in their

children. “Papa,” Ariadne relates,

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would wear a fustanella . . . the uniform of the Greek guardsmen. Mama and

Auntie would wear their chitons, Aphrodite would wrap herself in silk or satin

red crepe paper, in the manner of an Egyptian or Indian princess, Achilles,

Demosthenes and Aristotle would array themselves as Greek gods or American

generals, according to their mood. (78)

It was also on weekends that the narrator’s mother, accompanied by Auntie on guitar, “sang

Greek folk songs in which everyone joined” (37). Certainly, in a house where parents “referred

to the Seat of Democracy and Two Thousand Years of Culture in the same breath they

mentioned Greece” (27), these weekend activities have the purpose of literally familiarizing the

myths, that is, making Hellenic culture something to which Ariadne and the rest of the family

can relate in personal and intimate ways.

Beyond mere entertainment, the dressing-up games and singing activities are meant to

impart knowledge of the “Glories That Once Were Greece” (29), and foster in the American-

born generation ethnic pride and identity. Through these games, the myths become symbols of

ethnic significance and meaningful sources of identity construction. By anchoring the lives of the

children to the lives and stories of the ancient mythical figures, the parents stress the children’s

“enormous luck in having been born with such a heritage” (135), and confer on them a sense of

community, familial as well as ethnic. The text evokes the idea of family as a unit of solidarity, a

collectivity that functions to brace intimate social relations, and shows how the children’s sense

of ethnicity is formed in and through social interaction.

Thompson repeatedly shows that, in using Greek myth to forge an ethnic consciousness,

the family is able to emphasize cultural particularity and nurture in the children a proud sense of

ethnic difference. The origins of ancient Greece are not presented to the children as being those

of the entire Western tradition. The myths, whose multifaceted richness has been discussed as

the “roots of meaning and being in Western thinking and understanding” (David Miller ix), are

in Thompson’s narrative depicted as a legacy exclusive to those with a Greek genealogy and

ethnicity. The narrator recalls how her mother “really managed to make [them] feel it was a

pretty inferior type mentality that didn’t recognize the significance of [their] Hellenic

background” (136), a comment which can be either read to emphasize ethnic belonging as a

source of pride and empowerment or as a way of defending cultural particularity. Interestingly,

the writer inscribes in the myths, as did her family, cultural significance by recording and weaving

them into her own tale, a story of a girl’s developing sense of Greek ethnic identity. In other

words, the invocation of the classical myths in Thompson’s memoir, as in much ethnic writing,

can be seen to function to define the writer’s ethnicity.

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Ethnicity, as I have earlier mentioned, figures as the most central element of social

identification for the family depicted in The Octagonal Heart. But what is the meaning of ethnicity

in Thompson’s story, and what consequences, if any, does ethnic belonging have for the family

depicted? To offer a response to this question I will return to the family’s weekend activities. The

festivities held at the octagonal house display a disconcerting solace, merriment, and romanticism

that bring to mind a carefree, Gatsby-like environment, with the main difference that whereas

Gatsby, who despite his lavish parties is a solitary figure, the characters in Thompson’s text enjoy

a seemingly harmonious family collectivity. Characterized by an atmosphere filled with laughter

and song, leisure and serenity, even exoticism and adventure, the family’s activities imply an

untroubled performance of ethnicity, which re-emphasizes the household’s privileged position

when it comes to class belonging. With a “most delightful freedom” (78), the narrator remarks

without the slightest tone of irony, the children can, according to their feelings, perform any

identity they wish, Greek or American.

The particular ethnic environment that the narrator’s family moves in and their ethnic

experiences are centrally informed by the social class to which they belong. Thompson’s text

emphasizes that depending on how families are embedded within the larger society, their

experiences of ethnicity, class, and gender will vary. Early on, the readers are informed that

young Ariadne comes from a wealthy family that can be defined as being part of the upper-

middle class, a very rare position among Greek immigrants. Her grandfather, we learn, founded

the Greek Orthodox Church in St. Louis, and her uncle Demetrius was a Greek consul—“King

George had conferred upon him the Order of the Royal Cross” (61)—a post to which the Greek

government appointed her father when her uncle gave it up. Living in a white American

suburban area, in a colossal house “decorated with colored balls and golden acorns” (13), with a

Wine Room and a Billiard Room with magnificent chandeliers, and a German cook who

prepares their breakfasts, Ariadne’s family and relatives are well-off socially as well as

economically.

The narrator’s family can be said to have achieved assimilation to American society, the

“formula” for this process being that as immigrants assimilate, as Karpathakis notes, “they

achieve upward mobility and acquire greater individual freedoms, power, and rights in all spheres

of life” (152). Examples of cultural and social integration, as I will show later, recur throughout

Thompson’s narrative. In many respects, Ariadne’s family can be understood to have moved

ahead in the process of Americanization. However, the The Octagonal Heart does not simply

reinscribe the politics of assimilation. Although cultural changes do take place in the household,

the narrative is predominantly concerned with the family’s Greek ethnic origins and identity.

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Additionally, the narrative suggests that the family’s privileged social position is not something

that they have achieved in the U.S. After all, the social opportunities made available to Ariadne’s

uncle and father, their positions as consuls and their “upward mobility,” were not achieved

according to a theoretical model of assimilation. Rather, the Greek government conferred these

privileges upon them, a fact indicating that the household in which Ariadne grows up is not

representative of the average immigrant one. Her family can enjoy their socio-economic

advantages and take pride in their ethnic identities in a country where the ethos of cultural

homogeneity prevailed. An event which stresses this circumstance is when the family, during the

First World War, holds a Greek fete to raise donations for the “starving Armenians” (Thompson

91). At that time, the reader is informed, “there was a great campaign on to help these

unfortunate victims of the war” who were “always depicted holding out poor, thin, shrunken

arms in a plea for help” (91). The economic resources of the family enables its members not just

to exhibit their generosity, and subsequently project an image of themselves to the mainstream as

benevolent, socially progressive citizens, with civic virtues, but to “GIVE TILL IT HURTS,” as

the posters urged on.

Given the class privileges that the family enjoys, the continued affirmation of national

origins and Greek cultural identity that appears as a vital element in Ariadne’s Greek American

home can be understood as an act of pride on the family’s part in their ethnic history that only

immigrants in positions of privilege and authority, such as themselves, can afford to display. But,

the family’s pride in their ethnicity can also be seen as evidence of the fact that assimilation is

not, as sociologists for a long time assumed, necessarily an inevitable and straightforward process

(which involves accepting the values, assuming the habits and learning the language of the

“outside” society). As Moya points out in her investigation of the relationship between the

culturally particular and the universally human in tales and debates of assimilation, “all of us can

benefit from engaging in a process of multi-directional cross-cultural acculturation” (Learning from

Experience 104). In the light of Moya’s theory of identity, which emphasizes the value of “multi-

directional” rather than “forced unidirectional cultural change” for productive human

interaction, The Octagonal Heart can be read as suggesting the importance of cultural knowledge

and ethnic identity for individual (and, by extension, societal) well-being. I will return to Moya’s

theoretical formulation in this chapter, but at this point I wish to suggest that by allowing for

different readings, Thompson’s narrative both complicates and problematizes assimilation as a

theoretical model of social and cultural integration and interaction, and brings into the discussion

of ethnicity the element of class.

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Contributing to the complexity of the work’s take on issues such as assimilation,

ethnicity, and identity is the time discrepancy between the occurrence and the narration of

events. This lapse of time creates a detachment from childhood. As in all such narratives, the

narrating “I” holds a retrospective position in the narrative, but in Thompson’s case it is evident

that retrospection is not necessarily introspection. Feelings of nostalgia take command of the

narrator’s story of her childhood, and the text offers no reflections on the consequences of the

narrator’s class privilege, the advantages and options that her social location confers, or how

these privileges shape her self-conception as an ethnic woman.

What the text does highlight are the tensions involved when ethnicity resides primarily in

family networks. As the narrator’s reminiscences of childhood events continue to unfold, it

gradually becomes clear that the family depicted in The Octagonal Heart is not as solid as it first

appears. Despite its alleged unity through a common ethnic heritage in the new world, the family

cannot resist forces of assimilation. The individuals inhabiting the house, especially the

American-born children who live simultaneously in two worlds, one Greek and one American,

are not immune to American influences and cultural forces. Though Greek heritage and

traditions are fervently preserved and protected at Parnassus, ethnicity, the narrative affirms,

both ties the family together and creates tensions and frictions in its otherwise neat structure and

arrangements.

The tensions and disagreements that play out at Parnassus between the parent who

eulogizes “the place that Greece had once held in world history” (135) and the child whose

arguments are “mostly pro-American and anti-Greek” (177) become conspicuous in a dispute

that arises between the narrator’s Auntie and Ariadne’s older cousin Aphrodite. Auntie, we

learn, regarded Greek culture in the same way as she did her liver, namely, “something one could

not do without and over which one must keep constant vigil lest it grow sluggish” (15). This

need to monitor Greek culture takes expression in Auntie’s wish to place her daughter’s

ambition for education (and through that her future marriage and sexuality as well) under

surveillance. Auntie, who belongs to the generation of women that were raised according to a

patriarchal and heavily gendered division of responsibilities within the family unit, is of the

opinion that education and careers are not necessary for women. Consequently, she will not

approve of her daughter’s desire to study medicine. It is Auntie’s opinion that a woman’s

refinement is determined by her ability to play the piano, not her schooling. Although the subject

of Aphrodite’s career, as the narrator observes, “included all kinds of side issues such as morals,

prudence, propriety, motherhood, wifeliness, fastidiousness and refinement” (177), another point

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of debate between mother and daughter is hiding beneath it, namely, the question of ethnic

intermarriage, an issue that I will return to and discuss more extensively.

The Octagonal Heart constructs family as an important foundation of the gender system,

and accentuates how ethnicity may be closely linked to ways of organizing social and family life.

Auntie’s and Aphrodite’s dispute brings forward issues linked to a transmission of ethnicity

through family networks such as gender structures and constraints within patriarchal settings like

the family. The narrative clearly stages the challenges involved when family imposes its values on

the younger generation, especially women, curtailing their individual freedom as the only way of

maintaining an ethnic identity. Auntie’s attempt to regulate the social and personal life of her

daughter by imposing limitations upon her can be understood in the light of the “patriarchal

system of governance” that, according to the research referred to earlier in this chapter, the first-

generation Greek family in the U.S. is based on. The traditional domestic/public distinction that

such families have been observed to uphold rigidly defines the roles for females within the family

unit and, by extension, their opportunities in society at large. Through Auntie’s and Aphrodite’s

interactions, The Octagonal Heart demonstrates how the mother’s determination to “preserve a

culture purely Hellenic in her home” (63) and her discouragement of her daughter’s wish to

pursue a career and to go on dates, are interrelated.8 Aphrodite’s comment that “Girls didn’t

have any independence in Greece” (40), a condition which also regulates her own life in

America, suggests how issues of gender may function at the core of family life.

As earlier mentioned, the traditional gender differences that the narrator’s Greek

immigrant family upholds can also be seen in the light of widespread ideals and assumptions

about family in the U.S. in the 1950s. At the time, most family scholars, as Maxine Baca Zinn

and D. Stanley Eitzen note, assumed that “role division between the sexes was necessary if

families were to operate effectively” (179). Family was seen as “a basis of social order in a

modern society” (178), and sex roles as “the building blocks of harmonious families” (178). The

ideal of family stability through clear-cut sex roles informs the narrator’s parents’ discussions on

the issue of work. An “ardent champion of women’s rights” (86), the mother’s goals for women

were “Freedom to Come and Go and Pin Money” (87). With a magnificent voice and an offer

for a contract to sing with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, she herself might have reached

these objectives if her husband had not put his foot down with the words that “no Wife of His

would go gallivanting around the country living in hotels and leaving his babies in the care of

servants while she accepted pay for a God-given talent” (87). This exchange between husband

8 It is noteworthy, and interesting in relation to the parent’s decision regarding dates, that “no Greek

word,” as Tsemberis remarks, “exists for ‘dating.’ The most commonly used expression is borrowed from the French, rendez-vous, which is defined as a meeting or an appointment” (207).

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and wife does not merely suggest a clash between old-world values and new cultural values. The

inconceivable idea (to the father at least) that a woman would earn her own living can also be

understood, I argue, within the dominant family framework in the 1950s.

The patriarchal role division between the sexes endorsed by the older generation is not

readily accepted by the younger Greek American individuals living in the octagonal house. In

staging family conflicts over gendered roles, and in raising the issue of women’s emancipation,

The Octagonal Heart enacts a cautious feminism. Her mother, Thompson remarks, intended to

have her daughters “equip themselves for independence” (88), and encouraged them to reach

beyond the traditional roles of women as domestic caretakers. She wished to give them what she

herself never attained, the opportunity for professional emancipation, an ambition that was

progressive at the time when the writer grew up not just within the Greek ethnic community but

also in society at large. And the mother’s predictions came through: Ariadne became a writer and

her sister Artemis a painter. Despite the representations of family as a locus of traditional gender

attitudes which threaten to limit a woman’s development, family in The Octagonal Heart does not

necessitate self-effacement. After all, the family itself gave Ariadne, the writer, the materials out

of which she created her memoir.

To recapitulate, in Thompson’s depiction of Greek American family life, matters of

ethnicity and gender are strongly interrelated, not least through the theme of marriage. As I have

mentioned, implicit in Auntie’s concern for Aphrodite’s ambition for a career is a mother’s fear

that her daughter will marry outside of the ethnic community. By clinging to the gender

distinctions with which her generation of women was raised, Auntie hopes to uphold Greek

family traditions and ensure cultural continuation. She does not approve of Aphrodite’s

university studies, hoping to minimize the possibility that her daughter meets and falls in love

with an American.

Auntie’s anxiety that her daughter will marry somebody outside of the ethnic community

goes to the heart of issues of ethnicity, family, and cultural hyphenation. Her fear was shared by

many Greek immigrants who travelled to the American shores in hope of better lives.

Psychotherapist Euthymia D. Hibbs discusses how immigrants who came to the U.S. at the turn

of the century held on to Greek values as a way of protecting themselves from the new and

frightening culture:

Being strangers in a country that embraces different lifestyles and family values

forced them to become strict and somewhat inflexible, because by maintaining

the status quo and the cultural values they felt more secure. Parents became

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fearful that their children’s, especially their daughters’ moral values might be

spoiled by the foreign, liberal society’s influence. (224)

As a result of this fear or anxiety, Hibbs remarks, daughters were socialized to stay home and

encouraged to remain close to their families, an observation which sheds light on the pressure

that Auntie exerts on her daughter. As a consequence of her fears that her family may forget

their ethnic roots and embrace American cultural values, she fails to understand that her grown-

up children want, in Aphrodite’s words, their “independence” (40).

The transmission of traditional values to the younger generation involves many

challenges, as Maria Kotsaftis also notes in her discussion of Greek American writer Helen

Papanikolas’ novel The Time of the Little Black Bird (1999). Papanikolas’s work, Kotsaftis argues,

undermines a common representation of ethnic family as a site that imparts “moral, ethnic as

well as personal strength” (127). Rather, the novel indicates how family makes up a “contested

site that more often than not stunts rather than promotes individual development” (Kotsaftis

127).9 The Octagonal Heart does not exclusively construct family as a site confining personal

development. In a fashion similar to the way Ariadne, the writer, was encouraged to develop her

potential, Aphrodite’s personal wishes, the narrative shows, are in the end allowed to take full

“bloom.” Her family’s values and, more specifically, her mother’s hopes and fears for her future,

do not cripple her emotionally or hinder her from developing professionally.

But the fate of Aphrodite’s personal fulfilment and professional emancipation does not

lie exclusively in the hands of her family. Regardless of Aphrodite’s own strong determination

not to give up her ambitions for education by defying the future assigned to her by her family,

interestingly enough, and to Auntie’s surprise, the highest church of Greece finally resolves the

controversy over Aphrodite’s career. One Sunday afternoon when the Metropolitan, the head of

the highest church of Greece, comes to visit the grandfather, Auntie asks for the Metropolitan’s

opinion on the matter of Aphrodite’s medical career. Instead of putting “his stamp of

disapproval on the idea” (126), however, as Auntie believed he would, the Metropolitan

considers Aphrodite’s desire admirable. “We are entering an age when women, as well as men,”

he says, “must learn to be self-reliant” (127), a comment that forces Auntie to admit defeat and

irrevocably settles the issue of women’s right to education and careers at Parnassus.

The elements of irony and humour here are, of course, evident. The fact that an official

approval of women’s right to education comes from the highest patriarch of the Church of

Greece is both highly ironic and amusing. Simultaneously, however, there is also a seriousness

9 See Kotsaftis’s essay for an interesting discussion of Papanikolas’s portrayals of women of the immigrant

and first generations, and the writer’s exposure of the negative pressure exerted on them by their immigrant families.

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implied in this incident, which is linked to issues of ethnicity and assimilation. How can the

Patriarch’s remark on the relevance of young people being “self-reliant” be understood if it is

read as an allusion to that most American of essays on the topic of selfhood, Ralph Waldo

Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”? Is the Patriarch’s approval of Aphrodite’s ambition for education

proof of the inevitability of conformity and gradual assimilation? Or does it stress the need to

modify cultural values and institutions in a new social and cultural environment, suggesting that

while some are retained, others must change? Though Thompson’s text returns to issues of

ethnicity and assimilation, it offers no easy answers or conclusions, reminding us of the

significance of literature, discussed elsewhere in this dissertation, as a laboratory of sorts for

exploring issues of ethnicity and ethnic identity formation, and its capacity to both exhibit

complexity and sustain contradiction.

Thompson’s text stages a seemingly complex relationship between “Greekness” and

“Americanness” on Parnassus through the interactions between Auntie who is “as Greek as the

first stone Pyrrha threw behind her from which, according to mythology, sprang the Hellenic

race” (63), and Sophia Martin, affectionately nicknamed Thea, a former governess and

permanent member of the household, who is a patriotic Southerner intolerant of “anything

relating to foreign culture” (53). Thea’s character can be read as an internalized desire for cultural

homogeneity. Indifferent and hostile to anything Hellenic, her “American opinions were

disturbing and constituted a threat to Auntie’s little stronghold of Greek culture” (55). These

feelings of mutual mistrust signal that both women participate in a process of “othering.” At first

glance, the act of othering can be understood to originate from a foreigner’s unwillingness to

assimilate and an American’s impatience for the foreigner’s noncompliance to the social patterns

and cultural values of the dominant society. However, Thompson presents their relationship in

much more ambivalent terms. Auntie’s and Thea’s suspicion and distrust of each other, the

narrative shows, is not as tenacious so as to blemish their relationship. After all, Thea, whose

former professional tasks are no longer required in the household (Ariadne’s cousins are old

enough not to need a governess) still lives at Parnassus.

The implied tensions in the relationship between Auntie and Thea are further suggested

in the narrator’s use of epithets for the two women—Auntie, an American phrase, for her Greek

relative, and Thea, the Greek word for aunt, in place of Sophia. Ariadne’s reversal of epithets

indicates that a re-structuring, or blending rather, of cultures is, in fact, taking place in the

household. This re-structuring marks a form of cultural change which can be understood in

terms of what Moya calls “multi-directional cross-cultural acculturation” (Learning from Experience

127), referred to earlier in this chapter. Moya, who critiques the assumption that “productive

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human interaction is predicated on assimilation to a predetermined norm” (126), and points to

the emotional and psychological consequences for those individuals who are forced to abandon

their own culture, discusses the value of understanding assimilation as cultural change that

occurs “in several directions” (127). Auntie’s and Thea’s relationship is an example of

acculturation as multi-directional and cross-cultural, inviting a more productive understanding of

social arrangements and human interaction.

The contrasts in The Octagonal Heart between Auntie’s ethnic pride and Thea’s Southern

ways, and the disputes between Cousin Aphrodite and Auntie, which raise all kinds of questions

about ethnic and gender identity, compel young Ariadne to brood over her ethnic heritage and

identity. Too young to formulate her thoughts on ethnicity in a theoretical vocabulary, she

grapples with her concerns in the form of questions about family, marriage, and ethnicity:

“Would cousin Aphrodite really have to marry a Greek . . .? Why was this important?” (15).

What does it mean to be “purely Greek” (42)? Does it mean to have a “passionate nature,” to be

“a demonstrative people, as emotional in argument as . . . in love,” to use both hands and hearts

in conversation, to be incapable of “dispassionate and self-contained objectivity” but capable of

“[f]eel[ing] Deeply” (76), or is ‘purely Greek’ equal to holding the “old-fashioned” (119) opinion

that the profession of doctor is “unseemly for a young girl” (70)? The narrator “weighed these

things in [her] mind” (42). Too young, however, to understand the full implication of these

issues, Ariadne cannot settle on any answers.

Ariadne’s questions contain several overlapping issues: cultural hyphenation, cultural

purity, and ethnic identity. Thrown into confusion by Auntie’s remark that Aphrodite “wouldn’t

be happy married to an American” (206), the child voices her opposition in the following words:

I am going to marry an American. . . . I’m not going to marry a Greek. I’m going

to marry an American doctor, like you, and if anybody tries to stop me I’ll run

away. They’ll come and get me and lock me in a tower, but I’ll escape and then

I’m going to sail away and live with the doctor in a foreign land. If he does

anything I don’t like I’ll run away again and go and live in Chicago. (206)

Ariadne’s outburst reveals that she and her cousins live, simultaneously, in two cultures: the

narrow circle of the ethnic family and the surrounding dominant Anglo culture, a position that,

she warns her family, she will break out of. She will forge her own Greek American female

identity rather than comply with the expectations of her Greek family.

Ariadne’s outburst, besides exhibiting the emotional struggle to define an identity amidst

the strong ethnic culture of the Parnassus household and the influences of American ways and

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values that seep through its doors, suggests that identities are, to refer to Mohanty’s formulation

of identity, theoretical affairs that we construct through our experiences and our emotions. It

signals the “cognitive role” (Mohanty, Literary Theory 210) of the emotions, which help the girl

evaluate her situation and the world around her. Her remarks also re-emphasize that the

knowledge she extracts from the classical Greek myths provides her with the means to also deal

with her gendered identity, even if the child’s sudden expression of strong feelings explores the

implications of marrying an American doctor, not becoming one. The declaration that if she

becomes “locked up in a tower” for running away with an American man she will “escape” and

“sail away” to “a foreign land,” reveals that it is by employing images and figurative expressions

from the world of myths and stories that young Ariadne “theorizes” her experiences and voices

her feelings and thoughts about the cultural tensions that permeate the household. Her last

remark, which appears nonsensical in relation to her initial concern about the ethnicity of the

man of her choice, can be seen to emphasize a child’s desire for continuous escapade and

adventure but it can also be read as a budding feminist’s insistence on her own integrity. The

mediation of the young narrator’s developing sense of feminist consciousness through the stories

of mythical goddesses and female relatives, attains, as I will demonstrate in the second half of

this chapter, concrete manifestation in Davidson’s novel The Priest Fainted.

