Uneven stitches and exquisite designs: new thoughts on the texts and textures of Irish America

Lawrence J. McCaffrey's classic work Textures of Irish America1 promulgated the idea that the immigrant narrative of the Irish in the United States was one of success. The author's “textures”, reminiscent of medieval broadcloth, were measured according to a trifold width: Catholicism, politics, and nationalism. Since then, differences articulated between McCaffrey's interpretations and those of others have yielded new insights that challenge his foundational layout;2 so too have competing views on the particulars of the course of Irish American history. These include a focus on such topics as the diverse nature of the Irish American immigrant experience; the cross-cultural variation that exists between and among distinct cohort groups; the importance of gender-related concerns; and the role of popular culture and entertainment in shaping and influencing backward- and forward-looking processes. Today, the warp and woof of Irish American history are more likely to reveal unusual contours and shapes, hard and smooth surfaces, feathers, craters, and divots. In addition, the historical field exposes the range of nuanced strategies for self-expression that the Irish utilised as they became Irish Americans. These, together with other noteworthy dimensions of the Irish-American experience, receive close examination in this special issue of Irish Studies Review.

As they became acclimated to American life the Irish did so not only through the use of a variety of well-understood discourses but also through the creation of a variety of “texts”. The papers in this issue suggest, that numerous strategies of self-expression and identity were borrowed from the Irish homeland; others were hybridised; and still others were invented anew in songs, novels, short stories, plays, and print media. The data presented here provide an enriched understanding of the kinds of textual – and textured – negotiations that shaped Irish American identities in the past. In some situations, they inform ideological utterances to this day.

The issue opens with Mary C. Kelly's account of the trials and tribulations associated with the The Boston Pilot newspaper. Entitled “Coarse Cloth and Clerical Tailoring: Negotiating Boston Irish Cultural Imperatives in the Famine Era”, Kelly's work resonates with what Sarah Roddy refers to as the “double dichotomy” facing clergymen in Ireland:

While they may have recognized migration as being in an individual's best economic interest, they could equally regard it as hazardous to their [their flock's] moral and religious wellbeing. Secondly, with regard to their own institutions, clergymen may have found themselves torn between wanting to keep their own congregations intact and their home church strong … and wanting to see their particular brand of Christianity expanded abroad by means of emigration.3

At the same time that Roddy investigates these kinds of questions, asking in the process whether emigration's benefits accrued more to the strengthening of the churches at the expense of their congregations or vice versa, Kelly's task is to explore another dimension: the experiences of one particular member of the Roman Catholic clergy in America. She argues that Boston's Bishop John Fitzpatrick was not “cut from the same cloth” as the congregants to whom he ministered. Yet the bishop's recognised gravitas, like that of others of his ilk, meant that he could function as a force of assimilation in a world in which he and his family had already been assimilated. In essence, having been dipped in the vat of social inclusion, Bishop Fitzpatrick sought to apply his acumen to the advantage of the immigrant Irish he served.

Pitted against Fitzpatrick were print media figures – specifically, The Boston Pilot staff and editors – who took their textual mandate from a readership that still nursed the scars that famine and emigration had wrought. Although Doyle argues that the Pilot's editor, Patrick Donahoe, “found ways to make reform issues sit [easily] on the sideboards of the ‘fruit dish’ Irish”,4 and notwithstanding the fact that many of the Pilot's columns were perceived as benign and non-threatening, one particular strain of them – one pull in the paper's overall fabric, so to speak – rankled the bishop and earned his rebuke not only because it hampered his efforts to assimilate his flock but also because it undermined his efforts to create a peaceful and acculturated Irish polity. That was the reinvigoration, through incendiary rhetoric, of anti-British historical memories.

Kelly's work serves as a pivot to David Doolin's article, entitled “Exploring Textures of Irish America: A New Perspective on the Fenian Invasion of Canada”. Doolin's main focus is Ridgeway, a loosely defined novel that, like the aforementioned controversy affecting the Boston Pilot, is now largely forgotten. However, Ridgeway deserves closer scrutiny as a “distressed” genre, namely, a text whose author tries to present verifiable knowledge by referring to objects that speak “both in and out of time”.5 To fulfil his aim, Ridgeway's pseudonymous author, Scian Dubh (Black (or Hidden) Knife), knits documented statements and experiences of the Fenians into fictionalised accounts of them. The result is an example of a text that enables readers to perceive a less smooth and finished view of the post-Famine Irish American experience.

In addition to covering the times in which the invasion was situated, Doolin explains the ideology motivating the Fenians, who believed that the liberation of Ireland from Great Britain would earn respect for the Irish in the United States.6 Such rationalisation can be understood in terms of a nationalistic fervour that was so suffused at local levels among grassroots Irishmen that they physically trained and subsequently marched for their cause. On the other hand, Doolin argues that forces of acculturation, non-clerical as well as theatrical, pandered to other Irish women and men, keeping them quiescent. For example, even as hundreds were marching in lockstep towards the liberation of Ireland via Canada, others were approaching the theatre – as character actors and as audience members alike – in order to produce and consume relatively “positive” representations of themselves.

In her article “The Texted and Textured Construction of Irish Identity in the Theatrical World of Charleston, South Carolina”, Dee Dee Joyce picks up a parallel thread, demonstrating how the Irish of Charleston, South Carolina, upon encountering racial realities neither to their expectations nor to their liking, skilfully spun those givens to their own advantage. Presenting a case study of Ignatiev's How the Irish became White thesis, Joyce argues that, although Irish strategies for gaining a foothold into Charleston's society were varied and included operations that took place on social, economic, and political lines, the key devices by which the Irish advanced in the South were theatrical. Not unlike the staged performances discussed in passing by Doolin, Charleston's shows were able to redirect audiences' attention away from the malevolent ideas about the Irish generated in the discourses of the elite. For instance, Joyce references John Brougham, an actor and playwright who enjoyed a long and successful tour through the American South and West and who earned praise in the New York Herald for attempting “to elevate the Irish character and to dispel the prejudice which exists against … citizens of Irish birth”.7 Moreover, Joyce demonstrates that, by the eve of the American Civil War in Charleston, performances that had once attracted a more affluent class of patrons had been replaced by variety acts of a more mundane calibre; the ticket purchasers for those types of programmes were, by and large, Irish. Indubitably, the closely interwoven textual elements of inclusion and exclusion that had once been perceptible on the Charleston stage had, by 1860, loosened to become grainier and grittier. Perhaps against the backdrop of Famine upheaval and the concomitant results it produced – slums, illness, death, and desertion, to name a few – such graininess and grittiness were to be expected. However, as the Irish moved past the Great Famine years, change was palpable and detectable, and by 1900, because of the creativity of Brougham and others, the market for the dissemination of negative depictions of the Irish had changed dramatically.

Chris Dowd's article is entitled “The Weird Tales, Spicy Detectives, and Startling Stories of Irish-America: Irish Characters in American Pulp Magazines”. His work on what are euphemistically known as the “penny dreadfuls” – inexpensive, sensational comic books or storybooks – explores a new kind of masculine figure who earned awe and respect even as he “tipped off” readers as to the kinds of shifts that had taken place in the rough and tumble world (rural as well as urban) of American life. One character discussed by Dowd is “Hopalong Cassidy”; he began his fictional life as a clannish (read: Irish) and humorous Plains “bunk-buddy” who engaged in gratuitous violence of enormous proportions “just for the fun of it”. Later, this irascible yet genial figure was transformed into the classic “good guy”, much to the chagrin of his creator, Clarence Mulford, who is said to have fainted when he saw what the character actor William Boyd had done to Cassidy. Smelling salts revived Mulford initially but, as Savage indicates, it was “the money he made from the cinematic versions of his work [that] sustained him later”.8

Other pulp fiction characters were reinventions of “the noble savage”. Their bodies were on display in new and fresh ways and so too were their exploits, which earned respect and admiration, and, perhaps most of all, aspirations of imitation. Dowd reveals how, by the eve of the Second World War, the kind of hyper-masculine male that America wanted had been “pulled and stretched” many times over and a new kind of Irish “hero” had come on the scene.

