Writing Irish America: Communal Memory and the Narrative of Nation in Diaspora

In this project I trace Irish ethnic identity formation in the United States and the creation of the Irish-American narrative throughout the twentieth century as reflected in Irish-American life-writing—autobiographical or at least semi-autobiographical fiction and memoir—from just after World War II to the early 2000s. All of the works included in this study examine in some way the question of what it means to be Irish in America. The authors in this study collectively show how an Irish identity was given up in America and eventually pieced back together again. Some of the original elements remained, but others were forgotten, misunderstood, or invented. The IrishAmerican narrative tells of a rise from poverty and oppression to American comfort and respectability. There is pride in this rise, but there is also loss. I argue that symbol has replaced substance in popular representations of the Irish in America, and that imagination has been used to create an Irish-American identity that attempts to soothe the pain of what has been lost. To think through these works in terms of ethnic identity formation, I employ theories of home and nation, applying those concepts to a people in diaspora and how they see themselves in relation to two different homes, the one they left behind but that still informs their identity, and the one in which they live and raise their families. In the early twentieth century, the way Irish Americans see themselves against a dominant Anglo-Protestant culture can be traced back to the colonial setting they have left. For this reason I apply some tenets of postcolonial theory to this American literature of a displaced Irish population. This move from one homeland to another, especially when forced by poverty rather than a desire to leave, does not come without trauma. As such, I also employ theories of individual trauma and trauma as it is passed down the generations. The theory of ethnic identity formation as an ongoing process is also useful to understand how the Irish understand themselves in America. Finally, what makes it into a national or diasporic narrative has at least as much to do with what is forgotten as what is remembered in the name of presenting a unified whole. I use theories of cultural memory and forgetting to understand the fractured nature of the Irish-American story that is passed on, and the gaps and fissures found therein.

given up in America and eventually pieced back together again. Some of the original elements remained, but others were forgotten, misunderstood, or invented. The Irish-American narrative tells of a rise from poverty and oppression to American comfort and respectability. There is pride in this rise, but there is also loss. I argue that symbol has replaced substance in popular representations of the Irish in America, and that imagination has been used to create an Irish-American identity that attempts to soothe the pain of what has been lost.
To think through these works in terms of ethnic identity formation, I employ theories of home and nation, applying those concepts to a people in diaspora and how they see themselves in relation to two different homes, the one they left behind but that still informs their identity, and the one in which they live and raise their families.
In the early twentieth century, the way Irish Americans see themselves against a dominant Anglo-Protestant culture can be traced back to the colonial setting they have left. For this reason I apply some tenets of postcolonial theory to this American literature of a displaced Irish population. This move from one homeland to another, especially when forced by poverty rather than a desire to leave, does not come without trauma. As such, I also employ theories of individual trauma and trauma as it is passed down the generations. The theory of ethnic identity formation as an ongoing process is also useful to understand how the Irish understand themselves in America.
Finally, what makes it into a national or diasporic narrative has at least as much to do with what is forgotten as what is remembered in the name of presenting a unified whole. I use theories of cultural memory and forgetting to understand the fractured nature of the Irish-American story that is passed on, and the gaps and fissures found therein.

PREFACE The Personal Becomes Academic: Grandpa O'Leary's "O" and the Loss of Connection to Ireland
This dissertation is the culmination of a lifelong interest and passion. I cannot recall a time when I was not somehow invested in my Irish ancestry and learning more about Ireland. My elementary school was Gates Lane, and our mascot was the Gators, making green our school color. That was a happy coincidence when I was able to get viii A brief look back through four branches of my family shows just how diverse the experience of the Irish in America could be: from early arrivals of the 1820s who quickly established themselves and fought to establish their church, to later arrivals of the 1880s whose children thrived as Americans in their already-established communities, to that large wave of Famine immigrants in the middle who were looked down upon for their poverty and their non-Yankee ways, and whose specific roots in Ireland were lost to their desperate circumstances and the crush of trying to survive once they arrived here. From men who were shoemakers and mill workers, to women who raised large families of new Americans in trying circumstances. From different counties all over Ireland, to different locations all over the United States. From those who worshipped daily at the pub to those who worshipped daily at the altars of churches they established. There is clearly no one Irish-American experience. The being Irish. Being Irish in the Northeastern United States at that time was membership in a very large, very proud club. The tough years of overt prejudice were well behind ix us, the ascent made official through the election of JFK over a decade before my birth.

I was proud to say that my Grandfather Dennis O'Leary was born in Castleisland in
County Kerry, Ireland, when most of my peers' families were several generations in America. The truth was my grandfather was brought here by his parents as a toddler, so he would be considered more of a 1.5 generation in the parlance of American immigration history. He would have had no memory of Ireland, and even if he did I never met him to speak of it, for he died twenty years before I was born. That I never knew my closest Irish ancestor personally, and that even he had little if any of his own memories of Ireland, are just some of the many gaps in my family's Irish history. In this I am not unlike most Irish Americans, who feel a connection with a country that many have never seen, and with a story of their Irish ancestors that is as fractured as it is whole.
What I do know about my Grandpa O'Leary is he grew up playing baseball and American football. He turned down a baseball scholarship to the College of the Holy Cross so he could start earning money for his family. He learned a trade (pipe fitting) and became a factory worker and a landlord of some of Worcester's famous three-decker apartment buildings. He married a woman from a long-established Worcester Irish family. He managed his money well enough to buy land both in the city of Worcester and in the rural areas around it. In the rural areas he tried his hand at raising chickens and goats. He and his wife put their six children through Catholic elementary and high schools, and the three who wanted to go, through college. One became a nun and the rest, all boys, married nice Catholic girls. In true mid-twentieth century American fashion, their wives were Italian, Polish, and Irish; it was their x Catholicism that mattered most to their future in-laws. If the O'Leary boys did not go to college they served proudly in the American military during World War II and the Korean War, and then entered trades. The college-educated ones became teachers.
Except for the nun, all of the siblings had between four and eight children. They were fruitful and multiplied during the Baby Boom years.
My grandfather was an American success story, but there is evidence that he did not forget his Irish roots. In fact, without him my maiden name would not have been so glaringly Irish, for it was he who rescued the "O" his father had left off when he came to this country. According to family story, when he came of age, Grandpa went to city hall in Worcester and restored the "O" to O'Leary. That to me is an act of pride in his heritage, an act of not wanting to blend in completely to Anglo-American whiteness. At this I have to guess, however, because he is not here to speak for himself. I only recently heard the story from my aunt, as my father has no recollection of it. What one sibling remembers and another forgets on the familial level has implications for what is retained and forgotten on the communal level. These are gaps and fissures in our story that we fill in with imagination and (more or less) educated guesses.
Another family story is that my father was set to be named Robert Emmet, after the Irish nationalist hero who famously declared before being put to death that no epitaph should be written on his tomb until Ireland was free. My grandmother, fearing that he would face prejudice, insisted his middle name be Edward. Thus Robert Edward O'Leary was born in 1922, the same year that most of Ireland gained its independence from Great Britain. The coincidence of my father's year of birth with xi the birth of the Irish Free State was never once mentioned, or probably even thought of, in our house growing up. Quite honestly the first time I thought of it was in writing this preface, after decades of studying Irish history and literature. Yet my grandfather must have been conscious of what was happening in Ireland. The stories of both my father's last and middle names make me think that his father probably followed the news of his native country from Massachusetts as so many others did.
There is another side to my Grandfather O'Leary's immigrant success story.
My father's paternal grandmother, also a native of County Kerry, is said to have been quiet and cross, and probably depressed. She barely spoke to her grandchildren. Did she not want to leave her homeland? Did she have a choice in the matter? Who did she leave behind? My aunt the nun tells me that her O'Leary grandparents spoke Irish to one another when they did not want the children to know what they were saying, yet three generations later I hardly knew about this language I heard called "Gaelic" as a child. The language had been lost to us. But what other losses was Sarah Moriarty O'Leary mourning? It is only as a scholar of Irish-American literature that I am beginning to figure that out. Again, though, there is a gap I cannot bridge because my paternal great grandmother was gone long before I was born, as was her son. I can only make historical generalizations, and even those are suspect because lives of ordinary people, especially women, were not often recorded. This woman's voice, like so many others, has been lost. I do not even know if she were alive and willing to tell her story, whether she would tell it in English or in Irish. Irish. They did not appreciate the relatively wild and often drunk new immigrants, according to my aunt. The Lavertys were among the first parishioners of Worcester's first Catholic parish. More than that, they were involved in pressuring the Bishop of New England (based in Boston at the time) to establish a church that became the first in the diocese of Worcester and Springfield, and they also donated land that became the first large Catholic cemetery in the city of Worcester. They had been in the United States since the 1820s, and were well established before the Irish poured into the country during the Famine years of the 1840s and 50s. If my Grandma O'Leary's family had a problem with her marrying the son of more recent immigrants, born in Ireland himself, I have not heard of it. Dennis was clearly a sober and hard-working young man, who must have impressed her family. My father says that by the time his father proposed to his future bride, he had already accumulated more money in his short time in the U.S. than the long-established Lavertys. They may or may not have heard the rumors that Dennis's father had smuggled guns and priests for Irelandanother great story the details of which are sadly mostly forgotten. Perhaps they would have approved, especially if the goal was to protect a Catholic Ireland. Either way, the only hesitancy regarding the marriage I have ever heard about was on my xiii grandmother's part, and that purely based on her suitor's height. At about 5'7", she was taller than he was.
The Lavertys' story was recorded in Worcester history because the family was of some prominence in the local Church. They had enough wealth, land, and influence to be remembered. The stories about their contributions to the Worcester Diocese first came to me not through family lore, but through documents I stumbled upon in my Meagher, explaining the early history of the Church in Worcester, states, "As the number of Catholics in Worcester increased in the early 1830s so did the pressure to assign a permanent pastor to the town. In 1832 Robert Laverty wrote the bishop xiv lamenting that new generations were being born, including his own children, who not only received little instruction in the faith, but were not even baptized. Though  where facts end and imaginative reconstruction of stories takes over. Consider, then, how much more difficult it is to piece together the story of the masses of poor Irish who came to this country in the middle of the 19 th -century. This is the case of the other half of my family.
My mother's maternal side of the family tree has more obscure, and more troubled roots. On her maternal side, I heard vague references as a child to their being from Cork and Mayo. Maybe they were from both places, and the immigrants met here in the States. They were Bests, Farleys, and McAuliffes. No one has yet traced that side all the way back, though some of my cousins are actively working on it. My cousin Dennis Bean has found on Ancestry.com that my maternal grandmother's family is actually from Limerick. I find it hard to believe that the Cork and Mayo rumors are totally unfounded. I had interest in our origins since childhood and while I wish I asked more questions, I know I asked where in Ireland we were from and those were always the counties named. While Dennis puts more faith in the documents he found online, I will not rule out entirely what I heard as a child, because I believe in oral history despite its limitations. Someone, somewhere must have told my grandmother we were from Cork and Mayo if that was what she passed down.
Academically, I can understand the disconnect and the confusion. Here is another, wider gap in our story, which again mirrors the Irish-American story at large. Likely these were Famine immigrants. They settled in the mill towns along the Blackstone xvi River, which runs from Providence, Rhode Island to Worcester. Their exact stories have been lost to time.
I have inherited the Bible of my great-great grandmother Mary Farley, her name embossed in gold on the thick leather cover. My mother was told that Mary bought that Bible piece by piece, eventually having it bound when she collected the whole thing. I can only imagine how much time, effort, and sweat went into paying for her treasure. She recorded her children's birth and marriage dates in the Bible, as many of her generation did. Someone later wrote in their death dates. Mary Farley's own death was never recorded in it, nor were her date and place of birth. I am the fifth woman to own the Bible, over five generations. Unfortunately, as with so much of this family story, the entries written into the Bible leave out much more than they tell us. Mary Farley did not write herself into the Bible, only her children, and only their dates of birth and marriage. There are no death dates, presumably because she herself did not live long enough to know them, and no one picked up on writing these Bible entries until possibly my grandmother nearly a century later. As a prosthetic for family memory this Bible is an imperfect one for what it leaves out, but also a perfect symbol for how I understand the gaps and fissures in the Irish-American story, as communal memory constructed despite or around what has been forgotten.
The most complete genealogical work in my family has been done on my mother's paternal side. Her cousin Irene Amsden traced their Ferris side of the family to counties Derry and Louth. Our two Irish ancestors from those counties likely met here in the U.S., with a common bond of Irish Catholicism trumping any county allegiances from home. Bridget McNally Ferris, my mother's paternal greatxvii grandmother, left the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts after marrying and raising a family here, and returned to her hometown of Termonfeckin in County Louth, where she subsequently drowned in a river. Family story says she had a photograph of her children commissioned sometime before she left. To our knowledge this photograph no longer exists, except in fading transgenerational memory. No one knows why she left, or why or how she drowned. This is where history fails us, in the loss of voices like hers, ordinary people behind the scenes. This is where fiction can step in, to fill in the gaps, if not with historical fact then perhaps with emotional truth. In a novel I based loosely on Bridget's life, I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be driven out of her home by poverty, to be forced to leave behind parents and siblings, and the only community she had ever known, knowing she would likely never see them again. I tried to imagine what it would be like travel to a new land, with foreign surroundings, and then as a woman to be home with children all day, while her husband likely made new social connections through work. I renamed my character Kate, not wanting to do a disservice to the real-life Bridget, whose real-life motivations I could never know for sure. For Kate, the upheaval of moving across the ocean results in a loneliness and depression she cannot bear. She is divided between the home country that cannot feed her, and the new country she does not love, and to which she does not feel connected. Yet that new country is the country of her children, and even her husband who is adjusting better to the move, settling in through his mill work. I wonder how close I came to the feelings of Bridget, at least one of whose sons became an alcoholic, as did his son (my grandfather) after him. One could argue for both nature and nurture as causes here-a xviii genetic disposition toward depression and alcoholism, combined with the abandonment by and subsequent death of my great-grandfather's mother. These personal losses would of course have been heaped on top of the earlier traumas of experiencing famine and emigration, and even before these, thanks in part to British imperialism, the loss of the mother tongue. Transgenerational trauma theory would help to explain the alcoholism and depression we see later in the family history.
In my mother's family the loss, loneliness, and emotional damage can be traced down the generations. That emotional trauma does not just go away, buried with the originator in the grave. Bridget's son George, my mother's grandfather, was described to my mother (and then by her to me) as lazy, allowing his wife, reportedly a very good woman, to do everything while he lounged. His son, also named George, my mother's father, was an alcoholic with a gambling problem. He liked to bet on the horses, my mother would say, and he drank most of his pay before he got home. In true Angela's Ashes fashion, my mother's youngest sister was sent into bars to fetch him before he spent all his pay. On the nights they could not fetch him out of the bar, my grandmother might have added water to already thin soup, to make sure it stretched far enough to feed seven kids. This is not just a literary trope or an Irish stereotype; this was real life for my mother, her siblings, and their mother from the 1920s into the 1940s, by which time the young adult Ferris kids had voted their father out of the family, vowing to pitch in and help their mother with living expenses if she would ask him to leave. My mother's brother, also named George, detested his father for his drinking and what it did to the family, especially to his mother. He also detested being named after his father. This third George was nothing like the other xix two who came before him. A loving son, brother, husband, and father, George Arand Ferris, my uncle, put himself through Boston University's School of Journalism with the help of the GI Bill. He had a career as a journalist and a technical writer. There was nothing lazy about him. He was happy that there was one difference between his name and his father's name, for according to my She was right. My grandmother always liked her, according to my mother, which might explain why she gave her George the middle name Arand (and my mother the middle name Grace). When my Uncle Bob, in an act of kindness, belatedly put a tombstone on his father's previously unmarked grave, he mistakenly added the middle initial "A" to his name. My Uncle George was incensed that the one difference he held dear between his own name and his father's was thereby erased. The bitterness of past trauma lasted at least into my mother's generation, with her hatred of alcohol, and her brother George's hatred of his own name, which he inherited from his father and grandfather before him. In my own generation alcoholism and depression still persist among some members. The origins of the trauma are largely forgotten by most members of the family, but the after effects still linger.
You might say none of this has anything to do with Ireland, or you might say that of course, the Irish are known for being alcoholics. I say it is connected to Ireland, but not with the familiar stereotypes of drunkenness, and perhaps not even xx with the more sensitive analyses of alcoholism brought on by a combination of genetics and depression. I see a larger, social-historical context behind the many different types of connections to Ireland and America found even in my own family tree. If my theory about my maternal great-great grandmother Bridget McNally Ferris is correct, it is the loss of her family and community in Ireland that was at the heart of her struggles. Long before I studied postcolonial theory, I named the novel I wrote about her Divided, to express how she felt being separated from her homeland, caught between her old and new countries. It was likely a similar loss to that experienced by Sadly, the originators and the keepers of these stories have been silenced, either through death, through dementia, or more recently (as I have written and revised this dissertation) through debilitating strokes suffered by both my aunt, Sister Mary O'Leary, and my mother, Rita Grace Ferris O'Leary. Sister Mary's stroke did not take away her speech, though it did set it back briefly. She was able to regain speech, and still holds onto the family memories, but her perception of the present is altered. She is probably better equipped to tell you a family story from 60 years ago than to tell you who came to visit her today. That after being sharp as a tack, driving and volunteering at the hospital from which she had only recently retired, at 90 years old. My mother xxi also suffered her stroke at 90, about four months after her sister-in-law did. In my mother's case the stroke left her with aphasia, the inability to recall words she wants to use. It is hard to watch her struggle to come up with what she wants to say. She can sometimes manage a few words, but there is so much more in her she cannot get out.
She can speak, physically that is; she can read a song off a page or recite a memorized prayer. Reading does not require the kind of recall spontaneous speech does, and the prayers and songs are so ingrained in her she does not have to think about them to recite them at Mass. The aphasia, though, has made it impossible for her to share a family story with me again. Sometimes she can get out a word or two, in a style her speech therapist calls "telegraphing." It is up to the listener to fill in the gaps and make connections to complete the sentence. Instead of life imitating art, I find in this situation that life is imitating history. In my mother's case we have to guess the missing words until she tells us we are correct. Thankfully she is still here to do that much. More distant ancestors are not, so their voices remain completely silenced with some remnants, such as a family Bible or obituary, standing in for the speech we cannot hear. We use imagination to fill in the rest of the story.
My family history is marked at least as much by what I do not know as by what I know, and I probably know more than most, due to the combination of the curiosity I have had about my heritage since I was a child, and my academic pursuits.
I am finding at wakes and funerals, which is where we run into each other these days as our parents' generation dies out, that my cousins have also been left with stories.
Sometimes we have different versions of the same stories, sometimes different stories altogether. We all have scraps and pieces, depending on the perspectives of our xxii parents, and their relative willingness to share, combined with our own past willingness to listen, to take these stories in as children and young adults. In this we reflect the larger Irish-American community that lost its access to memory of the early decades of mass immigration to this country. As the years went on these memories died out along with those who lived them and their immediate descendants. The stories may not have been told by new immigrants busy surviving in a new place.
They may have been withheld based on shame over poverty. They may have been distorted through the generations if they were retold at all. They may not have been listened to by their children and grandchildren, new Americans trying to make their way up the social ladder. For a combination of all of these reasons, snatches and fragments now remain at best, over 100 years later, with stereotypes and imagination filling in the gaps. We suffer from a collective aphasia, an inability to recall, a loss for words to tell the stories of how our families went from being Irish to being American, and what they had to give up along the way.
Yet so many of us still want to identify as Irish, to find a connection with this place about which we know so little. It is this connection to Ireland that brings me to this project. Why did I always look at Ireland as home, even though I had never been there, and my parents had never been there or shown interest in going? When they did not even play Irish music in the house, unless you count Bing Crosby? Why, among eight siblings, are only two of us interested in our Irish heritage in any depth? And why, as the youngest, was I the first to have this interest by a couple of decades?
What was left for my parents to hand down to me was an Irish name, fair skin that burned too easily in the sun and freckles, and a Catholic faith. As a child I had no idea xxiii of the connection between these remnants of our Irish history. I did not know how hard my ancestors had fought to keep a faith that I would come to resent as a teenager, forced into mandatory weekly Mass attendance, andthe horror-even week day Holy Day Masses a few times a year. Perhaps if I had made the connection between the Irish heritage I looked on with such pride and the faith I had a hard time swallowing, I would have taken more kindly to being seemingly the only person under 60 in Mass on a Holy Day.
In this project, my investigation into how an Irish-American narrative was written of these disparate circumstances continues. I examine Irish-American fiction and memoir from just after World War II through the early 2000s. These books show the evolution of an Irish-American ethnic identity as the generations go on, in an ongoing process of selective remembering and forgetting, with silences being replaced by symbols. To complete the study, I also look at 21 st century fiction from Ireland that takes as its subject emigration to the United States, and the endless transatlantic cultural exchange. Both Ireland and America, and the Irish people who moved between them as well as their descendants, would forever be marked by the crossing.
In all of the works I have chosen, whether they are fiction or memoir, I see the authors piecing together the fragments of their own Irish and Irish-American experience, their own family histories and communal histories. They are filling in the gaps in memory with their imaginations, and in doing so they both capture and add to how the Irish-American story has been lived and told.