The representation of Greek myths as sources of self-definition and identity-formation in

The Octagonal Heart does not remain unchallenged. The seemingly live presence of the mythical

characters in the narrator’s childhood is, toward the end of the narrative, contested. Speaking of

the vile and monstrous plots of the Greek myths, the “pretty atrocious atrocities handed down

to [the children] by way of Greek mythology” (189), the narrator remarks that “strangely they

made little or no impression on us” (189). “Perhaps,” she continues,

it was because Greek mythology has a fairy-tale quality, concerns itself with

unreal people and belongs to an ancient age. There was nothing to emulate as

there is in many of the current comic books. We could only pretend, and after all,

it is rather taxing to pretend your middle is a goat. I only know we listened to

these tales, found them mildly interesting and could hardly wait to get on with

Hans Brinker And The Silver Skates. (189)

Given the narrative’s recurring emphasis on the pertinence of the myths to Ariadne’s

evaluation of her experiences and structuring of her world, this remark is unexpected.

Admittedly, Greek myths display supernatural components and fantasy. But how can Ariadne’s

comment that Greek mythology “concerns itself with unreal people” be understood when it

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disclaims all that her story has emphasized so far, namely, the children’s indulgence in the

delights presented by the stories of Greek gods and goddesses and the role of myths, as invoked

by family, in nurturing their identities?

Though myths may be fictive, identities, Thompson’s narrative indicates, are not. They

are theoretically constructed but “real” in the sense that they have epistemic significance, just as

Mohanty argues; they inform the ways we experience, understand, and interpret the world. In

them, and through them, Mohanty writes, we make sense of our experiences and “we learn to

define and reshape our values” (Literary Theory 216). The “real” nature of identities, as defined by

Mohanty, serves to explain Ariadne’s intense reaction to myth, which can be seen as a rhetorical

strategy that she employs in her efforts to come to terms with her bi-cultural experiences and to

find a balance between the choices available to her as Greek American. Earlier on, the classical

stories were held in high regard for their educational value, while American stories like Mother

Goose were “dull fare.” By emphasizing the immediate otherness of the god and goddess figures

she can, if only momentarily, ridicule them and advance the stories of Hans Brinker as far more

interesting and amusing.10

The idea of myths as significant resources of meaning for ethnic identity construction

and the function of family in mediating knowledge of the classical stories is presented anew at

the end of Thompson’s story, when the narrator once again radically shifts ground. Early in the

narrative, Ariadne remarks that being only six years old she was “much too young . . . to

comprehend the great, complex, anomalous quality of the ancient Greek mythology,” or to

understand “its many profiles” (17-18). Reaching the end of her memoir, the narrator expressly

contradicts her earlier observation of myths as trifling stories that belong to an ancient age, re-

emphasizing the mother’s function as culture bearer:

Combining pleasure with learning Mama always gleaned [her stories] from the

store of Greek mythology which was at her fingertips and soothed us as we went

of to dreamland with tales of the gods and goddesses who swallowed their

children whole, drove people mad, cast men into the sea and women into Hades.

We listened while stories of wrath, vengeance, pride, vanity and even promiscuity

among the immortals fell upon our ears. (193-94)

10 Giulia Sissa and Marcel Detiennes account for the “ambiguity” discernable in the Homeric

representation of the Olympians in their book The Daily Life of the Greek Gods. Investigating the common origin of the mythical figures and their world as created by Homer and Hesiod, these writers remind us that throughout the Western literary tradition “comparisons are constantly drawn between the lives of humans and the lives of the gods” (4). Yet the representation of the Olympians in human form, they argue, is “ambiguous” (5). The writers note that while the Homeric world stresses the gods’ exceptional status with regard to attributes such as strength, knowledge, power to control events, and immortality, it also attributes the Olympians with human characteristics.

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Thompson, this passage confirms, plays with the meaning of myth. By challenging her previous

assertion about myths, by interrupting one specific set of meanings and functions for these

communal stories, the author allows for their function to be multiform rather than internally

consistent. Hence the author’s allusion, in the above quote, to the amusement, or in her own

words “pleasure,” of listening to the ancient Greek myths concedes the point that myths can

harbor multiple meanings. Additionally, the passage reveals that the myths are not just part of a

decayed civilization and an ancestral ethnic past. They are alive and have meaning in the sense

that they are evoked not merely to lull the children to sleep; they are referred to for purposes of

ethnic identity.

Early in the narrative the narrator ascribes to Parnassus, the house of her childhood

summers, a “fairyland quality” (12), an attribute which, by contrast to the “fairly-tale [sic!]

quality” (189) of the Greek myths, purports enthusiasm and conveys magical or supernatural

powers. The fairy-like nature of Parnassus, a quality that as the narrator says, “quickened our

hearts” (12), is not the result, as readers may first believe, of “the fruitful orchards, . . . rolling

pasture and fertile farmland” (12) that surround it. Nor is it contained exclusively in the objects

of the house—the secret messages or pressed flowers found in the old library books, the hiding

place behind the bricks in the chimney where Auntie kept her jewel box—that to a child gave an

“air of mystery and suspense” (110). The enchanting quality and mythical essence that the

narrator ascribes to Parnassus and to her childhood is to be found, I suggest, in the totality of

the life that is led in this elaborately fanciful house with “Greek statues on the newel posts”

(220). It is embodied in the activities that blend Greek culture with American attributes, Old

World with New World ideas, ancient mythical past with present, and the ordinary with the

extraordinary. In other words, what makes the house alive is the presence of the family, and the

individuals that make up this family, their joys and concerns that are informed by questions of

ethnicity, old values and new influences, generational differences, and gendered identities.

Consequently, the octagonal house, which embodies the narrator’s dearest childhood

memories and particular experiences of growing up Greek American, becomes the metaphorical

“heart” of this narrative, a link which brings the physical and the mental, body and spirit,

together. The narrator fashions the house, a structure that once contained her bodily, into a

metaphor for the heart—regarded as the center of an individual’s total personality, intuition,

feeling and emotion—an act which reminds the reader of the well-known saying “home is where

the heart is,” and suggests that her self-conception is significantly shaped by her ethnic

background and familial history. More than metaphorically pronounced in the title, the

representation of the house as a metaphor of self and locus of ethnic and gender identification is

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explicitly stressed in the narrator’s concluding reflections that, even though the house is burnt

down, it “lives sweetly undisturbed in the heart. It holds out its arms as compassionately as ever.

. . . It is all still there. It awaits only to be recalled to come back to a heart shaped by its

memories” (220-1). These nostalgic remarks suggest that, in the end, the child’s queries have

come together in the grown-up narrator’s story. Though Thompson’s text does not address, in

an explicit or critical manner, any of the social concerns and political debates around issues of

ethnicity and assimilation that so crucially defined the times of the narrator’s childhood, it offers

valuable insights into what it means for the America-born generation to be Greek, and especially

what it implies to be a Greek woman caught between the cultural demands of family and the

influences of society at large, the relevance of the Greek myths for ethnic identity formation in a

country where children read the stories of Mother Goose, and the status of family for the

shaping of an ethnic consciousness and gendered identity.

Re-visioning Familial Bonds, Re-mything Ancient Stories

Like Ariadne Thompson’s autobiography, Catherine Temma Davidson’s debut novel, The Priest

Fainted, stresses the importance of ancestral myths for identity, and depicts family as an

important site of ethnicity. Published in 1998, Davidson’s work picks up on tensions present in

some of the earlier texts discussed in this study with regard to gender structures and family

relations, and attends to them from an explicitly feminist angle. Additionally, the novel displays a

self-conscious seeking of identity and roots, a quest for which, as we will see, myths play a

significant role. Fictionalizing a young Greek American woman’s return to an ancestral place of

origin, the novel employs myths of divine foremothers and stories of mortal mothers and

grandmothers as important elements in the protagonist’s self-identification as an ethnic person

and as a woman. But in order for the classical myths to both yield knowledge of and to function

as significant constituents in the process of identity construction for the narrator they need to be,

as argued in the introduction to this chapter, “re-mythed.” In other words, re-mything as a term

is meant to signify an active and deliberate practice of re-writing the patriarchal ideologies of the

stories that make up part of the ethnic culture that the protagonist is genealogically connected to.

The aim is to transcend historical constructions of female identity, and challenge some of the

cultural ideals of family life that shape our perceptions and expectations of family and gender

roles. The act of re-mything is thus a cognitive and creative process, which connects to

Mohanty’s cognitivist conception of experience and his understanding of identities as theoretical

constructions. Through the re-mything practice, I argue, the narrator pursues a personal project.

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She develops knowledge of and grounding in the histories of her family and ethnic culture. It is a

revisionary process that allows her to evaluate her experiences, and serves to “theoretically”

inform and inspire her sense of ethnic and gender identity.

Davidson’s narrator, who remains nameless throughout the novel, is a third-generation

Greek American on her mother’s side and the daughter of a Jewish father.11 Desiring to find out

more about her Greek ancestry, the twenty-one-year old narrator decides to move to Greece.

Compelled to “[fish] into [her] mother’s story, trying to find the beginning” (233) of her own

ethnic origin and her place among women in her family, the narrator follows in the footsteps of

her mother’s adventure in Greece thirty years earlier, trying to discover the endings of the stories

she heard as a child, stories about her mother’s and dead Greek grandmother’s lives, inaudible

stories, stories that “spilled accidentally or turned up on the back of old photographs, caught in a

box hidden deep in the garage” (9).

Alongside the narrator’s physical travel back to the homeland of her Greek immigrant

grandparents another journey is set in motion, one which takes place across time and pertains to

the mind: the narrator travels through the mythical past to the lives of the gods and goddesses of

Olympus, which she re-myths in innovative ways. Convinced that “every woman needs a story”

(6), the narrator wants to “tear back the stories and find out what was really going on” (87)

behind the portrayals of brave male heroes with flashing swords and the nagging, angry wives

and overprotective mothers. By changing the familiar plots of the Greek myths, Davidson’s

narrator brings attention to and re-visions traditional ideas about women’s place and role within

the family.

The act of re-mything can thus be understood to display a set of theoretical issues in the

novel that can be anchored to those of feminism as well as to Mohanty’s understanding of

identities as theoretical constructs. Mohanty’s position on identity, as explained earlier in this

chapter, involves the argument that our personal experiences are socially constructed and that

“our access to our remotest personal feelings is dependent on social narratives, paradigms, and

even ideologies” (Literary Theory 208). There are, however, Mohanty asserts, “better or worse

social and political theories, and we can seek less distorted and more objective knowledge of

social phenomena by creating the conditions for the production of better knowledge” (214). The

narrator’s re-mythings can be seen in the light of Mohanty’s theoretical thinking, which bases

cognition in personal experience, and emphasizes that “theory-laden and socially constructed

experiences can lead to knowledge that is accurate and reliable” (209). Identities, the narrator’s

11 Davidson’s act of not naming her narrator/protagonist is a narrative device commonly used in literature

exploring issues of ethnicity. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) is another example of a work that takes the issue of ethnicity as a focal point and presents a nameless narrator to the reader.

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re-mythed stories can be seen to imply, can be evaluated in relation to “alternative descriptions

of the world” (Mohanty 230). The notion of re-mything is particularly apt for describing the

narrator’s reconstruction of alternative theories as well as Davidson’s explicit incorporation of

feminism in her novel.

When Davidson’s protagonist starts out on her journey, her knowledge of the

circumstances and events that have shaped her mother’s and grandmother’s lives is very limited.

She has yet to realize why “[h]eroines’ adventures end abruptly,” and why it is significant to

“discover the lines that run on after the man, after the island, after the escape from the houses of

their fathers” (235). As she learns more about the lives of her female relatives and re-invents the

fates of the goddesses of Olympus, the narrator acquires new knowledge about ethnicity and

womanhood, and discovers, I argue, alternative theories with which to interpret her own story as

a Greek American woman. What are some of the re-orientations in her thinking that the

narrator’s recreations of her mother’s and grandmother’s lives and the re-mythings of the fates

of ancient goddesses allow her to discover? How are these alternative theories or stories linked

to ideas about family and the narrator’s process of dealing with her individual experiences,

emotions, and developing sense of an ethnic and gender identity? In what follows, I discuss how

the narrator’s growth in her knowledge about her ethnic self and her development of a feminist

consciousness are situated in the context of her familial as well as cultural histories. I

demonstrate how the histories of the narrator’s Greek American mother and immigrant

grandmother (and, subsequently, how the Greek mythical figures and their stories) stress

concerns that challenge traditional family structures and serve as vehicles for ethnic and

gendered consciousness-raising.

The narrator’s process of ethnic identity formation, and her concerns with what forms

and constitutes the “Greek,” and consequently also the “American,” start taking shape in her

sub-consciousness already when she is a young girl. Born and brought up in America and with

no immediate connection to Greece, being Greek for the young narrator initially involves

conversing with her Greek grandfather in the garden, where he spends his time tending plants.

The child’s first associations with “Greekness” are informed by the language the grandfather

uses to describe the surrounding world to her. Davidson’s novel can thus be seen to emphasize a

linguistic basis for ethnicity, which is in line with the studies on the connection between ethnicity

and language acquisition discussed in Chapter Two. In the narrator’s case, however, it is the

extended family that nourishes her sense of ethnicity through language, and not the parents.

More specifically, though the child’s initial experiences of “Greekness” are stressed as being

linked to the figure of the grandfather, who after the death of his wife is invited to become a

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permanent member of his daughter’s family, the voice that calls the young narrator, leading her

outside to the backyard where her grandfather sits, “belongs to [her] dead grandmother” (17). It

is the grandmother, we are told, who tries to speak to the narrator, who “wants [her] to learn

something” (16), and who smiles when the grandchild acquires the Greek language in the

company of the grandfather. Whereas the grandfather’s appearance in the story slowly fades

away after his death eight years after the conversation in the backyard, the presence of the dead

grandmother, the woman “who started the new-world story” (106), and after whom the narrator

is named, lingers on. Her voice continues to speak to her grandchild.12 Let me mention at this

point that the idea that grandmothers (dead or alive) nurture the American-born individuals’

early experiences of ethnicity through language re-iterates in Nicholas Papandreou’s novel A

Crowded Heart.

Her mother’s Greek family, including relatives in the New as well as the Old World,

continues to shape the young narrator’s understandings of her ethnic origins. Visiting her

mother’s relatives in New York, her associations with “Greekness” are formed as those of

“polyester furniture, women with big doughy arms feeding [them] oily meats and tooth-

numbingly sweet deserts” (27). On the first family vacation in Greece, she is not much impressed

with her Greek relatives who, she remarks, are large and display bad teeth, “an unforgivable

offense to a young American from a middle-class family with expensive orthodonture” (27).

Greece for her is “what it is for so many outsiders—the edge of Europe, the back alley, faintly

seedy and litter-strewn” (26). These remarks stress the narrator’s adherence to her

“Americanness;” they indicate that in the beginning of the narrative her Greek ethnic heritage,

including her Greek family, is incomprehensible to her, a source of disappointment and

annoyance.

The second time the narrator goes to Greece, at the age of nineteen, for a college

language program, a change can be traced in her engagement with Greece and her Greek origins.

A shift in alliances is noticeable. The narrator begins to re-think her view of “Americanness,” the

part of herself that, up until this point, she has taken for granted, and embraces, unreservedly

and for the first time, her ethnicity. Annoyed by the instructor’s suggestion to take the first

sightseeing trip at noon (in her view an insane hour at which to be striding uphill) and irritated

by the fact that Americans “seem to feel they have the right to explore when and where they

12 In the poem “Across the Water,” Davidson writes about her Greek grandmother’s journey from the Old to the New world, and her experiences in America. The last verse of the poem emphasizes the strong presence of the grandmother in the life of the poet, in ways that recall the narrator’s relationship with her dead grandmother in The Priest Fainted. It reads: “My grandmother in me is a dark thread, woven: / her name in my name, her shaded coloring / her love of loved and undertended gardens. / She is a shadow in my blood that wakes me / some days wooly with anger, dry tongued, / swollen. She strikes like a fist to my head, / like ice in spring on a river cracking open” (29-35).

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choose” (47), she decides that “the United States is a land of idiots and children” (47). These

comments imply a transformation of ethnic consciousness, which is further highlighted by the

narrator’s third trip to Greece, which is compelled by her intentions to trace her familial history

by way of moving to the country.

Playing on the idea of “the magical three,” Davidson wittingly obliges her heroine to

undergo three visits to Greece before she fully attends to her concerns of ethnic and gender

identity. There was something, the narrator knows, that her “mother had come to Greece to

discover. What was it?” (59). She tries to imagine what her mother’s experiences while in Greece

might have been like, realizing that there is only one way of finding out: “to go back to the story

and enter it myself” (60). So she embarks on a journey, wanting to discover more of “the stories

of the women in [her] family [that] had shattered in pieces” (106). She travels the path her own

mother and grandmother had trodden: she visits Retsiani, the mountain village where her

grandmother’s roots are, a place her mother went back to see during her stay in Greece in 1955.

The village, she reasons, as she reflects on what it had been like to leave it, “was not enough to

sustain so many daughters, each needing a dowry. The youngest son could stay, but the girls

were sent to follow their older brother, first to Larissa, which must have seemed like the end of

the world, then to Athens, then to the port and down into the hold of the ship” (115). This

comment makes explicit the effects of family on the individual, and suggests how patriarchal

structures mold and determine women’s lives within the family. To be “a daughter of the

village,” like the narrator’s grandmother, “was to be a vessel into which social codes were

battered” (52).

Besides unfolding the prescribed roles and social functions that define the traditional

family unit, the above comment serves to remind the reader of the circumstances that forced the

Greeks into their great diaspora: the desperate economic situation of the country. As pointed out

in Chapter One, the majority of the first immigrants who came to the U.S. shores came, like the

narrators’ grandparents, from the villages of rural Greece. Only a very small number of

immigrants came to the New World with the exclusive privileges held by the family depicted in

Thompson’s narrative. Depending on the immigrants’ very distinct prospects and fortunes in the

new country, ethnicity could take on different meanings and produce divergent experiences for

families and their individuals.

The stories of the narrator’s Greek female family function to establish ethnic continuity.

But they also give expression to family matters, allowing the protagonist to develop an

understanding of the traditional gender structures that define family life, especially how these

shape the lives of female family members. As someone belonging to the second generation of

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Greeks in America, her mother’s life was strongly marked by the diasporic history of her family.

“To gain protection in the new land” her mother’s family “kept to the old rules” (52), a

comment that reminds the reader of the circumstances figuring in the household depicted in The

Octagonal Heart. Like the America-born children in Thompson’s story, her mother learns to

negotiate two lives. At home, she is the Greek daughter “never raising her voice, always saying

yes” (21); outside, “she had learned to speak, with an edge as hard as leather boots” (21). She is

the first one in her family to attend college, an ambition that, as in The Octagonal Heart, the

mother’s family does not readily support. Instead she “forged her father’s signature on the

college application” (20) in order to get there, and in her final year of college she is elected

student body president, the first woman ever elected to that post. This fact stresses not just how

substantially different a daughter’s life in the New World could turn out from her immigrant

mother’s, but also accentuates the gradual changes that were taking place in the U.S. in the 1960s

and onward with regard to women’s growing opportunities for attaining personal fulfillment

outside the confines of the family.

As discussed in Chapter Two, sociohistorical research on Greek American families

highlights differences regarding issues linked to family structure as well as ethnicity identification

as signs of generational transformations. Being a third generation Greek American, the young

narrator’s commitments to her ethnic origins are, as might be expected, very weak. Her

indifference finds expression, for example, in her cries of relief at age eleven when her parents

give her and her siblings the choice to stop attending Saturday school to learn Greek. As a result,

she loses her ability to speak the Greek language, and in her adolescence she cannot follow her

mother’s telephone conversation with “another world in a strange voice” (18). Family language

development, Davidson’s novel suggests, does not seem to be a high priority in ethnically-mixed

families. Also Athas’s Greece by Prejudice, discussed in Chapter Three, illustrates the effects of a

waning interest in family language development. And yet both texts underline the relevance of

language as a marker of ethnic identity; both writers occasionally insert Greek words in the

notation system of the English language in their texts. “If I close my eyes,” the 15-year-old

narrator remarks when listening to her mother speaking Greek, “I can fall into the rhythm of this

speech and believe I understand the meaning of the words. Almost, almost, I am about to break

into the blue world of the old language. I can feel my grandmother rising up in me, a perfect

wave” (18). This passage suggests that knowledge of the ethnic language stimulates the narrator’s

connections with her ethnic ancestors and nurtures a stronger interest in ethnic identity.

The foreign realm of the narrator’s heritage and her intensified interest in finding out

more about it are emphasized by a vocabulary that activates associations to genealogy as both

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intensely pleasurable and highly menacing. “Perhaps in moving to Greece,” the adult narrator

reflects,

I was following a dark line in my blood; perhaps I craved it, wanted its bite,

wanted it to bite me. Maybe after two generations in America, I was seeking it

out in order to bite back, to swallow bitterness in order to turn it into sweet. To

find my own adventure, I had to be pursued by one story before being rescued

by another. (68)

More than highlighting the connections between ethnic identity and family, these contemplations

stress how significantly “real” identities are, to refer back to Mohanty’s theoretical formulation.

The narrator’s strong inducement to explore her ethnicity and find out more about her

bloodlines is presented as a compulsive but material craving which, interestingly, can be seen to

both reflect and complicate what sociological research has emphasized about the role of the

family institution and Greek ethnic identification among the American-born generations, namely,

that they have significantly weakened. It is true that family histories in Davidson’s text function

as tools for stimulating Greek ethnic identification but, at the same time, family relations work as

reminders of the constant negotiations that characterize the narrator’s construction of a Greek

American identity. Unlike what the narrator and her Greek relatives like to pretend, “the

generations in America” have not “evaporated” (44). In their company she is a “visitor and

native, outsider and insider” (239), and their country appears both “familiar and strange” (239).

