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Regular Wild Irish: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Irish American Fiction

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Regular Wild Irish: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Irish American Fiction REGULAR WILD IRISH: RACE, ETHNICITY, AND IDENTITY IN IRISH AMERICAN FICTION A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Bridget M. Chapman January, 2011 Examining Committee Members: Miles Orvell, Committee Chair, English and American Studies, Temple University Katherine Henry, English, Temple University Michael Kaufmann, English, Temple University Megan M. Quigley, English, Villanova University © Copyright 2011 by Bridget M. Chapman All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT Regular Wild Irish: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Irish American Fiction examines the ways in which Irish American writers construct “Irishness” in fictional texts which borrow from and respond to literary and cultural discourses in the United States and Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It analyzes the short fiction and novels of Irish immigrant and Irish American authors writing from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century and particularly focuses on those figures who were publishing in the 1890s. Regular Wild Irish considers the links between the representational strategies used by Irish American writers and broader domestic and international discourses of race and ethnicity in the period. It argues that, while participating in various U.S. literary traditions such as sentimentalism, regionalism, and realism, Irish American writers complicated standard literary and visual representations of Irishness. Regular Wild Irish establishes that Irish American writers mobilized key, if sometimes competing, cultural discourses to shape an image of the American Irish that both engaged with national and transatlantic popular and literary discourses and theorized emergent forms of ethnic and racial identification in the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, Regular Wild Irish demonstrates that if, at the turn into the twenty-first century, Irishness is a “politically insulated” form of ethnic identity fashionable at a moment when white identity seems to be “losing its social purchase,” then it is worth thinking seriously about how Irishness was represented at the turn into the twentieth century, when the terms “white” and “Irish” bore a different, if related, set of anxieties than they do today. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank all of those individuals who have influenced this project. It could not have been completed without the thoughtful advice, inspiration, and support of my committee members: Miles Orvell, Katherine Henry, and Michael Kaufmann. Jacqueline Emery and Tatum Petrich have offered, over the years, insightful suggestions for revision to key sections as well as steadfast encouragement for the project overall. I am very thankful for their friendship and support. I would also like to thank the Center for Humanities at Temple University, for my fellowship there during the spring semester of 2009. I am also grateful to the workshop group at the University College Dublin’s Clinton Institute Summer School, 2009. Of the Clinton folks, I especially thank Werner Sollors, Jennie Sutton, and Sunny Stalter, whose feedback on the chapter dedicated to Sullivan’s Tenement Tales of New York has been invaluable to me. I also thank Charles Fanning. I have not had the pleasure of meeting Professor Fanning, but this project is indelibly marked by his pioneering recovery work on Irish immigrant fiction and I am indebted to him for it. Finally, I thank John, and my parents, for their unending encouragement and support in my pursuit of this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1. IRISHMEN AND AMERICANS AT THE SAME TIME: MARY ANNE SADLIER’S DOMESTIC FICTION AND IMMIGRANT IDENTITY ............... 1 2. REGULAR WILD IRISH: AMERICAN CELTICISM, JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY, AND LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY’S “CIVIL WAR” MARTYRS .......................................................................................................... 38 3. REVISITING RUM ALLEY: JAMES W. SULLIVAN’S TENEMENT TALES OF NEW YORK ....................................................................................... 80 4. SERVANTS, HELP, AND HIRED GIRLS: KATE MCPHELIM CLEARY’S REGIONAL FICTIONS OF THE MIGRANT MID-WEST ........ 122 5. EPILOGUE: JAMES T. FARRELL’S STUDS LONIGAN AND THE ORIGIN MYTH IN IRISH AMERICAN FICTION ......................................... 158 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................... 180 v INTRODUCTION Irish American fiction of the nineteenth century largely has been ignored by literary scholars due to their understanding that the short stories and novels written by Irish immigrants and their children from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century are marred by sentimental, romantic pretensions. Several “proto- realists” aimed to document Irish American life in the late nineteenth century, but few succeeded and, so the standard interpretation goes, it was James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan series in the 1930s that authentically inaugurated Irish American fiction. The literature produced by Irish American writers of the mid-to-late twentieth century such as William Kennedy, Maureen Howard, and Alice McDermott has been placed within a literary genealogy that, by and large, begins with Farrell. The critical disregard for nineteenth-century Irish American fiction is particularly striking given the traditional predominance of historicist and materialist analyses of ethnic literature and the fact that, as one of the largest immigrant groups in the nineteenth century, the Irish have been the object of extensive study by scholars of ethnic history. There is a surprising disjuncture between the wealth of historical, sociological, and cultural criticism about Irish immigrants and Irish Americans during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries and the reluctance, among scholars of Irish American literature, to offer sustained criticism of the fiction produced by authors from these same groups. 1 This dissertation, Regular Wild Irish: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Irish American Fiction, offers a corrective to this critical neglect. At its most basic level it is a 1 See, for example, Higham, Handlin, Meagher, Miller, Kenny, Igantiev, and Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness . vi project of recovery that aims to engage with late nineteenth-century fiction by Irish American writers on their own terms, by recognizing the literary and popular modes they were working in and trying to understand how these writers construct “Irishness” within those modes. It focuses on the short fiction and novels of three authors publishing in the 1890s. It examines: the ways American Celticism inflects the short fiction of poet and essayist Louise Imogen Guiney; the influence of realist representation, reform tracts, and popular cartoons on the Tenement Tales of New York by journalist James W. Sullivan; and the regionalism of Kate McPhelim Cleary’s short stories and novel. An analysis of the domestic fiction of the most influential Irish immigrant writer of the antebellum period, Mary Anne Sadlier, and a consideration of Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy act as bookends to the central chapters of this project. Because questions about the ethnic identity of a single group are always bound up with representations and definitions of “out groups” the questions driving this project consider not only how Irish American writers construct Irish American identity but also how they represent ethnic and racial identities across ethnic groups in an American context. How do Irish Americans represent racial or ethnic difference in their novels and stories? What does their participation in particular literary genres or popular modes imply for their representations of Irishness? What do their constructions of various ethnic or racial group identities suggest about how they understand the Irish as an ethnic group? What links or dissociations do they represent among Irish America and other non-white or European ethnic groups in the United States? The primary aim of Regular Wild Irish is to situate this body of late nineteenth- century Irish American fiction in relevant literary and cultural contexts and to consider vi how ethnic and racial categories of identity are represented within narratives by Guiney, Sullivan, and Cleary. This dissertation’s approach to Irish American fiction is advanced through a methodology that analyzes literary texts by Irish Americans alongside canonical texts, short fiction, cartoons, popular novels, and periodicals from the mainstream press and the Catholic and Irish American presses. It examines Irish American fiction within the context of three overlapping registers: nineteenth-century representations of Irishness, changes in the social and economic status of Irish Americans in the late nineteenth century, and the contradictory ideas about the racial status of European immigrants emergent at the turn into the twentieth century. Ultimately, Regular Wild Irish demonstrates the ways in which Irish American writers participate in the ambivalent discourses underpinning the representation of Irish Americans and other immigrant groups. It affirms
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