INTRODUCTION
History stays with us, even when we don't want it to. Forgotten or unwritten, history shifts beneath our feet, one minute imperceptibly, the next tectonically, shaping nations, neighborhoods, and families.
--Peter Quinn, Looking for Jimmy The Irish-American 1 narrative is a story told by a diasporic people longing to maintain a connection with a homeland that is receding into their past. It is also a narrative of ethnic identity formation in America, and the changes that needed to be made in order to fit in. This narrative is not only written by novelists, memoirists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, and filmmakers-all of whom have done their partbut also by the everyday people who told their stories, and by those who withheld their stories but let them come through in their actions and attitudes toward their new country and their old one. It is a narrative told about a partly remembered and partly imagined homeland through a filter of distance and time, from across an ocean and across generations. It is a story told to protect the Irish-American self from memories of past trauma-the dual pains of colonialism and emigration, the shame of poverty and hunger. The narrative paints a picture of a people who have thrived in America despite facing oppression on both sides of the Atlantic. In creating this narrative, the Irish in America have borrowed both from the nationalist rhetoric of Irish independence, and from the rhetoric of the American dream. This narrative of a people in diaspora has preserved for the Irish in America a sense of their own ethnic uniqueness when faced with the anxiety of losing themselves in a dull, if profitable, 1 Throughout this study, the term "Irish-American" will only be hyphenated when being used as a compound modifier for a noun that follows it. Thus I will speak of "the Irish-American narrative" or "Irish-American literature," but will not hyphenate when referring to Irish Americans as a people, or an individual Irish American.
American whiteness. What subsequent generations would remember-and what they would work to forget-of Ireland and their ancestors' early years in America, would become the core of the Irish-American narrative.
In the Irish-American literature in this study there exists a tension between the drive to become respectable Americans and the fear of losing themselves as they begin to blend in. This prompts a call to ethnic uniqueness in the Irish-American narrative, an effort to cling to some sense of Irishness. There is tension in the narrative as Irish-Americans fight against becoming the dreaded "Yank." Yet that is what they needed to become to live the American dream. In examining this thing called "the Irish-American narrative," it must be said that there is no one Irish-American experience.
J.J. Lee makes this clear in the introduction to Making the Irish American. Lee reminds us that in thinking about who an Irish American is, regional differences and particular circumstances of each city where the Irish settled need to be considered (11)(12)(13) The Irish-American narrative tells of a rise from poverty and oppression to American comfort and respectability. There is pride in this rise, but there is also loss. This study argues that symbol has replaced substance in popular representations of the Irish in America, and that imagination has been used to create an Irish-American identity that attempts to soothe the pain of what has been lost.
The theoretical tools that will be used to examine these works will center on notions of home and nation, applying those concepts to a people in diaspora and how they see themselves in relation to two different homes, the one they left behind but that still informs their identity, and the one in which they live and raise their families.
In the early twentieth century, the way Irish Americans see themselves against a dominant Anglo-Protestant culture can be traced back to the colonial setting they have left. For this reason some tenets of postcolonial theory will be applied to this American literature of a displaced Irish population. This move from one homeland to another, especially when forced by poverty rather than a desire to leave, does not come without trauma. As such, theories of individual trauma and trauma as it is passed down the generations will also be employed. The theory of ethnic identity formation as an ongoing process is also useful to understand how the Irish understand themselves in America. Finally, what makes it into a national or diasporic narrative has at least as much to do with what is forgotten as what is remembered in the name of presenting a unified whole. Theories of cultural memory and forgetting will be used to understand the fractured nature of the Irish-American story that is passed on, and the gaps and fissures found therein.

Home is what we imagine it to be.
Before trying to gain a better understanding of the Irish-American narrative, one must know the how national narratives are constructed. Benedict Anderson, who famously theorized nation as an "imagined community," explains how the idea of "nation" is only about two centuries old, yet national narratives claim for themselves ancient origins. Anderson compares the narration of nation with telling an adolescent of his early childhood through photographs and stories: "Because [early childhood] cannot be 'remembered,'[it] must be narrated" (204). In this way a national narrative reaches back through time, connecting generations, explaining an origin that the current generation cannot remember. Language allows national narratives to reach back through time. National narratives also reach across space, bringing together large numbers of people who will never come into contact with one another: "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their community" (6). As Anderson explains, it takes a leap of the imagination to make these connections across time and space. The national narrative allows people of a nation to make that imaginative leap. An even larger leap will be needed to carry that imagined community into diasporic spaces. His vision has come true and then some, as the Internet breaks down walls between countries. Now more than ever, the idea of home can travel. Appadurai sees this portability of culture as "fundamentally fractal" (46) and leading to chaos (47). He says, "It is in this atmosphere that the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity markers) can become slippery, as the search for certainties is regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transnational communication" (44).
Appadurai's view is not all negative, however, as this slipperiness can lead to opportunity for new social relationships beyond those tied to nation or nation-state.
Culturalism, according to Appadurai, is the willful connection of a group to a culture.
Groups in diaspora can choose their own ethnic or national affinities. While it may be anxiety-provoking for the immigrant to no longer be physically connected to a homeland, thus severing traditional modes of cultural transmission, Appadurai's "ethnoscapes" allow for new means of connectivity in a transnational space.
Charles Fanning sees creative potential in being of more than one country. He calls the Irish-American way of being "ethnicity as liberating doubleness," which he says is "a view of ethnic otherness not as destructive self-estrangement but as creative expansion of possibility" (371). It must be noted here that this possibility of "liberating doubleness" is attributable at least in part to the fair skin of the Irish. As Appadurai points out, other former colonial subjects with darker complexions do not always have as much choice in how they will remake themselves in this country (171).
That the nineteenth-century Irish were at first also not welcomed into white America is a key part of the Irish-American narrative. That they were able to eventually blend in is something the narrative would rather forget in its claim for ethnic difference. Put in Appadurai's terms, those who actively identify as Irish in America would like to exist in that ethnoscape that transcends national boundaries, to claim for themselves both an Irish and an American home. While Fanning correctly sees the creative possibility in that arrangement, claiming an Irish home comes with a history of trauma that has only been superficially remembered in the Irish-American narrative.

Trauma from home weighs down the emigrant's baggage.
The spiritual principle of the nation is not the only thing emigrants carry with them as they head out into what becomes diaspora. Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. (18) While it may not have been the jungle in the Irish case (the word "bog" would be a fair substitute), the process was similar, as was the psychological damage sustained.
Fanon terms this psychological damage a "psychoexistential complex" (Black Skin 12), and in his later book, The Wretched of the Earth, explains the resultant identity crisis, which causes the colonized subject to ask, "Who am I in reality?" (182). The process of colonization feeds the colonized person myths about who he or she is: how savage, how uncivilized, and therefore how in need of being governed by someone else. After being used so effectively in Ireland, this process was then replicated in empires all over the world. The process of planting that inferiority complex was so thorough that though Irish nationalists resented the English and knew they should be independent from them, they still measured their success by them. As David Lloyd and Declan Kiberd argue, they even modeled their newly independent Ireland after England in terms of its political, economic, and educational systems. The names may have changed from colonial days, having been "spray-painted green," as Kiberd says, but the systems largely remained the same Lloyd Anomolous 54).
This psychoexistential complex left the Irish questioning their own value not only at home, but also in America where they faced at first similar discrimination from another Anglo-Protestant ascendancy. In both places their faith, their language, and their way of life were devalued, and whether the Irish were aware of it happening or not, they took that devaluation to heart.
Appealing to Fanon to explain the inferiority complex experienced by the Irish in Ireland and the United States is not meant to dismiss the very real difference of skin color between the dark-skinned former colonial subjects of whom Fanon writes, and the fair-skinned Irish who could much more easily blend into the Anglo world. David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev have famously explained the process by which the Irish "became white" in the United States. Roediger cites W.E.B. Dubois' concept of the "wages of whiteness" by which he meant that the white working class could claim social and psychological benefits even if their pay was not higher than some freed African Americans. These benefits came precisely from being able to say that they were "not slaves" and "not blacks". According to Dubois, this allowed white workers to be satisfied with lower wages and exploited by the capitalist system (Roediger 13).
Roediger argues that under different circumstances the Irish may have resisted being so conflated with the Anglo majority, "But within the constrained choices and high risks of antebellum American politics such a choice [to take on a white identity] was quite logical" (144). Similarly, Noel Ignatiev explains that the nineteenth century Irish arriving in America "came to a society in which color was important in determining social position. It was not a pattern they were familiar with and they bore no responsibility for it; nevertheless, they adapted to it in short order." He continues, "To enter the white race was a strategy to secure an advantage in a competitive society" (2). The nineteenth century Irish in America moved into a racial minefield they had not experienced at home.

Forgetting is an attempt to heal trauma.
If, as Ernest Renan says, "the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things," the things that are forgotten still leave their mark. They may be buried deep in the national subconscious, but they still are missed. They are gaps in the national story. These gaps include aspects of the group's past that are too painful, embarrassing, or shameful to remember. When they are lost, that is when imagination and symbolism can step in to rebuild group identity. Even before the nineteenth century Irish left Ireland, they were already in the process of forgetting some of their past ways of living.
Linguistically, economically, educationally, and politically, the lines had blurred between the Irish and their former colonial government. For the sake of following a not at all unlikely that the clachán community of the Blaskets was replicated by the rural folk forced off their farms into crowded city living in the Dublin slums. They were still poor, they were still looking out for one another, and they were likely still singing and telling stories when they could. Similarly, Peter Quinn finds that in America the Irish crowded into urban ghettos because, "crowding was part of who they were" (80), and he attributes this to their having come from the clachán system.
He describes the clachán as "a clump of cabins that leaned on one another, a physical embodiment of the tight-knit community built on a communal method of land distribution" and says that "outsiders often remarked on the intense conviviality of the clachán, the incessant emphasis on singing, dancing, and storytelling that wasn't merely part of Irish culture but its living heart, the vessel of its survival" (80). What are the psychological reasons for, and ramifications of, this kind of cultural forgetting? Studying the theory of memory and forgetting reveals some clues.
Maurice Halbwachs famously theorized memory as a collective process: "the greatest number of memories come back to us when our parents, our friends, or other persons recall them to us…. It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories" (38). How disorienting the immigrant experience must be in light of this collective view of memory. Immigrants are cut off from many of the people who share and help them recollect their memories. If we remember together, we lose our past when we separate from those who share it with us. Distance from family and neighbors left behind accounts for some gaps in memory. Another break down in memory comes from a loss of language. Halbwachs calls language "the precondition for collective thought." Language and the social system attached to it "allows us at every moment to reconstruct our past" (173). For immigrants who leave a native language behind, then, there is another disconnect with memory. Granted the Irish and many immigrants who followed tried to reconstruct their communities in their new country.
Staying in crowded urban ghettos likely provided a sense of comfort to them. It is no wonder that immigrants would choose to settle amongst people from the same country, and even from the same county or region when possible. It must be horribly isolating to feel one's past slipping away.
Halbwachs also explains that we privilege some events of the past, depending on the demands of the present: "Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess" (51). This would account for how memories of home become tinged with nostalgia, when what one needs is the comfort those more positive memories bring. The needs of the present change the story told of the past, leading to a form of forgetting that may leave out some details while cherishing others. If this can happen in the immigrant generation, imagine how the story can change as these memories are passed on. It is like a game of "telephone" told through the ages, with each generation remembering what meets its needs at the present time. In that process some details are passed on faithfully, some are misconstrued, some are made up, and some are forgotten altogether.
Paul Ricoeur differs from Halbwachs in that he sees memory as not just collective, but a series of exchanges "between the living memory of individual persons and the public memory of the communities to which we belong" (131). Still, memories are tied to communities as half of that exchange in Ricoeur's theory.
Leaving one's community then is a disruption in memory. Though we often think of memories as things we can carry with us, Ricoeur shows that they may not be easily portable: It is on the surface of the habitable earth that we remember having traveled and visited memorable sites. In this way, the 'things' we remember are intrinsically associated with places. And it is not by chance that we say of what has occurred that it took place. It is indeed at this primordial level that the phenomenon of 'memory places' is constituted, before they become a reference for historical knowledge. These memory places function for the most part after the manner of reminders, offering in turn a support for failing memory, a struggle in the war against forgetting" (41) Emigrants leave behind their memory places-the favorite pub, granny's cottage, the farmland they worked, the school or dancehall where they first fell in love. Leaving behind these places must have caused emigrants who could not return to feel they were losing "the war against forgetting" as faces and places faded into the past. For Ricoeur memory has an imaginative function, in that we put our experiences into images. He admits that this gives memory a credibility problem (53-55). When memory is made part of a narrative of identity, it can break down even more: "It is…the selective function of the narrative that opens to manipulation the opportunity and the means of a clever strategy, consisting from the outset in a strategy of forgetting as much as in a strategy of remembering" (85 In Catherine Nash's work on the popularity of genealogy amongst members of the Irish diaspora, she, too, explains that memory is tied to places. Specifically, for Nash, memory is tied to land. Nash's work is a reminder to include the loss of land on the list of traumatic experiences. Disinheritance of the land through colonization, forced eviction, and emigration would have been among the earliest traumas the Irish carried with them. Nash examines what it means for third, fourth, and even beyond fourth-generation descendants of Irish migrants to go searching for their "roots." She points out that even the language of genealogy (roots, family trees) is land-based.
Those conducting genealogical investigations are often interested in visiting the places their ancestors left a century or more before, because "Having a genealogical connection to a place and the cultural forms associated with it is a routine guarantor of the right to say 'that is my culture'" (Nash 181). While Nash points out that there is no such thing as pure culture, as different groups have always come and gone and mixed even from "Old World" places, she says that this quest for connection to one's ancestral land "reflects a nostalgia for an imagined time when place, identity, culture and ancestry coincided. Where you lived was where your ancestors had lived and there was no dissonance between cultural identity and location" (179). This is the Irish dimension to themselves altogether, that they tried to reassemble those memories.
Homi Bhabha tells us that "Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present" (Location 90). Gayatri Spivak defines nationalism as, "the product of a collective imagination constructed through rememoration" (288). Re-memoration indicates more than just remembering, but also a reconstruction or rewriting while remembering. By the time the Irish in America were ready to re-member, there were many gaps in the memory chain that needed to be filled in. As is often the case with those suffering from trauma, those gaps would be filled in with a more pleasant version of events.
Sigmund Freud would tell Nietzsche that no matter how we "pretend to disown" our past, however, it will still be present, if buried, in our lives. Things we have forgotten have ways of popping back up until we are ready to deal with them.
Freud says of the goal of psychoanalysis in its third phase (around 1914), "Descriptively speaking, it is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression" (148 Ireland of the mind" (252). He says that at this point "it is clear that the principal traits for those who call themselves Irish-American…have sufficiently eroded to make Irish-American identity less an inescapable heritage and more an elective affinity" (254).
J.J. Lee echoes this idea, saying "it is likely that except for those who work systematically to sustain it, consciousness of an Irish dimension of their lives will be confined mainly to the immigrant generation itself, and perhaps to the second and third generations, and even many of those will have begun to melt into the American mainstream" (37-38). To varying degrees, then, people choose to maintain a sense of themselves as Irish, or Irish American, or they let that part of themselves go. Also to varying degrees, those who claim an Irish identity can make an effort to connect with the music and literature of Ireland, to study its history and its language, or they can resort to simple essentialisms based on the stereotypes of old. There is no one way to be an Irish American, and this study will not attempt to define one. What is more important here is the process used for re-membering or rememoration, and what that process leaves out, creating gaps and fissures in the narrative. together. According to Kathleen Neils Conzen and her cowriters, "What emerges as important in this process is not how much of the traditional culture has survived, but rather the changing uses to which people put cultural symbols and rituals" (97). Like the Italian-American festivals these authors also describe, Irish-American rituals around Saint Patrick's day can be read as a "psychological defense against the…faceless anonymity…of America" (97). Starting with a need to express Irish pride while they rose in America, these parades and celebrations often do still promote Irish culture at its best, teaching those who rarely think about Ireland for the rest of the year about its history, music, and dance. They can also devolve into contests about who can get the drunkest, and who can wear the most green, from green antennae to tutus and leprechaun hats. Reading Irish literature of the twentieth and early twentyfirst century can teach us how an ethnic Irish identity has evolved in the last 100 years in an ongoing process that "does not necessarily ever end" (Conzen et al 87), and what about our past has caused us to fill in our present in such interesting ways.