The narrator’s inversely related experiences of being both “at home and displaced” (93) while in

Greece exhibit the strengths and challenges of the process of claiming a Greek ethnic identity

when profoundly mediated through family. Though she seems comfortable with the view of

herself “as a potential new Greek, a returning daughter, [that would have] to learn their rules”

(70)—a description of ethnicity noticeably inflected by a vocabulary of kinship and family—she

also senses “an invisible fence” (126) in the company of her Greek relatives. This fence involves

issues pertaining to distance and language, but also to class (as the narrator’s previous remarks on

expensive orthodonture suggested), factors that centrally affect family relations and shape the

process of ethnic identity formation.

The life experiences and histories of foremothers embody not just ethnic but also female

consciousness. The narrator acknowledges the need for (gendered) family and community, a

need which is both affective and cognitive, in the process of negotiating and claiming an identity.

This is suggested by the very narrative structure of the novel and, more particularly, by the

narrator’s motive for travelling. In the beginning of the novel, the young narrator’s relationship

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with her mother is recounted as a nexus of conflict over issues of independence and sexuality.

The image of family as encumbrance, a site that inhibits the narrator’s full experience of self, is

gradually modified in the narrative. Years later, when the grown-up narrator moves to Greece to

re-create the fragmented stories of her mother’s and grandmother’s lives, she is convinced that

“Women need their mother’s stories” (24). The representation of female family as key to the

narrator’s personal quest is further illuminated when the narrator understands that part of the

“all too familiar” (163) story of her mother, which she had known as a child, also “belonged to

[her]” (163). Like her mother, who had once forgotten what she thought she wanted and had

looked for a change by traveling to her ancestor’s country, thinking that it would propel her into

a new life, the narrator, too, decides to abandon “the tracks in the earth laid out for her” (193).

Much like her mother, she resolves to invent her own life, to keep “what she wanted from her

mother’s past and [discard] what tasted too sour or cost too much” (219). This observation

stresses identity formation not merely as a process influenced by family but as one significantly

shaped by individual agency and free will. Identity formation, the novel underscores, is not

purely a social matter; it is not only influenced by family or the theories and accounts provided

by one’s social environment. A necessary part of a person’s interpretation of her experiences is,

in fact, determined by the individual, as the passage quoted above also confirms. Pursued by

family stories, the protagonist recognizes the importance of seeking her own adventure in the

process of forming a self and a sense of ethnic and gender identity.

But all adventures eventually come to an end, and so does this one. When the narrator is

ready to return to America, there is a transformative experience, a deepened understanding,

present in the description of the mother-daughter relationship. The end of Davidson’s narrative

constructs family, to use Baca Zinn and Eitzen’s formulation, “as the physical site for a vast (and

repressed) range of human expression” (7): from annoyance and discomfort to fulfillment and

strength. The narrator realizes that her mother is no longer a part of herself that she has to fight

against (255). Interestingly, however, the ideal of family that Davidson evokes at the end of her

novel as a realm of harmony and togetherness does not include a father figure. Though the

narrator’s family exhibits a nuclear family configuration including two heterosexual married

adults and their children, who sustain relations with extended family, the Jewish father, like the

Greek grandfather, makes few appearances in the story. Most likely, the noticeable absence of

the father is the result of the narrator’s concerns with her Greek ethnic origin and identity as well

as with gender identity, which are in significant ways nurtured and sustained by her Greek female

family.

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As earlier suggested, the narrator’s search for her own ethnic identity and place among

women in her family is based not just on a new understanding of familial stories but also of her

cultural heritage. Greek myth, more specifically the act of re-mything, is stressed throughout The

Priest Fainted as a process significant for the formation of an ethnic but also gendered and clearly

feminist consciousness. By re-imagining and re-shaping a variety of mythological women such as

Psyche, Aphrodite, Demeter, Persephone, and Medea, to name but a few, the narrator shows

that “every story can be told, and in so many different ways” (9).13 Although strength by reason

of divine authority is an attribute ascribed to the Olympian goddesses in the classical tales, the

narrator’s re-mythings create female characters with the power to influence their own fates and

intense desires. The goddesses that she fashions do not merely “live by love, waiting passively on

the sidelines, [as] the reward or the temptation” (15). “With a little imagination,” the narrator

explains, “it is possible to see the stor[ies] very differently” (14). The narrator’s ambition to see

the stories through different lenses is, as I will show shortly, an act of defying traditional

representations of womanhood but also of defying traditional family ideals and nuclear family

configurations. Her re-visions illuminate the experiences of contemporary women, stressing roles

and concerns that go beyond those of being a good mother or wife. Additionally, I argue, the re-

mythings ask the readers to rethink traditional family patterns and living arrangements. To

illustrate how the above issues unfold in the narrator’s re-mythings, I will discuss her re-writing

of the myth of Psyche and Eros, and then move on to examine the myth of Medea.14

Davidson’s re-mything of Psyche’s adventure, I propose, can be interpreted in line with

Barbara Weir Huber’s re-visioning of the story in her book Transforming Psyche, mentioned in the

beginning of this chapter. Exploring the classical myth of Psyche and Eros, Huber shows how

this myth, which so overtly portrays female experience in a patriarchal context, can be

interpreted in a more modern vein to illuminate the experiences of present-day women. She

gives a woman-centered interpretation of Psyche’s adventure, one which shows how the classical

rendering of the myth, which is found in Metamorphoses and was first written down by Lucius

13 The myth motif is also prominent in Athas’s novel Cora (1978), which has been described as a

“meaningful variation on the story of Persephone” (Chappell 28). Athas includes a brief discussion of the myth of Persephone also in Greece by Prejudice.

14 In a recent essay, “Bi- or Mono-Culturalism?: Contemporary Literary Representations of Greek-American Identity,” Tsimpouki discusses The Priest Fainted, pointing to the narrator’s need to contest traditional structures as well as to “displace” (24) the inherited maternal model or narrative in order to achieve liberation from the confines of patriarchy. Though the point that Tsimpouki advances is significantly like mine, the primary focus of her discussion of the novel is not to show how the narrator achieves empowerment by challenging traditional structures and gender arrangements. Rather, reading the text from a postcolonial theoretical perspective and a “bicultural approach,” Tsimpouki’s aim is to show how juxtapositions of insider and outsider, visitor and native in Davidson’s text, as well as the narrator’s investment in stereotypes in her representations of “the Greek Other” (22), point toward a “complicated notion of bicultural identity, one that is already discursively constructed through its relation to the Other” (22). Given the focus of her essay, Tsimpouki does not present any lengthy discussion or interpretation of the narrator’s re-writings of the classical myths, as I do here.

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Apuleius, “accentuates the powerlessness of the women” (45) by supporting a patriarchal social

order.15 My interpretation of Davidson’s rendition of the myth is both woman- and family-

centered. I refer to Huber’s re-telling of the myth of Psyche and Eros as well as emphasize the

family matters that Davidson’s re-mything of it highlights.

Davidson’s re-mything rewrites Psyche’s adventures in ways that do not, to use Huber’s

words, “underscor[e] women’s loss of voice and agency” (45). Rather than presenting a narrative

that makes Eros and his experience the focus of the story (which for Huber is an obvious

concern in the traditional myth) the narrator in The Priest Fainted portrays a Psyche with agency,

voice, independence, and desire. In contrast to Apuleius’s myth of Psyche, which portrays a

young maiden who is silenced and obedient, the narrator offers a rendition where Psyche does

not remain outside the action. In fact, in her version of the story, it is not Eros who “falls in love

with [Psyche] and whisks her off to his palace” (13), but Psyche who “dreams up Eros out of her

own boredom” (14). Thinking that “there must be more to life” than waiting to be married off to

“the fat sons of her father’s neighbors” (14), Psyche rebels against her situation rather than

submitting to it. Every evening, “she stares at the horizon, imagining fate walking out of the

haze” (14), until, one day, following a voice in her ears that leads her to a marble palace, she

meets her lover, whose face she cannot see. He “talks to her about her life” (14, emphasis added)

and, between kisses, he tells her to “lie down on the satin pillows, to open and relax” (14).

Though Davidson’s re-mything, at this point, does not completely challenge traditional

perceptions of male versus female sexual desire—Eros takes command of the sexual act, he tells

Psyche to relax—the re-writing of the myth makes erotic pleasure part of Psyche’s experience,

and emphasizes the necessity for Psyche to act for herself, as opposed to allowing others to act

on her behalf, in forming her life and sense of self.

Family issues are at the heart of the narrator’s re-mything of the tale of Psyche and Eros,

which, I argue, disputes some of the prevailing myths about the family. Psyche’s agency, the

novel suggests, springs from a daughter’s frustration over the pressures and patriarchal confines

of family. She imagines a different fate than the one her father has in mind—“barter[ing] [her]

for pigs like her sisters” (14)—and decides to follow the voice she hears in her ears. “Predicting

her mother’s disapproval” of her sexual adventures “only makes her [Psyche’s] desire more

fierce” (14), a comment which reminds the reader that sexuality was also the subject of the

young narrator and her mother’s disputes. By making Psyche the agent of her own life and

sexuality the narrator challenges a commonly held image of family as “a single actor with a single

set of interests” (Baca Zinn and Eitzen 16); it cuts through romantic assumptions about family as

15 Unlike Apuleius, Huber uses the divinities’ Greek names (Aphrodite and Eros) instead of the Latin ones (Venus and Cupid).

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a unity with common needs and common experiences. Her re-mything also shows the

fundamental flaws is the idea of family as “based on ‘companionate’ or ‘consensual’ relations”

(Baca Zinn and Eitzen 18). Envisaging, when Eros disappears, the reactions of her mother and

sisters, who will “say that they warned her while they wrap themselves around their husbands”

(15), Psyche decides to look for her lover instead of returning home. Individuals, this choice

suggests, to use Baca Zinn and Eitzen’s formulation, “do not always find nurturance and support

in their families” (19).

The re-mything of Psyche’s story additionally shows that when family members do not

find emotional support within the family realm they may seek it in other people. The person that

provides Psyche with the support that she seeks is her future mother-in-law, Aphrodite, a re-

writing of the traditional story which underlines female solidarity and companionship as more

important than the genealogical connections between mother and son. The narrator’s version of

the myth contests the representation of Aphrodite’s persona as we encounter her in Apuleius’s

Metamorphoses. Apuleius presents Aphrodite as a wrathful and fiery goddess who shows her fury

by “ripp[ing] her [Psyche’s] dress into several pieces, [tearing] her hair, and beat[ing] her head,

hurting her sorely” (329).16 “The famous story of Aphrodite and her son, Eros,” the narrator

observes, “reveals [the goddess’s] worst qualities” (13).17 It devalues her associations with golden

beauty, sunshine, earth and water, fertility, wisdom, and creative power, and renders her a

goddess of sexuality, the “flaxen-haired and large-breasted, the Marilyn Monroe of the Olympus”

(13) or simply the “typical Greek mom, jealous and overprotective” (14). In line with Huber,

who sees opportunities in the traditional myth for an interpretation of Aphrodite “as a mentor of

wholeness, of holiness, and of transformation for Psyche” (52), Davidson’s narrator renounces

the reductive visions of Aphrodite and advances new aspects to the plot of the myth. “In my

version,” she explains, “Aphrodite herself inspires Psyche to drop hot wax on her lover’s chest”

(14) as she illumines him with a lamp to see his face. For Psyche, Aphrodite is “the beat of her

blood pounding her inner ear, the part of her that says, This is not enough” (14). So by assigning

Psyche tasks Aphrodite means not to destroy her but to make her “face her fears, to be strong”

(15). Aphrodite, a single mother, knows that her son “is in danger of becoming another of

Psyche’s confining horizons” and that love is “a testing ground” (15). Thus she provides

opportunities for Psyche to recognize her own power. She teaches her patience and bravery,

16 I quote from John Arthur Hanson’s translation of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses. Hanson’s translation exists in two volumes but it is only the first, in which the story of Psyche is found, that I reference here.

17 In her poem “Aphrodite,” Greek American poet Olga Broumas poignantly captures the reductive and patriarchally defined vision of the goddess as cruel and raging (as found in, for example, Apuleius’s tale of Psyche and Cupid): “The one with the stone cups / and the stone face, and the grinding / stone settled / between her knees, the one with stone / in her bosom, with stones / in her kidneys, a heart of pure / stone, the one with the stony lips [. . .]” (1-7). As opposed to Davidson, however, Broumas does not “correct” this representation.

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preparing her for an eternity face-to-face with a god. In this version of the myth, “Aphrodite and

Psyche are allies” (14), a re-writing which corresponds to Huber’s interpretation of the goddess

as a mentor and “mother figure” (76). As the title of the third chapter in Davidson’s novel

signals, it recounts the story of “Psyche and Aphrodite” rather than that of “Eros and Psyche.”

The parallel drawn between the ancient myth of Aphrodite and the modern myth-making

of Marilyn Monroe deserves some reflection, as it raises issues of historio-cultural representation

and what constitutes femaleness. The mythic representations of the Greek deity and the mass-

mediated and mass-consumed representations of Monroe as an American goddess reveal that

cultural constructions of the feminine have not recognized or accepted any connections between

sensuous sexuality and motherliness. Paul Friedrich notes in The Meaning of Aphrodite that there

has been a consistent suppression of the mother figure in the representations of Aphrodite.

Early poets, Friedrich writes, say little about the goddess’s qualities as a mother: “Aphrodite’s

maternal love is significant but minor compared with her erotic subjectivity” (191). In like

manner, examining the movie star and cultural phenomenon “Marilyn Monroe,” critics discuss

how Norma Jeane Baker, the woman, has been reduced to a sex symbol and an icon of feminine

mystique. In his study of Marilyn Monroe, Graham McCann writes that “[s]he was marketed as

the modern mistress, yet she yearned for monogamy and motherhood” (8). The mystification

incarnated in the persona of Monroe, her life narrative and her early death created a myth,

McCann remarks, that biographers have tried to correct ever since. And authors continue to

refer to Monroe as a goddess or portray her “as a manipulative, conniving female with only her

own interests at stake, and with a ruthless drive to succeed at any cost” (McCann 42).18 Given

the representations of Monroe and Aphrodite as one-dimensional objects of beauty or sexuality,

I read the narrator’s reference to Monroe as an implicit critique of patriarchal, antithetical views

of women as sexual creatures or caring mothers, which is also invoked in McCann’s observation

about Monroe quoted above.

The comparison between Aphrodite and Monroe unfolds cultural-historical

constructions of maternity and sexuality as oppositional experiences. This opposition also

informs the traditional family ideal of a heterosexual, monogamous couple. Much traditional

sociological family research makes evident that active sexuality or sexual desire is seldom, if ever,

discussed in relation to motherhood, the quintessence of women’s roles within a nuclear family

configuration.

As earlier mentioned, searching for the “[f]eminine power [that] is hidden under the

Greek culture, as in so many others” (237), the narrator re-myths a number of classical tales, an

18 The idea of Monroe as a goddess is, for example, introduced in the title of investigative journalist Anthony Summers’s book from 1985 Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.

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activity which also leads her to uncover and challenge prevailing myths about family and family

life. Another example of a powerful re-imagined account of a traditional myth in Davidson’s

Bildungsroman is the tale of Medea, which, I again emphasize, advances new configurations of

family relations and womanhood. Like the re-mything of the tale of Psyche, the story of Medea

exhibits gender identities as social and cultural sites that, in line with Mohanty’s identity theory,

are open to revision on the basis of new or relevant information.

Medea is “the most famous Thessalian witch” (112), says the narrator, whom we know

from the traditional myth as Jason’s wife and assistant in obtaining the Golden Fleece. We know

her as the mad woman who, when deserted by her husband, kills their children. But as the

narrator speculates why a woman who knew powerful spells fell for Jason, her re-mything

reminds the reader that “Without Medea, Jason had no chance” (113):

I picture Medea when she first sees Jason. . . . He ripples with single-minded

determination, eyes gleaming with his mission. Imagine how attractive that is to

Medea, who has been worrying lately about how to balance all her roles—career

and family, performing rituals as a king’s daughter while needing to gather herbs

under a full moon. When he comes to her dripping, in sweat, and says, Only you

can help me, Medea, only you can understand, her heart stops. . . . Only after she uses

her mother’s magic to steal the Fleece from her own father, only after she kills

her brother to help her lover, does Medea lose her edge. (113)

Re-thinking the traditional story, the narrator depicts a Medea whose troubles begin

when she betrays her family and follows her lover to the distant province of Corinth where no

one knows her as the powerful and wise healer that she is. Away from her family and her land,

“surrounded by foreigners who do not speak her language” (114), Medea is terribly lonely. But

when Jason asks her to support his new marriage with a younger princess, Medea does not lose

her temper, murder the princess, or kill her children, as traditional versions of the myth has it. In

the re-imagined story, Medea goes mad for a different reason, she is “consumed with longing not

for her husband, Jason . . . but for her homeland” (114). As a result, she becomes morose, and

loses interest in her children. She leaves them in the care of their father, “never teaching them

the language that she alone can speak” (114). She destroys herself, and dooms her children “to

wander the world without her, wondering about the pain that sometimes seizes them, the

longing for something they have never known” (114).

The narrator’s story of Medea advances several explanations for this classical family

tragedy: an intense longing for family and homeland, and the significance of occupational

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activities for women’s and mother’s personal fulfillment and self-expression. Medea, we learn,

shares the familiar concerns of a modern woman, struggling to combine career with family.

However, in exile, where Medea goes mad, the narrator imagines her as “just another foreign

mother, another disposable woman who has nothing to say and no words with which to say it”

(114). But being only a mother, the narrative suggests, is not rewarding for this professional

sorceress, whose disillusionment begins when she loses her magic in a country where she cannot

find the herbs that she needs. Family alone does not bring Medea happiness or nurture her

personal needs. By “destroy[ing] herself” (114), Medea withdraws from her family responsibilities

and the gender roles that traditional types of family encompass. This re-writing of the myth can

thus be seen to release the female from the family-fixed role of mother and wife.

But Medea’s decision has consequences, the re-imagined story emphasizes. Her forsaken

children become emotionally dysfunctional, a re-vision of the story which can be read to issue a

warning of what may happen when the prescribed duties are not performed, when family fails to

provide emotional support and to be the haven where, according to traditional images, family

members love and protect each other unconditionally. The way I read it, however, the narrator’s

re-imagining of the myth of Medea, like any of the re-mythed stories, also functions as a source

of knowledge about the narrator. The end of the re-written story of Medea calls the reader’s

attention to the significance of ethnic language development, as centrally mediated by family, for

ethnicity, an experience which defines the narrator’s personal identity formation.

The narrator’s re-mythings, Davidson shows, generate knowledge about herself and

family as well as ethnic and gender identity, and furnish some of the substance with which she

constructs her identities and thus matures emotionally and intellectually. By reconstructing the

fragmented stories of the Greek women in her family and offering new accounts of the

traditional stories, the narrator has “refashioned them into morsels [she] can claim and swallow”

(121). The re-mythings make her discover the significance of the mythical patterns of the ancient

narratives of Greek goddesses, their connections with and presence in both her mother’s and her

own life. The story of Psyche, for example, echoes some of her mother’s experiences during her

year in Greece. Her relatives, the narrator imagines, were engaged with finding her a husband.

Fragments of stories reveal two suitors, a local dentist and an Athenian lawyer. The second of

the two was the more interesting candidate but there is little about him in the stories that her

mother tells her, and the narrator worries about him. “Trying to find him in the murky waters of

my genes,” she says, advancing a view of family relations as biological, “why do I know he would

have been handsome as well as cruel?” (124). He praises her mother’s hair and body, and her

charming accent, but as for her mind, “he ha[s] so much to teach her” (135). In his company, the

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narrator envisions her mother as being compliant, as always saying yes to the questions he asks,

including his marriage proposal. At some point, though, her mother begins to wonder whether

this is really what she wants for herself. Suddenly, she sees that falling in love with him implies a

“giving up of power” (182), and she breaks off the engagement. Like in the revised story of

Psyche, her mother chooses to make her own decisions.

The narrator’s interlacing of her mother’s history with the stories of ancient goddesses

helps the narrator see her own life resonate with the fates of the goddesses whose stories she

revises. Through imagination she projects herself into the lives of the goddesses and their

concerns, which allows her to realize that she, too, gives way to gods, and to admit to herself that

her boss Leo takes advantage of her by publishing the articles she has written under his name,

and that her Greek American lover Steve cheats on her, and abuses, and disgraces her. These

insights into her own life through the fates of mortal and divine mothers engender knowledge

for the narrator, and can further be illuminated with Mohanty’s argument that identities, as

theoretical constructions, “enable us to read the world in specific ways” (216). “It is in this sense

that they are valuable” the critic goes on to argue. Through our identities, “we learn to define

and reshape our values and our commitments” (216). Reshaping her values is exactly what the

narrator’s awareness of a gendered and ethnic identity permits her to do. “Rites of passage,” she

remarks, “are always associated with pain and endurance” (159), a reflection which sets afoot the

beginning of the end of her affair with Steve as well as her working relation with Leo. 19

As I have suggested earlier in my discussion, in order for Davidson’s narrator to come to

terms with her identity as a woman with an ethnic history, re-writing the power relations

engendered by the hierarchical structure of the society of the Olympians is not sufficient. Her

revised stories also need to forge connections between the past and the present, between the

ancient and the modern. In a colloquial tone, she therefore fashions the gods and goddesses as

figures inhabiting the daily living experiences of mortals in the late twentieth and early twenty-

19 As earlier noted, re-visioning myths to articulate female experience and subjectivity is, of course, a

project that many women writers from different cultures are involved in. Whether on a literal or on a theoretical level, the goals for these writers seem to be analogous, as are the ways of achieving these goals. As earlier noted, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is one well-known example of the feminist undertaking of re-visioning old myths, and through that history, to empower women. By rewriting and re-inventing the famous old myths of female deities such as Malinali, la Llorona, and the Virgin de Guadalupe in new ways, Anzaldúa, as Saldívar-Hull poignantly remarks in the introduction to the second edition of Borderlands, is “strategically reclaiming a ground for female historical presence” (6). Similar to the new mestiza who, in looking upon “the forces that . . . women have been part of” (104), in breaking down paradigms, “reinterprets history, and using new symbols . . . shapes new myths. . . . adopts new perspectives” (104), Davidson’s narrator re-myths the foundational stories of ancient Greece to find her own history as a Greek American woman. Notwithstanding the explicit resonance of Anzaldúa’s project, which Davidson’s narrative exhibits, it is absolutely essential, I believe, to be aware of and acknowledge the cultural varieties and differences that exist between the various projects. After all, Anzaldúa and other feminists with similar projects are situated in different geo-political locations, voicing highly different experiences of (gendered, racial, and sexual) marginalization.

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first centuries. She transforms the myths in ways that present the familiar as strange, and the

exotic as quotidian. In the narrator’s appropriations, the goddesses appear more human—

Psyche, for example, “is depressed, has stopped washing her hair, and has drunk and seen too

much” (15)—and their desires and concerns dictate their behavior as they do with mortals. By

placing the Greek divinities in family settings and living arrangements like those of contemporary

human beings, Davidson, as it were, domesticates and deflates the traditional and patriarchal

heroic world. At the same time, she advances the domestic as the site of the heroic, and the

realm of family life becomes, as in the singing and dressing-up activities at Parnassus in The

Octagonal Heart, mythic.

The re-imagined and reconstructed stories, I have argued so far, are powerful sources of

inspiration in the narrator’s identity formation. They inform her sense of self as a woman but

also as an ethnic subject. It is thus possible to understand the narrator’s journey to Greece in

terms of learning and personal growth. “The journey, as path and quest,” Huber claims, “occurs

frequently as a metaphor of learning because it implies change—usually growth—and putting

ourselves into the centre of the learning experience” (19). However, too often, Huber goes on to

say, the journey has been thought to represent “an experience gendered as male” (19). The

perfect example of this is the story of Odysseus, the traditional hero’s journey. This kind of

journey has come to imply a travelling without maps; it has come to be associated with a traveler

following unknown tracks. In the Western world, the story of the man on the road, or rather, of

the man making the roads, has been advanced as the prototype of a distinctly male adventure. I

refer to this discussion here since the word “odyssey” has been used to describe Davidson’s

journey to Greece. As reviewer Lisa Shea notes, Davidson has created “an admirable, appealing

heroine, a kind of female Odysseus that must survive the dangers and beauties of a foreign place

that happens to be her ancestral homeland.” Although Shea presents Davidson’s heroine as an

Odyssean female alter-ego, she downplays the obvious ethnic connection between the narrator’s

motive to travel to her Greek ancestors’ country and her concerns about identity. There is thus a

special urgency to the meaning of the protagonist’s journey, which, I argue, remains unnoticed in

Shea’s review of the novel.

In line with how the form of the ethnic Bildungsroman has been described, Davidson’s

novel expands the personality-oriented plot of the traditional genre. Instead, it represents the

community, in the form of female relatives and goddesses, as important for individual identity

formation. This social vision of identity development becomes evident in Davidson’s re-

gendering of the traditional Odyssey-story, which shows some significant differences between

the hero’s journey and that of the heroine’s. If the male heroic adventure “chafes at the confines

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of home and seeks enterprise for its own sake” (Huber 19), the female journey is a quest deeply

concerned with exploring the personal self. In this exploration of self and identity, Davidson’s

narrator is not the imprudent Homeric hero and rash adventurer whose conduct often endangers

the lives of his companions. Rather, like her mythic counterpart whose journey, in Huber’s

description, is “a soul’s journey on the soles of her feet in the footprints of the goddess

Aphrodite” (139), the narrator is involved in a cognitive and imaginative process. The act of re-

mything the stories of her divine as well mortal foremothers functions to provide the narrator

with theoretical knowledge about her personal life and gender ethnic identity. Through a

defamiliarizing intertwining of the “unfamiliar” stories of her foremothers and the “familiar”

classical Greek myths, the narrator constructs her identity as a Greek American woman.

In conclusion, what may a comparison between my analyses of The Octagonal Heart and

The Priest Fainted yield? Thompson’s and Davidson’s Bildungsromans attend to issues of ethnic and

gendered identity through an invocation of the classical Greek heritage. Each text implies the

central function of Greek myths as well as ethnic family as meaningful sources of self-

understanding and identity construction. These texts demonstrate that ethnic origins, whether in

the form of cultural or familial histories, provide knowledge which informs the Greek American

narrators’ theoretically-constructed identities. But the texts also display striking differences in the

ways they evoke the ancient heritage and approach matters of family and identity formation.

In The Octagonal Heart, family, especially mothers, evoke the traditional form and familiar

content of the ancient Greek myths in the process of ethnic identity formation, bestowing on the

America-born generation knowledge of their ethnic heritage. By contrast, the Greek American

narrator in The Priest Fainted playfully, yet acutely, and with an explicitly feminist voice, re-

constructs the fragmented stories of the women in her family and the ancient myths—in

particular the fates of Greek goddesses—to learn more about herself as a woman and an ethnic

subject. This act is what I have called re-mything: a cognitive and creative practice, which

functions to ground the protagonist in the histories of her ethnic culture, allowing her to evaluate

her personal experiences, and “theoretically” informing her sense of ethnic and gender identity.

By re-mything the patriarchal ideologies embedded in the ancient stories, delivering exciting and

woman-centered interpretations, the protagonist also challenges the gender structures implicated

in the traditional family ideal, and advances new configurations of family relations and living

arrangements.

The dissimilarities outlined in the chapter between the ways that Thompson’s and

Davidson’s narratives attend to matters of family, ethnicity, and gender are best understood as

centrally informed by the times in which each text was produced. To various degrees, both texts

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relate to a process of cultural change. If the continued affirmation of Greek ethnic identity is in

focus in both texts, the works emphasize that cultural transformation always occurs from one

generation to the next. However, a complexity prevails in the narratives with regard to this issue.

The Octagonal Heart is the work which most conspicuously appears to invite an assimilationist

reading, and yet it presents us with a narrator who does not explicitly claim an American

identity.20 The Priest Fainted presents us with a narrator who, with much self-consciousness, claims

not only Greek and American identities but also stresses her Jewish descent, thus contesting the

notion of a cultural homogeneity. These complexities, or contradictions, which also recur in

some of the other Greek American works discussed in this dissertation, trouble any easy readings

of the issues of ethnicity and ethnic identity formation, and challenge prescriptions of a linear

cultural transformation. Though Thompson’s and Davidson’s narrators are American-born, they

form attachments to and an understanding of their ethnic heritage through myths, re-mythings,

familial stories, ethnic language, and/or returns to the ancestral homeland, processes of identity

construction which are cross-cultural, multi-directional, and intrinsically mediated by Greek

family.

20 Seven years after the publication of The Octagonal Heart the story “Our Octagonal World” appeared in

Reader’s Digest (1963). This twenty-page long story is condensed from Thompson’s memoir but includes a new ending. The event which concludes this adaptation is a family reunion at the home of the narrator’s cousin Aphrodite, “built just outside the gates to the area where Parnassus once stood” (298). At this event, the narrator reflects on “the transformations” (299) that have taken place in their lives. “The Greek heritage,” she remarks, “was still there—in our sudden arguments, the emphatic gestures of our hands and the dark, heavy-lidded eyes of our children—but something distinctly American had been added. My sister Artemis was now Mrs. Edward Albertson, co-editor, with her husband, of a monthly newsletter called The American Purpose. Pericles was in the advertising business; as a hobby he played jazz on the piano. And all around us the children were talking about baseball, satellites and movie stars” (299). Despite these “distinctly American” influences, Thompson’s story, like her Bildungsroman, does not lend itself to a linear assimilationist reading. In the final paragraph of the story the narrator, watching the members of her family sing, laugh, and argue, describes them as being “at the same time so American and so Greek” (299).

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Chapter Five

Family, Politics, and Male Gender Identity in Papandreou’s

A Crowded Heart

You see what happens when a Greek man marries

an American woman? You get this.

Looks just like his mother.

Just like his father.

His grandfather.

—Nicholas Papandreou, A Crowded Heart

As my epigraph indicates, Nicholas Papandreou’s debut novel A Crowded Heart (1998)

foregrounds the family as a complex site of ethnic and gender identity formation. In the previous

chapter, I discussed the role of family in the process of forming an ethnic female identity. Here, I

return to this issue by focusing on the ways in which Greek male identity for Papandreou’s

Greek American narrator, Alex, is determined by the history of his male progenitors. More

specifically, I examine how the boy’s developing sense of ethnicity and masculinity is centrally

informed by his paternal origins. Alex’s self-formation, I argue, entails coming to terms with his

relationship with his father, a man who is more dedicated to his political enterprise and more

available to the general public than he is to his children.

A Crowded Heart is a coming-of-age novel. Over the course of sixteen vignettes Alex

recollects his childhood and adolescence. In the process he narrates the cultural experiences that

formed his process of self-development from child to young man, and his self-definition as an

individual of Greek American origins. Ethnicity and gender are, in other words, prominent

concerns of Papandreou’s narrative. Alex is a boy who early on has to cope with what it means

to inhabit and negotiate two very distinct worlds, the world of his American childhood in

California and the world of Greek politics for which his family leaves their American home in

the sixties, as a result of the father’s political ambitions. Integral to Alex’s coming of age process

is the relationship and interplay between individual experience, family (particularly male descent),

social location, and political context. The process of Alex’s identity formation, which is complex

due to his ethnic origin as the child of a Greek father with double citizenship and an American

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mother, is further complicated by his social position as the descendant of a famous Greek

political clan. The brutal arrest of the narrator’s father on the night of the Greek military coup in

1967 and the family’s subsequent life in exile in Canada are circumstances, I show, that bring

additional challenges to Alex’s sense of gendered self and ethnic identity.

As a result of the father’s association with politics and public life, family in A Crowded

Heart is quite complex in itself. In fact, two different representations of family seem to co-exist in

the narrative. First, the traditional manifestation of family as characterized primarily by

domesticity and the private world takes the form of a private unit consisting of a nuclear family

with extended relations, in Papandreou’s novel. This private family is sustained by mothers and

grandmothers who offer comfort and tenderness, but is also shown to function as a locus for

political action. Second, there is an idea of family which is connected to the public realm and is

eminently masculinized, void of privacy and intimacy. As a result of the father’s political position

in a time of social upheaval, family in A Crowded Heart is not constructed as a private and safe

haven seen in, for example, Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart. Even if many of the hierarchies

embedded in the traditional family ideal are also seen in A Crowded Heart, ideas about home as a

space of “privacy and security for families. . . . where members can feel at ease” (Collins, “It’s All

in the Family” 67) are not present in Papandreou’s novel. Instead, family becomes part of the

public world in which the father and grandfather are actors.

The social patterns and dynamics of gender structures are crucially related to the issue of

family and the negotiations of ethnic and gender identity in A Crowded Heart. Theoretical analyses

of gender relations are therefore significant sources of inspiration for my investigation of the

intimate interplay of ethnicity and masculinity, as manifested in Papandreou’s work. The power

relations of gender and social gender role expectations, as the discussions of Robert Connell,

Victor J. Seidler, and Lynne Segal account for, are crucial aspects of the broader social structures

from which knowledge of masculinity is produced. “Masculinity and femininity,” Connell

maintains, “are inherently relational concepts, which have meaning in relation to each other, as a

social demarcation and a cultural opposition. . . . Masculinity as an object of knowledge is always

masculinity-in-relation” (44). In my discussion of ethnic masculinity in A Crowded Heart, it should

be emphasized, I explore the specific meanings attached to maleness as portrayed in this Greek

American novel, set in the particular historical and political environment of a military junta. In a

Greece of political instability and fascism, the narrator’s sense of both ethnic and male identity is

intricately informed by his experiences of military violence and its effects on the father and, by

extension, the family. For this reason, a concise history of the military coup will render the

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specific political context in which the narrator’s ethnic masculinity is formed as more

comprehensible.

The military coup of 21 April 1967, a political revolt initiated by a small number of

colonels who, with virtually no bloodshed, revoked the legitimate government of Greece a

month before new elections were to be held, was a devastating development for the Greek

nation and its people, one which would last for seven years.1 Colonel George Papadopoulos

assumed the offices of Prime Minister and President of the Republic. The Parliament was shut

down, political parties were dissolved, press censorship was instituted, various articles of the

constitution guaranteeing human rights were suspended, and martial law was proclaimed. Anti-

communist in ideology, the regime imprisoned and/or sent into exile thousands of people with

records of left-wing political views or activity, among them politician George Papandreou and

his son Andreas Papandreou, the father of Nicholas Papandreou and the future Socialist prime

minister of Greece. In addition, civil servants and teachers whose allegiance was mistrusted were

dismissed, and the educational reforms of George Papandreou “were systematically dismantled,

school textbooks were rewritten, and entry to higher education made dependent on political

tests” (Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece 190).

The dictatorship was a regime of brutality; extremely harsh treatment was meted out to

the regime’s opponents. The Council of Europe was from the very beginning forthright in its

criticism toward the military junta. In 1969, as a result of a thorough investigation of the Greek

case, the Commission produced an extensive report which established evidence of systematic

torture and violation of human rights. The Council of Europe expressed its official disapproval

of the regime by proposing a suspension, even an expulsion, of Greece from the Council. 2

As opposed to the Council of Europe, which worked to undermine the legitimacy of the

regime, NATO, with which Greece was an ally, was less critical of the dictatorship. Though U.S.

public opinion opposed the military dictatorship, the Nixon administration supported it and

ensured that Greece “came under no real pressure from her NATO allies” (Clogg, A Short

1 The history of the military junta is, of course, a highly complex issue. It is impossible to go into an

exhaustive explanation of it here. The interested reader may turn to the vast literature on the subject, beginning with, to name a few works in English, Richard Clogg’s A Short History of Modern Greece (1986), James Becket’s Barbarism in Greece (1970), and Richard Clogg’s and George Yannopoulos’s edited collection Greece under Military Rule (1972). Some of the personal accounts that exist on the topic are Andreas Papandreou’s Democracy at Gunpoint: The Greek Front (1970), Amalia Fleming’s A Piece of Truth (1972), and Mikes Theodorakes’s Journals of Resistance (1973).

2 For a detailed description of the way in which the Council of Europe dealt with the Greek dictatorship and the Council’s support of the struggle for the return of democracy to Greece, see The Council of Europe Fights for Democracy in Greece, 1967-1969 (1998). The team at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that did the research for this booklet was led by Nicholas Papandreou. The Greek case, explain the writers, marks in many respects “a historic point in the history of the European Council.” It showed that if a member did not obey certain rules, there was a mechanism for reducing that member’s legitimacy. Moreover, as a result of the Council’s activities, “we no longer consider human rights as simply an ‘internal affair,’ but a matter of concern for all modern nations” (2).

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History of Modern Greece 192). The Pentagon was apparently particularly interested in maintaining

good relations with Greece because of the country’s strategic location. Moreover, Greece was an

ally in the fight against the ominous Soviet Union, a sufficiently strong reason for America to

remain the major supplier of military equipment to the regime.3

Supported by international critique of the junta, active opposition to the regime within

Greece was finally taken by university students. In November 1973, students occupied the

Athens Polytechnic and university buildings in Salonica and Patras.4 In an attempt to evict the

students, military troops stormed the Athens Polytechnic, which led to the death of at least 34

people and the arrest of almost a thousand.

This brutal demonstration of force generated widespread condemnation, and within

several days Papadopoulos was deposed in a bloodless coup mounted by the army. Instead of a

civilian government, the Papadopoulos junta was replaced by a new military regime with the

commander of the military police, Dimitrios Ioannidis, as its leader. The country was, however,

facing pressing problems. The tense relations between Greece and Turkey over the issue of

Cyprus reached their culmination, and after an ineffectual attempt to overthrow the Cypriot

government and an invasion by Turkey, the dictatorship began to dissolve. Seven years of brutal

military regime and tyranny finally came to an end in July of 1974.5

Given the significance of “politics” for Papandreou’s novel, and the broad spectrum of

meanings that “politics” has lately had in literary criticism, I wish to explain my use of the term

in this chapter. The widespread feminist proposition of the seventies, “the personal is political,”

is a slogan meant to launch a critique of the political values of the patriarchy, which created and

controlled personal structures. Currently, the word “politics” is time and again invoked in

phrases such as “identity politics,” “body politics,” “politics of truth,” “politics of belonging,”

and “politics of location,” which abound in literary and critical discussions. In such contexts, the

meaning of “politics” appears to diverge from the feminist conception of the political; roughly,

3 At the time, the U.S. was interested in continuing enjoying base facilities in Greece, in order to strengthen

its position in the Mediterranean. In a foreword to James Becket’s Barbarism in Greece (1970), when Greece was still under the control of the Colonels, U.S. Senator Clairborne Pell regretfully confirms the American senate’s support of the junta regime. There is, he writes, “an all too general acceptance of the view that, bad as the junta may be, we need the use of the Greek facilities for NATO. The Pentagon seems to approve of the Greek government as an efficient government and one which provides agreeable ports of call for our military forces” (vii).

4 When Colonel Papadopoulos declared his intentions to hold elections in 1974 that would be overseen by a civilian government—Papadopoulos and his chosen prime minister, Spyros Markezinis, had difficulties convincing the Greek people at large of the impeccability of the planned elections—Greece’s university students protested to “a type of ‘guided’ democracy, in which real power would still be held by Papadopoulos and the army” (Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece 197).

5 On July 24, Constantine Karamanlis returned to Greece from his eleven-year self-exile in Paris, as a result of a request from senior former Greek politicians to oversee the dismantling of the dictatorship and set Greece on the path to democracy. An overwhelming majority of the Greek people greeted the 67-year-old Karamanlis with great enthusiasm; they were relieved by the downfall of the Colonels’ junta.

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its meaning seems to pertain to a particular theoretical concept of “discourse.” My use of the

word “politics” in this chapter is more narrow. By politics, I refer to the political practices of a

specific government, that is, politics formalized through certain political institutions. Whether it

involves democratic, parliamentary politics, which so profoundly defines Alex’s familial history,

or the despotic politics of a military regime, which informs the historical context of

Papandreou’s story, it is the politics of the state that is in focus. In addition, the word politics, as

will become clear from my discussion, refers to gender politics—the prevailing relationships of

power and subordination—that A Crowded Heart highlights. Through the unit of the family and

the idea of politics, I will demonstrate, the novel both enacts and challenges traditional social

gender arrangements and distinctions, including the female private world and the male public

sphere that gender critics have discussed and problematized since the beginning of the feminist

movement in the 1960s.

In spite of Papandreou’s recommendation that A Crowded Heart be read as fiction, the

extensive material on which the story relies, as presented in Chapter One, as well as the

narrative’s historical context, makes it possible to characterize the text as autobiographical. Much

like his narrator, Papandreou belongs to a family of prominent Greek political spokesmen. His

grandfather, George Papandreou, was a leading Greek Liberal politician from the 1920s to his

arrest after the military coup of 1967 and his death in 1968. The author’s father, Andreas

Papandreou, the founder of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), had an equally long

and notable political career. He departed for the U.S. in 1939 after being released from prison,

where he had been placed for his political activities during the Metaxa dictatorship in Greece. He

became an American citizen, but eventually returned to his native Greece to re-enter politics

with his father, then the Prime Minister of the country. In 1967, he was arrested by the military

junta for his radical political opposition, only to be expelled from Greece eight months later. In

exile, Papandreou continued to strive for the restoration of democracy in Greece; he founded

the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (PAK), and along with other émigrés, was active in

organizing an effective propaganda campaign against the military regime. After the fall of the

junta in 1974, he returned with his family to Greece, and eventually governed the country

(between 1981-1989 and 1993-1996). In other words, A Crowded Heart follows the broad outline

of the author’s childhood experiences.6

The biographical content of Papandreou’s work is, however, not my interest in this

chapter. Rather, my focus in what follows is on the literary representation of the narrator’s path

6 The autobiographical material on which A Crowded Heart is partly based becomes apparent when reading

Margaret Papandreou’s Nightmare in Athens (1970), Nicholas’s mother’s personal account of her family’s confrontation with the military junta and their subsequent flight first to Sweden and then to Canada.

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toward male and ethnic self-definition, and the forces and/or components involved in this

process of self-development. For my specific purpose, therefore, the genre of the Bildungsroman is

analytically more fruitful than that of autobiography. As discussed in Chapter One, what is

integral to the Bildungsroman is the narrator’s quest for self-formation and grappling with identity.

A Crowded Heart may be characterized as a Bildungsroman, in that the narrative can be read as one

of development. The central figure, Alex, comes to an understanding of his individual self, and

reaches the threshold of maturity through social experience. However, in a fashion similar to the

other texts examined in this dissertation, Papandreou’s story is one of identity formation with

emphasis on ethnicity and family. It expands the personality-oriented plot of the traditional

Bildungsroman, and stresses a more social vision of identity formation. Alex’s passage into

adolescent and his burgeoning sense of ethnicity and manhood is informed by his confrontation

with the world and with politics, and by social experiences and familial relations, an essential

feature of the genre of the ethnic Bildungsroman.

Informed by the thematic pattern of the ethnic Bildungsroman, Papandreou’s novel

presents identity formation as intricately dependent on the effects of social location. It portrays

Alex’s self-development as a process evolving over time as a result of a confrontation with his

surroundings and through first-hand encounters with others, and accounts for the intimate

entanglement and simultaneous experience of ethnicity, masculinity (manhood, fatherhood, and

male identity), and social class. In examining A Crowded Heart, I again draw on Paula M. L.

Moya’s work on cultural identity, which theorizes the complex interrelations that structure

various forms of human identity. An integral part of Moya’s theory, discussed in Chapter Two, is

the view that cultural identity is grounded in social location—that is, the particular nexus of

ethnicity, gender, and class in which an individual exists in the world—and that there is a

connection between an individual’s social location, experience, and knowledge. However,

whereas Moya, as a critic, gives “greater weight to socially marginalized identities” (Learning from

Experience 131), Papandreou presents us with a narrator who occupies a different subject

position. Alex’s interpretation of his experiences of ethnicity is linked to his privileged position

as the member of a powerful political clan.

