Gender, ethnicity and identity in Canadian ethnic minority fiction : the Lithuanian-canadian example

Abstract

The goal of this article is to examine how, in the process of immigration, ethnic ties affect the understanding of gender norms. Particular attention is paid to Lithuanian women immigrants who came to Canada as Displaced Persons shortly after World War II. The gender norms which these women had internalized while growing up in interwar Lithuania were different from those that existed in Canada. Yet these women did not simply abandon their understanding of gender in their new world. As can be seen from an analysis of identity tension in recent fiction in English by two Lithuanian-Canadian writers, Antanas Sileika and Irene Maciulyte Guilford, immigrant women felt painfully caught between different sets of gender norms and different concepts of identity. Identity tension dominates Guilford's novel, while Sileika's Lithuanian immigrant woman succeeds in forming a new gender identity which satisfies both her Lithuanianism and her Canadianism.