The American dress: migrant objects in Irish literature

Abstract

This essay reads the “American dress” as a synecdoche for emigration in Irish literary culture, as a means to explore translocational identities in twentieth-century Irish literature and society, as well as patterns of reciprocal exchange and influence between Ireland and North America. Returned or visiting migrants were marked out from the local community by the difference in their clothing, which often consisted of cast-offs from the wealthy households they worked in as domestic servants. Costume was not the only aspect of performativity and social mobility earlier Irish women migrants gleaned from their new context; theirs tended to be a story of gradual empowerment as they found themselves in (and helped to construct) a social milieu in which they might achieve more than was possible within the limitations of life “back home”. However, there is another side to this picture than the power conferred on the returned migrant by the American dress: a picture of non-assimilation, of repressed memory and experience which is not useful or not understood “back home”. Reading across a range of literary sources from the 1860s to the 2010s, this essay explore such disjunctures in the representation of migrant objects, enlivening the negotiations migrants engage in with “home” and “adopted” cultures in a translocational context.

Keywords:

• Irish literature
• migration studies
• gender
• dress

Notes

1. See http://www.davidcreedon.com/house/index.html

2. A triacetate fibre, marketed as “Tricel” or “Celanese Arnel” in Britain, its use was discontinued in 1986 due to concerns about the toxicity of some of the chemicals used to make it.

3. Sadlier, Bessy Conway, 73.

4. According to Susan Kennedy, by 1850 eighty per cent of the domestic services in New York comprised Irish women; Kerby Miller observes that “[as] late as 1900, over 70 per cent of employed Irish-born women in the United States were engaged in domestic and personal service” (Kennedy, If All We Did Was to Weep at Home, 102; Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 316.

5. Beecher, Letters to Persons Who are Engaged in Domestic Service.

6. Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 307.

7. Ibid., 308.

8. Gedutis, See You at the Hall, 82–84.

9. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America, 142.

10. Brennan, “The Servants’ Dance,” 127–8.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 131.

13. Ibid.

14. Somers, “Relinquishing and Reclaiming Independence,” 232.

15. Hickman, “Diaspora Space and National (Re)Formations,” 34.

16. Avtar Brah’s term “diaspora space” encapsulates both the experience of the migrant and that of family members who remain in the country of origin, reflecting the interconnectedness between the two. See Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 181.

17. O’Kelly, “Parcels from America,” 92.

18. Ibid, 86.

19. O’Carroll, Models for Movers, 65.

20. MacCurtain, “The Historical Image,” 49.

21. The RTÉ radio documentary “Down with Jazz” (1997) details these events.

22. Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora, 2.

23. Travers, “Emigration and Gender,” 190.

24. O’Carroll, Models for Movers: Irish Women’s Emigration to America, 75.

25. Ibid.

26. Relatedly, Gavin Doyle’s current doctoral project at TCD considers the relationship between butch daughters and their fathers in twentieth-century Irish-American communities, focusing on the contemporary literary work of Eileen Myles and Peggy Shaw. This research poses useful questions about the ways in which queerness re-positions Irish-American identities.

27. Said, After the Last Sky,14.

28. Marangoly George, The Politics of Home, 176.

29. As in a well-known ad for Kerrygold titled “The Sod”, in which a migrant clutches a tin of soil dug up from the farm at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REqZ4h_5fZI

30. Tony Murray’s 2012 essay on migrant memoir discusses the Galloway novel in some detail.

31. Trevor, “The Ballroom of Romance,” 190.

32. Wills, That Neutral Island, 31.

33. Trevor, “The Ballroom of Romance,” 189.

34. Ibid.

35. Meaney, Sex and Nation, 7.

36. Meaney, Sex and Nation, 6. See also, for instance, Smyth, The Abortion Papers, Ireland; Cullingford, Ireland’s Others; Barry and Wills, Introduction to “The Republic of Ireland: The Politics of Sexuality 1965–1997.”

37. O’Kelly, “Parcels from America,” 85.

38. Neville, “Dark Lady of the Archives,” 212.

39. McGahern, Amongst Women, 126.

40. Toibin, Brooklyn, 208.

41. Neville, “Dark Lady of the Archives,” 212.

42. McWilliams, “The Vanishing Irish in John McGahern’s Amongst Women,” 111.

43. McGahern, Amongst Women, 102.

44. O’Brien, “Two Mothers,” 170–1.

45. Ibid., 171.

46. Ibid., 172.

47. Ní Laoire, “Complicating Host-Newcomer Dualities,” 35.

48. Ibid., 42.

49. Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change, xv.

50. The Women Writers in the New Ireland Network (WWINI) was set up in 2007 as a network for migrant women writers, co-ordinated by Nessa O’Mahony, Alice Feldman, Anne Mulhall and Pamela Akinjobi. Akinjobi, originally from Nigeria, is a Dublin-based community activist and writer; her publications include, as editor, Herstory: African Women’s Stories of Migration to Ireland (2006) and Travelling Light (2004).

51. Pamela Akinjobi, Interview in Jody Allen Randolph, Closer to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, 196.

52. Lentin, “Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness.”

53. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 16.