The first eleven vignettes of Papandreou’s story relate events that take place in Greece,

the home country of the narrator’s father, beginning when Alex is eight years old. They give an

account of Alex’s childhood years, the boy’s first exposure to public life, his experiences of the

Greek countryside in Peloponnesus away from his family, and the father’s imprisonment during

the junta and its traumatic effect on the family. In the following four chapters, the narrator

reconstructs specific moments from his teenage years in Canada. The military dictatorship still

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haunts the family. The children deal, in various ways, with their distressing experiences, while the

father continues his struggle for democracy in Greece from their country of exile. At the same

time, Alex grows into an adolescent who copes with a growing awareness and critique of U.S.

political imperialism, with an intensified confusion of cultural affiliation, and with an unceasing

effort to acquire his father’s attention and acknowledgement. The final vignette takes the reader

to a democratic Greece after the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1974. At the end of the

narrative, young Alex makes the transition into manhood. He reaches the age of seventeen,

slowly grows to understand his Greek heritage, and achieves a sense of personal ethnicity and

masculinity.

The summary of Papandreou’s narrative emphasizes that the issues of ethnicity,

masculinity, politics, and social class in A Crowded Heart are complexly related through family. I

will begin my discussion looking at ethnicity as it is contained in familial history.

Becoming Ethnic through Family Relations

Papandreou’s novel emphasizes early on that Greek ethnic identity for Alex is entrenched in his

family history, more specifically in the male lineage and in the figures of his grandfather and

father. In contrast to the opening sentence of A Crowded Heart that introduces the Greek

landscape as one of perpetual enchantment, the narrator’s introduction of his Greece reads quite

differently: 7

To know my Greece I would take you to my grandfather’s village in the

Erymanthean Mountains, where Hercules caught the wild boar, and translate

while an eighty-year-old woman in black tells you how my grandfather came into

this world after a difficult birth . . . and how he emerged victorious carrying a

rose in his hand. . . . I would take you to the island of Chios across from Turkey,

where my father was born, and show you walls pocked by Turkish guns. . . . I’d

show you the spacious halls of Maximou—the offices of the Greek prime

minister—where [my father] resided in the 1980s and 1990s and then let you pick

someone at random from the streets of Athens to tell you why he or she hates

him or loves him. (1-2, emphasis added)

7 The opening sentence reads: “To describe Greece I would share with you a tomato on the sandy beaches

of Skopellos, open a sea urchin with my penknife and serve you the scarlet eggs inside while the salt stretches the skin on our backs” (1). Reviewer Gary Krist’s comment on Papandreou’s opening lines is that they “may edge dangerously close to the idiom of the travel brochure” (630).

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Notice the prominence of national and familial history in Alex’s account of his Greece. The

narrator’s identification with his Greek heritage, which is articulated through the use of the

pronoun “my” in the above passage, is notably related to the history of his Greek male relations.

His narrative of Greece portrays a grandfather who grammatically descends from Greek heroes,

and a father who comes into the world on an island that testifies to a violent national history, an

account which suggests that the male relatives appear to have a mythic quality for the boy.

Simultaneously, Alex’s history advances his familial (patrilineal) and ethnic lineage in terms of

historical continuity; it stretches from ancient times to modern Greece, from the mountains

where Hercules resided to the modern offices of a prime minister. This account establishes the

social location and political background of his family.8 It stresses his family’s fame—Alex’s

familial history is not a representative one—and advances a love-hate theme that recurs, I will

show, in the narrator’s complex relationship to his father.

It is hard to overlook the significance that the above passage grants to family—here

defined by male descent—for the narrator’s sense of ethnic identity. In the previous chapters, I

have discussed how family can be a source of both comfort and anxiety for identity formation.

The link between family and ethnic gendered identity also figures strongly in Papandreou’s novel.

But if Davidson’s The Priest Fainted portrays the role of mothers, mortal and divine, as essential to

the narrator’s ethnic and female identity, A Crowded Heart principally features a father-son

relationship, and focuses on this relationship’s role in the narrator’s coming to terms with his

ethnic and male identity. Alex’s Greek father, “the Pan-Hellenic Liberator” (145), is of crucial

importance for the boy’s movements—geographical as well as emotional—between the different

worlds of his childhood, as well as for his ethnic and gender self-conception. Due to the specific

history of Alex’s family, yet another difference between Davidson’s and Papandreou’s

representations of family becomes evident. Whereas family in The Priest Fainted figures mainly in

the state of the domestic, in A Crowded Heart it exists primarily, though not exclusively, in the

public realm, an issue that I will return to later in this chapter.

The connection between ethnic and male identity in A Crowded Heart is most thoroughly

apparent in the father-son relationship. However, despite the father’s centrality for the narrative

as the personification of Greek ethnicity and maleness he remains, in many ways, an undefined

figure. In the story, the father is primarily distinguished by his absence: “My childhood memories

of my father,” the narrator remarks, “are of a man at a distance. I don’t recall the smell of his

shaving lotion, the shape of his hands, or the way he wore his hat. Instead I see him being

8 Together with the political anchoring, the class privilege of Alex’s family is an aspect that Papandreou’s

novel shares with Thompson’s autobiographical narrative, although the substantially different texts depict two very diverse kinds of childhoods.

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carried on the shoulders of Greek villagers, I see his solitary form on a balcony, I see him

surrounded by crowds, lost in their embrace” (2). The absent father motif is prominent in the

narrator’s reminiscences; the interactions between father and children in the novel are, as Alex’s

reflection suggests, few and inseparable from politics. As a result of Alex’s father’s public

position and political pursuits, the whole family comes together on occasions such as electoral

campaigns and speeches more often than they do at home. These moments in the narrative, as

Alex’s memories also reveal, take the well-known motif farther by reconstructing fatherhood;

they advance the narrator’s father as a father figure lost not in the embrace of his wife and

children but in that of the crowd.

As a result of the father’s unavailability due to his public undertakings, the occasions for

tenderness in the relationship between father and son are, in the narrator’s memory, limited. The

father’s “gentle, sing-song voice” (126), lulling the children to sleep, or his visits in their rooms

to kiss them goodnight, are rare occurrences. Instead, what Alex remembers most vividly is the

lack of attention that characterized the father-child relationship, or the interrupted and

unfinished conversations whenever other people who demanded his father’s attention were

prioritized. The day the family learns that all political prisoners will receive amnesty and their

father will come home again after his imprisonment, young Alex, who in his father’s absence had

developed the habit of visiting his office to smell his tobacco and of running his fingers through

his silk ties, imagines “what things would be like now that [his] father was coming back” (105).

Rather than feeling an immediate joy about the news, the boy feels anxiety: “I could already hear

the buzz of people that followed him and I could see the small groups appearing at our doorstep

at all hours of the day” (105). Alex’s comment signals that as a result of politics, the boy’s

relationship with his father suffers. Their private moments, before his father is again “swallowed

up” (106) by people, are few.

Alex’s relationship with his father is, in both his absence and presence, profoundly

framed by public politics. The experiences of growing up in a prominent political family have

implications for Alex’s sense of his gender and ethnicity. An incident that marks Alex’s transition

from a private individual to a public figure, and that emphasizes his otherness in terms of

ethnicity and social location, is when, at the age of eight, he serves as his father’s emissary to

preside over a baptism in Crete. The baptism incident, I argue, has a symbolic significance in

Papandreou’s text that goes far beyond a mere plot or story function. It is informed by issues of

family, ethnicity, social class, and masculinity, the last of which will be discussed later in this

chapter. I will therefore return to the baptism incident on several occasions in my discussion of

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A Crowded Heart to illustrate how it represents the process of ethnic and male identification, and

the individual experience of social location when mediated through family in a foreign culture.

“Greekness” for Alex is gendered and personified in his male ancestry. This becomes

clear during his visit to Crete. Being the descendant of well-known members of the Greek

political establishment, Alex is subjected to a public scrutiny that makes him sensitive about his

lack of resemblance to his Greek father and grandfather. The particular day of the baptism,

“strangers” (7), pressing close, pinching Alex’s cheeks to show him fondness and affection, are

searching, the narrator knows, “for some proof that [he] had inherited [his] progenitor’s blood,

some evidence that [he] was blessed” (9). The Cretan people meet Alex with comments such as

“He looks like an American!” (9), “Does he have his grandfather’s voice? He certainly has his

nose” (9). Completely unprepared for people’s interest in him, and overwhelmed by their

reflections that stress his mixed cultural belonging, young Alex is troubled. He realizes that

although he is half-Greek biologically, he will never be a “real Greek” in the sense that his father

and grandfather are. The narrator’s blatantly un-Greek looks, “blond hair, blue-green eyes, and a

freckled face” (9), and the fact that he knows “little of Greece and [can] barely speak Greek” (9),

are painful reminders of his difference from his father and grandfather. Under the power of the

gaze of the Cretan people, Alex apprehends his ethnic differences as “deficiencies” (9) which

“[he] would have to work doubly hard to make up for” (9).

The boy’s reactions to the Cretans’ inspection can be seen to support Moya’s contention

that experiences, like identities, can be theory-mediated: “Experiences happen to us, and it is our

theoretically mediated interpretation of an event that makes it an ‘experience’” (Moya 38). Alex’s

experiences of cultural and ethnic hyphenation and his social belonging—determinants of his

social location—influence the way he interprets these experiences as well as the world around

him. Thus, the boy’s painful growing awareness that he is different due to his Greek American

heritage as well as his social belonging to a political clan triggers off feelings of defiance in Alex

about everything constituting and denoting “Greekness,” including his male relatives. This

becomes clear when the priest asks him, the godfather, at the baptism, in the customary way,

whether he rejects Satan, and the boy’s loud answer “I reject him!” (19) resonates with issues that

relate to his specific Greek heritage and social class:

How good to cry “I reject!” to anything that forces you to eat orange peel, stands

you in a suit on a blistering day while a few feet away tourists lie on the beach

and cool off in the blue Mediterranean; anything that forces you to smile while a

toothless old lady suffocates you with kisses; anything that forces you to nod

your head while an old man with a bilious wart growing from his nose brings his

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face close to yours and tells you an interminable story about your grandfather;

anything that forces you to lift your arms and begin a recitation: People of Crete!

People of the Aegean! People of Greece! (20)

Alex’s forceful rejections of Satan, the passage reveals, take the form of a refusal of all that to

him represents “Greekness,” from the candied orange peel soaked in syrup to the political

speeches of his father and grandfather. His Greek heritage, fundamentally defined by his paternal

lineage, becomes “satanic” to the boy. It is his identity as the son and grandson of two

historically powerful men that forces these experiences upon him, that makes him feel stared at

and chased to the point that he “descend[s] into [his] English-speaking conscious, until [he is]

autistic to all things Greek” (20).

But identities, Papandreou’s novel emphasizes, are subject to continual verification, a

process during which “identities can be (and often are) contested and . . . can (and often do)

change,” to borrow Moya’s words (Learning from Experience 41). Alex’s encounters with the

physical and historical specificity of Greece allow him, as Theodora Tsimpouki accurately points

out, “to contest the hegemony of the American vision of [his] Greek identity (“Bi- or Mono-

Culturalism?” 18) and to “form his own textualization of Greece” (19). The narrator’s gradual

verification of his Greek ethnic identity is obvious in “Day of Secrets,” the vignette that tells the

story of Alex’s summer away from his family. In July 1966, Alex’s father sends his four children

to different parts of Greece so that they can improve their knowledge of the Greek language and

customs. In the southern mountains of Peloponnesus, the young boy encounters Greece in new

ways. In the company of two village boys, Taki and Spiraki, Alex begins to see Greece as a place

of mysteries and wonders. One of the many adventures that his newfound friends invite him on

involves the Day of Secrets, a yearly custom when all the villagers gather to tell each other their

secrets. “At that moment,” the narrator reveals, “I wouldn’t trade Greece for all the hot dogs

and Mars Bars in the world” (40). Quite suddenly, Greece is transformed into a source of

enchantment for Alex.

One of the more illustrative instances of Alex’s verification and active interpretation of

his Greek ethnic identity through social relations is when he allows his new Greek friends to tear

off the “Made in USA” label from the neck of his T-shirt. In exchange, Alex is allowed a peek at

a postcard of a half-naked woman. This exchange of services between the boys can be seen as an

equation of Greek ethnicity with traditional masculinity. The boys, delighted by the act of adding

Alex’s T-shirt tag to their “hoard of treasures” (39), want to know everything about their friend:

Will he allow them to try on his shoes? What does his house in Athens look like? Does

everybody in America have a car? How many different cars has he been in? Are the windows of

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government cars bulletproof? The boys’ questions not only accentuate Alex’s ethnic and cultural

hyphenation; they also highlight his class belonging (an important part of his family history that I

will have reason to return to in this chapter) that, in their eyes, singles Alex out. If Alex’s

privileged social location is intriguing for the Greek boys, for Alex it is yet another source of

unease.9

In the process of interacting with the Greek boys, the narrator learns more about himself

and shows a growing awareness of his difference from them. When Alex gets into a fight with

Takis and Spirakis for killing birds with their sling-shots, he hates the boys “for being so strange,

so Greek” (46). This particular response once more involves the issue of ethnicity and male

identity. The boys have a disposition for cruelty, for which Alex dislikes them. Angry at their

exhibition of toughness and boldness, qualities which are presented in the narrative as being

expected of Greek boys, he cries out at them to stop killing birds, a reaction to which Takis and

Spirakis respond with kicks and shouts. The boys’ violent behavior affirms a kind of ethnic

masculinity; it re-emphasizes traditional masculinity in connection with “Greekness.” Greek

ethnicity and masculinity, I argue later in the chapter, are also tied together in the representations

of Alex’s father and grandfather.

Halfway through the narrative, identities are again portrayed as shifting positions within

specific material and discursive contexts. As a result of the family’s move to Ontario, Canada,

due to the father’s expulsion from his native Greece, the narrator’s ethnic affiliation and identity

become subject to a new process of verification. Through an interpretation of his experiences in

Greece, Alex, now a teenager, begins to develop new knowledge of his “Americanness.” This

becomes evident from Alex’s poster-lined room in Ontario. One poster “showed a tank inside

the Parthenon. . . . There was an ad for a concert: ‘Pete Seeger and Joan Baez join Melina

Mercouri to sing freedom songs for Greece. New York, 1968.’ An American flag had fifty skull

and crossbones instead of stars, and the red stripes were runny, like blood” (121). The posters

and, even more explicitly, the flag, signify Alex’s maturing political interest and awareness. The

practices of the American government, the teenage Alex understands, do not always work for

democracy and freedom. The reader does not need to be reminded that these were the times of

American involvement in the Vietnam War, the longest and most massively critiqued war that

Americans had ever fought. In addition, and as earlier noted, the American agenda during the

Greek dictatorship was not to exert any pressure on the Colonels—any demands or attacks on

the junta, the argument was, might tempt the regime to join the Warsaw Pact. In fact, the

9 The boys’ fascination with things unfamiliar reminds us of a similar occasion in The Octagonal Heart. In

Thompson’s book, however, the object of attraction for the Greek children is the nursery rhyme of Mother Goose and, for their American friends, the stories of Greek gods and goddesses.

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American government went so far as to support the regime with U.S. armaments. America’s

unpopular involvement in foreign affairs complicates Alex’s hyphenated identity and adherence

to “Americanness.” And the challenge of belonging to more than one culture and nation, either

by birth or by force of exile, further intensifies as the narrator slowly begins to identify himself as

“a Canadian” (163). In Canada, a country which, in contrast to America, is portrayed as a haven

for protesters, Alex is the son of the acknowledged “Pan-Hellenic Liberator” (129).

Alex is not just enveloped in a male culture and family. His gradual socialization into

Greek ethnicity is also effectuated by a female relation, Alex’s Greek grandmother. Through the

figure of the grandmother, “that singular constant of my childhood” (18), Papandreou’s ethnic

Bildungsroman highlights the potential of private family for promoting a sense of community and

ethnicity. Hence the roles that women are allocated in Thompson’s and Davidson’s texts are also

evident in A Crowded Heart: the domestic world, sustained by female relatives, is shown to

function as a guardian of Greek culture and a perpetuator of ethnic pride. Alex’s grandmother

takes on the tasks of improving the children’s Greek and of teaching them to write Greek

beautifully. The grandmother emphasizes that for the children to understand who they are means

“learning Greek” (107). The significance of language for ethnic identity is also emphasized in the

already discussed scene of baptism. On Crete, Alex, at the time a recent resident in Greece,

experiences the difficulty of self-identification when transplanted to a culture he belongs to by

ancestry but is not at all familiar with. “Greek grammar,” he thinks. “What a humiliation if I

forgot the plural of a verb or used a feminine article for a masculine noun or simply

mispronounced a Greek word. I was young enough to believe that my father’s political future

hung on my syntax, his future and the whole family’s honor. These people expected me to speak

like my grandfather or father” (12). In addition to revealing the burden of the Greek language on

Alex, particularly the pressure to speak Greek and represent his father without shaming the good

name of his Greek family, the narrator’s concerns underline how profoundly ethnicity, as a

source of pride but also discomfort, resides in family.

If there is a significant relation between language and ethnic identity, as indicated by both

Alex’s and his grandmother’s comments, it is interesting to consider why the story of a Greek

American boy, which is primarily set in Greece, is presented in English by a writer who today

lives in Greece. What does Papandreou’s choice signify? The ties of language to ethnic identity

foregrounded in the novel echo the discussion of what the label “ethnic” designates and how

ethnic writing is defined, as presented in Chapter One. Which language does an ethnic writer

write in? Does a Greek American have to write in English to be considered “ethnic”? A writer

such as Papandreou, whose literary oeuvre includes texts written in both English and Greek,

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troubles any easy answers to these questions. A Crowded Heart was written in English but is also

available in Greek translation.10 One can, of course, only speculate at the writer’s underlying

intentions but the decision to publish in both languages suggests that Papandreou envisaged

both an English- and a Greek-speaking audience for his narrative. Also, the author’s choice of

subject matter could appeal to a variety of readers: Greek readers in Greece or abroad, the

English-speaking Greek American communities or any other English-speaking readers interested

in a story about family matters in the process of ethnic identity formation. Considering the

author’s choice of language and subject matter, combined with his Greek American origin and

his bilingualism, what is Papandreou’s place in the broader field of “American literature” and,

more specifically, in the category of “American ethnic literature”? Can Papandreou be

considered an American author, a Greek writer, or both? The case of Papandreou signals that

the variables of what determines a text or defines a writer as “ethnic” are not given. In fact, as

my discussion in Chapter One emphasized, there are several models of defining ethnic literature;

my own accounts for complexity and multiple determiners of ethnicity. After all, as Papandreou’s

novel shows, Alex’s burgeoning consciousness about his Greek American identity is a complex

process; language is only one of many aspects which are consequential for an individual’s ethnic

self-conception.

Papandreou’s narrative demonstrates family as an intricate source of ethnic identification.

Though Alex’s knowledge of the Greek language is shown to be fostered through the figure of

his Greek grandmother, by private family, it is primarily through public family, defined by the

specific social and political histories of the narrator’s male relations, that the link between family

and ethnic identity is established in the novel. But Alex’s confrontation with the public and with

politics through his paternal origins affects not only his sense of “Greekness” but also his sense

of masculinity.

Learning about Masculinity from Family and Cultural Practices

If Catherine Temma Davidson’s novel portrays the parent-child relationship primarily as a

constructive source of ethnic and gender identity formation, as discussed in Chapter Four,

Papandreou’s narrative depicts it as a source of confusion, anxiety, and anger. These feelings of

distress, the text shows, emanate, in part, from the rigid, patriarchal structure of Alex’s family.

10 Papandreou’s novel broke sales records in Greece and remained in the top 10 bestseller list for two

years. One can only guess at the reasons for the success of the book in Greece. One possible reason may very well be that the writer was a member of a prominent family of the Greek political establishment. This implies that readers might have been interested in the autobiographical material of the narrative as well as intrigued by the story as fiction.

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The life of the narrator’s family is charcaterized by traditional gender arrangements, reminding us

of the patriarchal structure of governance of Greek American family, and documented by the

historians and sociologists whose work was discussed in Chapter Two. Papandreou imagines

mothers as being responsible for the domestic space, and fathers as being in charge of public

politics. Closely bound up with such gender arrangements are ideas about what defines

masculinity versus femininity. The text presents nurturance and sensibility as feminine qualities

and emotional reticence and violence as masculine characteristics. But since patriarchy is both

“interpersonal and structural, private and public” (Baca Zinn and Eitzen 179), ideas of

masculinity, the text emphasizes, are drawn from many sources; they are produced both within

family and the culture outside of it. This is clear in the baptism scene, which I examined earlier in

this chapter. Aside from issues of ethnicity, the baptism event also highlights Alex’s unease with

regard to male identity, and stresses a divide in masculinity along class lines.

Being called on to represent his father on Crete, Alex exhibits an insecurity about his

male identity. The boy feels distress over his physical smallness when he senses that he does not

fulfill his host’s, Mr. Panagakis’s, expectations. “[H]e would have preferred my father,” Alex

thinks, “or, failing that, at least a larger boy, bulkier and more Greek-looking than me” (9). In

contrast to himself, Alex describes Mr. Panagakis’s son, Panos, as a “real Greek,” who knows

“how to introduce, shake hands, speak politely, and who won’t make any mistakes in grammar”

(12). This comparison makes the narrator’s fear of being insufficient obvious, as viewed by his

host, in terms of masculine “Greekness.” Alex’s musings reveal that his sense of failure over

whether he is “Greek enough” is explicitly linked to his uncertainty as to whether he is “man

enough,” an uncertainty that, the novel suggests, derives from the pressure the boy feels to be

like his father.

The set of images that the narrator identifies with “real” masculinity and, by extension,

“Greekness”—having a robust physique, intelligence, wisdom, the capacity to lead, and the

ability to speak in public—are embodied in his father and grandfather. These two family

members constitute the male norm against which Alex feels he is judged—two political

spokesmen that are esteemed for their democratic ideals and intellect, two men who know how

to take control of the public world. The Cretan people expect him, Alex understands, to show

proof of his genealogical connection with these celebrated politicians, to show that he, too, is

blessed with the endowment to “produce a word of wisdom” (7). Sensing a pressure from the

crowd to show that he, too, has been accorded the gift of intelligence and leadership, and

concerned with not being able to live up to these expectations, Alex straightens himself up in the

chair in an attempt to make a good impression. If he cannot produce a word of wisdom like his

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father and grandfather—or even introduce and speak politely in the excellent manner that the

Greek boy, Panos, can—he will at least try to pass as an emotionally serious and mature boy. He

learns, in other words, to entertain a certain idea of masculinity that includes the qualities that the

narrator identifies in the culture he is visiting.

