America and I

Throughout this essay Yezierska draws upon the contrasting images of dark and light to illuminate elements of her story. Darkness, or blackness, represents despair, while light, fire, gold and sunshine are positive, passionate and life-giving. She calls the country a land of hope, “aflame with longing and desire” (Paragraph 2). In one of the beginning paragraphs she contrasts America and Russia by evoking “colors that never saw light” (Paragraph 5), intimating that her writing talents would go unrecognized in Russia, and then references “my golden hopes” evoking the promise of the American Dream. When talking about her employment with the Americanized family, she says, “Here was my chance to begin my life in the sunshine, after my long darkness” (Paragraph 15). Her promised wages are “shining like a light over my head!” (Paragraph 20), and in anticipation of her reward she shines the house up “like a jewel-box” (Paragraph 24). When she doesn’t receive them, she says, “It went black for my eyes” (Paragraph 37)—she is slowly understanding that perhaps the US and Russia are not so dissimilar in their ignorance of her talents after all. At the factory, her boss is “like a black witch of greed” (Paragraph 44), and she goes to work in a dark basement, comparing herself to “a thing following blindly after something far off in the dark!” (Paragraph 47).