The papers of Kelly, Doolin, Joyce and Dowd direct readers' attention to the kinds of “textured texts” that post-Famine emigrants were consuming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, of even greater salience today are the experiences of those who came to America from Ireland in the eighteenth century, predominantly because they remain understudied. The next two papers of this issue constitute part of the greater interweaving of scholarly understandings on Irish emigration; specifically, they focus on some of the persuasions and inclinations that motivated the “Ulster Scots” – ancestors of today's so-called “Scots Irish” (or “Scotch Irish”) – to emigrate from Ulster, the most northerly province of Ireland. By and large, those emigrants professed a different religion than did their fellows who came in the nineteenth century: to wit, whereas the latter were predominantly Catholic, the former were largely Presbyterian. It is to that earlier immigrant cohort that the next two papers in this issue turn.

In “The Marriage Plot and the Plot against the Union: Irish Home Rule and Endangered Alliances in Henry James's ‘The Modern Warning,’” Mary Burke draws readers' attention to a short story by Henry James. Addressing James's Ulster Scots' ancestral background and his love of all things British (indeed, James became a British citizen before he died), Burke argues that James's work “The Modern Warning” has been neglected and misunderstood by American critics because, in Burke's view, scholars fail to grasp the import of the trope of the “marriage union” between Ireland and England. A perusal of a few critics of the short story in question corroborates Burke's argument; some stress James's obsession with expressions of nationalism;9 others, like Michael Moon, emphasise James's homo-erotic tendencies.10 Richard Dellamora, arguing that “improper knowledges” can be constantly detected in James's writings, goes so far as to characterise the sibling relationship in “The Modern Warning” as one of “psychic incest”.11

Steering clear of all these arguments, Burke sews with a thread of a different hue. She takes readers in the direction of the “marriage union” trope with its long and interlaced history and its manifestation in several forms. Burke amplifies her argument by referencing the recent (2014) referendum on Scotland's independence movement and by demonstrating how desire for or against union with Great Britain continues to unfold discursively. Especially interesting are politicians' uses of well-known biblical words and phrases deployed as verbal strategies for influencing votes; those related to marriage (i.e. “asunder”, “what God has joined”, etc.) were sewn with particular skill.

Christina Wilson's work, “Illegible Ethnicity and the Invention of Scots-Irish Narratives on the Stages of Belfast and Appalachia”, introduces contemporary material related to the Scots Irish. Wilson attends to On Eagle's Wing – a musical production that attempts to attract Irish American audiences by re-creating – some might say “inventing” – the group's origin myth. Wilson also analyses Borderline and Betsy, two creations of Roadside Theater, a Kentucky-based and government-funded project initiated as part of the “War on Poverty”. Wilson argues that the producers of On Eagle's Wing mistakenly tangled religion and ethnic identity, an error that she believes contributed to the show's less-than-stellar reception in the United States. The writers of Roadside Theater, on the other hand, by not only avoiding such a blunder but also by identifying with their viewers, accomplish their mission; moreover, they operate from the principle of co-creation, inviting audience members to assist in future performances through the narration of their own truths.

The willingness on the part of Roadside Theater to embrace wider Atlantic conceptions of Scots-Irish selfhood speaks to its crew's strategies for stitching together rather than for tearing apart. Likewise, Roadside Theater's expressions of tolerance and cooperation hark to the efforts employed by the aforementioned eighteenth-century Ulster emigrants in their establishment of fraternal organisations, their deployment of media channels, and their public displays of verbal art, all of which inclined those on spectatorship and readership levels to view this cohort of Irish immigrant favourably.12 Arguably, a better grounding in the nature of the Scots-Irish micro-identities that are emerging against the backdrop of globalisation,13 as well as a stronger connection to the literature regarding the sweep of Scots-Irish settlement in American culture, would have benefited the producers of On Eagle's Wing.14