A specific event at the baptism further reveals the standards of male demeanor in Cretan

culture. Mr. Panagakis’s brother, a respected performer of historical rhyming couplets

(mantinades) in the village, asks his nephew Panos, who in his view is “the real poet” (14) in the

family, to recite one of his poems for Alex. Panos’s father, Mr. Panagakis, upset about his

brother’s suggestion, exclaims “No, no, Mr. Alex doesn’t want to hear such nonsense! Mr. Alex

is a serious boy, you see he sits straight at the chair, head up, not like my son” (14), a comment

to which the brother’s immediate response is: “Your son’s also a man. . . . He must learn to speak

without fear, especially before guests” (14-15, emphasis added). Besides reminding us that public

speaking was long reserved for men, this exchange makes obvious that in Greek culture

assertiveness, seriousness, and the courage to speak without fear before a crowd—qualities that

are unmistakably identified with manhood—are deemed as evidence of a man’s ability and power

to negotiate the public realm. Hence Alex, despite his fears and uncertainties, exhibits qualities

that are indicative of manliness in the eyes of Mr. Panagakis and the culture that he represents.

Mr. Panagakis’s and his brother’s disagreement over Panos’s recitation of his poetry

exhibits, in interesting ways, the tensions within social gender role practices and arrangements in

the culture they represent. If men are to indulge in poetry, it is important that the poetry deals

with tradition, with stories of Crete, stories about patriotic and courageous men who fought the

Turks, like the mantinades of Panos’s uncle. In a culture like the Cretan one, which is patriarchally

organized, poetry should be imbued with male rhetoric and recited with seriousness and

emotional restraint. In other words, poetry about talking animals like squirrels and camels,

delivered, as Panos does, in a “soft” and “wavering voice,” and with eyes “full of watery

expression” (15), is seemingly not an occasion for Greek masculine performance. This becomes

clear from Mr. Panagakis’s disapproval of his son’s poetry and his comment that God punished

him with a son “who is good only for womanish poems” (16), a remark that appears to be based

on the familiar historical conception that “reason is taken to be the exclusive property of men”

(Seidler 3), whereas emotions are related to femininity. Given these conventional gender

distinctions, what can be said about the gendered identities of a boy like Alex, who admires

Panos’s poems and performance, and Panos, who in his father’s view indulges in “nonsense”

about talking animals, “Fairy-tales women tell their children” (16)? If masculinity is best

represented by and transmitted through poetry that deals with tradition and historical contents,

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and if emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge are disdained, the version of masculinity of

boys like Alex and Panos, sensitive in character and more attuned to poetry and the imaginative

world, are, the narrative shows, an issue of (paternal) concern.

The type of masculinity that Mr. Panagakis represents, “serious, running the whole show,

clearly the leader in the village, a man who inspired respect and fear from those around him”

(18), is one which Alex recognizes in his own father. Mr. Panagakis conforms to the male role

expectations of his culture, and possesses what appears to be an ideal set of masculine

(Herculean) characteristics: he is a man of influence who shows authority, determination, and

control. But Mr. Panagakis, Alex observes with sadness, is also different from his father. Mr

Panagakis is capable of being sensitive and encouraging, traits which Alex does not associate

with the type of masculinity embodied by his father. On his journey from Crete, Alex notices a

calmness and gentleness in the relationship between Mr. Panagakis and his son, one which was

not present during the baptism. The father’s arm around Panos’s shoulder is a sign for Alex that

“Gone was the father’s stern austerity, gone the son’s obsequiousness. Again they were doing

something together, something I couldn’t imagine doing with my father. Had Mr. Panagaki

forgiven him his poetry?” (22). Already here Alex’s reflections indicate his emotionally distanced

relation to his father, and reveal desires to be acknowledged by and to establish an intimate

relationship with him. Subtly, his observations suggest something that is re-emphasized later in

the novel, namely, that family, when it exists in the public realm, cannot operate as a place of

intimacy and comfort.

Alex’s reflections on the difference between Mr. Panagakos and his father within the

novel seem to imply that how we view masculinity may be complicated by class difference. The

way masculinity and class, as well as different kind of masculinities, are related in the novel is a

highly interesting issue in its complexity. The overall implication in Papandreou’s text is that

there is a populist, middle-class masculinity, which is embodied by Mr. Panagakos, and an upper-

class masculinity, which is represented by Alex’s father.11 Mr. Panagakos stands in opposition to

Alex’s father in the sense that, although he is identified as a leader in his village, he is first and

foremost a family man. The form of masculinity that Mr. Panagakos represents appears to be

more sensitive and emotionally expressive than the one represented by Alex’s father who, as

earlier demonstrated, knows how to interact successfully with the masses but fails to relate

emotionally to his children. In fact, what Alex seems to remember most vividly about the father’s

11 The text shows that in periods of intense social and political upheaval, there is yet another form of

masculinity, one which takes expression through militarism and brutality. This type of masculinity in the novel is, I will show later in this chapter, incarnated in the military officer who comes to Alex’s house to arrest the father.

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interaction with his son is the physical beatings that he received for disobeying him. I will discuss

one such incident later in this chapter.

The masculinity embodied by Alex’s father is also defined by the privileges that he holds

as a public figure with a leading position in social and political life. Some of these privileges are

implied by a note written by Panos’s mother, which Alex discovers in the pocket of his jacket on

his way to mainland Greece after the baptism. In the note, Mrs. Panagaki makes two appeals to

Alex. The first one is that Alex help find her son a job in Athens when he turns eighteen. “In my

son,” the woman writes, “you will have a loyal civil servant who can help you in your important

tasks in the future” (7). The second plea has to do with her husband being sued by a cousin for

stabbing him and causing him to limp. Knowing the power that Alex’s father possesses, Mrs.

Panagaki requests that Alex’s father speak to the judge before the trial begins. Interestingly, Mrs.

Panagaki makes her claims to Alex without the knowledge of her husband. A Cretan husband’s

sense of pride and decency, she knows, cannot be publicly undermined.

The mother’s pleas for her son and husband show that there are many ideas of

masculinity at play here. Although her note does not address the complex ways in which

masculinity and class are related, it can be read as emphasizing the issue of social class as a factor

that influences how we conceive of masculinity. Mrs. Panagaki’s strong belief in the capabilities

of an eight-year-old reveals her awareness that the exercise of power involves the deployment of

resources, to which certain people have easier access. Alex’s social position and the privileged

location that the boy enjoys is obvious to Mrs. Panagaki. Coming from a prominent family which

is part of a political establishment in Greece, Alex’s opportunities as a grown man, she knows,

will be greater than those of her son. In addition to this, her second appeal, full of distress over

having written the note without consulting her husband, suggests that Mr. Panagakis, as a man,

possesses the privilege of the usual gender superiority. He does not, however, share the array of

social prerogatives and political power to which a man like Alex’s father has access. The letter

acknowledges Alex as his father’s son, and establishes the significance of social location, both for

an individual’s experiences and for knowledge of the world.12

Another character in Papandreou’s text who stands in opposition to Alex’s father, and

whose presence in the family is informed by issues of social location and masculinity, is Manoli,

the male caretaker of Alex and his siblings during their early childhood. Manoli, a loyal follower

12 As mentioned before, Alex is a young boy in need of acknowledgement, far too young to worry about

Mrs. Panagaki’s requests or to be able to fulfill them. He reads the letter, expecting the mother to say something “terribly important, to tell me what a fine godfather I was, to tell me I was truly my father’s son” (23). It is understandable that an eight-year-old would have preferred a different letter, a letter saying something that mattered to him. Being the child that he is, he cannot comprehend that Mrs. Panagaki’s appeals do indeed point out some things “terribly important,” such as his privileged position.

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from the village of Alex’s grandfather, moves into the household and becomes an exhaustless

source of enchantment in the children’s lives. He brings with him “the smells of the village, tales

from the mountains of Erymanthos and a joy for life” (24) that make the children glow. Manoli

is “really different” (27) Alex notices, a difference that evinces issues of class and masculinity.

Manoli, who wears “shabby pants and old shoes [with] loaves of bread jutt[ing] out from his

jacket pocket” (25), has the habit of speaking to invisible friends, bushes and trees and pauses

“for imaginary applause” (28) because words, for Manoli, do not exist unless they are spoken and

heard. The fondness and sympathy with which the narrator remembers Manoli, in contrast to the

ambivalent feelings that he exhibits about his father, suggest that Manoli represents a masculinity

that is characterized by sensitivity and emotional capability. Besides the dazzling stories that he

tells the children and the books that he brings to life so “you could hear the characters talk, smell

what they smelled, taste what they tasted” (27), the part that they like best about him is that he,

unlike other adults, talks to them “as if [they] were important” (25). He gives Alex and his

siblings the attention and stimulation that children demand, and, unlike their father, does not

“raise a hand against [them]” (26). However, in his parents’ presence, the narrator recollects,

Manoli’s “strength and talkativeness fizzled out. Then he would grow quiet, his eyes would shine

and he seemed to shrink, as if he dared to only look at my parents from a lower place” (29). This

comment foregrounds a hierarchy of social class, one which eventually compels Manoli to

disappear from the children’s lives. A disagreement between Manoli and the narrator’s

grandfather on a political issue gives Manoli no choice but to leave. He has questioned the

decision of a public man who has allowed him into his family. Manoli’s decision to leave, like

Mrs. Panagaki’s appeal, emphasizes how a class hierarchy influences ideas about masculinity.

Patriarchal control over children is imparted in the narrative through the adolescent

Alex’s act of defiance one evening during the family’s exile in Toronto, when his father was

“recapturing his special bit of Greece, reclaiming it from exile” (162) with Greek music and

dance in the company of his friends and party colleagues. Walking down the stairs to the living

room, and seeing his father dance for the first time, Alex does the “unthinkable” (161); he turns

down the volume on the stereo, though he knows that when his father’s “torrential wrath” (163)

gets the better of him he does not hesitate to use the belt. “Faced with all this Greekness,” Alex

realizes that it is not sleeplessness that has brought him downstairs: “I rebelled against the music

with its absurd beat, a music whose words by now seemed other-worldly. I was embarrassed that

I knew enough Greek to understand the gruff voice coming from the stereo. The room was

stuffy with sweat, the romance of exile and maleness” (161). Alex, “[m]ore a Canadian than

anything else” (163), feels he has “no place in this bastion of illusion and exile” (163). These

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remarks reveal that Alex’s rebelliousness is not merely an act of a boy who now lives in Canada

and wishes to defy everything that for him represents “Greekness.” By defying “Greekness,”

Alex also rebels against patriarchal manhood as acted out by the father, a “ruling of fathers” that

implies that older men can dominate younger men. In this family, the narrator remarks, the

“father ruled and the son obeyed” (163); a hierarchy which implies that the father “could not be

questioned, especially in public” (163). The boy knows that “[s]abotage meant betrayal” (162),

and would lead to punishment, a consequence which, the text shows, creates tensions in the

father-son relationship.

As mentioned, there is in Papandreou’s story an element of violence in the father-child

relationship, which, in combination with the father’s physical absence from family life and

emotional unavailability to his children, complicates Alex’s identification with his father and his

ethnic and gender self-conception. One event that establishes how betrayal and disrespect may

lead to physical punishment is when Alex helps his father drive from Toronto to a Greek

American fundraiser in Astoria, New York. On the way to New York, the two stop at a diner to

eat. The owner, a Greek man who recognizes Alex’s father and who has voted for his

grandfather before emigrating to the U.S., expresses his admiration for the family. As Alex is

watching his father sign a menu, his heart swells at this “Sinatra recognition” (143), which he

proudly feels belongs to him as well. So, when the owner’s daughter asks Alex for his signature,

he decides it would be impolite to refuse her request, although his father is already sitting in the

car, ready to leave. The father’s rage at being kept waiting is acted out as soon as they are alone

in the car. Looking at Alex “like a wolf with its head between its paws, eyes narrowing, ready to

pounce” (146), the father punches him in the cheekbone with the words “No son of mine makes

me wait and no son of mine gives me orders” (147). Instantly, Alex squeezes toward the door,

wanting to get as far away from his father as he possibly can. After a short while, dizzy and with

tears stinging his eyes, the words that Alex lets out are: “Isn’t capitalism awful?” (147). Alex’s

question, which pertains to politics, may seem awfully strange at first. Considering, however, that

the boy’s question brings up his father’s favorite subject matter, namely politics, it can be

understood as an attempt to mitigate his father’s bad temper. Simultaneously, it is used to

conceal his sadness since crying, he learnt during his visit to Crete, is a sign of weakness, and is

not proper masculine behavior.

Besides emphasizing the hierarchical relation between father and son, and the mixed

feelings of admiration and fear in Alex toward his father as a result of violence, this incident

reveals that the only possible communication between father and son is in the language of public

politics. That Alex’s and his father’s conflicts find expression through the medium of politics

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becomes evident once again during their journey to New York. When they learn they had been

are inaccurately informed of the end of the Greek dictatorship, Alex exclaims:

I’m glad the dictators didn’t fall! Do you hear? I am glad! Glad!. . . . I’m glad

they’re torturing people! I’m glad the working class always loses! I’m glad Trotsky

was assassinated! I’m glad Stalin won and you can preach to me all you like, I’m

still going to be glad! Long live capitalism! You hear me Dad? Long live

capitalism! (153-54)

And with arms folded across his chest, Alex waits for his father’s reaction, which this time

around is an apology and a touch on Alex’s sore cheek.

Alex’s outcry marks a positioning against his father’s political camp and can be

understood as an act of confronting, to use Tsimpouki’s formulation, “the greater historical

shadow of a parental model” which denies him agency (“Bi- or Mono-Culturalism?” 19).

Tsimpouki argues that in order for the narrator to form his own sense of ethnicity (and, I add,

male identity) he must challenge paternal authority. The incident in the car suggests that by

losing self-control and protesting against the political ideologies and democratic principles of his

father, Alex “dismantle[s]” the political rhetoric that he has inherited from his father (Tsimpouki,

“Bi- or Mono-Culturalism?” 19). Moreover, I argue, Alex defies the behavioural ideals of

maleness embodied by the parent: control and order above emotions.

But Alex’s act of protest does not merely convey his anger and disappointment with his

father; it is also an intense cry for acknowledgement and attention. “Rarely did he acknowledge

my presence or make an effort to include me in the activities,” Alex reveals at one point in the

story. “Though I wanted to be part of the excitement, much of the time I felt like a hanger-on,

like an observer of a foreign organization” (166), a comment that reveals grief about a hapless

parent-child relationship and emphasizes the challenge of belonging to more than one culture

and nation.

Papandreou’s narrative illustrates that family relations, so crucial for identity formation,

can also be sources of conflict. It shows how a father-son relationship, which involves emotional

remoteness, aggression, and violence, may thwart identification with the parent. The pressure on

Alex to conform to his father’s expectations and gain acceptance in his eyes is clearly immense,

and makes the teenager live in constant anxiety over either upsetting or betraying his father. The

anxiety under which the narrator lives is exemplified by his remark that “Too much enthusiasm

for our land of exile felt like a betrayal of Greece, a betrayal of our father, who was traveling

around the world for the cause” (129). But the greatest betrayal of all, as Alex fears throughout

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his childhood, is breaking the continuity in the familial male line when it comes to developing an

interest in political affairs. Watching his father working to shatter dictatorship and fascism in his

country of origin, Alex associates maleness with strength of character, patriotism, honor, defense

of freedom and socialism. In the eyes of the maturing adolescent, the father enacts and embodies

all of these characteristics. Knowing already as a child that it is his older brother Jason, “the wild

one, the leader” (58), who will most likely have a political career, Alex’s political discussions and

outcries can also be understood as instances of foregrounding an ideal of exemplary manhood

which he knows is favored by his father.

Masculine Politics and Political Family

Masculinity and politics are closely tied up in Papandreou’s novel through the political pursuits

of Alex’s father and grandfather and, as earlier mentioned, through the specific historical period

in which the novel is set. Accordingly, the relations of masculinity and politics in the novel can

be seen to intersect with family defined not only in terms of male descent and the public realm

but also, in significant ways, in terms of the domestic world sustained in Papandreou’s novel by

female relatives. I begin my discussion here by investigating the nexus of politics and family in A

Crowded Heart, and move on to explore how the novel both challenges and enacts a conventional

conception of politics and public life as male spheres of influence and as the exclusive

prerogatives of men.

I have shown that Alex’s conception of masculinity is centrally informed by the specific

social and political location of his family. The young boy’s association of masculinity with

success, power, and authority has its source in his male progenitors’ triumphs in the political

arena, and is, among other things, emphasized through the narrator’s idolizing descriptions of

their successes. The potency that, in Alex’s eyes, his father and grandfather incarnate is

conspicuous in the imagery that is typical of the language with which he speaks of the two men,

the immense crowds that gather at their political speeches, and the emotions that they arouse in

people. For example, it is noteworthy that the masses that gather to listen to these men are

compared to natural forces or described with a vocabulary that denotes force, strength, and

power, characteristics that are traditionally associated with masculinity. The crowd is described as

“a caged lion, pulsing with life, hungry with anticipation” (5), “scarier than any thunderstorm,

more violent than any war movie” (68), an “earthquake” (12), a “human hurricane” (70), and a

“beast” (68) (though there are a few occasions in the novel when the crowd is also described as

offering safety and anonymity). What the images of the crowd suggest is the power with which

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men master the public world; they identify the public as a violent natural force controlled by men

of character.

What is even more interesting about these different images of the crowd is the way they

affect Alex’s emotions. As is also indicated by the title, Alex’s heart is undoubtedly a crowded

one. It is crowded by his bi-ethnic heritage, his negotiations between the distinct cultural and

political environments in which he lives, his process of developing an ethnic and gender identity,

and, related to this, the range of feelings that Alex harbors about his father, from admiration and

respect to disappointment and remorse. “The world of my childhood,” the narrator remarks at

one point, uncovering a tumultuous state of emotions, “was a world of crowds, of speeches and

cavalcades, of applause and adulation. I grew up inside these crowds. Sometimes I think they are

my real parents. I love them. I want them to shrivel up and die. I want them to leave me alone. I

want them to forgive me and praise me, make me great and make me humble” (6). Alex’s

ambivalent emotions toward the crowd—feelings of both admiration and disdain—pertain to his

distant relationship to his father and, as a result of his involvement with politics, the transition of

private family to public crowd.

Alex’s image of the crowd replacing his parents highlights the convergence of family and

politics in the novel. However, the kinds of politics and masculinity which, as we have seen,

pervade the narrator’s memories of his childhood and influence Alex’s formation of a male

ethnic identity, are not exclusively those associated with Alex’s father and grandfather.

Masculinity, much like femininity, is “a construct specific to historical time and place. They are

categories continually being forged, contested, reworked and reaffirmed in social institutions and

practices as well as a range of ideologies” (Davidoff and Hall 29). This is also true of the

representation of masculinity in Papandreou’s novel. In a period of militarism and political

dictatorship, student demonstrations, and streets “barricaded by burned buses and gutted cars,

doors, chunks of marble, and raw pieces of pavement” (77), the assertion of male power takes

on violent expressions. Brutality, uncontested authority, and supervision all characterize the

order of a vehement regime and the type of masculinity that people are confronted with,

including Alex’s family. In this specific historical and political context, masculinity is best seen as

shaped by an external set of discourses that incite men to act in certain ways.

In times of militarism, the text shows, the privatized space of the home and its function

as a sanctuary for family members, as implicated in the traditional family ideal and seen in some

of the other texts examined in this dissertation, is violated. In April 1967, on the night of the

Greek military coup, Alex and his family experience the practices of a militaristic regime, when

“a fanatic” (4) invades their home to arrest the father. Alex, nine years old at the time,

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remembers the officer’s “invincible gaze” (4) and the weird feeling that if he got too close to the

man, “[he] would be sucked into an empty space” (4). Alex’s descriptions of the Greek officer

are imbued with images of militarism: he shouts, saliva flies from his mouth, and his Adam’s

apple is “ribbed like a grenade” (83). His jerky movements make Alex think that he must have a

wire inside his body. The officer’s militant behavior becomes even more striking when he kicks

in the doors of the house looking for their father and, finally, presses his gun to Alex’s older

brother Jason’s temple to extort information, an act which provokes Alex’s father to give himself

up.

The convergence of politics and militaristic manhood, through the order of dictatorship,

and its subsequent effect on family and individuals is further displayed in the novel when Yorgo,

the political secretary of Alex’s father, visits Alex’s family after his release from prison. Yorgo,

whom the children remember as a vigorous man with playful eyes and thick black hair, “who

danced at the slightest excuse, always smiled, [and] spoke in a friendly voice” (92), shows up at

their door one night on crutches. His skinny, bony hands, sunken cheeks, and sparse hair, which

make it difficult for Alex to identify him at first, attest to the brutality and physical torture to

which political prisoners and individuals participating in action against the Colonels’ regime were

subjected, as noted in the Council of Europe’s reports on the Greek dictatorship. Interestingly

then, through the institutionalization of violence (which here takes the form of martial men who

in a vehement regime are used to exercise power), the junta for the boy becomes a site where

masculinity intersects with fascist politics and, in contradictory ways for Alex, with “Greekness.”

If masculinity and politics are shown to make a congenial pair, family and politics, which

are undeniably at the heart of Papandreou’s novel, are presented as an unfortunate and unseemly

combination. This is illustrated, among other things, through the profound emotional and

psychological effects of politics on Alex’s family at the night of the father’s imprisonment. “That

night,” Alex remarks, “weakened our family’s centrifugal gravity, loosened the orbits” (4). The

family members deal with the traumatic arrest in different ways: Lydia, the sister, turns inward;

Jason blames himself for his father’s arrest; their younger brother, Hector, hides his emotions

behind a fake smile; and Alex himself has recurring nightmares about being strangled or shot in

the head by the officer and attending his own funeral (122). “As for my parents,” the narrator

reflects in an instance of looking back, “in the ensuing years they exhausted their love for the

‘ultimate good’ and sacrificed it for the all-absorbing ‘struggle’ of politics” (4), a comment that

implies a threatening relation between politics and family.

The emotional impact of the dictatorship and militaristic masculinity on Alex is further

emphasized by the boy’s preoccupation with torture after Yorgo’s visit. He wants to “possess the

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knowledge of torture without having to learn it” (96). He imagines what it feels like to be beaten,

and what it takes to beat somebody, he wonders if they had put drugs in Yorgo’s food to make

him talk and whether his own father is being tortured. At these moments of anxiety, the

domestic family functions as a source of stability and comfort. Late at night, the family make

“cigarette trip[s]” (94) to the street across from the prison where the narrator’s father is held.

