ABSTRACT
This chapter explores multiculturalism is visually represented in Corman's graphic novel by foregrounding issues of women's looks, sexuality and everyday existence. The chapter traces the graphic novel's varied and at times controversial representations of womanhood in relation to traditional Judaic Eastern European lore and American mass media views of the early twentieth century. Instead she kept the "showgirl idea" but in relation to the early-twentieth-century history of the Lower East Side and especially Jewish women's mundane, everyday lives. These images are therefore particularly important for suggesting the inconsistencies and tensions between theory and practice, appearance and true beliefs, that started to dominate Jewish women's lives in the early twentieth century and epitomized the complex paths toward modernization that they needed to traverse. Leela Corman's graphic narrative thereby manages to complement historians' portrayals of the Lower East Side by not simply capitalizing on clear-cut generational differences between Jewish American mothers and daughters in relation to Jewish and American values.
