19th century AD

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2001 by Catherine M. Eagan

Readers are also encouraged to identify with Irish Catholic characters in matters of love. The lovers, distinguished by the flawless physical traits of their race as outlined above, engage the reader's sympathy as they surmount various obstacles to their union. James and Annie are joined after a long separation in Annie Reilly; Frank crosses the class divide to marry Alice in The O'Donnells of Glen Cottage; Emily and Edward and Henry and Rose manage to preserve their relationships in the face of emigration in The Dalys of Dalystown, and Patrick and Cecilia marry despite their previous religious differences in Mount Benedict. The love relationships in all of these novels encourage readers to admit that Irish Catholics can enjoy a love as respectable as theirs.

Finally, another significant way in which famine-generation Irish-American authors attempt to evoke sympathy for their characters is by alluding to the horror of the dispossession and starvation of Catholics in Ireland. In Sadlier's novel New Lights, which ominously foreshadows the destruction of the 1847 famine year, one character cannot bear to revisit the horror of past starvation, saying:

   Oh pardon me, my country,--pardon me, my own, beautiful, sorrowing
   land,--if I shrink frow [sic] dwelling on your record. I have glanced at
   it, and it is so blistered with tears, so darkened with sorrow, that I may
   not now scan it too closely; for mine eyes are filled with tears, and my
   brain reels with indignant shame! (54)

Because Sadlier has portrayed the Catholic Irish as fellow civilized whites concerned with religious faith and education, the starvation, property confiscation, and demoralization that they face would have been all the more horrifying to Anglo-American readers. When Meany's Mrs. Gillman finds out that her lighthearted, honest, hardworking, and charitable washerwoman lost four children in the famine, she marvels at the strength of a supposedly "simple creature." (55) The sentimental effect of these stories relies on the assumption that the outside reader should feel empathy, not just sympathy, for the tragedy experienced by their Irish brothers and sisters. (56)

The Irish use of cultural production to claim their whiteness has usually been discussed in terms of the blackface minstrel show. But it is no less important to examine this phenomenon in the Irish-American novel. In fact, it may be more important--for it is in this genre that the articulation of the Irish-American character as white was the most insistent and conflicted. Certainly, the stresses of such a perplexed approach to consolidating Irish whiteness may have compromised that message, despite novelists' efforts. Orestes Brownson's worries about the alienating tone of Irish-American fiction would have been magnified for nativists and Protestants who may not have read the novels, but were exposed to similar Irish-American arguments for whiteness in public discourse. Regardless of whether these famine-generation novels were able to further Irish Americans' "white racial project" in the nineteenth century, reading them provides important insight into the complexity of Irish-American racial identity in this period. Still shaped by and heavily invested in their politics and identity in colonial Ireland, the famine Irish struggled to benefit from their white skin color while retaining the religious and cultural distinctiveness of their Irishness. Historians have focused on the confused racial status of European immigrants mainly in terms of the establishment's unwillingness to grant them white racial status. What these novels reveal is that Irish immigrants were even more ambivalent about accepting it.