The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (3 page)

Prior to the Famine, Irish women married, socialized, and worked

side-by-side with the men in the fi elds; however, during the Famine years

these opportunities constricted as work disappeared and marriages were

postponed. Consequently, Irish women emigrated to escape such subservi-

ent positions and regain their fi nancial independence (Nolan 2004, 91–92).

They bought their own tickets, traveled unchaperoned, found employment

(usually as domestic servants), and then saved their salaries to bring over

family members, build churches, attend concerts, support nationalist move-

ments, and pay parochial school tuition for their nieces or nephews (Mea-

gher 2006, 623–24).

On the East Coast, where the majority remained, this infl ux of emi-

grants was met with anger, resentment, and palpable anti-Catholicism.

According to Christopher Dowd, they were the “hated immigrant group
du

jour
” (2010, 12). Coinciding with American concern about national iden-

tity, the publication of Darwin’s
On the Origin of the Species
(1859), and

the rise of Irish nationalism, Irish emigrants were depicted as “violent ape-

men bent on political anarchy” (Dowd 2010, 12). Nativists feared the Irish

because they were poor, unskilled, and unruly; they hated them because they

broke strikes, drank too much, worked jobs no one wanted, and produced

too many children (Kenny 2006, 372). By focusing on these social traits and

viewing them as “hereditary dispositions,” some Americans attempted to

reduce the Irish to “fundamentally fl awed organisms” who were contami-

nating society, if not the country (Dowd 2010, 14). Consigned to the lowest

stratum of society, this generation constituted the urban poor. Most men

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took jobs as laborers, whereas three-quarters of the women were hired as

domestic servants, a position that ultimately led to their social and economic

mobility. This steady work as well as the daily opportunity to observe models

of middle- and upper-class culture helped Irish American women grow into

solid members of the community and promote their daughters’ education

and independence (Nolan 2004; Diner 1993).

Nevertheless, this confl uence of hardship and negativity yielded three

types of novels: nationalistic, evangelistic, and pragmatic (Fanning 1997,

97). Of these, the nationalistic typifi es fi rst-stage post-colonial emigrants’

efforts to “reclaim the past” (Barry 2009). Mary Meany’s 1865 novel,
The

Confessors of Connaught; or, The Tenants of a Lord Bishop
, is one example;

however, it is also notable for its irate account of a Protestant bishop evict-

ing Catholic women and children into the cold. Another nationalist, Alice

Nolan, decried the evictions of Irish tenants and the hanging of an innocent

man in
The Byrnes of Glengoulah: A True Tale
(1870). But the most prolifi c,

didactic, and evangelistic writer, as well as the fi rst important Irish American

female voice, was Mary Ann Madden Sadlier.

Born in Cootehill, County Cavan, in 1820, at age twenty-four Miss

Madden emigrated to Montreal and married James Sadlier. Fourteen years

later, the Sadliers and their six children moved to New York. Thanks in part

to her husband’s publishing company, between 1850 and 1870 Sadlier pub-

lished over sixty novels, often serialized in popular magazines, praising home

and hearth and attacking anti-Catholic rhetoric (Fanning 2001, 114ff). Sad-

lier’s domain was the church. Her purpose, as she set out in her fi rst novel,

Willy Burke; or, The Irish Orphan in America
(1850), was to be “useful to

the young sons of my native land, in their arduous struggle with the tempter,

whose nefarious design of bearing them from the faith of their fathers, is so

artfully concealed under every possible disguise” (3–4). Each novel deals

with the diffi culty of discovering and resisting a different “tempting dis-

guise” hidden variously in business (
Willy Burke
), domestic service (
Bessy

Conway
, 1861), orphanages (
Aunt Honor’s Keepsake
, 1866), fi nancial success

(
Old and New; or, Taste vs. Fashion
, 1862), or the big city (
Con O’Regan;

or, Immigrant Life in the New World
(1864). Given this focus, it is not sur-

prising that in
Old and New
, Sadlier rejects the suffragist movement and

supports the Catholic tradition of women remaining in the home (Fanning

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8 | T H E B A N S H E E S

1997, 112). Considering that Sadlier was deeply involved with the family

publishing business, this stance was not satiric but unconsciously ironic.

The daughters of the Famine generation were less traumatized than their

conservative parents yet still somewhat cautious. After 1875, as they moved

into the middle class, their literature either reverted to postcolonial, roman-

tic idealizations of the Auld Sod; continued the moralistic, didactic tradition

in what was called the “new realism”; or, among the better writers, moved

onto a starker realism that dealt with the lives of common people (Fanning

1997, 177). Regardless of literary style, Irish American women continued

to protect their interests. Among the romantics were E. A. Fitzsimons’s
The

Joint Venture: A Tale in Two Lands
(1878) and Augustine O’Reilly’s anthol-

ogy of similarly themed Catholic tracts,
Strange Memories: Death Bed Scenes,

Extraordinary Conversions, Incidents of Travel, etc.
(1880). Examples of the

didactic were collected by Eleanor Donnelly in
A Round Table of the Repre-

sentative American Catholic Novelists, at Which Is Served a Feast of Excellent

Stories
, published in 1897 (Fanning 2001, 175). As their titles suggest, these

women defended the church.

