Sonya's Passion

The main character of Anzia Yezierbska’s novel, Salome of the Tenements, is a beautiful woman who uses her capabilities and physical characteristics to get what she wants. Sonya comes from the ghetto and she works for a small newspaper company. While Sonya does not have much going for her when it comes to economic status or class, she is very intelligent, charming, and beautiful. She is, in a sense, similar to Evelyn Nesbit in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, considering they both use their beauty to gain rank or to advance in a world dominated by men. You could say that Emma Goldman probably would not have many good things to say about Sonya.

While using beauty and charm are typically characteristics of dishonest and deceitful person, it is difficult for me to be too critical of Sonya. Like we mentioned in class, if this was a situation similar to that in the movie Wedding Crashers, a movie where similar tactics are employed, but done so by men, this story could have potentially have been criticized in a different way. Because Sonya is a woman, people would look at her as a gold digger, but they wouldn’t look at her story as one that has potential for romance and comedy as they most likely would have if she had been a man.

I really like the ending of the novel in that unlike the beginning, it expresses the romanticism of the novel and the passionate characteristics of Sonya, making it difficult for people to criticize her. Sonya ends up leaving Manning and turns her back on the rich and powerful people in society. She wants to make clothes that poor people in the lower class can gain access to. She could have stayed with Manning, and kept her connections among the upper class. This would have led her to great success and economic stability but she does not do that, which I see as a very admirable quality.