Erotic Underworlds: Gender and Sexuality in the Work of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer was raised in an observant Jewish household in Poland, yet he felt deeply compelled to protest against and question normative ideas about religion and sexuality. In his own literature, Bashevis often creates complicated plots with love triangles, journeys through mysticism, sup...
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| Format: | Dissertation |
| Language: | English |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
01-01-2014
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Isaac Bashevis Singer was raised in an observant Jewish household in Poland, yet he felt deeply compelled to protest against and question normative ideas about religion and sexuality. In his own literature, Bashevis often creates complicated plots with love triangles, journeys through mysticism, supernatural creatures, and the internal turmoil of highly sexualized characters who are frequently torn between desire and religion. His writing, playing with ambiguities and contradictions, is a protest against the very idea of the status quo in terms of Yiddish literature, gender relations and Jewish thought. He expresses contradictions in his relationship to traditional Judaism, which manifested itself in his commitment to writing about gender and sexuality. My dissertation "Erotic Underworlds" presents a new reading of the work of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer that emphasizes these contradictions. My argument is that Bashevis's use of sexual imagery, despite its defiance of religious norms, paradoxically draws on traditional Eastern European Jewish — especially hasidic — religious theologies. I argue that while Bashevis's writing nostalgically recalls the lost world of the past, it simultaneously subverts normative concepts of gender and sexuality through a fascination with cross-dressing, androgyny and sexual deviances. In order to make this argument, I analyze the interplay between demonology, libertinism and religion in Bashevis's work. I examine several of Bashevis's novels, autobiographical texts and short stories. I argue that not only does Bashevis play with the nostalgia for a world that is no more, but he also criticizes it very harshly. Through his depiction of shtetl life, Bashevis breaks the idyllic image of a pure environment untouched by modernity and depravity. His work is in fact everything but a celebration of idealized Yiddishkeit and nostalgia for the shtetl. It is, rather, characterized by mysterious enigmas, folkloric danger, demonological texture, and dense sexual imagery. He underscores the harsh reality experienced in Poland before the Holocaust but he does it through the representation of supernatural agency and narratives of the unexpected. My dissertation re-contextualizes Bashevis within a specifically European tradition that was open to talking about gender and sexuality. Bashevis's voice helped weave the complex fabric of Jewish-American literature while revisiting the connection between Ashkenazi American culture and its Eastern European roots. Many of Bashevis's characters are torn between tradition and modernity, religious devotion and asceticism, and are concerned with the impact of Jewishness on their identity. Dressed in the very garb of this literary and cultural tradition, he gives a voice to those who are not usually in the center of Jewish texts: the mistress, the prostitute, the cross-dresser, the androgyne, the sexually active women, and even demons. |
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| ISBN: | 9781321197877 132119787X |