Most Popular White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
RE-SIGNED SUBJECTS: WOMEN, WORK, AND WORLD IN THE FICTION OF CARLOS BULOSAN AND HISAYE YAMAMOTO
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2004 by Higashida, Cheryl
What is striking about "Homecoming" is that while it fundamentally centers on the problem of prostitution, it cannot fully grapple with it. On one hand, Bulosan renders the wretchedness of prostitution precisely by leaving it all but unnamed, resorting to a euphemism that captures the sisters' desperation all the more forcefully. He furthermore makes it clear through Mariano's reaction that Francisca and Marcela are not to be morally or personally indicted: "he felt like smashing the whole world; he was burning with anger. He was angry against all the forces that had made his sisters ugly" (94). The same forces that drive Mariano to the U.S. are what lead him to return home empty-handed and leave his family destitute, which renders prostitution the only viable path for his sisters to supplement the paltry income they earn as laundresses and nursemaids. At the same time, Mariano's systemic analysis of their situation does not account for the fact that they labor within a socio-economic structure that is not only capitalistic but patriarchal. Symptomatic of the narrative's phallocentrism is the fact that only the male protagonist comes to possess a larger understanding of the family's oppression. Having comprehended his sisters' situation, Mariano flees from rather than struggles with it, while coming to terms with the political nature of prostitution is never raised for the sisters. Nonetheless, the story conveys the message that both migrant fieldhands and prostitutes are exploited workers. The story's failed conclusion functions as a negative rather than positive call to resist collectively the degradation of Filipino women and men, whose fates are inextricably linked under global capitalism: it is because Mariano is alone that he cannot act on his newfound knowledge.
Bulosan's (mis)recognition of the laboring subject of prostitution-his registering the female's economic but not sexual subordination-extends to his treatment of white female intellectuals, who (along with Marian and the vagabond, Mary) embody the good America that Allos hopes to enter. Most notably, Eileen Odell, with "her almost maternal solicitude" and lack of "disturbing sensuousness" (234), is "the America [Allos] had wanted to find" (235). Lee argues that these maternal women serve as vessels "speaking male privilege, advocating political agendas set by men, and inadvertently securing brotherly bonds even as they remain marginal to their bonding," thereby "rendering antisexist work irrelevant" (33). Indeed, the rhetoric of brotherhood prominent in the book seems to support Lee's criticisms; for example, Allos describes the significance of the novels that Eileen gives him in terms of the "universal brotherhood" that they "so gloriously had ... succeeded in inspiring" (238). Furthermore, despite the fact that her sister is a proletarian writer, Eileen gives Allos only books by male authors, who become part of his international brotherhood; Dora Travers's stated reasons for leaving for the Soviet Union have entirely to do with U.S. racism; Laura Clarendon, Bulosan's fictionalized version of proletarian writer Clara Weatherwax, is notable not for her representations of female radicalism but for featuring a Filipino hero in her novel. Such women apparently prioritize racial and economic oppression to the exclusion of sexual oppression.