Katherine E. Conway fell between the fi rst two categories. A journalist

and assistant editor of the
Pilot
under John Boyle O’Reilly, Conway covered

all the bases. Her fi rst novel,
The Way of the World and Other Ways: A Story of

Our Set
(1900), continues the Irish habit of satire; her last publication,
The

Woman Who Never Did Wrong and Other Stories
(1909), is considered “uni-

formly sentimental.” Her middle novel and best work,
Lalor’s Maples
(1901),

splits the difference (Fanning 2001, 166). While it ultimately lapses into

sentimentality, Conway’s use of the family home as a symbol of Irish Ameri-

cans’ assimilation and ascendancy into the middle class, along with implicit

criticism of Mrs. Lalor as a domineering matriarch, mark it as a thematic

precursor to realistic twentieth-century Irish American women’s novels such

as Elizabeth Cullinan’s
House of Gold
and Mary Gordon’s
The Other Side
.

One of Conway’s colleagues on the
Pilot
was Louise Imogen Guiney,

whose father came from County Tipperary. Although she was mentored by

Oliver Wendell Holmes and published essays in
Harper’s
and the
Atlantic
,

Guiney never felt accepted (Fanning 2001, 166). And little wonder. Bosto-

nians viewed the Irish as illiterate peasants and did their best to oust them,

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I N T R O D U C T I O N | 9

forming the American Protective Association, an anti-Catholic, anti-paro-

chial school group; the Immigration Restriction League, which (as its name

suggests) tried to halt Irish immigration; the Anti-Saloon League, which

tried to shut down Irish businesses; and the Know-Nothings, an anti-Irish

Catholic political group (Dowd 2011, 99–100).

Unable to tolerate anti-Catholic sentiment, Guiney left America in 1901

to live in England. Early in her career Guiney’s talent was considered second

only to the editor O’Reilly’s. However, his infl uence, the anti-Irish nativism

she experienced in America, and her visits to Ireland led her to revert to the

postcolonial mindset perfected by Yeats, who sought to “regain contact with

an earlier, mythical nationalistic Ireland” (Barry 2009, 187). Guiney sub-

merged her talents in American Celticism—unrealistic, sentimental visions

of doomed Irish heroes whose lives she explored in
“Monsieur Henri”: A

Footnote to French History
(1892); a biography of the Irish poet James Clar-

ence Mangan (1897);
Robert Emmet, A Survey of His Rebellion and of His

Romance
(1904); and
Blessed Edmund Campion
(1908). Regardless of style,

through her writing Guiney defended (or reconstructed) her home coun-

try. Similar themes were explored by Anna Scanlan in
Dervorgilla; or, The

Downfall of Ireland
(1895), although her argument—that competition over

the hand of “a hapless helpless woman” (Fanning 2001, 173) should not be

viewed as the cause of the British occupation of Ireland—was admittedly

logical.

Yet another journalist, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, better known as Nellie

Bly, stands as a precursor to twentieth-century Irish American women writ-

ers. Bly got her start after she wrote a sarcastic response to a sexist article

in the
Pittsburgh Dispatch
and signed it “Lonely Orphan Girl.” Despite the

pseudonym, the editor was so impressed by the strong voice and convincing

argument that he assumed a man had written it and invited Bly to interview

for a position on the paper. When she appeared he initially refused to hire

her because of her sex, but she soon changed his mind. Once on the job, she

immediately began churning out stories about the rights of women factory

workers—a focus that resulted in her transfer to the women’s pages. Bored

and discouraged, at age twenty-one she took a position as a foreign corre-

spondent and traveled to Mexico, where she sent home dispatches eventually

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10 | T H E B A N S H E E S

published as
Six Months in Mexico
. When this work was not suffi cient to

change her state-side assignments she left Pittsburgh in 1887 and traveled

to New York, where she convinced yet another editor to hire her at the
New

York World
. Working undercover, she feigned insanity and was committed to

the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. After the
World
secured

her release, she published her fi ndings,
Ten Days in a Madhouse
, whose ensu-

ing publicity led to a review of women’s commitment policies and better

funding for asylums. Bly’s next adventure, and the one that contributed to

her lasting fame, was to replicate Jules Vernes’ fi ctional journey
Around the

World in Eighty Days
. Unchaperoned, she completed the trip in seventy-

eight days and famously went on to write about the experience (Kroeger

1995). These early emigrants served as models for future generations of Irish

American women writers.

Who Are These Women?

Irish American authors may be defi ned in a number of ways. The most obvi-

ous is by their surnames:

By Mac and O, you’ll always know

True Irishmen, they say;

But if they lack

Both O and Mac

No Irishmen are they. (Lysaght 1986, 57)

Patricia Lysaght’s study lists 180 Irish families protected by the banshee,

many of whom dropped the “Mac” or “O” when they emigrated. But other

families who moved to Ireland before the seventeenth century and whose

names therefore lack the requisite O or Mac are also part of this group. This

list includes the following names—Barry, Brady, Brennan, Carey, Corrigan,

Cullinane, Daly, Flynn, Gallagher, Manning, Moore, McCarthy, McDer-

mott, O’Brien, and O’Connor—all of whom may be found in this study

(Lysaght 1986, 259–80). Their works were selected on the basis of the fol-

lowing criteria:

• Specifi c literary genres—the novel and short story—but also popular

fi ction such as the mystery.

• Novels that trace the development of female experience.

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• Novels that look at women’s efforts to move beyond “female

experience.”

• Novels selected on the basis of ethnicity.3

In this postmodern era, ethnic identity sometimes involves self-identifi -

cation. This does not mean that ethnicity is arbitrary: ”ancestry, no matter

how elastic intermarriage may make the defi nition, remains the crucial ele-

ment” (Ebest 2004, 8). Nevertheless, Irish American identity might emerge