Outline of This Project
The Irish-American texts used in this study, based in small New England cities, as well as the major urban hubs of Boston Curran. Rather than having spent her childhood in a community that valued the contributions of its Irish immigrants, Cullinan admitted in an interview that her family did not want to be associated with being Irish: "Mother hated the Irish. We were supposed to be above all that" (qtd. in McInerney 99). Given the social aspirations of the mothers and the money problems of the fathers in Cullinan's stories, it is not surprising that the parents of her young women characters are often separated.
The divided identities of Cullinan's young women characters are reflected in the divisions between their parents, which in turn symbolize Irish Americans being torn between the Irish and American aspects of themselves. Cullinan's characters inhabit liminal spaces-almost but not quite let into the American professional world they desire to enter, or the Irish communities to which they travel. They are seen as American when they travel to Ireland, and as foreign and exotic when they try to make their way in the white collar business world of New York City, which in the 1960s was still largely Anglo-Protestant. They often have an insider/outsider status at one and the same time. They are forever on the threshold, until the end of her final novel, A Change of Scene, in which a more integrated and self-assured protagonist has finally made a successful career for herself and can claim New York City as her own.
As the evolution continues through the 1990s, as the distance of time from Ireland grows greater, the assimilation to American life becomes more complete, and the Irish diaspora becomes harder to recognize in the midst of suburban sprawl than they were in urban ghetto. There is at least one concentrated Irish-American neighborhood left well into the twentieth century, however.  give up, to get where they are in a way that makes them proud of who they are. It is a story that provides one example of the process of ethnic identity formation in the United States. The study itself will fill in a gap in the scholarship on the Irish national narrative, by telling how the story continued when the emigrants left. Their narrative did not end when they boarded boats, and later planes, to come to America. The Irish-American narrative is both a part of the Irish story, and a part of the American story.
It is a product of and a contributor to both. It is the narrative of a nation in diaspora.
And it is still being written.

CHAPTER 1 Irish Skin, Yankee Masks: Post-World War II Novels and the Assimilation of the Irish-American Community
There were, it is true, a few Irish on Money Mole Hill; and they were the worst of all, imitators of imitators, neither Yankee nor Irish, but of that species known as the lace-curtain Irish. They put the curtains up in their parlors, and decked out their souls in the same cheap lace.
--Mary Doyle Curran,The Parish and The Hill,[18][19] Once concentrated in urban ghettos and later working class neighborhoods surrounding thriving Catholic parishes, the Irish in America after World War II were ready to make the move to the suburbs. After 100 years in this country, for the first time Irish Americans would spread beyond close physical proximity of other Irish. In one way this signaled that they had made it-they had finally been accepted into the American mainstream, and into the middle class. They, by and large, had fulfilled the American dream. The Irish-American narrative is full of pride in this rise to American success despite the poverty and oppression that drove them from Ireland and greeted them when they first arrived in America. In rising, however, they had lost the safety net that was their Irish neighborhoods and, perhaps worse still, they had lost what defined them as Irish. This loss provoked anxiety over blending anonymously into the rest of white America, losing their uniqueness and perhaps losing their values along the way. This anxiety is shown in the works of Irish-American novelists from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, who in their writing both strove to capture the Irish-American community of their grandparents that they saw fading away, and to construct an Irish-American identity that would re-member (to use Homi Bhabha's phrase), or reassemble what was lost. These authors are at the same time recording, critiquing, and constructing the narrative of Irish-American identity. They do so in a way that reflects the anxiety of the time in which they were writing at least as much as it reflects the time about which they are writing. By capturing what elements they see being forgotten from the Irish-American communities of their youth, they reveal gaps and fissures in the Irish-American story.

Historical Background
Before looking at changes that were happening in the 1940s, it is helpful to have a clear picture of what life was like for many Irish Americans at the start of the twentieth century, while keeping in mind that differences in region, religion, and immigration generation make it impossible to define one Irish-American experience.
The Irish-American experience depicted in novels of the immediate postwar period by Edward McSorley and Mary Doyle Curran is an urban one, where neighbors lived crowded into tenement buildings or smaller multi-family houses. This is a reflection of the way the authors' grandparents' generation experienced America. Their apartments housed large families with many children, plus extended members, such as unmarried aunts and grandparents. The men in the families worked as laborers in the mills and foundries of New England cities at the turn of the twentieth century. As the families prospered, they may also have had in their ranks policemen, politicians, priests, clerks, and saloon owners. Women worked largely in the homes, where there was plenty to be done to feed, clothe, and minister to the health of their large broods.
If they worked outside of their own homes it was as factory seamstresses or as domestic servants for other families, most often established "Yankee" (as characters in both authors' works call them) Anglo-Protestant families. A single woman whose family had increased financial means may have been a teacher.
Outside of hard work, the defining feature in the lives of these families was their local Catholic parish. The  In subsequent generations this communal structure would be left behind, but at an emotional cost. The Irish in America at the turn of the twentieth century were able to still pass down stories, traditions, and values in a way that approximated what they had done in Ireland. That would soon be changing.
David Lloyd often points to "recalcitrant elements" in Irish life that refuse to be assimilated into its supposed modernity (Irish Times 4). Those who are disturbed by these elements or even those who view them nostalgically "have sought over and over again to fix, with all the ambiguity of that term, the remnants of other times that appear as the signs of Ireland's incivility" (Irish Times 1). These elements were also expected to be lost upon assimilation into American culture. Irish Americans in the mid-twentieth century would have been proud to be Irish, as long as being Irish did not mean being backward. They would have judged those backward elements as belonging to another time. Those who have constructed the Irish-American narrative to leave out Lloyd's "recalcitrant" elements are like Nietzsche's monumental historians, who have caused the past to be "damaged" with "entire parts…forgotten, scorned and washed away as if by a gray, unremitting tide, and only a few individual, embellished facts rise as islands above it" (100). The poverty in which Famine and post-Famine immigrants arrived, and the stereotypes hurled at them as a result, would need to be forgotten in order for the Irish to move up the American ladder of economic success. The fact of this rise would be the story embellished, rising as an island above what was by necessity forgotten in order to blend in, including an inclination for communalism over capitalism, a belief in the supernatural as part of our world, and a conception of time that saw history as alive in the present.
Up until just beyond the turn of the century, the urban ethnic communities inhabited by the Irish in America still had a steady stream of immigrants from Ireland to refresh their ties to the homeland. By the 1920s, there were enough immigrants who came in waves in the late nineteenth century still living to give the neighborhoods a strong connection to Ireland. These were the grandparents, the story tellers, the keepers of tradition. The children of the nineteenth century immigrants were now the parents of the third generation Americans attending parish schools. A series of changes to the demographics of these communities were about to take place, however.
The two world wars, and restrictive immigration laws put in place in the 1920s, In addition to demographic trends that saw fewer Irish immigrants coming into urban communities, established Irish Americans now had more opportunities to leave their city neighborhoods for newly built suburbs. The G.I. Bill of Rights provided education to returning Irish American soldiers who otherwise would not have had access to higher education, as well as low-interest mortgages, and other benefits (Quinn 41;Fanning 312). These benefits in turn opened up to these (mostly) men and their families income and housing opportunities that had rarely been experienced previously by the Irish in America. Though Kevin Kenny says that the Irish showed a preference for city living that kept them in urban neighborhoods longer than other white Americans (American Irish 227), they eventually became part of the white flight out of the cities and into suburbia as they gained the financial means to do so. By this time, the Irish in America had become "emphatically an ethnic rather than an immigrant subculture" (Fanning 239 (96). The drive to be seen as respectable in American eyes was behind this changing Church, as Catholics had to prove they were good Americans, loyal to the President as well as the Pope. The spirituality and enchantment of the faith the Irish brought with them to America would be one of the many elements of their culture forgotten as they assimilated in their new country.

Two Novels in Conversation
The novels studied in this chapter, Edward McSorley's Our Own Kind and Mary Doyle Curran's The Parish and The Hill, are constructed narratives of the places from which the authors came, beginning in the time period of their childhoods. As such they are a form of cultural memory, even if fictionalized. When one leaves behind both the community that helps him or her remember, and the place tied to those memories, it is then easy to forget. These post-World War II Irish-American novels have in common a clear mapping of the neighborhoods that are their settings, with street names and adjoining neighborhoods enumerated in detail. Moving from one's established neighborhood to another was a cause for distress. Forgetting who they are is a disturbing threat for those set adrift in a vast American landscape, without familiar cultural landmarks and friendly faces to help them remember. This is one thing disturbing McSorley and Doyle Curran at mid-century. We must not study these texts as historical documents of the period being written about, but instead as examples of the way "memory was produced, constructed, written, and circulated" in the time that they were written (Saunders 323). As constructions of memory, they "tell us more about the rememberer's present, his or her desire and denial, than about actual past events" (Neumann 333). Authors construct the past that they want to remember based on their needs at the time of writing (Neumann 334). For the Irish-American writers after World War II being studied here, that need was to capture a dissipating culture before it was entirely gone, as the move to suburbia was clearly on the horizon.
These authors also needed to re-member an immigrant generation they saw as relatively pure, and uncorrupted by American capitalism and racism, by virtue of having first-hand experience with Ireland. Some of the immigrants in the novels quickly adapt to the American way of doing business, but the beloved grandparents of the protagonists have been elevated to hero status. If anything is remembered nostalgically in these novels, it is these grandparents. America start losing their Irishness. These authors show that as akin to losing their souls. When greed and status trump caring for one's neighbor it is seen as the ultimate insult to the Irishness being constructed or re-membered in these books.
The disintegration of concentrated Irish-American neighborhoods, through the lack of new immigrants and economic opportunities that allowed those established in the U.S. to move to the suburbs, caused anxiety because it was a repetition of earlier losses of culture. The Irish in America had already survived colonialism, the Great Famine, and emigration. All of these ate away at their ability to transmit their language and customs. In fiction that recreates the early Irish-American community, characters portrayed as most authentically Irish are always great story tellers. This can be traced back to the clachán, where upcoming generations were educated through talk-stories that passed on communal values, and taught life lessons. This is more than the gift of gab or mere entertainment, though it is highly entertaining; it is also an essential pedagogical method. With the fragmentation of the Irish-American community by the mid-twentieth century it is in danger of being lost. Suburbanization was viewed as a step up the American ladder of success, but it was also the final step in a long and often traumatic journey for Irish Americans away from their Irish roots.
Both protagonist, and the novel proceeds through what seem to be his preteen and early teen years until, upon the death of his grandfather, he is left to make his way without his chief protector and advocate. Willie realizes by the end of the novel that the immigrant generation is dying and that his grandfather's insistence on educating the boy into a professional, respectable occupation will eventually make of him a stranger to his working class Irish community, and therefore to himself. The chief tension of the novel is how to balance an American education with retaining pride in an Irish past. The characters are complex, especially the grandfather Ned, who has a keen sense of justice, an unfailing work ethic, and a big heart, but also flaws that McSorley relates with humor. Ned wants two things in life: a free Ireland, and his grandson to show the Yanks that an Irishman can be their equal in intelligence and education.
Aside from that, a drop of whiskey, a full pipe, and the companionship of his dog never hurt either. The sad ending is not overly sentimental, but leaves Willie and the readers with the question of what will become of him now that Ned is gone.

