19th century AD

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

(7) If these novels invited Anglo readers to hear their argument for white racial privilege, one must ask whether that argument was heard. Quigley's preface, cited in note 6, seems to indicate that Irish-American novels were primarily geared toward the Irish Catholic immigrant and the Irish and/or Catholic American. There is some evidence that the novels were intended for outside audiences as well. Though Fanning claims that famine-generation authors "wrote only for their own kind," extended discourses on Catholicism and Irish culture, and open-minded Protestant characters, may have been inserted in these novels to persuade Protestant American readers of the Irish people's white racial credentials. Certainly, these novels got some exposure before the general reading public through Orestes Brownson's periodical Brownson's Quarterly Review. Brownson, a former Protestant who had converted to Catholicism, addressed his journal to both Catholics and Protestants; if he was right that Catholics mainly bought "Bibles, Prayer-Books, and school-books, but scarcely a book of any other description," his review and the sales of Catholic-written literature thus relied in part on Protestant consumers. He also assumed a potential Anglo-American audience for the Irish-American novels that he reviewed when he criticized them for being overly nationalistic, or when he recommended them to "those who are pretending that Ireland is about to apostasize from the faith." See Brownson, review of Rosemary, by J.V. Huntington, Brownson's Quarterly Review, 3rd New York series, Vol. 1, no. 4 (1860), 527; and Brownson, review of New Lights: or Life in Galway. A Tale, by Mrs. J. [Mary Anne] Sadlier, Brownson's Quarterly Review, 3rd series, Vol. 1, no. 3 (1853), 407.

(8) The word "Celt" had a pejorative sense when used by Anglo-Americans perplexed by alleged Irish savagery, and was infused with a certain racial pride when used by Irish Americans seeking to differentiate themselves from "Saxons." For both groups the word suggested more than a national identity (it was typically identified with the Irish, though the word technically encompasses the Welsh, Bretons, and others), but an identity defined by race and by blood. The use of the words Celt and Saxon to suggest racial difference indicates that the newer notion of racial difference as permanent and biological was beginning to intersect with the older notion of race as a term used to designate national or cultural differences between peoples. Needless to say, this did not agree with definitions of race that counted both Irish and English as whites. Commenting on this type of inconsistency, Matthew Jacobson has called the "contest over whiteness" in nineteenth-century America "untidy." He writes: "Conflicting or overlapping racial designations such as white, Caucasian, and Celt may operate in popular perception and discussion simultaneously--despite their contradictions; the Irish simians of the Thomas Nast cartoon, for example, were `white' according to naturalization law; they proclaimed themselves `Caucasians' in various political organizations using that term; and they were degraded `Celts' in the patrician lexicon of proud Anglo-Saxons." I would add, of course, that the Irish used the word Celt in a positive sense. Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5.