Finally, by directing attention to Ireland's textual storytelling practices before the Great Famine and detailing how they resurfaced in Irish America in the works of Dion Boucicault, Edward “Ned” Harrigan and others, E. Moore Quinn's paper, “The Irish Rent … and Mended: Transitional Textual Communities in Nineteenth-century America”, aligns with aspects of the material covered by Doolin and Joyce in this issue. However, Quinn's paper departs from their focuses by drawing upon Brian Stock's notion of the textual community. Stock argues that women and men living within narrative timeframes participate in understood sets of values and actions.15 As “textual communities” they are defined as those whose social activities:

are centered around texts, or, more precisely, around an interpreter of them. The text in question need not be written down, nor the majority of auditors actually literate. The interpreter may relate it verbally. It may be lengthy, but normally it is enough that its essentials can be easily understood and remembered. Moreover, the group's members must associate voluntarily; their interaction must take place around an agreed meaning for the text. Above all, they must make the hermeneutic leap from what the text says to what they think it means; [such] common understanding provides the foundation for changing thought and behavior.16

For Quinn, Stock's insights align well with what scholars have detailed about the oral traditional practices in Ireland before the Famine.17 Quinn reminds readers that the folkloric traditions in Ireland – proverbs, idioms, songs, storytelling practices and the like – provided practitioners and audiences with an inclination, or a habitus, in Bourdieu's words, to perform and entertain. Although some of the patterns of folklore extant in oral tradition before the Great Famine have, on occasion, been adumbrated by scholars of Irish American theatre,18 it is more often the case that they have been ignored. This dearth in exploration of the linkages between self-representational display from the Old World to the New has resulted in a blinkered understanding of the textual community's continuity of tradition in Ireland on the one hand and its innovation in Irish America on the other. The examination provided in Quinn's article presents an understanding as to why the Irish proved so successful not only in minstrelsy but also in Vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and musical theatre.

Collectively, the articles in this issue of Irish Studies Review add several layers to McCaffrey's Textures of Irish America. In doing so, they reveal that Irish experiences in the land that lay to Ireland's west, an t-oilean úr, the new (is)land, or the United States, were full of uneven stitches, exquisite designs, and much in between. Moreover, the authors of the articles in this issue present data to indicate that the immigrants to the United States who became known as Irish Americans cannot be interpreted through the narrow lenses of “exile” and “emigrant”; neither can their stories be sewn between the thin coverlets of “success and triumph” or “agony and despair”. Nor should enduring but surprisingly under-examined assumptions about immigrant Irish denominational affiliations continue to be characterised with the customary “one-size-fits-all” garment label. Rather, it behoves scholars interested in Irish America to understand that the Irish spun their way forward with threads of nuance, intricacy, complexity, contestation, and negotiation.19 It is hoped that further research will stitch together ever more finely the question as to how the varieties of Irish immigrants to the United States established themselves within the specific wraps of texture and contexture in which they found themselves.

Notes

^1.McCaffrey, Textures of Irish America.

^2. For instance, in Textures of Irish America, McCaffrey draws a sharp contrast between his understanding of Irish American history and that of Kerby Miller. See xi–xiii in particular.

^3.Roddy, Population, Providence and Empire, 9–10.

^4.Doyle, “Irish Elites in North America,” 42.

^5.Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 67.

^6.Brown, Irish American Nationalism, 35.

^7.Harrington, “Irish in Theater,” 900.

^8. Savage qtd in Bloodworth, “Mulford and Bower,” 102.

^9.Monteiro, “Americanism in Henry James,” 170–3; see also Ziff, “Literary Consequences of Puritanism,” 263–305.

^10.Moon, A Small Boy, 28.

^11.Dellamora, Review of Henry James and Homo-erotic Desire, 113, 114.

^12.Moss, “St. Patrick's Day Celebrations,” 125–48; see also Powell, “Political Toasting,” 508–29, and Quinn, “Toasters and Boasters,” 18–30.

^13.Baraniuk and Hagan, “Ireland's Hidden Diaspora,” 76–7.

^14. See Wilson's paper in this special issue; see also Hume, Far from the Green Fields.

^15.Stock, “Reflections on Ancient Narrative and Ethics,” 771–9.

^16.Stock, Implications of Literacy, 382 (emphasis added).

^17. See, for instance, Delargy, “Irish Story-teller”; Ó Danachair, “Oral Tradition and the Printed Word”; Zimmermann, Irish Storyteller.

^18.Harrington, “Irish in Theater,” 899; Murphy, “From Scapegrace to Grásta,” 21; Waters, Comic Irishman, 3.

^19.Mulligan, “How the Irish became American,” 102.