Doyle Curran's novel is different both in structure and in tone. The Parish and
The Hill is a series of character sketches, one per chapter, starting with "the Parish" itself, the Irish-American immigrant and second generation neighborhood to which the author ascribes a largely undiluted Irish culture. Each chapter starts with the young narrator Mary O'Connor's proclamation, "I remember…." She remembers first Irish Parish, which is odd because she did not live there. She is remembering a time before she was born in the first chapter, an act that Marianne Hirsch might call a form of "postmemory." The reader never knows exactly how old Mary is, but after that first chapter the story follows her from preschool years (her first memories) to adolescence.
In that sense it does have some sense of a chronological narrative, but as a series of sketches starting with the proclamation "I remember" and then describing a character, it does not move forward in a traditional way, rather circling back to the origin story of each character. In these character sketches, Doyle Curran can resort to caricature,

When Ned McDermott takes his orphaned grandson Willie McDermott under
his wing in Our Own Kind, it becomes his mission to see to it that his grandson will not become another soldier or laborer to give up his life or at least ruin his body for someone else's cause or profit. That mission is in jeopardy of failing when Willie gets in trouble with the law for breaking into a store with neighbor boys who are clearly heading in the wrong direction in life. Not wanting Willie to continue traveling their path, Ned decides to move the whole family to a different neighborhood, on the other side of Providence. This is a major move given how rooted Irish Americans are in their own parish. Ned will let nothing in the way of his goal, however. He wants to make of Willie a scholar, to enter him into a career where he will use his mind, not his body, and where he will earn good money, but more importantly where he will earn respect for all he knows. For illiterate Ned, reading is the key to Willie's success. In the new neighborhood, two priests and one kindly neighbor, who happens to be his uncle's fiancée, help Willie to continue his education and stay on the right path. It seemed damn queer to him… that every Irishman in the books Willie got from the library was a damned fool or a drunk and there never seemed to be a Catholic born into the world except perhaps a Frenchman and what the hell did they amount to after all, anyhow…. But go ahead, and read them, read them all for the more you read the more you'll want to read and God knows there must be an Irishman hidden away in them somewhere that walked on his hind legs and had learned to speak more English than 'whisht' and 'begorra.' (138) Notably these words that Ned credits to the Irish as English are barely English at all, with "whisht" being more of a dismissive sound and "begorra" a corruption of "By Is the sisters teaching them in the schools that was built on pennies and nickels that might have bought bread to feed a hungry mouth to go tearing and slashing at a man in the street because there's a beard hanging on his chin or he talks in a strange way to them?... Thick as we are we're above that I hope, above raising a hand against a man because his faith is not our faith. (66) This concern for the oppressed also makes Ned a strong union man. A union, for Ned, is not just a union for the Irish. He knows that all of the workers will be better off if Willie interacts with other men who stop to play baseball with him and his friends.
Though these men are hard laborers and often drinking, they are kind to the boys.
These men have no social pretensions. Willie compares them to Chris: "About the same age as his uncle, they were freer and happier than he was" (146). Chris has begun the journey of self-loathing that can accompany a rise out of one's community.
Chris McDermott is not alone in representing this social climbing type in Our Own Kind. Ned criticizes Pete Carron, his wife's cousin who, when new to the United States with nothing of his own, stayed in Ned's attic. Pete rises to be head of a bank not through honest means, but by loaning money to people in unfortunate circumstances, such as the newly widowed who need to pay their bills. Pete always seems to be there to offer a hand, but he is also there to collect-with interest-even from those who find it impossible to pay. That he does this to his own people makes Ned furious, but it shows an example of one way the Irish rose, by emulating the ways of free market capitalism. Ned has mixed feelings about Pete's success: "Pete Carron never did a dishonest thing in his life-without a profit. He wasn't one you'd be proud of among yourselves, but a damn good thing to let the Yankees know they weren't the only ones in the banks these days" (18). Pete's behavior would normally have been shameful in the Irish-American community but Ned and other Irish Americans realized they were on hostile ground in the Yankee-run business world. Ned's hat is the prosthetic for memory in this scene. It represents all Ned was to the family. It is a memory aid the family will not dare remove, but when the people he leaves behind die out, the hat will go, too. His "few bright words" will be lost with There was no dissension then. We were all the same, and if a woman made a cup of tea there would always be a friend by to drink…. There was always plenty. You will never see those days again, for they are gone, all of them, and it's the Hill that did it, the Hill with its pot of gold and Irishman fighting Irishman to get at it. Irish Parish was full of peace till the time came when the serpent got into the garden and none content afterall of them making the gold rush to the Hill and trying to outdo the Yankees at their own game. (49) It was hard to resist the temptation of the capitalist serpent, once it entered the Eden of 'It was good in the Parish when I first came, more like the old country than Boston just a hundred and fifty miles away….The Parish itself had nothing of the look of Kerry, but the people were the same…. There was the same gay look in the eyes of these people and there was love among them. None of us who were used to the fresh shining air of the sea and the green grass of Kerry liked the dark mill, but there it was and a man could earn a living for himself and his family in it. It was better than the old country for all that, where a man could watch his children starve and he not able to bring them a bite. ' (48-49) Johnny is a character drawn so clearly, and with such compassion, that it is easy to forget while reading that he is a fictional creation of Mary Doyle Curran. She has imagined the ideal Irish immigrant to found her Irish-American family. Johnny O'Sullivan represents the gold standard of Irish values that should have been passed down in a perfect world of uninterrupted cultural transmission.
Not only does Johnny remember Ireland, but he also remembers his language.
He is a native Irish speaker, who speaks the language with his wife until the day she dies. He speaks in English to his American-born children. When young Mary becomes his closest companion, however, Johnny is suffering from dementia, and he speaks his language again. Mary remembers: I walked beside him, holding his hand, while he talked, talked in a language I have never heard since. His voice was beautiful, and as impossible of reproduction as pure music. The intonations were those of the purest Gaelic speech. The whole talk would be a long monologue, for he talked as though he were conversing with the disembodied, and indeed he was. Everything came to life as he spoke. In the world he created for me, the man in the moon was as real as the man in the street. (21) Mary understood his Irish with the ease of a child. That she has never heard it since is evidence of the disrupted transmission of this crucial vehicle of culture, the native language. Johnny's disembodied voices with whom he communicates are his dead.
They are the only people who speak his language. Mary seems to understand it, but never speaks it. When Johnny is gone, the language for Mary is gone with him. The ties to those disembodied voices are severed, and no longer can Mary commune with her dead in their language. The same goes for most of the Irish-American community.
Johnny was separated not just by language from the younger generation of Irish Americans, but by custom, especially in the understanding of a spirit world.
When failing health forces him to move away from Irish Parish and in with his daughter Mame's family on the Hill, Johnny loses what was left of his community.
This is the break, not the break with Ireland, that ends Johnny's life as he knew it.
With no community, and thus no shared collective memory, he begins to lose his mind. "It was the Hill that stifled him," Mary says (39). Johnny explains his disconnect: 'What's the use of talking there when no one has the mind to comprehend you? If you meet a man on the street and stop him to tell him that through the window last night you saw a great procession pass and that he was among them, he would think you crazy, but if you tell that to Bridgie Flynn in the Parish, she would wash herself, put on her best, make a visit to the priest, say good-bye to her friends and go home to die. A dog howling on the Hill is only the howl of a dog-in the Parish it is an omen.' (39) The Parish is a place where, like Johnny's Ireland, the world is still understood as enchanted. On the Hill the same beliefs shared in the Parish are looked at as crazy, backward, or old-fashioned. Johnny represents the Irish past that is fading away.
Both his language and his beliefs in the otherworldly among us are not of use to those wanting to rise in middle class America. Worst of all for Johnny, his stories are no longer appreciated by the next generation. He thinks, "How could he tell his stories to his own sons and daughters, who would only hush him for his superstitions?" (39).
His social-climbing daughter Josie calls the stories exchanged in Irish Parish "fairy tales", and forbids Johnny from visiting there anymore when he prophesies his own death after he hears the wailing of the dead two times (the third time would be for him) (40). There is no room, in the world the Irish Americans have entered, for enchantment. The Irish like Josie want to be modern, and enchantment and the modern cannot coexist. Those who see themselves as modern want to attribute belief in an enchanted world to an earlier time in their development; they have to relegate it to the past (Chakrabarty 87). In the case of the Irish in America, a belief system such as Johnny's had to be labeled quaint and cute, a thing of the past, but something that Irish Americans had outgrown. If someone held those beliefs in the present, as Johnny did, he was deemed feeble-minded. This is a clear break with the dead of the Irish nation, who had always been included in the Irish present rather than seen as in the past. Of the story tellers in Irish Parish, Mary recalls, "In telling the stories, there was always one man or woman who was favored, depending on the number of supernatural visions he or she had had. The one with the longest memory was best, for he could tell visions that were none of his own, but belonged to those dead ones whose names were forgotten" (4-5). Beyond the immigrant generation, the chain that connected the Irish-American community to their dead would be weakened. She withers up with hatred, bitterness and greed against her husband's family. Here Doyle Curran is the most heavy-handed in her depiction of selling out one's Irishness for Yankee respectability. The Yankee in-laws never see her as anything but Irish, though she is willing to give up everything she knows and is to be one of them. As Mary describes, "Her husband, out of deference to his mother, had seen to it that she received the proper education for a lady. She was refined and polished into a proper nonentity" (153). Hannah tells Mame, "'God knows…I had no desire to remain Irish, but they saw to it that I could be nothing else'" (153). In a literal embodiment of the disruption of cultural transmission, Hannah's only son is taken from her to be raised by her in-laws, and then sent to boarding school as soon as he is of age. Hannah had not wanted the baby; in fact she had tried unsuccessfully to avoid getting pregnant out of spite for her husband's family since she knew they desperately wanted an heir.
Nonetheless she is terribly aggrieved, staying in bed ill for months, when her son dies Maggie's reading "off a financial statement, telling how much more had been taken in than had been spent" (92). Even the entertainment had to be for commercial value and social status, rather than the joy of gathering together. It must have given Doyle Curran much joy writing Aunt Maggie's end: "One night she lifted her arm to emphasize her last words-she got out the 'Erin,' and dropped dead on the stage" (92). In a wonderfully ironic twist, this same woman who had erased any trace of true Irishness from her nephew died with the word "Erin"-Ireland-on her lips.
In The Parish and The Hill Aunt Hannah is rendered unrecognizable by the greed that overtakes her, and her desire to be someone else. Aunt Maggie becomes a cartoon version of an Irish woman, putting on an evening of "Irish" entertainment that has nothing to do with the way the Irish entertained, after once denying everything in her that was Irish. She, more than anyone, represents the type of Irish that erases her cultural identity only to try to re-member it in a way that would be palatable to her respectable American peers. Both of these women are consumed by a self-loathing rooted in the low status afforded the Irish upon entry into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though they have white skin, they still are seen as fundamentally different than the Protestant business and civic leaders who are in charge. The way these characters think of themselves, and try to model their lives after the "Yankees," is evidence of what Frantz Fanon has termed a "psychoexistential complex." In the process of trying to mimic the dominant group, these characters lose sight of who they are. The seeds of their own inferiority are planted in their minds, and once there lead to identity confusion and a pattern of self-destruction. America in the first half of the twentieth century.
Organizing labor is another concern for the descendants of Irish immigrants in The Parish and the Hill as it is in Our Own Kind. It is a concern particularly ascribed to the members of the Irish-American community whom the authors see as retaining their Irishness, while those willing to give up their Irishness to get ahead come out against the unions. The Parish and The Hill, too, has a sympathetic radical character.
James O'Connor's friend from the mill, the Scotsman Hugh, is a union activist. Hugh is "too damn radical" for James's taste, yet James admires his intelligence (103).
Unlike James, Hugh is not afraid to rock the boat in favor of workers' rights. It is Mame who finds herself aligning with Hugh's activism. Mary says, "My mother knew nothing about the economics of labor, but instinctively she took the side against the powers that be and came out strong for unions" (103  Oh, and they'd follow me, too, from the Parish and the Hill, like they follow any priest or politician that is willing to pipe them over the top of the dam" (212). Billy likes to criticize, but in his smugness he suggests no alternative. It is all a joke to him. He jokes about the visiting Tabby being a disciple of the bigoted radio priest, Father Coughlin, whose popularity was one of the many things making Mame sick over what had become of her community. Billy says derisively of Father Coughlin that he "knows what the Irish need is a leader. He'll lead them a fine dance, and one day they'll all go up in a puff and Eddie here will be fiddling for them" (218). He continues, With Tabby's fists and Eddie's brains and a keg of whiskey to keep both of you from collapsing, we could go far. But that keg of whiskey would be essential, for neither of you bastards have any guts without it….Look at youtwo of a kind-fine typical Irishmen! God, you disgust me! Get out of here, both of you, braggart and coward, two sides of the same coin. Get out! You remind me too much of myself. (218) This leads to Billy's confrontation with Tabby who was apt to defend the Irish and the Church he barely believed in with his fists. They both tell Eddie how to live, but neither one can make him feel any less sick over what he has become, an Irish American who has lost his soul. He erupts on both of them, claiming he is not like either of them, and then finally flees home to his violin.
Eddie's return home to open his violin case suggests the possibility of healing and re-membering in the Irish-American community, but Mary's dream to end the novel shows that the fight is far from over. The final words of the novel, "Olagon! Olagon! Olagon!" (221) are the same sounds of keening for the dead heard earlier at a wake Mary attends with Mame. At the time of the wake, Mary says of the sound, "It was the cry of the living clutching, clasping at the departing spirit of the dead, begging, beseeching his return. It was the cry of those who knew there would be no coming back" (70). At the end of the novel, in Mary's dream, the departing spirit is of the Irish-American community, and though Eddie has finally remembered as Mary begged him to, many more others have forgotten. The connection with the dead has been severed. This book is a keen for the Irish-American community, Mary's keen.
There is no going back to the Parish, no going back to what it was. Perhaps that is why Mame attends all the wakes she does early on-not only is she mourning each individual, but also each piece of the community falling away, and the old ways with them. The dead return to mourn the living in Mary's dream. The dead are raising the keen for their values that have been forgotten by this new generation of Irish Americans, who appear in the dream as "red-faced people, prosperous and fat" (220).
They have achieved the material wealth they so wanted in America, but in the process they have given up their souls. They are consumed by protecting their new-found wealth. In Mary's dream they chant, "Don't tread on the tail of me coat! Ha! Ha!" Mary says, "With each 'Ha! Ha!' the red-faced people stamped collectively and raised their glasses high in the air. It was a horrible, unmelodious song, and the spirit behind it was vicious and violent" (220). Like Tabby and Aunts Hannah, Josie, and Maggie, these red-faced people have turned their backs on what once made them Irish to protect the money and power they have gained. They are a grotesque embodiment of selling out. They will celebrate the trappings of Irishness acceptable in America, but they lack substance, and they are ready to fight anyone to retain the position they have gained. "Don't tread on the tail of me coat," they say to those coming up behind them.
They do not have the power to fight the Yanks, so they turn themselves into them as much as possible, treading on those below and causing self-hatred at what they have become. In the dream, Mary says, "As the din increased the figures of my mother and my grandfather rose and with slow, sad step went down the long, dark hallway. No one noticed their departure. I called to them but they never looked back" (220). Eddie stands in the middle of the room, torn between his departing mother and grandfather, and the red-faced people. Tabby urges Eddie to play a song of celebration, "something Irish…. Make it loud" (220), but instead Eddie plays a soft, sweet lamentation for the dead (221). The dead in turn keen their lamentation for the living to close out this allegory of the fight for the Irish-American soul (221).

Conclusion: Communities in Jeopardy
Through these two novels, Edward McSorley and Mary Doyle Curran are recording what they remember of the once concentrated Irish-American community that was disappearing-the customs, habits, rituals, food, drink, work, and worship of the people they remember from their childhoods. They are also critiquing where that community had gone wrong-the fake Irish, the Protestantised church, and the bullies taking out the way they had been oppressed on those beneath them. At the same time they are re-membering what they see as a more authentic Irish-American past, with the best values and virtues, and some of the vices, of folks like Ned, Mame, and Johnny.
Illiterate, but wise and compassionate, a drinker, but a hard-working man who labors at the iron foundry until his body wears out well into his 70s, McSorley writes Ned as a complex human being rather than a stereotype. Doyle Curran does resort to types.
Each character represents a type of Irish American witnessed by her. She shows those who are allegedly moving the community upward are actually moving them to be something sick, grotesque, and monstrous. Even worse, they appear to be soulless.
Though not written as researched history, these books are alive with the lived history of the authors, and the communities they knew as children. From the authors' perspectives just after World War II, they could see these communities dispersing and were trying to preserve something that was almost lost, for while the Irish kept coming to American shores, they never did so again into such concentrated neighborhoods in great numbers. Both novels, set a few decades earlier than when they were written, show that people were already starting to move away, to make an effort to blend in, to Moving their way up the socioeconomic ladder, many Irish were choosing to look down on those below rather than giving them a hand up. These authors wrote to remember, and to critique, the communities they loved. In doing so they leave readers with important questions about what it means to be Irish in America.

"Not One Thing Nor the Other": In-Between Characters in the Fiction of Elizabeth Cullinan
By That same year, only 11.6 percent of second generation Irish were in management, with that number including building superintendents (Kenny American Irish 227). The second generation Irish in 1950 were beginning to move into white collar positions, but "at a slower rate than most other immigrant groups" (Kenny 228). These figures represent the working world Cullinan would soon enter as a third generation Irish American, and for the most part they represent men. Being raised by fathers and mothers who are so different in their values gives these protagonists a double vision, and often confusion over which is the better path to happiness, the carefree path of their fathers, or the practical path of their mothers.
Irish-American mothers in Cullinan's work do not want to be associated with anything lower class. They want their daughters to look and even smell appropriately.
Their insistence on keeping up a higher class appearance shows all the desperation of someone who just ascended out of the ghetto to not be associated with it. Kathleen McInerney aptly labels this attitude "maternal tyranny born of immigrant anxiety" Elizabeth is arguably the character who has given up most in her life to tend to her aging mother. Elizabeth's daughter Winnie, a teenager in this story, is the closest character to Cullinan's own voice (Fanning 372). Hers is a voice that challenges accepted social class status as well as the hold her grandmother has over her mother.
Though Winnie seems to be a minor character compared to the children of Mrs.
Devlin who are all gathered in the matriarch's house on her dying day, Maureen Murphy argues, "It is Winnie Carroll's understanding that people have the right to be themselves, to their own identity, that is at the heart of House of Gold, for it urges the claims of the individual over the twin bonds of faith and family in Irish-American life" (147-148). Second generation American Elizabeth is not able to claim her own identity separate from her domineering mother. It is up to Winnie, third generation as is Cullinan herself, to break free of the old bonds.
In writing the mother-daughter relationship of Elizabeth and Mrs. Devlin and other characters in her fiction this contentious way, Cullinan is consistent with the "matrophobia" Adrienne Rich identifies as "a predominant preoccupation of feminist women." According to Rich, "'Thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of, the one through whom the restrictions and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted" (qtd. in Hirsch Mother/Daughter 136). In Cullinan's work, the "degradations of a female existence" are also bound up in their ethnicity, religion, and social class. The self-hatred comes not just from gender, but from any reminders of being lower class, which in turn are connected to the legacy of discrimination faced by Irish Catholics when they entered this country. It is difficult to disentangle all of these forces at work on the protagonists as they try to figure out their positions in the world.
Marianne Hirsch explains that in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic feminism, "a continued allegiance to the mother appears as regressive and potentially lethal; it must be transcended. Maturity can be reached only through an alignment with the paternal, by means of an angry and hostile break from the mother" (168). For Cullinan's characters, however, the paternal is also not a satisfactory model with which to align. Cullinan's father figures are infantilized. They are playmates, not masculine models of efficiency and security. These fathers are often rehashes of old stereotypes-the lovable, yet incapable of self-control Irishman. They cannot control their money or their addictions. Cullinan's young women protagonists do not model themselves after these fathers. In fact they worry about the traits they have inherited from them. They also do not want to be housewives obsessed with social propriety like their mothers. Instead, they attach themselves to male role models in the professional world they are trying to enter, presumably because they find few, if any, female models there. In many of Cullinan's stories older, white-collar professional men become mentors to these young women. Even these mentors prove insufficient, however, as sexual relationships with the protagonists complicate their paternalistic teaching. To find themselves, ultimately, Cullinan's young women must break from their mothers, their fathers, and these male professional role models. Consistent with the mother/daughter plot Hirsch identifies in feminist fiction, these women must eventually give birth to themselves to determine their own course (166).

