Representations of multiple oppressions in American proletarian literature

This study discusses the racial, class, gender discrimination against the characters and their struggle against these discriminations in the selected American proletarian novels named The Disinherited, The Jews Without Money, The Girl. To be examined in this thesis, three different American worker characters, a white male worker, a white female worker and a Jewish male worker, are discussed. Through the novel characters, concepts such as class inequality, racism and sexism in American society are evaluated in the context of the intersectionality theory. The novels will be discussed in the context of multiple oppressions in which each individual in American society experiences discrimination specific to his or her identity, and in which each discrimination is in relation to and structuring one another. In order to make this analysis, in the first part, two contrary sociological theories dealing with racial, class and gender discrimination in American society will be explained. In the next section, the political, economic and social conditions of America in the 1930s covering the historical background of the novels will be addressed. In the third chapter, the themes, styles and categories of American proletarian literature will be mentioned and criticisms towards this trend will be presented. In the last chapter, the novels analyzed in the light of the mentioned theories are included. In the thesis, it will be tried to prove that a homogenous American working class cannot be mentioned in the light of the novels studied. While doing this, it will be revealed that class identity is intertwined with race and gender identities and that class consciousness cannot be considered independent of other identities. Another aim of the thesis is to present through the selected novels of American proletarian literature that power relations cannot be evaluated simply by class inequality and there are multiple oppressions in society.