An illuminating comparison of Ann Petry s
The Street and Gwendolyn Brooks s
Maud Martha with Cynthia Kadohata s
The Floating World and Chang-rae Lee s
Native Speaker by You-me Park and Gayle Wald ( Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres,
AL 70: 607-33) establishes the extent to which minority literature represents the boundaries between public and private spheres in the United States and how these boundaries reinforce and overlap class and gender lines. The critics conclusion is that both the African American and Asian American groups are feminized (in the sense of being marked under the sign of the feminine).