With a lit cigarette in the darkness, Alex’s mother and the children hope not only to signal their

affection to their father whose cell, they had heard, faces the road, but to ease their own terror

and despair.

The damaging impact of politics on the well-being of the family unit is a recurrent theme

in Papandreou’s novel. “Politics,” Alex observes at one point, “is an enemy to family, an

opposing force. At some point love, no matter how strong, hides and cowers in the corner while

politics, hot, naked and sweating, moves in like a Minotaur” (4-5). The allusion to the Greek

myth of the Minotaur in the narrator’s remark on family and politics is a telling one. In the myth,

the Minotaur, the result of the Cretan queen Pasiphaë’s passionate love for a white bull and

hence a shame for the royal family, had to be hidden away in a labyrinth. Every nine years, seven

Athenian young men and seven women were sacrificed to the flesh-eating creature with the head

of a bull and the body of a man. The youths were shut into the maze of the labyrinth, where they

wandered, hopelessly lost, until the creature caught and devoured them. Interestingly, in the

narrator’s description, love and family share the ultimate fate of the young men and women in

the myth. They cringe in the corner while politics, Alex’s comparison suggests, like the Minotaur

that was fed on human flesh—an analogy that reminds us of earlier images of the crowds as

untamed animals and human hurricanes—traps and consumes them.

However, unlike the Athenian youths of the Greek myth, the love of Alex’s parents and

their family is not irrevocably consumed. Through the figure of the mother in the novel,

domestic family has the capacity to operate as “a natural cell of resistance” (103) against fascist

politics.13 At the time of the military regime, while the father is in prison, Alex’s American

mother is active in writing letters to influential Americans, senators and congressmen—an

alternative political act to the exclusive male right to public speaking—and managing the family’s

emotional life. It is interesting to note that Alex’s family’s resistance is strengthened not just by

13 Max van der Stoel, the Council of Europe’s assigned rapporteur on the Greek case, emphasized, on 7

May 1968, the Greek people’s place in the European family: “By its history, its traditions, its aspirations and its love of freedom the Greek people belong to the European family; it would be tragic if they were to be alienated by a regime opposed to the principles that the family holds essential to its unity” (qtd in The Council of Europe Fights for Democracy in Greece, 1967-1969). Though van der Stoel’s concept of family differs considerably from the idea of family present in A Crowded Heart, it is interesting to note that he, too, speaks of family as a unit that offers support in times of crises. The politics of a military regime, Van der Stoel’s comment suggests, is a threat to democratic values, a reason strong enough for the Council of Europe to fight for Greece’s return to “the European family.”

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the concrete protective efforts of the mother but also by the family’s bi-ethnic belonging as a

result of the mother’s American nationality. It is based on a conviction of the “power of [their]

other country” (100), America; the international media publicity that the mother’s letters initiate

serve as “a protective mantle” (103) during the imprisonment of the narrator’s father.

If Alex’s family, at this moment, finds protection in their American ethno-national

affiliation, the military regime considers their bi-ethnic heritage a problem and a threat. When

officers of internal security visit Alex’s mother one morning to discourage her from taking action

against the dictatorship and making Greece look bad internationally, they proclaim interethnic

marriage to be an ill-fated and destructive commitment. “He’s Greek. You’re an American. One

day he’ll leave you” (102), the man says to Alex’s mother as he is trying to convince her, by

twisting and distorting information, that her husband is being unfaithful. Alex’s mother,

however, knowing that “some governments . . . separate husbands from their wives, tell them

lies, write false letters” (103) to “break [the] resistance down” (103), is not fooled by their

methods. She may have “used her American citizenship as if it was made of gold” (103-4) for

publicity and protection, but it is not ethnicity per se that keeps the family intact and eventually

releases the narrator’s father from prison. In the narrator’s understanding, the strength of his

mother’s love, in combination with the family’s fame, brings his father safely home.14

The narrator’s explanation of what it takes to sustain a family in times of crises displays

an uncritical acceptance of conventional values regarding gender roles and division of labor, and

advances traditional equations such as “private” family and “public” politics. As a result of such

gendered ideas about private space and public territory, and because women, according to

Patricia Hill Collins, “are so often associated with family,” the home is seen as “a private

feminized space that is distant from the public, masculinized space that lies outside its borders”

(“It’s All in the Family” 67). Collins argues that “[w]ithin these gendered spheres of private and

public space, women and men again assume distinctive roles. Women are expected to remain in

their home ‘place.’ Avoiding the dangerous space of public streets allows women to care for

children, the sick, and the elderly, and other dependent family members” (67). These ideas about

private space and public territory, which can also be found in the sociohistorical portrayals of

Greek American family discussed in Chapter Two, can be seen to inform Papandreou’s novel.

Whereas politics in the narrative is obviously the monopoly of men, women are principally

granted the role of nurturers and care-takers of familial relations. This distinction, gender critics

14 The narrator’s fictive remark on the significance of the family’s fame for his father’s treatment in the

hands of the regime is sustained by the actual events around Andreas Papandreou’s imprisonment. According to Clogg, as opposed to the unknown opponents of the regime, and in particular students, opponents who were well known abroad, such as Papandreou, received more lenient treatment and were expelled from the country.

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have argued, is inherently patriarchal, and one that fails to take into account the political nature

of family arrangements. Although patriarchy has historically advocated the traditionally defined

(heterosexual) family as a significant configuration on which our society must rest, it has also

upheld the divide between the private and the public spheres.

In relation to the novel’s manifestations of a private-public distinction, it is interesting to

consider a narrative remark which provides a linguistic dimension to the understanding of a

divide which feminists have pointed out as de facto deeply cultural. “The Greek language,” the

narrator reflects at one point, “has no word for ‘privacy,’ except for the word idiotes, which

means private citizen, the one who is not interested in society and not involved in politics, from

which we get the word ‘idiot’” (105). This observation signals the contradictory relation in which

private family and public politics can be understood to exist for the narrator. The only alternative

word for expressing the private in Greek appears to stand in irreconcilable opposition to an

interest in politics. In fact, the word “idiot” which according to the narrator derives from the

notion of the private individual not partaking in the political, intensely emphasizes the degree to

which the private and politics, for Alex, are at odds with each other.

Alex’s conviction that politics and domestic family are an ill-fated combination has its

source in traditional distinctions like the one between the private “feminine” sphere and the

public “masculine” world discussed earlier. Such conventional gender distinctions clearly exist

within the narrator’s own family. Moreover, the life experience of his grandmother, who had

first-hand knowledge of the fact that “politics was the death of the family” (18), confirms this as

well. Marriage, her husband once wrote in a letter that asked for a divorce, “holds him back”

(119). The passion that he felt whenever a crowd gathered in a square was one he could not

share with anybody. The reason given for the divorce of Alex’s grandparents gives an additional

dimension to the meaning of “crowded heart” in the novel’s title, which can be understood to

refer not just to the narrator’s crowded emotions, as suggested earlier, but also to the crowded

hearts of his father and grandfather, two men whose love for politics and the public do not leave

enough room for family life. What is more, the narrator’s grandfather’s justification for his

separation from his wife transmits patriarchal values about politics and family. It re-asserts the

conception of politics as a pursuit assigned to masculinity and the contradiction between the

public world and femininity, which, as I demonstrated in Chapter Four, also features in

Thompson’s narrative. Men, more specifically fathers, in Thompson’s work—Ariadne’s father,

grandfather, and Uncle Dimitri—are involved in political and ecclesiastical work conferred upon

them by the Greek government. Mothers, on the other hand, are guardians of family

relationships, and the private is the arena where cultural values are cultivated and perpetuated.

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The power relations of gender as depicted in the novel can be examined in the light of

the emerging feminist challenge to the idea of politics and family as an unseemly combination.

At the close of the 1960s, “feminists had identified women’s role in the family as basic to their

subordination” (Segal 46). With the famous slogan of the 1970s “the personal is political,”

women struggled to eliminate the patriarchal ideologies which “restrict women to a narrow range

of less valued and rewarding activities” (Segal 47). The private sphere of the household (also the

family) became, for feminists, the arena for the political work of transforming society in ways

that would allow women a full and equal role within it. Consequently, the distinction between the

private and the public domains was challenged, and the conception of the private sphere and

family as non-political was shown to be problematic.

Papandreou’s otherwise perceptive narrator offers no reflection on the feminist idea of

family as a highly political structure or as a unit that can mobilize for specific actions. The public,

political realm is presented as an exclusively male arena; it is obvious that women can neither

understand nor qualify for politics. In the political project of Alex’s grandfather, for example, the

grandmother is not even allowed to occupy the common symbolic place and role for women in

politics in a patriarchally defined society, namely that of a supporting actor. In fact, the only

political activity women are shown to indulge in is the writing of letters to influential men, an

activity which is acknowledged not as a political means of opposition per se but as an act of

protecting the private sphere and the family. Seen in the light of gender critics’ insistence upon

the political nature of gender arrangements, however, the mother’s action takes on a political

significance as well. Her work, exercised from the home, may not pertain to party politics in the

sense practiced by her husband and father-in-law, but it is subversive and political enough to

inflame the military regime. It functions, to evoke the political image of family quoted earlier in

this chapter, as a “cell of resistance.”

Finally, in Papandreou’s A Crowded Heart the idea of family, I have earlier argued,

expands beyond the private family and the extended kin system to incorporate a larger system of

relationships such as the crowds that gather at the political speeches held by the narrator’s father

and grandfather, and the national and political communities which, together with the narrator’s

family, struggle to overthrow the dictatorial regime. As a result of the political ambitions and

careers of the narrator’s male progenitors in Greece, the private and the public spheres are

shown to command both loyalty and devotion. The sacrifices that family and national

community elicit so prominently in A Crowded Heart can be illuminated with Anthony Smith’s

account of the links between identity, family, and nation as expressed in Nationalism: “it is

because our identities, needs and interests, our very survival, are felt to be bound up with, and

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dependent upon, those of ‘our’ family and ‘our’ nation, that we feel such devotion to them and

are ready to sacrifice so much for them” (80). Smith’s remark suggests that the personal feelings

of belonging to a nation and those of belonging to a family are on par. Nations, like families, in

Smith’s words, are “communities of emotion” (Nationalism 80).

The relationship between collective will and emotion is central to the paradigm of the

diaspora. According to Charles C. Moskos, the paradigm implies that “one’s cultural roots and

political sensitivities must be nourished by responsiveness to contemporary Greek realities—

even if at a distance. The underlying presumption is that, whether residing or even born in the

United States, Greeks in America share a destiny somehow connected with other people who call

themselves Hellenes” (Greek Americans 145-46). The beliefs in a collective ethnic history and in a

national identity and allegiance centrally inform Papandreou’s novel, specifically, the father’s

vision of a socialist and democratic Greece, which inspires his decision to repatriate with his

family to Greece. Unlike the wish to re-claim ethnic heritage seen in, for example, Greece by

Prejudice, The Feasts of Memory and The Priest Fainted, it is possible to understand the return of

Alex’s family to their father’s country of origin, I argued in Chapter Two, as a response to

diaspora nationalism. The father’s emotional and personal ties to Greece and Greek politics

emphasize a type of ethnic attachment which, in a fashion similar to Smith’s commentary on the

family and nation quoted above, brings together the individual and the collective, the private and

the public. However, this inter-connectedness, the reader should be reminded, stands in

opposition to the gendered ideas about private space and public territory present in

Papandreou’s text. As I discussed earlier in this chapter, the idea of family and the gender

relations seen in the novel are primarily informed by traditional family ideals and equations such

as “private” family and “public” politics.

Papandreou’s novel constructs family as a site where issues of ethnicity, politics, and

masculinity are inextricably combined, entangled, and enmeshed. The intricate relations between

family matters and public politics are shown to produce varying experiences for the Greek

American narrator. There are occasions in the narrative when family is represented as a private

(maternal) site which offers emotional sustenance and mediates a bi-ethnic self-conception, and

moments when (paternal) family exerts pressure and violence on the individual, thereby failing to

nourish or sustain the ethnic and gender identity formation of family members. And yet the

novel depicts the possibility of transformation in the construction of ethnicity and masculinity

through family and through self-agency. This is clear when Alex decides to turn up the volume

of the music in their living room in Canada, and he begins “to listen, slowly, ever so slowly, to

music written for a different world” (164). Back in Greece again at the age of sixteen, that solo

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show of manliness—Zebekiko—that he had seen his father dance eventually becomes part of his

own soul and sense of “Greekness.” Although his impaired left foot (caused by an accident with

a lawn mower) gives him little support and makes his movements strange, he does not give up.

Over the years, Alex “discovered [his] own dancing style” (173), and with that, the novel

suggests, he discovers the meaning of his own ethnic and male identity. The music of the

bouzouki, Alex remarks, is not music; “it is speeches, cavalcades of cars, emigrant workers,

crowd-filled squares” (173-74). It is a rhythm that includes his experiences first as a Greek

American child and then as a young man: “the bouzouki rings inside me and stirs me like a cry in

the middle of the night, the eastern voices seem inevitable, as if they had been part of me all my

life” (174). Greece is a democracy again, and he is at the beginning of his life. His father is still to

be found in “some large town, giving a speech from a hotel balcony, lecturing to party members

in a restaurant, but always, always surrounded by men” (177, emphasis added). As for the narrator,

“everything still seems possible. [He is] seventeen” (177), a closing of the novel which is imbued

with hope and a possibility of self-knowledge and self-transformation, that of a young Greek

American man’s coming to terms with his “Greekness” and his developing manhood.

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Conclusion

To be different without being confusing, to be radical

without promoting a scorched-earth policy, to be intellectual

while remaining emotional and to be emotional without

succumbing to sentimentality, to find a new form that is

immediately negotiable—these would be the aims I’d shoot

for, in our drear day.

—Eugenides, “The Father of Modernism”

In this study I have examined the function of family in the process of ethnic self-definition in

five Greek American literary texts, published between 1956 and 1998. The close readings of the

texts have focused on the ways in which each writer explores the ethnic identity formation of

first-, second- or third-generation Greek American protagonists. All the selected texts, the study

has shown, represent ethnic and gender identity formation as a dynamic and self-conscious

process, one which is mediated through interactions with family but also shaped by individual

experience. Focusing on the literary representations of identity formation my analyses have also

emphasized such themes as the journey to ancestral homelands, the Greek mythical past, family

genealogy and relations, generational differences, ethnic language acquisition, and the process of

assimilation/acculturation. In my discussions, I have attempted to bring the texts into dialogue

with theories of identity and identity formation, ethnicity, and sociohistorical accounts about

family, specifically the Greek American family (introduced in Chapter Two).

Much like the sociological studies reviewed in Chapter Two, the literary texts examined

in this dissertation evoke a traditional definition of family: they depict an immediate family

consisting of two biological parents, with prescribed roles and social functions, and their

children. In addition to this nuclear unit, family in the texts may also include near relatives both

by blood and by marriage, such as aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins (what is typically

known as an extended family.) In other words, family in these narratives is chiefly defined in

terms of genealogy. But the literary texts also complicate, question, and create a more complex

picture of traditional family definitions and ideals. Family is presented as a constraining site of

ethnic identity formation, as well as a rich site of developing, coming to terms with, and claiming

an ethnic sense of identity.

I have argued that Greece by Prejudice foregrounds a concern with what constitutes family,

and displays the complexities and resistances involved in the process of creating affiliations with

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family in a pre-American fatherland. Athas’s text displays certain ambivalences informing the

ethnic traveler’s process of identity formation when mediated through family, and the tensions

that arise from seemingly contradictory positions such as Greek and American, family and

stranger, insider and outsider. However confounding, these contradictions entail moments of

personal transformation and cognition for the narrator, not least through the experiences of

travel to imaginary ethnic homelands.

The Feasts of Memory shares the preoccupation with origins and genealogy that

characterizes Athas’s text, and represents travel to ancestral homelands and family as central

sources of knowledge about ethnicity and ethnic self-identification. However, as opposed to the

unsettling experiences that travel is shown to have in Athas’s story, Kulukundis’s text depicts

travel as a way of settling uncertainties and re-claiming the past. The cognitive potential of travel

in Kulukundis’s text is linked to the act of “unearthing” and creatively reconstructing ancestral

history and individual ethnicity. The act of imagining stories and re-claiming histories of the past,

I have suggested, is informed by a constructivist approach to ethnicity and a subjective

interpretation of ethnic meaning.

A text that emphasizes the links between ancestral stories, more specifically the stories of

classical Greek mythology, and the conception of a proud sense of ethnic identity is The Octagonal

Heart. Family, especially mothers, Thompson’s text shows, assumes a central role in developing

in the American-born characters generational knowledge about ethnic heritage, and nurturing an

ethnic sense of identity. However, the mediation of an ethnic identity through family is not an

uncomplicated process. The conceptualization of an ethnic self, Thompson suggests, is informed

by issues of gender, more expressly by patriarchal patterns of gender differentiation upheld by

immigrant families, which include intergenerational tensions over concerns about education,

personal freedom, and ethnic intermarriage.

A text that prompts careful consideration of gender issues and their influence on the

formation of female ethnic identity is The Priest Fainted. This text, more explicitly and self-

consciously than any of the others, challenges prevailing ideals linked to family and traditional

gender arrangements implicated in the nuclear family. By re-imagining the stories of mothers and

grandmothers and re-writing the patriarchal ideologies of classical myths (an act that I have

called “re-mything”) Davidson’s narrator is able to interpret her experiences as both an ethnic

person and as a woman. This process of inscribing explicitly woman-centered modes of being in

the familiar plots of classical Greek myths entails personal development and cognition.

If The Priest Fainted explores the formation of ethnic identity as intrinsically informed by

the lives of female relatives and the stories of mythical women, A Crowded Heart foregrounds

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paternal origins, and the interplay between family, politics, and social location, as crucial to the

process of developing an ethnic male identity. Unlike any of the other ethnic Bildungsromans

examined in this study, Papandreou’s text expands the idea of family as a private and domestic

site. Embedded in specific social discourses and political contexts, family, I have argued, also

exists in a masculinized, public realm framed by national (socialist, democratic but also

dictatorial) politics. Given these different representations of family, family life and family

relations in A Crowded Heart are sources of love and grief, comfort and conflict.

My literary analyses of Greek American ethnicity as mediated through family are centrally

informed by Paula M. L. Moya’s and, to some extent, Satya P. Mohanty’s theories of identity and

identity formation. Moya and Mohanty’s approaches to identity as a theoretical construction, one

with material consequences, as well as their propositions of the cognitive value of individual

experience have been significant sources of inspiration in reading these narratives. As my

discussions have shown, their theories advance ways of interpreting literary representations of

Greek American identities as complexly influenced (but not determined) by social location

(including the categories of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality, to name a few) as well as

dynamically shaped by family and self-agency. In addition, by viewing identities as subject to a

continual process of verification and revision that takes place throughout an individual’s life,

Moya and Mohanty’s identity theory enables an analysis of the ethnic identities represented in the

narratives as enriching, and not emotionally crippling, structures of feeling.

The narratives examined here place great significance on the role of family in ethnic

identity formation and ethnic language acquisition at the same time as they grant the individual

agency to influence the processes of identity development. However, parental expectations to

preserve ethnic heritage, as my analysis of The Octagonal Heart has emphasized, may just as often

cause conflicts between the immigrant and the American-born generations over issues of

education, independence, personal integrity, and sexuality, especially with regards to the female

protagonists. Such conflicts are shown to emerge from the gendered structure of the first-

generation Greek family. Constructed as a unit with a patriarchal ideology, the Greek immigrant

family shows certain similarities with the American family of the 1950s presented by sociologists

as consisting of “two-biological parent[s], male-breadwinner, female-homemaker” (Baca Zinn

and Eitzen 6). For example, the politically and ideologically informed distinction between private

and public spheres, with the family representing the private sphere, largely upheld by mothers

and grandmothers, features in most of the literary constructions of the Greek immigrant and the

Greek American family. However, the texts’ representations of the invented equation between

“private” family and “public” work also show variations. Whereas, the narrator’s re-mything of

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the classical myth of Medea in The Priest Fainted advances new configurations of family relations

that can be seen to challenge a private-public distinction, A Crowded Heart portrays a mother

who, besides taking responsibility for the family, enacts a form of political opposition by writing

letters to influential men to help her imprisoned husband.

In addition, the family variations and differences that the narratives emphasize are

informed by the categories of social class and gender. The families depicted in these texts and the

individuals they comprise occupy different social locations, which in turn produce different life

experiences. The Octagonal Heart and A Crowded Heart give expression to the advantages that the

protagonists have access to as a result of their families’ economic resources and public power.

Gender can also be the basis for distributing resources and opportunities, and the texts, either

explicitly or implicitly, portray the family as an important foundation of the institutionalized

gender system. Whereas two of the narratives (Greece by Prejudice and The Feasts of Memory) are

conspicuously silent about issues of gender, and how these may inform the identity formation

processes, and a third one (The Octagonal Heart) shows implicit concerns with gender aspects as

they relate to family life, and women’s careers and education, yet others (The Priest Fainted and A

Crowded Heart) engage in an exploration of the development of a female or male sense of self

through family and self-agency.

In the light of the literary investigations and the sociological discussion of family

presented in Chapter Two, it is important to reflect on the distinctiveness—if any—of Greek

American family. What are the unique traits ascribed to the Greek American family? What makes

the Greek American family such a rich (although complex) site for mediating ethnicity? Images

of Greek Americans as a family-oriented ethnic group appear with frequency in historical and

sociological literature, even though affiliations with extended family and commitments to the

ancestral culture, the studies of George A. Kourvetaris, Alice Scourby, and Charles C. Moskos

report, have weakened with the American-born generations, primarily as a result of acculturation

processes. The literary narratives examined in this study challenge and complicate this

sociohistorical image by emphasizing how the effort of ethnic self-definition largely involves

connections with family and the ancestral past. The texts feature the dynamic processes by which

the Greek American narrators re-claim family, at times even stretch traditional definitions of

family in terms of bloodlines to affirm an ethnic heritage and invent an ethnic identity. In other

words, they emphasize individual consent and agency in forming an ethnic identity but depict

how Greek American family, in various configurations, makes up an integral venue through

which a sense of ethnicity, and to varying degrees also gender identity, is mediated.