Repetition and Working Through Double Identities
Cullinan engages in a repetition and working through of her own experiences over the course of two decades of writing fiction. Characters, their relationships, and plotlines appear in her short stories and then reappear, with some adjustments, in her two novels, House of Gold and A Change of Scene. Young, educated, professional women with uptight mothers and fathers who gamble too much recur in Cullinan's fiction. The most frequently reoccurring protagonist in her short stories, and also the lead character of A Change of Scene, is a young woman who works either in the publishing industry (magazines or books), or television. Kathleen McInerney calls this young woman Cullinan's "metacharacter" (114). She is most often from New York, although in one story she is from Boston. She often is living abroad in Ireland or has lived abroad, as Cullinan did in her twenties. Most of these young female characters aspire to more challenging professional positions, as editors, for example, and some succeed in getting them over the course of the stories. These are unmarried women, often with sisters who have chosen the more traditional path of marriage and family. The traditional path is what pleases their mothers, because to them it means middle class respectability, but Cullinan's young women protagonists have little desire to follow it. This repetition of characters and plots, rather than indicating a lack of creativity on the part of the author, instead indicates a tension or problem she is trying to work through. Problematic relationships with both mothers and fathers, as well as with emotionally or legally unavailable lovers, are explored and re-explored. In almost every story with a young woman protagonist, her parents' marriage is either strained or broken. There is also a larger problem than these intimate relationships; lurking behind or within these troubles at the personal level is the issue that these characters are ethnic Americans trying to figure out where they fit in. They frequently find that they do not fit in, that they are considered outsiders, or that they are straddling two worlds. Cullinan uses the phrase "not one thing nor the other" and the similarly worded "neither one thing nor the other" to describe characters who have double identities in two of her stories. This phrase captures the identity issues of most of the characters in Cullinan's catalog. It is the dominant trope in Cullinan's fiction, and it is used for all manner of identities: social class, religion, nationality, and gender among them.
Charles Fanning sees what he calls "ethnic doubleness" as a common thread in the writing of Irish-Americans in the late twentieth century. Fanning cites Elizabeth Cullinan's story "Commuting" as "a defining piece of the… concept of liberating doubleness" (372). In this story, "Everything that the narrator sees while 'commuting' she sees twice, and thus more clearly-as the Irish girl from the Bronx that she was, and the New Yorker that she is now" (Fanning 375 (114), Ann's final moment is one of confidence in being able to guide her Irish guest-a man who was once her guide to Ireland-around her city. She is also in a position of authority in the television industry. Instead of being someone's secretary, Ann has a secretary, and a sizable office of her own. Ann is not her mother or her father, but her own woman confident in her place in the world. She has chosen a third option, one not presented by either parent and not available to her mother's generation, of becoming a career woman. In doing so she seems at peace with her identity as that novel comes to a close. As McInerney points out the story "Commuting" is published

Social Class: In between blue and white collar worlds
Entering The women are isolated in comparison. The network of relationships between the families, many of whom were cousins, "was scarcely noticeable until the fathers came.
The mothers, so self-contained during the week, became not really friendly like the fathers but certainly gracious, and as they called to each other from under circles of shade, talking of beach suppers and cocktail parties, it became apparent to the children that their own lives were intimately joined" (7-8). It is the men on their weekends in Riverport who restore something like the communal bonds known to Irish and early Irish-American life. The mothers, as in much of Elizabeth Cullinan's fiction, are more responsible, but also colder. They are less fun. Though at leisure, these women do not make time for one another. They are isolated in their refinement.
Nora Barrett, a young professional woman who is the protagonist of "The Perfect Crime," from Cullinan's Yellow Roses collection (1977), thinks of herself and her family as "neither one thing nor the other" in relation to their status in the beach community where they spend their summers. They are not just weekend "invaders," but they do not own a cottage on the island (119). Instead, they rent their cottage every year. This puts them in between the working class which would not be able to afford a summer-long rented vacation home, and the upper class who could afford to buy the vacation home outright. Nora is musing about this as she takes the ferry over from Manhattan to visit her parents, an in-between state in itself, as she is neither one place nor the other. Nora is one of Elizabeth Cullinan's characters who are both stuck between two identities and left outside of them at the same time.
Another one of these in-between social class characters is Father James Fox, a Jesuit priest at the center of "The Ablutions" from The Time of Adam collection.
Father Fox has long been aware of the poverty in which he was raised. In fact, he resents it, and his mother's recent death means he does not have to reenter that world as often. He is happy for the separation: "the truth was he hated that other household.
The thought of them all-his sister and her husband and her two sons and, until a week ago, his mother, the matriarch-the remembrance of the old house devastated him, driving away, as it always did, the peace and self-respect that twenty years of separateness had built in him" (103). This peace and self-respect has come not only from his belonging to the Society of Jesus, but more specifically for the entry into the upper class that this order has afforded him. He had been headmaster of "some of the Society's expensive preparatory schools" (102), leading him, ultimately, to the role he calls "diplomat" (101), but which is essentially a fund raiser: "It was men of his sort, in the line of princely Ignatius, who inspired wealthy ladies, richly repentant bankers-all manner of affluent people, dying in wisdom, or loneliness, or disillusion-to leave their fortunes to the Society" (102). A talent for this work finds Father Fox frequently in the homes of more of Cullinan's repeated characters, those who attach social status to friendship with the clergy.
In the case of Father Fox, the social climbing nature of these relationships is reciprocal, for not only does it lend his hosts status to befriend the clergy, but it lends him an air of wealth when he is entertained by the wealthy. At the beginning of "The Ablutions," Father Fox feels he can fully enter this upper class world now that his mother has passed away: "His mother had been the bond between him and the world he was born into, and now he was about to cross over once and for all into another world, one that had already recognized him as its own. Death, thought Father Fox, was indeed a door" (102 she dismisses his pain with a quick, "Well, then, we must be very bright and cheerful now, mustn't we, since it's all over and we have you here with us" (107), as if burying one's mother puts an end to the emotions that accompany it. Among the wealthy he had so wanted to join, he is missing a depth of character to which he had been accustomed growing up among people who had not had life so easy.
Father Fox is finally awakened to the position he has among the wealthy when he finds that the Conroys' recently engaged son, whom he managed to keep out of most trouble during preparatory school, would have a different clergyman, of even higher status, preside over his wedding. It seems that Dickie Conroy is marrying even further up; his fiancée has "a Bishop up her sleeve," who is a family friend, much to the delight of Mrs. Conroy (113). Father Fox is asked to assist on the altar, a request that is an unintentional insult and a final reminder of where he belongs and where he does not. He thinks, "What place had a priest on the altar unless he was officiating?
What place, indeed, had he in this room?" (114). This insult precedes an argument in which Isabel Conroy says that the Mass is just drama rather than the sacrifice that Father Fox insists it is. Even with this professed Catholic, a Catholic he now realizes is in it only for the pageantry, Father Fox finds himself at odds and out of place. He quickly makes an excuse to leave this uncomfortable situation. "The Ablutions" is one example of a typical Cullinan dilemma: the protagonist is on the threshold of a world that will not fully let him in. He sees the door open, but he cannot cross through. He also no longer wants to be of the world he has left. Though that may give him a sort of double vision, having seen both worlds, it also leaves him as "neither one thing nor the other." He is ultimately left out of both.
The drive for middle class respectability, in Cullinan's stories most frequently spearheaded by Irish-American mothers, drove out most other elements that were recognizably Irish. Communal living was replaced by consumerism, the desire to own one's own space, one's own single-family home, with its white picket fence separating it from the neighbors. Mrs. Ganley in "In the Summerhouse" from Yellow Roses, is even concerned with her daughter's appearance as they travel to an asylum to visit Mr.
Ganley, who has gambled the family into terrible debt and tried to kill himself. Mrs.
Ganley expresses her wish that her daughter Angela wore her pink linen dress. Angela has chosen to dress for comfort instead. "'It always helps to look your best,'" Mrs.
Ganley remarks. Angela responds, "'For a visit to a mental hospital?'" (42). The remark stings, and Angela regrets it, but she momentarily needed to cut through her mother's pretenses about who they were. Mrs. Ganley had grown up poor, a fact her in-laws never let her forget, and thanks to her husband she is on the verge of being poor again. She laments the loss of their car, and that Angela has had to spend all the money she had saved to travel abroad to keep up with the rent and medical bills.
When they get to the asylum Mrs. Ganley admires the grandeur of the old home and its furniture. She thinks back on when she wanted to own her own home: When she was younger, she'd hoped to have a home of her own-nothing like this, of course, just a comfortable house on a nice street, a little piece of the earth where she could reign supreme. She was a homemaker. She loved the things that belonged to her and she loved looking after them-not that there wasn't plenty to keep you busy in a four-room apartment, but it wasn't the same as your own place. (47) Mrs. Ganley, having grown up in a large family of ten children, had dreamed the American dream, to have some space she could call her own. She comments derisively about the source of her in-laws' money: "'Mr. Ganley senior was one of those clever Irishmen who made some money in real estate,'" she tells her husband's therapist, explaining that the Ganleys were "Comfortable…but not really well off" (48). When the therapist tries to figure out what caused her husband's trouble, Mrs.
Ganley bluntly offers her assessment: "'The trouble with Robert Ganley, Doctor, is always money'" (52). She could well be talking about herself, too, as a lack of material possessions, and a home of her own, seems to have been a major blow for her. There she was on the threshold of middle class; she had even married someone with at least a comfortable life, but she could not quite make it through the door. Her husband had gambled away her chances of moving up, but that did not mean she would give up on her daughters breaking through in the next generation.
Near the end of "In the Summerhouse," the reader finally hears from Robert Ganley, as the narration subtly shifts from one third-person limited narrator to another, giving Robert the last words after his daughter and wife have introduced him so negatively: Money. To him it meant no more than good weather-sometimes you had it, sometimes you didn't. He couldn't understand how for some people, for his wife, money was everything, though she'd have denied that. She thought of herself as a spiritual woman, but her interest in things of the spirit was…purely practical, the interest of someone for whom everything has to be concrete and real. (56) The concrete, the real, the practical, an obsession with money-these are Yankee traits Louise Gallagher, protagonist of three interconnected stories from Cullinan's

Yellow Roses collection (1977) is another character who at least temporarily bumps up
against the ceiling of her family's social class. Louise has returned to New York after living abroad in England, a journey she takes when she finds herself in a romantic relationship that is going nowhere, a plot point that also sparks Ann Clarke's departure to Ireland in A Change of Scene. Because Louise and her relationship with her married lover Charlie Davis are developed over three stories, the title story "Yellow Roses," "An Accident," and "A Foregone Conclusion," the reader is better able to get a handle on where she stands as a young professional woman and as an Irish American. Louise finds she cannot overcome all the parts of her identity that put her outside of Charlie's world. Charlie inhabits the professional world confidently as a middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon male. Before he is her lover, Charlie, a photographer, takes on a mentoring role for Louise, then a young assistant to a magazine publisher. There is no indication that Louise sought out his help, but acknowledges looking back that Charlie shaped her into "the person she wanted to be and had it in her to be" (67). When she was "that poor twenty-two-year-old girl," he had instructed her on everything from makeup and jewelry ("don't wear [it]") to what to read and what to eat ("try anything"). He helped her become more cosmopolitan, but she admits she "ended up hating herself and her ignorance" (67 allowed inside that world when she changes who she is. What she cannot do, however, is remake herself into a woman whom Charlie could marry. There are some aspects of herself that she cannot polish or educate away.

Religion as marker of ethnic difference
No matter what level of professional success Louise manners to achieve, she is still Irish, and she is still Catholic. In, "An Accident," Louise recounts to Charlie a story of refusing to ask her English friend to explain what a "fish slice" was when she was living abroad. She says she did not ask because, "It seemed low-class…. Fish will always mean Catholic to me, and I thought that in England Catholic meant Irish, and Irish meant low-class" (83). Charlie responds, "'Forget about England….Forget about being Irish. If I can forget you're that, certainly you can'" (83). That is easy for Charlie to say as Louise's lover, but he would not marry her. Ethnicity, class, and religion are divides he cannot or will not bridge for her except in bed. He cannot be with her in any official capacity. It seems he cannot forget her Irishness any more than she can. Back from her time abroad, and now in control of her professional career (she is between jobs but in demand as an editor), Louise is finally coming to terms with this part of her identity she once worried was considered "low-class." She reminds Charlie that she is "Five feet six inches, one hundred and eight pounds…of Irish-American Roman Catholic" (76), while he has Scottish roots and came from New England and "had married a girl of Scandinavian descent" (76). These differences had once bothered Louise, but not at the time of this story: "All that had given Louise a feeling of being beyond the pale that it took years to get over; when she did, she discovered she liked being beyond the pale, and she got a kick out of rubbing it in" (76). Teasing Charlie about their differences is a handy defense mechanism for Louise who, in her early twenties, was so hurt by them. She remembers, "What an uneven match they'd been; how hard it was for her to see that and how firmly he'd had to go over their differences" (76-77). Those same differences, now that she is a confident woman of thirty who no longer needs or expects to marry him, Charlie says they can forget.
Louise is another of Cullinan's in-between characters, and in fact she describes herself that way in "Yellow Roses": "She'd also got in the habit of saying, 'I'm in between,' and her answer to 'In between what?' was 'Everything. Jobs, countries'she wasn't long back from a year off in London-'in between twenty and forty, in between happy and unhappy'" (62-63). She stops short of saying she is in between Irish and American, but that is the reality of many of Cullinan's characters, and all of her protagonists. By the last of the trilogy of Louise Gallagher-Charlie Davis stories, "A Foregone Conclusion," Louise finally ends their long extramarital affair. She does so when Charlie tries to give her his grandmother's ring, at the same time that he is explaining to her he had spent the last few weeks at his wife's side, after she had found a lump in her breast. It is not Louise's Irish heritage so much as her Catholicism that finally puts an end to the relationship. She realizes that anything more than an affair with him was "out of the question since [she] was Catholic" (90).
Oddly, her beliefs have not prohibited her from having the affair, but she realizes they would prohibit her from legitimizing the relationship through marriage.
Louise is still not sure she is going to end the relationship, because she enjoys Charlie's company, until their differences become clear to her again. He repeats a joke he told his wife about going to a Catholic hospital with meat on her breath on a Friday. When Louise tries to explain to him that not eating meat on Fridays is no longer a rule after Vatican II, it is clear that Charlie just does not understand her, and Louise is slowly realizing he never will. When Charlie questions her on why she still abstains from meat on Fridays, she replies, "'Out of habit, I suppose,'" but then changes her mind and says, "'No, loyalty, really'" (93). Though Louise has rationalized away an adulterous affair, she is still loyal to and finds comfort in her faith. When Charlie calls the religious iconography at the hospital "depressing" (93), Louise again finds herself engaging in what amounts to cross-cultural communication.
She finds the "plaster Virgins" and "Bleeding Sacred Hearts" that he mocks to be a comfort, but she lacks the words or the desire to explain this to him, so she changes the subject (93-94). Shortly after this she ends the relationship by slipping his grandmother's ring into his coat pocket. She knows that a ring is supposed to mean the stability and commitment he cannot give to her. It is at once an impulsive move and an inevitable one, the "foregone conclusion" of the title. In Cullinan's world these two people could enjoy one another's company, but they would never truly know one another in a meaningful way. It is fitting that it is Louise's Catholicism that drives the final and lasting wedge between her and Charlie Davis. Her faith, though she is not an active or strong practitioner of it, is one of the last vestiges of her ethnic difference in  (96), is the most visible element that remains of being Irish in America by the time Cullinan is writing. Mrs. Devlin, the elderly mother and grandmother dying in her home as the story takes place, with the family gathering for her last moments, was born poor to Irish parents in England, and then sent to live with a wealthy aunt in New York, who provided her with material but not emotional comfort. Mrs. Devlin, who married at age 17 to get out of her wealthy aunt's house, took pride in the large family she raised, with some regret, but also a "certain satisfaction" that "she had given four of her children to God, two nuns and two priests" (3). Another son became a military officer, a daughter a piano teacher and then wife and mother, and the youngest son, the least successful but as Charles Fanning argues the most emotionally well-adjusted of the bunch, a bartender who drinks during and/or after work. Justin Devlin is the only one who does not buy into his mother's "vision of herself as saintly paragon and of her house as a house of gold" (Fanning 338). The gold is literally the place settings the Devlins used to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, but more figuratively could symbolize the drive for American security felt by the child of the poor who had lost so much. As the nonconformist of the family, Justin is the most free, both of guilt and of the desire for status and respectability that drove his mother. He is the only one who still lives at home, having never quite grown up or reached material success, but according to Fanning he is "the best equipped Devlin for the motherless world the family is about to enter. He has perspective on himself and on Mrs. Devlin's dream…. In addition, he is good-natured, easy-going, and likable-the most human of the Devlins" (341).
Though not a father himself yet, Justin has the qualities of the fathers in Cullinan's other fiction, the qualities that make them the most fun and the most Irish. He is likable, and free of the constraints put on him by the drive for middle class respectability. That he is also likely an alcoholic who is not quite grown up of course taps into other traits frequently attributed to the Irish. Cullinan does little to directly address Irishness in this novel, but it is there in the lives of the Devlins, many of whom have succumbed to the capitalist, individualist drive as Mrs. Devlin has, to acquire her property and her gold. Those who have given themselves over to religious life have found the other path to respectability available to the Irish at the time.
A similar short story to House of Gold, "The Voices of the Dead" from Yellow Roses, shows middle class materialism taking over even the protagonists' Catholic faith. Again in this story, an elderly mother and grandmother is visited in her home by her family. In this story she is not dying, but she is not well. Mary Nugent can no longer walk to Mass, though the church is just across the street, because of her failing legs. Her son, a priest, has obtained special permission to bring Easter Mass to her in her home. The living members of the family gather for the Mass, while the voices of the dead call to Mrs. Nugent from their photographs on the wall. The Mass is offered in the Nugents' living room, with the television serving as "the substitute altar" (107)-a nice touch of symbolism as popular culture is increasingly becoming the new religion of 1970s America. Mrs. Nugent would like her son to use one of her tablecloths, "that lovely piece Aunt Kitty brought from Belgium," as the altar cloth.
She tells him, "it would be nicer than that little bit of a scarf you have there" (107).
Father Nugent politely declines, assuring her that his is "the standard altar cloth" and that nothing more elaborate is needed. Father Nugent is about substance, while Mrs. Nugent admits that bringing it into her living room has made "the ceremony ordinary" (109). Still, it is a source of pride that "at eighty-five she was a woman accustomed to religious privilege," a privilege she has earned in exchange for giving up three of her children to religious orders (103). Though Irishness, as in House of Gold, is barely mentioned in the story, the Nugents are an Irish-American family through and through, with the tension between spirituality and materialism playing itself out in their crowded living room, which is complete with the piano in the parlor, the ultimate symbol of reaching middle class.

