caa a22 4500 388048387 CHVBK 20180307125044.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199810 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0361233300006384 doi S0361233300006384 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0361233300006384 Gelfant Blanche H. The Possessive Self in Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska: Gender, Jewishness, and the Assumptions of Americanization [Elektronische Daten] [Blanche H. Gelfant] Mary Antin was not modest in her use of the possessive case in The Promised Land — in her iterations of Mine, Mine, Mine. While still a schoolgirl, Antin asserted that everything she saw in the Boston Public Library, a "treasure house” of wisdom and art, was "Mine.” As the child of a newly naturalized American, she felt entitled to claim possession; the library and its treasured holdings were "Mine,” she said, "because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien; mine ... My palace — mine! ... This is mine” (266, original emphasis). By the time Antin came to the soaring conclusion of The Promised Land, she had exchanged her natural (and naturalized) father for the country's Founding Father, and as the child of George Washington, she claimed as her "heritage” everything in human evolutionary history that had led to the creation of America and everything yet to be evolved. "I am the youngest of America's children,” she wrote, "and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage ... Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future” (286). In swooping hyperbole, Antin equated American citizenship with possession, and possession with inheritance, property, and rights: with a treasure house in which she "had a right to be ... at home” (266). Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998 Prospects Cambridge University Press 23(1998-10), 357-377 0361-2333 23<357 1998 23 PTS https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300006384 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300006384 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Gelfant Blanche H. NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Prospects Cambridge University Press 23(1998-10), 357-377 0361-2333 23<357 1998 23 PTS CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge