Assimilation And Resistance:the Crisis Of Jewish Identities In American Pastoral

This thesis probes Seymore Levov’s(alias the Swede)and Merry Levov’s American Jewish identities under the influence of bourgeois values,in relation to conservative egoism,materialism and respect for authority.Based on Homi Bhabha’s idea of cultural hybridity,this thesis discusses the father’s and daughter’s Jewish identities construction.As the postwar economic boom led to American nationalism permeating among people of all ethnic groups,it provided a physical basis for the Swede’s assimilation.By mimicking Johnny Appleseed,the Swede reshapes his American identity in the Jewish community,constructing pastoral fantasy in the postwar suburb,and reifying his white Catholic wife to assimilate racially.The thinking goes that the Swede’s adoration of Johnny Appleseed is a testament to his de-ethnicized and irreligious bourgeois values.While facing his white neighbor Orcutt,he is still regarded as the “other” outside the mainstream of American society.Therefore,the Swede’s ostensible compliance with mainstream WASP culture is no more than an assimilated Jew with sly civility,a Mr.America living under masks with little subjectivity.Based on Homi Bhabha’s mimicry strategy,the Swede’s pastoral dream derives from his mimicry of white culture,which fails to make him all-Americanized,nor back to Jewish tradition,living in in-between cultures instead.For Merry,her identification is constructed in the process of the unremitting resistance to her family bourgeois values and social injustice,which turns her into a radical activist in the anti-war movement and the third-world revolution,carrying out self-imposed starvation as a Jain and ending up being a wandering Jew,homeless,stateless and with no fixed identification.The thinking goes that Merry’s cultural and national identity transformation result from the mimicry of the revolutionary in the third-world and her wandering state serves as the third space to construct her hybrid cultural identity,with a nature of ambivalence and uncertainty.Through Roth’s surrogate Zuckerman,Roth reveals how the father’s and daughter’s American Jewish identities are affected by the illusion of American narrative and the fixed conflicts within bourgeois values.