America And I By Anzia Yezierska Analysis

American literature has the distinct benefit of including narratives and texts that encompass a wide variety of human experiences. During the early 1900s, there was a large influx of immigrants into America, especially into places like New York City and Chicago. Many of these people came to America searching for the land of opportunity, but they were instead pushed into the work force of an industrialized capitalist nation that strove for a maximum profit. The hardships these immigrants faced created room for stories about the American immigrant experience. Anzia Yezierska, a Russian immigrant, wrote “America and I,” an autobiographical piece about her life as an immigrant in New York. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, a fictional account meant to reveal the poor treatment of workers in the Chicago meat packing …show more content…
While both The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and “America and I” by Anzia Yezierska are texts that deal with the dehumanization of Eastern European immigrants in the efficiency movement of the early 20th century, Yezierska’s narrator is quicker to fight against this Americanized ideal and redefine what it means to be an “American” than Sinclair’s Jurgis. During the efficiency movement of the …show more content…
Because Anzia and Jurgis’s respective employers viewed them as subhuman and cheap labor, it was easy for them to “den[y] full humanness” and view Anzia and Jurgis as unrefined, uncivilized, immoral, unintelligent, and lacking self-control (Esses 522). If the employers viewed their workers as animalistic and less than human, they were not obligated to feel guilt for creating an unsafe working environment and paying unfair wages. Most, if not all, business owners of the time held these viewpoints, and so if workers felt they were being treated unfairly, there was no alternative work to turn to. They were forced to endure this inhumane