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In different ways, either implicitly or explicitly, each of the ethnic Bildungsromans

examined in this study raises the question of assimilation at the same time as each can be seen to

trouble easy readings of a linear cultural transformation, as implied in the ideology of

assimilation. Ethnicity may be re-claimed or re-invented but will not completely erode with each

succeeding generation. Ethnicity in the American-born generations emerges as, to invoke

Michael M. J. Fischer’s words, “a process of inter-reference between two or more cultural

traditions” (201), or, to refer to Moya once more, as “a process of multi-directional cross-cultural

acculturation” (Learning from Experience 104). Greece by Prejudice, for example, presents a narrator

who, initially, identifies as American but through affiliation with her ancestral homeland and

Greek family gradually develops an ethnic self-awareness. The Feasts of Memory implies the process

of assimilation in the early comments on the narrator’s hyphenated childhood experiences yet

shows how the journey to an ancestral island is compelled by an urge to explore one’s ethnic past

and identity. The Octagonal Heart shows that although the family depicted cannot resist forces of

assimilation, none of the characters perceive themselves as exclusively American. The Priest

Fainted depicts a narrator who claims not only Greek and American but also Jewish identities. In

a similar fashion, A Crowded Heart emphasizes the possibility of sustaining multiple ethnic and

national allegiances and affiliations: Greek, American, and Canadian.

The opening sentence of this study remarked on the powerful capacity of literature to

produce and circulate images of ethnic identities. The selected texts indeed serve as laboratories

of sorts to explore the processes of ethnic identity formation. However, none of them are as

self-reflexive or theory-informed as Jeffrey Eugenides’s recent novel Middlesex, which moves

through three generations of the Greek Stephanides family, tracing the rare genetic mutation that

caused the intersex condition of the hermaphrodite Calliope Stephanides. Earlier in this study I

have occasionally used Middlesex as a point of reference because this ethnic Bildungsroman

reiterates issues of ethnicity and identity. I wish to return to it in my concluding remarks since

the text, in a highly self-conscious way, both historicizes and theorizes identity matters. The

narrative’s commentary on issues of ethnicity, assimilation and racial relations offers

opportunities to investigate the sometimes conspicuous silences about the historical events,

culture, and climate that the other texts examined in this dissertation are steeped in. Unlike any

of the other texts, Middlesex gives expression to the significance of structural relations based on

gender and sex for individual experience. Given the novel’s many themes, historical threads, and

theoretical concerns with identity, it would be possible, I argue, to consider the book as the

“magnum opus” of Greek American literature published thus far. In what follows I will use

Middlesex as a touchstone to discuss how the novel further complicates representations of family,

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ethnic and gender identities, as well as show how the text additionally transforms the traditional

Bildungsroman.

I have suggested that the first-person narratives examined in this study can be read as

ethnic coming-of-age stories, or ethnic Bildungsromans. They reformulate the traditional genre of

the Bildungsroman in terms of ethnicity but also gender, and feature self-identification as a process

in which the communal (constructed as family) and the individual co-exist and interact. This

description applies to Eugenides’s coming-of-age story, but the text also differs. Eugenides’s

story interweaves the fraught inner life of the young narrator Cal, who was raised as a girl but at

the age of fourteen was “reborn” as a boy, with the escape of his Greek immigrant grandparents

from the Turkish destruction of Smyrna in Asia Minor to Detroit. It then relates the

grandparents’ experiences through the Depression, World War II, the race riots of 1967, and the

family’s move to suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. By means of the wide-angled perspective of

the story’s first-person narrator (who will at times make direct commentaries to the reader) and

by means of the omniscient narrator who is capable of inhabiting all ages and sexes and is able to

recount his birth as well as his pre-history back to 1922 and to the village that his Greek

grandparents descend from, the text can be seen to further transform the genre of the

Bildungsroman. In a 2004 conversation with Jim Lewis on literary Modernism, Eugenides

expressed his growing hostility to the first-person narrator. “Self-examination,” he writes, “has

been done to death, and the novels we need now require a broader, less, single-minded

perspective” (“The Father of Modernism”).

Indeed, the narrator Cal and his story serve as lenses into many issues: the tensions and

intersections between biology and culture, heritage and milieu, hormones and upbringing, the old

world and the new, Greek and American, male and female, and black and white. All of these

concerns, I propose, gather and expound in the Greek American family history that Middlesex

recounts.1 The novel’s three-generational structure, which provides a broad panorama of Greek

American ethnicity and family experience, makes Middlesex a useful narrative alongside which to

read the representations of family and ethnic identity in the other texts. As James Wood wrote in

his review, the many stories of Middlesex “gather to present a broad swath of Greek American

life” (32). The same can be argued about the text’s representations of family. Though

Eugenides’s narrative evokes the idea of family as a biological arrangement based on

heterosexual marriage, the text also raises a set of new questions about family when understood

1 Although the narrator’s confounding sexual identity is what has attracted most reviewers’ attention, the

novel is primarily a family saga. Family history, I propose, serves to emphasize the Greek heritage by which Cal’s identity formation, including his unusual anatomy, is complexly informed. Even the narrator’s tendency to get “a little Homeric at times” is “genetic” (4) and rooted in family.

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in terms of blood ties. By accounting for the replication of a rare chromosomal defect through

an incestuous relationship between two siblings, the narrator’s Greek grandparents, Eleutherios

(later Lefty) and Desdemona, the text probes into the physiological consequences of

consanguineous family relations. The focus on the genetic and chromosomal aspects of ancestry

in Middlesex provides an explanation to the “polluted pool of the Stephanides family” (4) that the

narrator is destined to carry. However, the “infected” and “impure” genetic links of the

narrator’s family also reminds us of the social and cultural stigmas commonly associated with

incest. The family is affected by disease (albeit unseen) but the burden, Eugenides shows, is not

only that of heredity. In the light of Desdemona’s guilt, shame, and constant agony at the

“impurity” of her marriage, and the potential birth defects that may result from it, Middlesex can

be seen to challenge the commonly held ideal of the nuclear, heterosexual family as a healthy and

harmonious unit without flaws or conflicts.

Middlesex makes up a good occasion to bring together theories of ethnicity which view

assimilation as inevitable and those that conceptualize ethnicity as a dynamic and emotional

component of identity that continues to be re-claimed and re-invented. Eugenides recounts the

history of U.S. immigration in the early twentieth century, offering not a sociological review but a

fictionalized account of the forces and processes that have shaped the experiences of what today

is referred to as the Greek American ethnic group. His narrative provides explicit comments on

immigration policies and issues of assimilation (and its rejection), which are not as pronounced

in the other Greek American texts that this study has examined. Thus Middlesex comments on

the outlook on immigration that prevailed in 1922, when the narrator’s Greek grandparents

reached the American shores. Already before the restrictive immigration law of 1924, Eugenides

shows, certain immigrant groups were seen as a threat to the fabric of the American race. Aware

of the reviewing of passenger lists upon arrival to America, and the documentation of different

information (among other things, color, country and province of birth, mother tongue, religion,

and disabilities) by immigration authorities, immigrants, including the narrators’ grandparents,

learned “how to finagle their way through Ellis Island” (Middlesex 73). Illiterates “learned to

pretend to read; bigamists to admit to only one wife; anarchists to deny having read Proudhon;

heart patients to simulate vigor; epileptics to deny their fits; and carriers of hereditary diseases to

neglect mentioning them” (73-74).

Eugenides’s representation of the experiences of Greek immigrants upon arrival to the

concessions area at Ellis Island, including the experiences of the narrator’s grandparents, signal

the conflicts between the urgency to become an American and the immigrants’ responses to

these expectations. Lefty who, in his own apprehension at least, is “already an American”

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(Middlesex 67), cajoles his wife to enter a tent where Desdemona goes through a “makeover”

from a “shawled and kershiefed” (82) immigrant woman to somebody wearing “a drop-waisted

dress and a floppy hat shaped like a chamber pot” (82). As part of this transformation,

Desdemona’s “immigrant braids” (82) are cut off, an act which stresses the insistence, through

force, to literally terminate any immigrant connections to the old country.

Whereas Lefty seizes “the opportunity of transatlantic travel to reinvent himself” (67),

Desdemona has a more cautious attitude to the Americanization ideal. In her mind and heart,

Desdemona never leaves the village; she lives in America “as an eternal exile, a visitor for forty

years” (222). And yet the narrative emphasizes how she is “struggling against assimilationist

pressures she couldn’t resist” (222). “[C]ertain bits of her adopted country,” the reader learns,

“had been seeping under the locked doors of her disapproval” (222), a piece of information that

raises expectations of a linear narrative of assimilation in Middlesex. However, Eugenides resists

any such narrative by also foregrounding the anti-foreign sentiments that immigrants, and

occasionally also their American-born children, experienced as part of the process of

Americanization. In spite of Lefty’s eagerness to become an American, and his willingness to

embrace America as his country, the story shows that all immigrant groups were not equally

welcome to participate in the making of the American melting-pot. Exhortations such as “Why

don’t you go back to your own country” (169) make up a crucial part of Lefty’s immigrant

experiences in his chosen country.

If Middlesex features Greece as the “true home” (363) of the immigrant generation, the

text also shows how the American-born generation is not likely to put “Greekness” at the center

of their social identities. An incident in the novel linked to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in

1974 and the U.S. involvement in the affair makes clear that the narrator’s father, Milton, a

second-generation Greek American, perceives himself as primarily American. Whereas some of

the family’s Greek American friends feel that “America betrayed the Greeks” (363) in the Cyprus

affair, increasingly identifying as Greek, Milton renounces his Greek roots when the

conversation turns to the presence and purpose of U.S. battleships in the Mediterranean.

“Forced to choose between his native land and his ancestral one” (363), Milton does not hesitate

and ends the heated discussions yelling, “‛To hell with the Greeks’” (363). It would be possible

to read Milton’s choice to take sides with the Americans rather than the Greeks on the Cypriot

issue in line with Marcus Lee Hansen’s contention of a second-generation flight from ethnicity,

referred to in Chapter Two of this study. However, Eugenides does not portray, to invoke

Hansen’s thesis, the “strange dualism” (204) into which second-generation individuals are born

as “the source of all their woes” (204). Although the narrator’s father identifies as an American,

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he does not completely renounce his Greek background, and neither does his second-generation

Greek American mother. Both attempt, in different ways, to pass on certain knowledge to their

children about their Greek heritage. Whereas the mother regularly visits the local Orthodox

Church with the children, Milton’s ambition is to make the trip back to the ethnic homeland.

The aspiration to achieve the American dream is a dominant influence on Milton’s sense

of self. Milton, who can be seen to incarnate the entrepreneurial spirit that has generally been

ascribed to the second-generation of Greek Americans, becomes a successful businessman as the

founder of Hercules Hot Dogs. However, despite this social and economic mobility, Milton’s

ethnic origins are not entirely assimilable, not even beyond his generation. When Callie, at the

age of twelve, is enrolled at a private school it slowly dawns on her the ways in which she differs,

not just biologically but also in terms of ethnicity, from the other girls. “Until [I] came to Baker

& Inglis,” the narrator observes, “I had always felt completely American” (298). Now, however,

she realizes that she belongs to the group of girls known as “Ethnic” (298), and that

there was another America to which [the Ethnic girls] could never gain

admittance. All of a sudden America wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods

anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something

that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything

that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now! (298-

99)

The narrator’s observation, and his remark that “who wasn’t [ethnic], when you got right

down to it” (298), signal that what is often at stake in narratives of assimilation is the issue of

politics, more specifically, the politics of representation. At the same time as the ethos of

assimilation is framed by the need for ethnic groups to forget their ethnic memories, and

disavow their cultural traits in the attempt to make the country politically and culturally

homogenous, ethnicity is a symbol of otherness against which “real” Americanness is identified.

A central feature of Middlesex is its investigation of gender identity, which is carried

further here than in any of the other texts. As a result of the hermaphroditic condition of the

narrator, which implies somebody who has “the sex organs and many of the secondary sex

characteristics of both male and female” (430), Middlesex troubles and transcends the stereotypes

of what is male and female, masculine and feminine. Although the narrator has an “androgenized

brain” (20), he is “not androgynous in the least” (41). He relates a story with “an innate feminine

circularity” (20), and he can feel Calliope surface within him, “doing a hair flip, or checking her

nails” (41), “wearing [his] skin like a loose robe” (42). In other words, Cal’s emotional life and

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sexual identities, though at points confounding, endow him with “the ability to communicate

between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both”

(269). He has the ability to perform as a feminine narrator at the same time as he is a male

character. Unlike the other texts that I have examined in this study, in which categories such as

male and female, and the experiences related to these categories, are presented as relatively

uniform, Middlesex can be seen to defy clear gender categorization and to bend our notions of

gender.

Middlesex can further be seen to foreground the psychological and physiological aspects

of gendered experience, without downplaying the cultural aspects of that experience. In the light

of Cal’s self-determination to embrace his male gender identity without undergoing the genital

surgery that the sexologist prescribes, the text stresses that there is no physiology outside of

culture. As Robyn R. Warhol observes, Middlesex offers “a compelling and original representation

of the connections and disconnects between the body’s sex and the personality’s gender” (227).

When “Cal’s bodily sex shifts in its identity from female to male” due to the secondary sex

characteristics that the narrator’s emergent hormones bring on, “his personality does not alter,

even though he learns to modify the details of his gender performance” (227). In other words,

Eugenides “refuses to alight on either the body or the mind answer to the question of where

gender identity comes from” (228). This becomes clear in the final chapter of the book, which

describes Cal’s journey of self-discovery in the following words:

After I returned from San Francisco and started living as a male, my family found

that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important. My change

from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from

infancy to adulthood. In most ways I remained the person I’d always been. Even

now, though I live as a man, I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter. (520)

Cal’s psychological and physical make-up, as this passage signals, is informed by the relationship

of genetics, nurturance, and individual agency. The narrator’s identity emerges from a complex

connection between his experiences (mediated through family and interpreted through theories

that explain the world), the reality of his anatomy, and individual choice. Or, as the narrator puts

it: “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind” (479).

Middlesex is centrally concerned with biological determinism and self-invention, and with

descent and consent, that is, with issues of identity and identity formation. It also raises,

examines, and resolves the fundamental difference that lies at the center of critical (essentialist

and constructivist) formulations of identity as either innate or constructed. Eugenides represents

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identities as socially and discursively produced categories yet shows the material “realities” these

categories describe. In addition, his book features the significance of family determinism but

emphasizes, in the end, “free will” (Middlesex 479) as important for the narrator’s self-conception

and identity formation.

Finally, given its thematic and narrative heterogeneity, Middlesex may indeed be called a

hermaphrodite novel, as Michael Griffith has called it. Hermaphrodite, Griffith explains, means

“anything comprised of a combination of diverse or contradictory elements” (213). Middlesex is a

hermaphrodite with regards to identity; it combines essentialist and constructionist conceptions

of identity, and emphasizes the cracks, uncertainties and contradictions in the process of identity

formation. Moreover, Cal’s story is a hybrid also in the sense that it is at once a Greek American

family saga and a coming-of-age narrative, it juggles comedy with tragedy (like the lucky set of

Drama cuff links that we learn the narrator’s father owns), and moves from wit to pathos,

combining a tone of affection with mockery. It provides ethnic material with American history as

its backdrop. It is, in other words, an ambitious and sprawling book, which in many respects can

be characterized as a “hybrid.”

Categories such as “hybrid” or “hyphenated” may operate, I argue, as viable terms in

discussions of literary representations of ethnic Greek experience and identity, however, not as

markers of authenticity or of who is entitled to speak for whom in American ethnic writing. Such

struggles, critics remind us, have defined much of the ethnicity debate in literary criticism.

Rather, the usefulness and viability of such terms as “hybrid” or “hyphenated,” can be found in

the way they function to emphasize the complexity of representations of ethnicity. Before I

discuss this matter in the context of Middlesex, a text which reviewers have likened to a

“deliriously American” epic (Laura Miller), with “confidence in [its] Greek material” (Wood 32),

I will first briefly address some of the issues and arguments surrounding the ethnicity debate.

One of the questions I raised in Chapter One was: “What is ethnic literature?” The

overview of various ways of understanding “ethnic” that I have offered aimed to reflect the

difficulties of arriving at a satisfying, flexible, and ultimately all-inclusive definition. But what if

we were to reverse the question, and instead ask, “What is American literature?” “What are its

attributes?” Would it be easier to come to a conclusion as to what the label “ethnic” may

designate if we were to formulate the question differently? Such an interrogation would have to

start with the conception of American literature, which critics have shown, is inextricably related

to the idea of America.

Investigating the boundaries in twentieth-century histories of North American literature,

Marietta Messmer argues that the “referential scope of nationally oriented histories of American

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literature var[ies] in accordance with the changing conceptualizations of America as a (national)

entity” (42). The project of literary and cultural nation building has, Messmer observes,

frequently been accompanied by shifting notions of the nation-state. For example, Messmer

shows, whereas literary historiographies from the turn of the century display an Anglocentric

perspective, more contemporary histories are characterized by a more polyphonic understanding

of what makes up American literature. This extension of boundaries, she argues, is implicated in

a broadening of the term “America” to include also the cultural and ethnic diversity of the

continent. As a consequence, histories of American literature have started to offer a selection of

American literary texts written in languages other than English.2 Despite these attempts, a strong

intercultural, transnational, and interliterary approach to American literatures, it is argued,

remains to be developed.

But questions of inclusiveness raise a related issue, namely, the problems inherent in

pluralistic demands in discussions surrounding literary historiography. The alternative to the

traditional (racist, sexist, elitist) and exclusionary American literary history, Sollors argues in his

essay “A Critique of Pure Pluralism,” is “theoretically problematic” (254). Sollors criticizes the

openness associated with what is often called “cultural pluralism” for merely adding up diverse

facets of a writer’s cultural identity without any attempts at integration. Considering that “ethnic

literary history ought to increase our understanding of the cultural interplays and contacts among

writers of different backgrounds” (256), Sollors observes that the focus on a writer’s ethnic

descent is too narrow as a unifying factor of what is often called “the ethnic perspective.” How

do we, for example, define texts which cannot be comfortably locked into a unitary

compartment such as “ethnic” writing? And what happens when all of the variables (ethnicity,

race, gender, sexuality, class) are located in a single identity or text, as with Middlesex? At the same

time, and as Sollors remarks, should the very categories “on which previous exclusivism was

based really be used as organizing concepts?” (255)? Other critics raise the question whether the

so-called “integrationist logic,” classically associated with area studies, is outmoded. By means of

totalizing categories, such as, for example, “ethnic literature,” even discordant voices and radical

difference, such critics argue, may be subsumed under some preestablished framework of unity.

Such debates signal that the assumptions informing unitary perceptions of “ethnic literature”

need careful reexamination.

2 Recent anthologies which pay attention to the multilingual heritage of America by including texts in

Native American, non-English colonial, and immigrant languages are Literatures of Colonial America (2001), edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, Early American Writings (2002), edited by Carla Mulford, and the already mentioned Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000), edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors.

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In her essay “The Technology of Ethnicity,” Smaro Kamboureli reminds us that “the

ethnic subject is a product of a knitting-together of political, social and cultural forces” (211).

Kamboureli’s idea that “the technology of ethnicity, what produces and is produced by it, is part

and parcel of the larger systems within which it operates” (211) can be seen to inform Lori

Ween’s account of the politics of representation involved in the publication and marketing

processes of images of ethnicity, difference, and American identity. The ways in which “we see

ourselves and others,” argues Ween, “are partly based on “the images we receive from marketing

and media, especially as they pertain to literature” (101). To challenge the circulation of limiting

and limited ideas about ethnic groups, Ween contends, it is important to understand the creation

of images of ethnicity and American identity through the ways in which literature is packaged

and marketed to the reading public. Although I have not engaged in a discussion of the various

forces that surround the production and marketing of Greek American texts, I wish to raise the

question of the role of ethnicity in Eugenides’s Middlesex as an element that assists in negotiating

hyphenated identities, and shaping public images of Greek America.

Upon publication Middlesex became an internationally acclaimed novel; an immediate

bestseller, winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, and translated into more than 30 languages. In

the framework of the novel’s international fame, discussions of the marketing and circulation of

literary representations of ethnicity, as well as the conceptual difficulties involved in definitions

of ethnic literature (and the sociopolitical and historical contextualization of American literature),

it is interesting to consider what function Eugenides’s ethnic Bildungsroman is assigned when it is

labeled “American,” at the same time as reviewers acknowledge its ethnic material.

I would like to propose that it is possible to view Middlesex as an account that supplies to

its readers, whether American ethnic or mainstream, a “different,” “radical,” and highly

“intellectual” (ethnic and gender) identity narrative, to invoke Eugenides’s literary goal as

described in the epigraph of this concluding chapter. The story provides opportunities to read

representations of American ethnic identities and the resonance of Greek American experience

in the novel not in terms of authenticity but as literary images that mark a writer’s attempt to re-

claim affiliations with his hyphenated ethnic heritage. Moreover, Eugenides imagines identity

formation as a process that occurs on several levels, both within and beyond the family unit and

the individual, and creates a narrative voice that does not violate the various social components

and experiences that shape identities. Finally, Middlesex demonstrates that hyphenated identities

(both ethnically and biologically) need not be contradictory and disabling, and presents us with a

narrator who, in the end, is far from a shameful, “contaminated,” “freak” (476). He is a

complicated hybrid with an extraordinary sensitivity, a synthesis of both male and female

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characteristics and emotions. In the narrator’s concluding remarks about his “Byzantine” face as

“the face of my grandfather and of the American girl I had once been” (529) the hyphen

becomes a marker of complexity and continuity (rather than a marker of indeterminacy and

fragmentation). At the end of the story, Cal is an artist whose journey of self-discovery will, he

hopes, “bring [him] full circle” (440) (although without the possibility of reproduction, which is

where his story began).

Middlesex signals that the viability of such concepts as hybrid and hyphenated is to be

found in their ability to express the dynamics of cultural difference and interaction rather than

otherness. For this reason, it would be profitable to approach Eugenides, and the other writers

whose texts have been discussed in this study, as artists rather than as “members” of an ethnic

group. In a similar fashion, their texts—as well as ideas, styles, themes, and forms—may be

fruitfully investigated in contexts and constellations that are cross-cultural rather than

monoethnic. Though there appears to be in the selected texts the resonance of a shared ethnic

experience, this study has demonstrated how all the ethnic Bildungsromans make valuable and

multivalent contributions in the circulation of dynamic images of hyphenated Greek American

identities, through a combination of social relations, including those of family, and self-agency.

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