The one place Ann Clark of A Change of Scene does not feel like an outsider in
Ireland is in the Catholic Church. Though the Irish language spoken by some of her were all very much the same. Of the Irish people, she comments, "Nothing they said or did could change the fact that they belonged together" (186). For the first time, rather than feeling excluded by this knowledge, she feels something missing in the Irish. She continues, Looking around me that morning I had to or finally could admit that this also amounted to something not so desirable-a birthright unexamined makes for a false sense of security. Whereas in America it was hard to sustain the illusion that your particular heritage was unrivaled. Any such state of mind was constantly subjected to the need to accommodate, to accept, to make allowances till eventually you were rubbed smooth. (187) What Ann finds to be a positive, that rubbing up against other ethnicities smooths out differences, can also be seen as troubling from the perspective of loss of cultural memory. That does not trouble Ann, however. These are among her final thoughts on Ireland, while she is in Ireland, and they prompt her to want to explore other parts of Europe before heading home. "I wasn't limited to Ireland," she realizes. As soon as she finds somewhere in Ireland to fit in, inside the Catholic church, she is free to go home. She decides she prefers the diversity of the rest of the world and of America, specifically New York City, where the rest of the world seems to gather.

The insider/outsider dichotomy of nationality
In "Maura's Friends" from Cullinan's The Time of Adam collection (originally published as " Nora's Friends" in The New Yorker in 1970), the title character describes one of her friends, Patrick Butler, as "not one thing nor the other" (171).
Patrick is described as such because he is from Northern Ireland, so cannot quite be The last three stories in Cullinan's The Time of Adam collection feature young female Irish Americans living abroad in Ireland. As is Father Fox, these young women find that they are in some ways left out of both worlds they try to inhabit.
Frances Hayes, protagonist of "A Sunday Like the Others," thinks of a bus conductor she has seen frequently before, "If he remembered her, it was probably because he'd made out that she was a foreigner-something she herself was always forgetting and, one way or another, always being reminded of. Here in Ireland she was American, though back in Boston she was what was known as Irish. Irish-American" (119).
Frances once again feels her foreignness when she is rebuffed by a little Irish girl she thought she had befriended on the bus. The girl turns away when Frances tries to say good-bye a second time, by waving to her out the window: "Americans overdid things, Frances remembered" (120-21). It is perhaps not surprising that an American in Ireland would be seen as foreign, though to the American who has always considered herself Irish, it would be insulting, even hurtful. More surprising is that she is not quite considered American in the Boston of the 1960s. She is still the ethnic other.
That is not necessarily a bad thing, as "ethnicity was 'in'" in the late sixties (Gerber and Kraut 321 Donegal who seems to have the best claim to an authentic Irishness of anyone she meets, Ann says, "it was he who plunged me into Irish life as I knew it best" (10).

Tomás and his friends give Ann a window into a life an American, even an Irish
American, does not normally get to see. This is just one of the many ways in which Ann is both an insider and an outsider, making A Change of Scene the perfect capstone to Cullinan's decades-long quest to work through Irish-American identity issues.
When Ann first arrives in Ireland, it is frequently presumed that she is there to seek out her Irish roots. "'Come to look up your kin, Yank?'" asks the waiter in her hotel restaurant (15). It is a safe assumption, given that most Americans he sees are likely there for just that reason. The Irish-American journey "home" will fill published memoirs and private bucket lists for years to come. Ann is different; she thinks, "I had no desire to be strictly speaking among my own" (12). Neither parent had encouraged in her any strong affinity for being Irish, and in fact her mother discouraged it. She tells the waiter, "'I haven't any family in Ireland….Not that I know of'" (15), but within hours, on her first walk around Cork city, she is already feeling the sentimental pull of those who do set off to Ireland to discover something about themselves. "Blood isn't the only kind of kinship," she thinks (15). This pull to have an inside connection hits Ann early and often during the 10 months she lives in Ireland. At the same time, she is equally repulsed and rejected by it, and she is frequently reminded of her outsider status. When Tomás first meets her and hears her last name he asks if she is of Irish descent, to which she replies, "not very" (18).
Though she has come to Ireland in part because the people are English speaking, on the first day in the country she turns on the radio and hears a man talking "in a foreign language" (15). At a dinner party the next night, Tomás and his friends use that same language, Irish, to exclude her from a conversation (19). She exhibits her outsider status by confusing Tomás's native Donegal with Galway. Yet before she leaves Cork for Dublin, her final destination, she has it in mind that she will study the Irish language, one she barely knew existed a few days earlier, at Trinity.
Speaking the native language of the country would be one way to make herself an insider. Ann later admits, however, that she at first naively saw that language as a commodity she could acquire: She had once again almost been let in, only to be reminded that other people who were on the inside were able to judge how much she belonged, or how much she did not.

Mothers and fathers: gender and Irishness
Though the young women protagonists in Cullinan's fiction are professionals on the rise, their mothers do not approve of this route to middle class comfort. The daughters are still limited by their gender in their mothers' eyes. For the second generation American mothers, women working for pay may still have the stigma of being lower class. Middle class comfort, to these mothers, means women are free to take care of their own homes. Their husbands, if they present themselves well enough to land good ones, will bring home the money. The mothers want their daughters' future husbands to provide the class mobility, rather than the young women themselves. Respectable middle class women, according to these mothers, look good and keep the house in order. They keep up all of the right appearances. Nora Barrett from "The Perfect Crime" is critiqued by her mother for working too much. Mrs.
Barrett does not understand why Nora wants a professional career in television advertising instead of a husband and children. She wants Nora to take some time off from her busy job to rest. As Mrs. Barrett sees Nora descend from the ferry to their summer beach community, she judges her as "very pale and thinner than usual. And she'd done something to her hair, pushed it back some way that wasn't in the least becoming" (123). Nora, seeing Mrs. Barrett's face, knows "how far short of her mother's expectations she was bound to fall" (123-24). This is nothing new in their relationship, but an ongoing battle. Mrs. Barrett wonders if Nora is "a little unbalanced" and whether she should have better nutrition. Her oddness, perhaps, could be cured with vitamins (139). Nora is compared negatively to her sister, who was less of a puzzle to Mrs. Barrett because she had married and had a large family of children, as she was expected to do. Nora "love[s] her job," but she knows an understanding of how she thrives on her work is "beyond her mother" (125). As excited as she is about her career, she admits that she even puzzles herself by not wanting what her sister has and what her mother wants for her (131). In all of Cullinan's fiction she does not mention any female professional mentor for these young women. It must be puzzling for someone from Nora's generation to see a future for herself as a career woman with no models of how that looks. They look to their mothers and do not see a life they want. That does not stop the mothers from trying to mold their daughters into the women they want them to be.
Mothers, even well-intentioned ones in Cullinan's stories, would like to control their daughters' bodies: the way they dress, the way they wear their hair, even the way they smell. In "The Sum and Substance," from Yellow Roses, Ellen MacGuire has given up all control of her body as a patient undergoing the removal of an ovarian cyst. While in the hospital for a procedure to which she barely assents, fittingly on her reproductive organs, allowing the male doctor to make all of the decisions for her, she finds herself subjected to one humiliation after another-having to remove her nightgown, to have her genitals shaved for the procedure, to give blood and take pills she did not want. Before the post-surgical pain sapped up her reserve of politeness, she even thanked the various medical workers for the unwanted pre-op procedures. At the height of Ellen's pain, her parents come to visit, with her mother bearing gifts.
First is a jar of face cream, to keep her skin moisturized. When Ellen protests that she does not care how she looks, Mrs. MacGuire counters, "'You will, dear'" (35). The second gift is talcum powder, the use of which is not elaborated upon in the story, but which can be used to eliminate excess moisture, especially in the genital area. The final gift is cologne, "'To cover up the hospital smell,'" per Mrs. MacGuire (36).
When her daughter is in post-surgical pain that makes her feel like she could die, Mrs.
MacGuire is concerned with her looks, her smell, and her feminine hygiene. Ellen is left to believe that she is nothing more than a body, a body upon which others force their decisions and desires. She is expected to be "agreeable" (35) and "the perfect little patient" as she was as a child (11). It is only when the pain is severe that she can tell her mother "'That's enough'" (36), a small act of defiance she regrets once a pain killer sets in (37). Bad skin, bad hygiene, and bad smells are all markers of lower class that Mrs. MacGuire would like to erase from her daughter's body.
Throughout this interaction with Mrs. MacGuire, Ellen's father is the more sympathetic parent, asking her how she really feels (36), and coming to her defense against his wife's beauty products: "'I think she looks beautiful'" (35). While the mothers in Cullinan's stories strive for middle class respectability and refinement, right down to control over the natural body, the fathers including Mr. MacGuire can be the pal, the friend, the cheerful one. The mothers' love is shown in concern for the daughters' future, a future that should include marriage and prosperity, and that will do so, the mothers' logic goes, as long as the daughters present themselves well. This love comes with constant correction and critique. The fathers' love is shown in different ways. Angela Ganley from "In the Summerhouse" ponders what her relationship is with her father: "If you could say that love was play, then you could say her father loved his daughters, but Angela didn't think love was play" (41). While people thought they were complimenting her when they said her father was like a brother to his girls, she thought "what it proved to be was a deprivation. They'd missed out on whatever it was fathers were supposed to give or at least be able to give" (41). Just what it is she thinks fathers are supposed to give is elaborated upon in other stories, as again these father-daughter relationships repeat throughout Cullinan's work. In "Life After Death," Constance thinks, "My father's spirit is something I love, as I love his sense of language, but common sense is more to the point in fathers, and mine has hardly any" (Yellow Roses 171). Both Constance's and Angela Ganley's fathers fell out of grace with their extended families by "tampering with the books" of businesses owned by their brothers-in-law (171). Fathers are supposed to be reliable, dependable, to provide for their families, but these fathers take away the little security the families have gained. This puts stress on their marriages and their relationships with their daughters, who want to love their playfulness, but need them to be more than playmates.
Interestingly, and perhaps stereotypically, Cullinan also attributes to these fathers the most Irish traits. Cullinan's fathers lend credence to the statement, "the task of understanding what it means to be Irish frequently entails a reconsideration of one's father" (Rogers 13). Ellen MacGuire's father, in addition to the relative warmth he shows compared to her mother, has given Ellen a physical trait of Irishness that is written on her face. She feels, "the intelligence there was obscured thanks to a simple accident of nature, the mass of freckles she'd inherited from her father" (Yellow Roses 14). Angela Ganley worries that she has inherited her father's lack of money sense because she gives up her travel abroad savings so easily to support her family, but then realizes she had no choice with her father institutionalized after a suicide attempt (45). What being in Ireland for ten months has taught Ann Clarke to embrace is that she is, in fact, an American. In that time she has come to a more intimate knowledge of Ireland than most Americans ever get, a knowledge she treasures even years later, but she is firmly an American, more specifically a New Yorker, and a confident, educated, professional on the rise at that. She recalls her return to New York in Irish-American woman finally feels she is on the inside. At last she is comfortable there.

CHAPTER 3 The Exception to the Rule: Michael Patrick MacDonald's Memoirs of South Boston and Dissonance in the Irish-American Narrative
Michael Patrick MacDonald's two memoirs of growing up in South Boston, or "Southie," as it is known locally, call into question the unity of the Irish-American narrative, reminding readers of just how much that narrative leaves out, and exposing the lack of depth behind American symbols of Irishness. In MacDonald's All Souls (1999) and Easter Rising (2006) Simply put, for Catholic Irish immigrants to be perceived as productive American citizens, they had to overcome negative associations with starvation and disease. On an even more basic level, they had to replace perceptions of themselves as uncultured primitives with indicators of successful assimilation in the United States. Reminders of the Famine could exacerbate popular condemnation of the Irish as premodern peasantry ill equipped for the tasks of American citizenship. (Ireland's Great Famine xv) The Irish in America had to push down those aspects of themselves that were seen as shameful, but what is repressed will find its way of returning eventually. MacDonald's memoirs give readers a window into the performance of Irish-American ethnicity as the twentieth century draws to a close, in a neighborhood where the screen was used to protect residents from present as well as past trauma.

