Mary Gordon Critical Essay | Critical Essay by June Dwyer

Critical Essay by June Dwyer

SOURCE: Dwyer, June. “Unappealing Ethnicity Meets Unwelcoming America: Immigrant Self-Fashioning in Mary Gordon's Temporary Shelter.” MELUS 22, no. 3 (fall 1997): 103-11.

In the following essay, Dwyer discusses the theme of Irish-American identity in the stories “Delia,” “Agnes,” and “Eileen,” included in Temporary Shelter.

Many academics nowadays tend to assume the redemptive power of asserting one's ethnic identity in the United States. But the issue is a complex one: all ethnicities are not equally benign, and there are a number of different relationships one may have both to one's ethnicity and to the country's dominant group. For example, there is a huge difference between a third generation Japanese-American student who acquaints herself with her ethnic heritage by majoring in Asian studies, and her Japanese-speaking grandfather who was interned in a “relocation center” for two years during World War II. Hers is, in the words of Berndt Ostendorf, “ethnicity by memory...
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