The Boston Difference
While some aspects of the Irish-American experience were similar across the board, others depended on local economic, political, and social circumstances (Meagher 16). It is unsurprising, then, that Thomas H. O'Connor begins his book The Boston Irish with the assumption that "the Boston Irish are different" (XV). He explains the origin of that difference: If there had existed in the nineteenth century a computer able to digest all the appropriate data, it would have reported one city in the entire world where an Irish Catholic, under any circumstance, should never, ever, set foot. That city was Boston, Massachusetts. It was an American city with an intensely homogeneous Anglo-Saxon character, an inbred hostility toward people who were Irish, a fierce and violent revulsion against all things Roman Catholic, and an economic system that rejected the Irish from the very start and saw no way in which people of that ethnic background could ever be fully assimilated into the prevailing American culture. (XVI) Over the next three hundred pages O'Connor shows how this hostility to the arrival of the Irish and their continued residence in the city shaped the course of the city's history and the unique ethnic dimension of the Boston Irish. This "difference" will be necessary for understanding MacDonald's Southie, as the cold reception the Boston Irish received would not soon be forgotten. Though nineteenth century Irish-American history may seem to have little to do with MacDonald's neighborhood in the 1970s, the ripple effects could still be felt. O'Connor points to the busing crisis that resulted from a desegregation order for the Boston public schools as evidence of a divide within the Irish neighborhoods of Boston (Southie and the similarly demographic Charlestown). MacDonald devotes a chapter of All Souls to how this crisis played out in his neighborhood. Per O'Connor, the divide was between those he calls the "rebel" Irish who had stayed in their urban, ethnic neighborhoods and were politically conservative, and the "organization" Irish who had assimilated and moved out to the suburbs and skewed more liberal (297). Of the latter, O'Connor remarks elsewhere, "the new Irish-Catholic business leaders quickly took on most of the characteristics of their Yankee counterparts. They worked hard, invested wisely, prospered greatly, joined country clubs, and moved to the suburbs. There, they joined the exalted ranks of the 'two-toilet Irish' with expensive homes in Wellesley and summer places in Nantucket" (232-233). The divide after the 1974 desegregation order, he argues, "was not a matter of balancing the interests of the Yankee and the Celt, the Protestant and the Catholic-those controversies had long since disappeared" (297), but indeed he has already made the case that the Irish who had moved out of the old neighborhoods and prospered had made themselves into Yankees in many ways.
O'Connor makes the point that it was easy for suburban Irish Americans to say desegregation was the right thing to do, since it did not require their children in the suburbs to be bused to black school districts (295).
Samuel Huntington explains that "to define themselves, people need an other" (24). To define who the Irish in Boston would be, they needed the dreaded "Yanks" who ran the city when they arrived. They defined themselves in opposition to them, and at times measured themselves against them. According to Huntington, How others perceive an individual or group affects the self-definition of that individual or group…. If a large majority of the people in a country think that members of a minority group are inherently backward and inferior, the minority group members may internalize that concept of themselves, at which point it becomes part of their identity. Alternatively, they may react against that characterization and define themselves in opposition to it. (23) The Irish in America have done both. As O'Connor describes above, the Irish who assimilated and prospered in the twentieth century did so by modeling themselves after their "Yankee" counterparts. Over time others did conform to or embrace the stereotypes held against them. The persistence of heavy drinking among the Irish, for example, is a particularly tricky aspect of the ethnicity to explain. Kevin Kenny struggles with finding historical reasons behind the problem that he calls "part of a cultural stereotype as well as a social fact" (231). He says "the historical experience of colonization and displacement might yield a… plausible explanation but it is notoriously difficult to document" (201). Whatever the reason, "Irish-American manhood, in particular, came to be associated with heavy drinking, as distinct from drunkenness; a man who could hold his liquor was truly a man, and truly Irish" As a people, they had already lost so much by uprooting themselves from their native soil and leaving behind their beloved cultural traditions that they were determined not to lose any more. In the unity of togetherness, there was not only the strength and security they desperately needed in a hostile environment, but also the last opportunity to preserve whatever remained of their Celtic identity. The small piece of turf they had carved out along the shabby waterfront might be unsightly and unsanitary, but it was theirs and they did not intend to give it up. (59) Fast forward a century, and Kevin Kenny still finds the Irish in the city, not only because they "retained some of their historical preference for city life" (American Ireland. Cultural exchange is complicated, however. It is not just a one way street from source country to diasporic community. MacDonald's Irish grandparents brought with them not only Irish ways and stories of growing up in Ireland, but also the trauma of having to leave, forced out by poverty, and the shame that poverty brought them. They brought all of these things to America, where they affected the way they chose to live their lives and the way they interacted with their children and grandchildren. America also spoke to them about what was accepted and respectable. This dynamic, which affected the way MacDonald's grandparents parented, ultimately colored the way their daughter saw the world, which in turn was passed down to her son Michael. Gabriele Schwab's "Haunting Legacies" details this process of transmitting trauma transgenerationally. She explains, "Memories are passed on from generation to generation, most immediately through stories told or written, but more subliminally through a parent's moods or modes of being that create a particular economy and aesthetics of care" (51). If these memories include unresolved trauma, "it will be passed on to the next generation" (49). Using MacDonald's Boston Irish community as an example, one can see how both the joys and the sadness of being Irish are remembered and forgotten. This in turn can show how cracks and fissures appear in the Irish-American narrative, or other narratives of ethnic identity.

Reading Memoirs as Cultural Texts
Daniel Weinberg calls novels and autobiographies of the immigrant experience "profoundly important documents" to use in the teaching of history when combined with other historical sources (424). He argues that these texts "are immensely valuable for insights into an immigrant's life and his family and community from the moment of entry into the United States" (409). Fiction and memoirs "allow the reader a rare intimacy with the actors and events described" in an immigrant community (423). As such, they can get at the experiences of individuals in a way that history books generally do not. Weinberg cautions that the biases and agendas inherent in these creative texts must be taken into consideration. He argues that the same type of careful analysis must be done with these texts as with all historical sources, however.
If careful attention is given, "an author's own biases, philosophy, and general outlook may also shed light upon the sentiments of his socio-economic class or community" (412). Weinberg's words provide both a justification and a caution for reading MacDonald's memoirs as evidence for his community's position vis-à-vis the Irish-American narrative.
MacDonald is a social activist; he is a champion of the poor and oppressed and he is a crusader against gun violence. He writes his memoirs, especially All Souls, which first tells his family's story, with an agenda of exposing the abuses of those in power-be they politicians or gangsters-and encouraging those who are not in power to band together to fight those abuses. He also writes his memoirs as narratives of healing, with the idea that breaking the silence over past traumas will begin that healing process. He writes All Souls to give a voice to his community. He writes as someone who has experienced the benefits of talk therapy. He also writes as someone who has studied colonial and Irish history. These influences are clear in the way he frames his story, and what he chooses to include in it. His biases could also influence what he leaves out. MacDonald is clearly angry about the effects of drugs on his neighborhood. Drugs were a scourge on his and his siblings' generation in South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. He can place blame on the gangsters who brought the drugs in and the FBI who work in collusion with those gangsters-turned-informants.
What he spends less time examining are the effects of alcoholism on the neighborhood, though it is clear that it is also a prevalent problem. Perhaps because alcoholism seems to be the curse of the generation above his, while his generation succumbs to drugs, or perhaps because as Kevin Kenny noted it is difficult to pin down the reasons for alcoholism as a persistent problem among Irish Americans, MacDonald leaves unexplored the instances of alcoholism that he does bring up. He might accept alcoholism as a given, a fact of life in his neighborhood. If pushed further, he might get to the heart of the depression that is at the root of addictions to both drugs and alcohol, and the social problems with which they are so entangled. If MacDonald himself does not take his reasoning so far, scholars of his work could use his memoirs to help fill in a gap in the Irish-American narrative-a gap that looks at poverty and associated traumas as a thing of the past that has been overcome, rather than as a haunting legacy in the present.

MacDonald's Memoirs of Southie
Michael Patrick MacDonald was born in Boston in 1966, in a country that had already elected and lost John F. Kennedy, but in an Irish-American community that was still clinging to that "small piece of turf they had carved out along the shabby waterfront" over one hundred years earlier (O'Connor 59). Their pride led them to say it was "the best place in the world" (All Souls 2), but their economic circumstances left them little to no options to be anywhere else. In MacDonald's two memoirs, he tells his story of growing up poor in the projects of South Boston in the 1970s and 80s, where his family and his neighborhood were decimated by drugs and violence, all under the watchful eye of James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious Irish-American gangster. MacDonald's mother loses one baby in infancy due to insufficient healthcare coverage just before the author was born, and three other sons in their early twenties due to suicide and ties to Whitey's gang. In addition, MacDonald's sister fell from a roof in an argument over drugs and was left permanently physically and mentally disabled after months in a coma. Countless other young people in the neighborhood died or were left disabled in similar circumstances. This family and this neighborhood experienced unimaginable trauma on a regular basis, to the point where the parade to the neighborhood funeral parlor became a norm rather than an exception.
The Irish identity of the neighborhood was a source of pride despite the poverty and violence. This proud Irishness, coupled with an unwillingness to accept that they were poor, became a screen for the trauma the neighborhood faced over and over again.
MacDonald's instinct in dealing with the trauma in his family at first is to bury it within himself. No one wants to hear about all of the death in his family, he thinks.
People outside of South Boston would not understand it, and he does not want their pity, or to burden them with his sadness. People within South Boston were numb to it.
In the 1980s death became the norm. MacDonald describes the coffin of one of his brothers, a twenty-four year old golden gloves boxer buried in his championship robe: "the rest was the usual for Southie's buried children: Rosary beads, Irish flags, and shamrock trinkets collected from the annual St. Paddy's Day parade" (All Souls 186).
That there is anything "usual" about burying children, be they infants or teens or activist. He helped organize gun buyback programs in other troubled, mostly black and Latino neighborhoods of Boston. He worked with grieving mothers in those communities and in the Irish-American community of Charlestown, which was very much like his own Southie. It is from the mothers in these communities that he gains the strength and courage to finally help the people of South Boston give voice to what they had experienced. Chapter 1 ends with MacDonald at the microphone, trying to voice his own siblings' names. His struggle to speak represents all the years of repressed trauma he, his family, and his community had been through: I looked up at all the faces of my friends and neighbors who had broken their silence, in a way, by getting up there and saying their loved ones' names through a loudspeaker-in Southie, of all places, the best place in the world. The kids, I thought, trying to remember their names. I knew they were right there in the church, but I still couldn't remember who they were. I looked for them, scanning the entire crowd. But there were so many faces. The crowd stared back at me, and for a long time I looked for my family, among the faces of the living and of the dead. (15) Not until he tells his family's story in full in the pages of his memoir, does MacDonald appear at that microphone again. The book itself is his speaking for his dead, a way of releasing him from the silence in which he and his community had suffered for decades. The code of the neighborhood had told them "the worst thing you could be was a snitch" (67). This meant they could not speak up about murders that were happening. There was also a psychic cost to admitting that this place they loved, and that they could not afford to leave, was anything but "the best place in the world." They could not admit their poverty, or that they were losing a generation to drug addiction and suicide. These wounds were all unhealed, covered over with a toughness that was the mask Southie showed to the world. That mask is entangled in symbols of Irishness. Even in the church, during a particularly emotional speech from a father whose teenage son died of an overdose, MacDonald is not sure if the boy's friends are crying, because "their Fightin' Irish baseball caps were pulled low to cast dark shadows on their eyes" (10). Along with Irish-themed tattoos and tough-guy attitudes, the caps are an attempt to conceal painful emotions behind a veil of Irishinflected bravado. The vigil's goal is to lift that veil so healing can begin.
MacDonald says of the vigil, "I'd been scared of this day, the day when we'd all do our small part in breaking the silence, by saying names some people never wanted us to mention" (262-63). On the final page of the book, he is finally able to name his brothers, but only after he has allowed their story to spill onto the pages in between.
All Souls is the story of MacDonald's family. In it he tells what is happening to everyone around him. Easter Rising, in contrast, is MacDonald's story of how he copes with it all, his story of personal healing through music and ultimately a reconnection with his Irish roots. It is a story of how he manages to get out of his neighborhood without suffering the fate of so many of his family and friends. It treads some of the same ground as the first book, though not in as much detail about the tragedies that come rapid fire for the family through the late 1970s and early 1980s when Whitey Bulger's drugs are flowing through the streets. As a teen MacDonald wants nothing more than to escape; he says of Southie, "its borders were starting to feel like a noose closing in on me" (Easter Rising 25). He finds his escape in the underground music scene of Boston, a scene at times labeled punk and new wave, but which for him and his friends defies labels. Rather than continuing to conform to the "Southie look" with the perfectly parted hair and turned up collar (All Souls 62), MacDonald at 13 shaves bald patches into otherwise spiked hair, and wears an old trench coat, too-short plaid pants, and whatever else he can find from thrift shops or his grandfather's closet. He hangs around downtown Boston, which was only a few train stops but "worlds away from Old Colony Project" in isolated Southie (Easter Rising 1). The friends he meets downtown and the music he is exposed to from the British punk scene open him up to "new ways of looking at things, aesthetically, politically, and personally" (Easter Rising 39). Thanks to this music scene he makes it from downtown Boston to New York City and to California, and finally in his late teens to Europe, where his planned stops include London and Paris. It is on this trip that, at the insistence of his grandfather, MacDonald travels to Ireland. The last third of Easter Rising details two trips to Ireland, one on his own because his grandfather will not wire him money to return from England unless he goes to visit his grandmother's relatives in Donegal, and the second a return trip with his mother, where he learns to see her in a new light.

The Quest for Respectability
MacDonald's Grandpa and Nana Murphy, "made [him] feel a connection to Ireland and to a world bigger than what [he] had in Old Colony" (All Souls 127). He gets mixed messages about Ireland from his grandfather as he grows up, however. At times, Grandpa tells him Ireland was "a lonesome old place with nothing but TB and dying cows" and that "'the best thing I ever did was leave'" (Easter Rising 174-75). Kerry, and then left Ireland altogether after his mother's death. He only shares this with his grandson when he is "weakened by age in his last year" (Easter Rising 204).
He tells Michael he had "made up his mind to leave Ireland forever" after he heard of his mother's death from "blood poisoning caused by a pulled tooth and bad medical care" (Easter Rising 204). For Grandpa this was the last wound inflicted on him by a faltering Irish economy. He had already left the family farm because the cows were dying from TB, but when his mother died, essentially from not being able to afford proper medical care, he could take no more. He waits several decades to tell the full story because he is ashamed of the country that let his mother die this way.
MacDonald's earliest memory is of his own mother crying over the baby she had lost years earlier. This memory is intertwined with the earlier loss his grandfather experienced. When MacDonald saw his mother crying, she was "sitting on the old trunk that her father had carried from Ireland when he was eighteen in search of some good luck in America" (All Souls 16). James Silas Rogers calls this scene, "a compelling image of the sadness that has haunted the Irish diaspora" (125). That this is where MacDonald's mother first told him of the infant she had lost, and that for him it is tied up in the memory of his grandfather's trunk and his coming to America, alert the reader to the transgenerational trauma that has occurred. The generations are tied together through losses, more specifically losses that happen due to the impoverished having inadequate medical care. Both deaths could have been avoided if the family had had money. Grandpa's mother was an otherwise healthy woman, with the refrain "'Christ, she was strong as an ox'" repeated every time her memory is invoked (Easter Rising 238). There is no way she should have died near middle age of a toothache.
Yet she did, and this pushes Grandpa out of Ireland for good, packing his bitter memories along with his other belongings in his trunk. MacDonald's mother is dealing with her own loss, sitting on her father's trunk. Hers is the loss of a baby who had pneumonia but was turned away from the hospital because it "had filled its quota of what were called 'charity cases,' and didn't need to take any more that night" (All Souls 19). Patrick died overnight in his crib (All Souls 20).
In an illustration of how transgenerational trauma is passed down, years after this experience when MacDonald's mother has her two youngest boys, she checks in by phone whenever she leaves the house to see if they are still breathing. MacDonald says, "ever since Patrick, Ma never really trusted that her babies weren't dead when they were just soundly sleeping" (All Souls 148). By this point, Michael is a young teen and in charge of the younger kids when she goes out to play her accordion or guitar in pubs. He gets annoyed when his mother calls so frequently, but knows he cannot get her off the phone until he puts her fears to rest, so he puts his hand on his brothers' backs as instructed. He remembers, "I took my time, because I knew that if I came back to the telephone too soon, she wouldn't believe I'd done it" (All Souls 148-49). Only a few years later when MacDonald is the one traveling away from home to follow punk bands, he frequently calls to check in, to make sure everyone is alive. This is after losing his brother Davey, and sitting at his sister's bedside for months while she was in a coma. His own traumas have now been heaped on top of his mother's loss of the infant Patrick before Michael was born. He frequently travels to New York City to get away from the violence and pain of Southie, but he calls home collect so much "to make sure everyone was okay" that his mother threatens to disconnect the phone (Easter Rising 117). He worries, especially, about his youngest brothers, because of the uptick in shootings in the neighborhood. A stray bullet had even come through a window and grazed his mother's arm. Now it is his turn to call home and ask his mother, "'Where are the kids?'" and his mother's turn to be annoyed. MacDonald recalls, "She said I should get my head checked" (Easter Rising 118). Two more of his brothers will be lost before he finally takes her advice. If his mother notices here how her son has taken on her own worries, she does not mention it. She would rather he live his life and let her do the worrying, but it is too late; she has already passed on her traumatic legacy.
MacDonald's mother was not the first in the family with a traumatic history to pass on. Grandpa's trunk is consistent with Rosemary Marangoly George's finding that in the immigrant genre, which she argues is a sub-genre of postcolonial literature, "Immigrants have to come to terms with the spiritual, material and even linguistic luggage they carry or inherit" (173). Ironically what is carried can actually be a void or loss. It is an emptiness, but it is not weightless. Intangible burdens are often the hardest to bear. The theory of transgenerational trauma explains how families pass down their reactions to such experiences. Family therapist Richard C. Scwartz finds that "some families have passed burdens from generation to generation-burdens that were first instilled hundreds of years earlier" (138). MacDonald's Grandpa's loss would not have been the first such loss in his family's history either, as the Great Famine hit the rural West of Ireland where he was from particularly hard. At least three generations before his had sent those who could make it to America. According to Schwartz, "whole cultures can carry legacy burdens as the result of being massacred, colonized, enslaved, or impoverished…. Cultural burdens constrain all families within the culture, and in turn burden the individuals within the families" (139). The shame over the impoverished conditions that sent Grandpa and the Famine Irish and others who preceded him to America was not forgotten, but it was silenced.
It was only remembered in the way that the Irish in America pushed themselves to never be seen as poor and backward again.
The concepts of attachment theory and dissociation explain how trauma is passed down the generations. Interestingly, though not speaking about immigrants specifically, Doris Brothers says, "I have come to think about traumatized people as exiles, forced to live in a world that they no longer recognize-a world without meaning" (3). The traumatic experience has shaken the person's sense of meaning in the world he or she inhabits. To reestablish a sense of psychic well-being, the traumatized person utilizes dissociation, a kind of forgetting or eliminating from consciousness the traumatic event (7). The person may act in ways that protect him or her from experiencing that kind of trauma again even if it is not recalled on a conscious level. For parents or those who become parents years after the traumatic event, this will affect the way they interact with their children, establishing patterns that subconsciously seek to avoid future trauma. They are parenting in fear. Children, attached to their parents and reliant on them for survival, will learn to interact with the world in a way that reflects their parents' fears (Brothers 5). This is the psychological process behind the haunting legacies Schwab theorizes. In MacDonald's family, his grandparents' near-obsession with the way the neighbors saw them, and what news might get back to Ireland, has all the marks of a legacy burden or transgenerational trauma. MacDonald recalls "having to put up with the Irish obsession with 'rosy cheeks' as a kid." He explains, "Nana would spit on a lint-encrusted napkin from the depths of her purse and come at me to rub my cheeks before we met up with anyone who might judge our appearance, usually friends of hers from Ireland" (Easter Rising 224). Anyone in his grandparents' charge was not allowed to look poor, dirty, or sick.
Whether they knew it consciously or not, his grandparents were not over the shame that such conditions could bring.
The immigrant generation looks forward to upward progress for their children and grandchildren. They often come to America poor, attracted by the opportunities promised if one is willing to work hard. MacDonald's grandfather put in the hard work as a longshoreman on the Boston waterfront. He eventually managed to buy his own multi-family apartment building in Jamaica Plain, a working class area of Boston.
Through a series of rebellions and one fateful decision to marry a man who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic, MacDonald's mother does not at first make good on the upward progress thought to await second generation Americans. When she finally decides to divorce her husband, she is living on her own in a nearly all-black project called Columbia Point. Tired of her children being threatened and harassed for being white, she moves into one of her father's apartments in the working class neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. She is a divorcée with eight children ranging from toddler to young teen, and the rules in her household are few. It is there that MacDonald starts to learn that his family does not quite fit in with the other Irish families in the neighborhood: our Irish neighbors had some American middle-class pretensions that were at odds with the ways of my mother and us kids. And if we ever did anything considered lower-class-like go to the corner store barefoot-in front of someone from Ireland, they might call us 'fookin' tinkers.' This was the worst you could be, according to Irish immigrants, especially once you'd already made it to the Promised Land. (All Souls 30).
The immigrants expected their children and grandchildren to take advantage of American opportunities, and above all to carry themselves with respect. It was not respectable to act low-class. While MacDonald's mother does frequently repeat her parents' warning that "news of her would be 'all over Ireland'" referring to the transatlantic gossip network of which the Boston Irish were part (All Souls 26), she is also a rebel, one who at fifteen, "had thrown open all the windows and screamed 'Fuck the neighbors,' working her parents into a panic" (All Souls 42). Her mini-skirts and children born out of wedlock after her divorce are a constant scandal for her conservative parents, who are driven by the shame of past poverty to strive for respectability above all else.
As a child MacDonald is torn between this drive for respectability and his love for his family's freedom to be unabashedly who they are. He inherits these conflicting desires from his grandparents and his mother, respectively. He observes that his grandparents "run and hide for the shame" when his mother plays Irish rebel songs on her accordion at the annual Irish Field day outside of Boston (All Souls 28). He realizes that though his grandparents are ashamed of her, "the crowds loved [her]. She made everyone feel that they were at a real party back home. Some even dropped their American middle-class airs, to toss each other around, doing set dances on the dirt in front of the stage" (All Souls 28). Still, even as a young child he is a worrier.
He recalls, "I thought all the Irish would talk badly about Ma, as my grandparents said she was a shame to us all with her accordion, and her long hair and short skirts" (All Souls 29). A sensitive and observant child, MacDonald "took over the job of trying to keep things looking whatever way they were supposed to look" (All Souls 33). He has a close bond with his grandmother, but he struggles with her disapproval of his mother's out-of-wedlock pregnancies with his two younger brothers (All Souls 107).
His mother's influence wins out, as he learns "from Ma's example to ignore what other people thought" (All Souls 42). When his grandfather can no longer put up with the antics of his daughter and her tribe of kids, for whom "freedom had become the rule above all others" (All Souls 49), he sells his multi-family unit in Jamaica Plain and the MacDonalds are forced to find housing elsewhere. MacDonald's mother works some local political connections and is thrilled to land a low-rent apartment in Old Colony Project in South Boston (All Souls 51). There they find Irish-American neighbors like themselves, who do not mind if their children run through the neighborhood barefoot or stay out until all hours, who are not above drinking in their open windows or on their front stoops, and who generally have few middle-class airs beyond pretending that they are not on food stamps or that cockroaches do not crawl through their apartments (All Souls 53).

What Makes Us Irish?
Helen Murphy MacDonald King, affectionately known by her kids and all of their friends as "Ma," is the heroine of All Souls. She is the kind of person who proves the adage, "truth is stranger than fiction," a character who would seem too outlandish if she were made up. Mother of eleven, Helen King is known for her big red hair, fishnet stockings, miniskirts, spike heels, fringed cowboy jacket, and an accordion held together with duct tape slung over her shoulder. She rebels against her parents' desire for respectability by refusing to contain her body in ways consistent with their conservative, middle class values. Despite a first abusive marriage to an alcoholic, and subsequent failed relationships, she manages to keep her children fed, housed, and clothed through a combination of skillful maneuvering of welfare services and playing music in the Irish pubs of South Boston and nearby Dorchester. She is the daughter of Irish immigrants who spends summers in Ireland when she is young, so she has a firsthand connection with her parents' culture. Where her parents would like to deny any low class associations, however, Ma embraces what she sees not as low class but as fun, and free. Her Irishness goes beyond the obvious: her playing of Irish music or drawing in a crowd with her story-telling abilities wherever she goes. She has those qualities, but she also has more subtle aspects of who she is that align with characters Ma is quick to hand out money or food stamps to her kids whenever they ask for it. She brings home food stuffed in her pocketbook from the shows she plays, rarely saving any for herself. Beyond her own family, Ma is known for giving whatever she has to the homeless. She never considers herself above anyone who is down on their luck, and does whatever she can to help them. MacDonald attributes his own openness to his mother's example, allowing him to easily befriend an eclectic group of Boston's castaways as a teen. He explains, "Growing up with Ma, who talked to pretty much every homeless person we passed in Southie and sometimes let them sleep on the couch, I was used to characters in the streets" (Easter Rising 71).
Sometimes it may have gone too far, as "Ma was always trying to save someone from the gutter, and that's literally where she met some of her boyfriends. They were usually Irish or Irish American and often alcoholic and jobless" (All Souls 35). As soon as she fixes up these men and gets them ready to be productive citizens, she loses interest in them and moves on. Years later MacDonald bumps into a homeless man who recalls Ma as "A good woman" and says, "We never went hungry with her pocketbook full of toast" (All Souls 258). There seems to be an endless supply of these men whom Ma helps, men who are forgotten in the Irish-American narrative of upward social progress.
Ma is also MacDonald's role model as a community activist. When South Boston becomes embroiled in the infamous busing crisis that was a weak attempt to desegregate the Boston Public Schools, she volunteers in the neighborhood Information Center answering phones. At the time Southie stood together in protest of their children being bused away from their neighborhood schools. MacDonald details how at first some of the talk against the desegregation order was about the rich forcing change on the poor neighborhoods that they would not force on their own, but not doing anything to improve the schools (76). Soon, however, the protests deteriorated into a "race war" (All Souls 77). Ma told young Michael "it was wrong to hate the blacks for any of this" (All Souls 85) and even though she is against the busing because she wants her kids attending school near home, "she felt like she was kicked in the stomach every time she heard Jimmy Kelly talking about niggers this and niggers that at the Information Center where she'd been volunteering. She said she couldn't get used to that word, no matter how much she hated the busing" (All Souls 118). Ma is open and welcoming to all people, regardless of race. She is disturbed and confused, as her son Michael is, that the neighborhood has turned against black people so violently, instead of against the politicians and judges who put them in this predicament of sending their kids to different failing schools rather than fixing them all. More than a decade later when low-income housing in Boston is the next front in racial integration, Ma "wondered out loud why we were always fighting for the same piece-of-shit schools and cockroach-infested apartments" (All Souls 215). Perhaps not eloquent but definitely to the point, Ma's question informs MacDonald's later activism across races; he realizes that as long as the poor are divided by race, they will only fight one another rather than for better living conditions for all. As Chapter 1 shows, this is a sentiment attached to the heroes of post-World War II Irish-American fiction. immigrants from other parts of the world started moving into the country, and even more so when the economy fell again and jobs became scarce. The idea here is not to idealize the Irish as a whole, but to show that the Irish MacDonald meets on his trip were much more open-minded about race than his South Boston neighbors, and much more apt to see commonalities across people who faced oppression, rather than trying to build walls between them. His first trip to Ireland also rids him of the illusion that the symbolic, green, plastic tokens he has always seen have a connection to Ireland.
He finds instead these are objects of Irish America.
The open-mindedness MacDonald discovers in his Irish cousins and the people of Derry and Belfast mirrors the way he feels, thanks to the influence first of his mother and older siblings who had friendships across races, and then of the English punk scene, which teaches him that "the class system instigated racism in Britain" (Easter Rising 73). He studies song lyrics and interviews with British punk rockers, some of whom have "Irish last names…buried underneath invented punk names." They are able to admit that they were poor, and speak out against racism (Easter MacDonald comes to find that "nigger" is a word that not only denotes race, but also social class: "It was always something you called someone who could be considered anything less than you" (All Souls 61). Danny labels the people in the D Street project, who are dirtier and do not dress as well as those in stolen clothes in Old Colony, "white niggers" (All Souls 60). Danny is young Michael's guide to the rules and layout of his new neighborhood, mapping out the social hierarchy of South Boston from the perspective of a street smart seven-year-old.
As they walk the neighborhood, Michael finds out that he and Danny are also "white niggers" according to those in the City Point neighborhood of South Boston.
The City Point kids are distinguished from those they call "white niggers" and "project rats" because they have fathers at home, and those fathers have blue-collar jobs, where the poorer neighborhoods have either no fathers or fathers who are unemployed.
MacDonald notes that the City Point kids "still had the Irish faces, and many had a tough look. But they wore turtlenecks and chino pants, pressed and cuffed just right.
Some had Irish knit sweaters, but these were draped over their shoulders the way rich people did. They also wore lots of green, I guess to prove they were still Irish" (All What Danny's tour of South Boston and the Irish bus passenger's comments have in common is that they show the way people are defined from the outside, from someone else's perspective, and how that may not match with the way they define themselves. As MacDonald says, "of course, no one considered himself a nigger" (All Souls 61). The pride in being "Irish" in South Boston, or even among the wealthy summer crowd on Cape Cod, has to be displayed outwardly in green clothing and Irish knit sweaters. One might feel Irish on the inside, and his or her face might still bear the genetic imprint of Ireland, but a connection with Ireland has to be proved in the complicated web of race and social class being negotiated by Irish Americans.
Irishness, used in this way, becomes a status symbol. As the sweaters get nicer and pants more carefully pressed and cuffed, the relative wealth is displayed. In MacDonald's Old Colony project the tattoos are hand made with a needle and green ink, and the only designer clothes worn are stolen from a department store or off the back of a truck. Still, they wear these things as markers of their own ethnic difference, a difference which many think set them apart from and above their African American neighbors just a couple of blocks away. What MacDonald shows through knowing irony is that the very things Danny and others claim are happening over in the African American neighborhoods-violence and drunkenness and drugs-are prevalent in their own neighborhood as well. The Irish in South Boston use their ethnic identity and associated neighborhood pride as a screen to block out their own problems.

Faith in This World and the Next
A Christian-in other words, one who follows the teachings of Jesus Christis called to help the poor and embrace outcasts of any kind. A Christian should recognize all of God's children as equal, including "the least" of Christ's brothers and sisters. Citing Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas discusses the importance of "mercy" as the "heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us to succor him if we can" (II. II, question 30, article 1). Though our first priority as Christians is love for God, in loving our neighbor we are showing a love of God. Aquinas says, "the sum total of our Christian religion consists in mercy." He continues to explain that acts of charity bring us closer to God because we are acting in his likeness (II.II, question 30, article 4). The Baltimore Catechism teaches that the Catholic faith is one of "head, heart, and hands" (Groome 178). The "hands" entail the active part of the faith, the doing for others. Thomas Groome points out that only the Resurrection is mentioned more frequently in the Gospels than Jesus's acts of compassion in feeding the hungry. Groome argues that all of Jesus's miracles "in one way or another, were prompted by compassion" (182). In reaching out to those in need, Jesus is living what he would have learned in Hebrew scripture, where "justice with compassion" is urged "in response to every form of poverty" (Groome 217). His acts are meant to be a model for those who follow him. Karen Arnold argues that "all religions teach the same thing-compassion." She cites the Dalai Lama as saying that "all faiths teach kindess." These are not values owned by Christianity alone, but if one claims to be a Christian, they are values that cannot be ignored.
As shown in Chapter 1, in Irish-American fiction of the mid-twentieth century, the characters seen as most Irish are Christians in this sense. They are usually the first or second generation in America. They speak out against anyone who abuses the poor, they chastise children and grandchildren for racist speech and what would today be called hate crimes, and they are wary of an ethnocentrism they see emerging among the American Irish in the first few decades of the twentieth century. MacDonald's mother is a true Christian by these same standards. Ironically she has been barred from receiving Communion in the Catholic Church because she is divorced. When his mother first goes to a priest about her husband's cheating and abuse so bad it one time broke her ribs, she is told "'You're a Catholic, make the best of it'" (All Souls 18).
She finally gets the divorce when her husband does not show up for their baby's funeral. The divorce stops Ma from going to Church, but not from practicing her faith. MacDonald explains, "I later found out that my mother had her own spiritual life…. While we were all off eating candy at mass, she was finding her own secluded spots down by the park, where she could be alone in nature and pray. She considered herself Catholic. She prayed through the Saints, and mostly through the Blessed Mother" (All Souls 39). MacDonald acknowledges that his own faith is influenced by his mother. As a child, asked to draw a picture of God, he amazes his mother by drawing what "vaguely resembled a face, but the features were made up of the elements of nature: the earth, the sun, the moon and stars, trees, birds, and other animals" (All Souls 38). It is the judgement of the Church that drives him to seek a faith outside of its walls. He says, "Even as a kid I always felt torn between the Catholic Church and its rules for who's in and who's out with Jesus, and a deeper relationship with God that might be found anywhere" (All Souls 40 Such practices might well appear naïve and even superstitious to outsiders. But in considering the trust that Ma and others place in these objects and practices, it is important to bear in mind the prevailing sense of powerlessness and abandonment in Southie. When Ma shares healing powers of holy water and stones from Fatima, she is at least indirectly asserting some agency in the cure of her own children. (123) Holy water, rosaries, praying to Saints, the Blessed Mother, and even ancestors looking down from heaven are all in the arsenal of the Irish Catholics from South Boston. As Rogers points out, sometimes their faith is all they have. It is a faith of the people, rather than of a hierarchical organization. It is certainly not a faith that would be called Americanized or modern; it is very similar to what had been practiced in Ireland for centuries.
In addition to holy water and other objects of faith, MacDonald and his family, especially his mother, are believers in supernatural signs and dreams. This, too, is a link to Ireland, and Ma often names it as such. She tells MacDonald he was given his brother Patrick Michael's name in reverse, "because the Irish always said it was bad luck to name a child after another who had died" (All Souls 16). She also believed, because the Irish did, that it was unlucky to have a bird in the house (All Souls 185).
Before her son Frankie is killed she dreams about a crow flying in and out of her house. MacDonald recalls, "Ma thought for sure after the big black bird invaded our home, that someone would die" (All Souls 185). She has dreams and visions before most of the deaths in her family, including when she buys a dress for her son Kevin's funeral before he dies because she had a vision of him hanging (All Souls 195). Ma is not the only one to have such dreams. Her own mother has a dream about a man in black in her bedroom, which gave Ma "the feeling Nana was going to die" (All Souls 127). Once again she is correct. MacDonald inherits this trait of his mother's too.
When he is away in New York he dreams of a Southie "kid" telling him "This shit's gotta stop." He realizes that it was Johnny Baldwin in the dream, a Southie neighbor who had been killed in a car accident. When he gets home from New York Ma informs him that Timmy Baldwin, Johnny's brother, was killed two nights earlier.
Timmy's murder was the same night of MacDonald's dream (All Souls 206).
MacDonald explains that rather than "religious beliefs…Ma had always taught us to believe in things bigger than that" (Easter Rising 83). For Ma, "the line between this world and the next world had been blurred" (All Souls 242). MacDonald, too, looks for signs from his deceased siblings and Nana, and prays for them to intercede before someone else dies (All Souls 195). Unfortunately Kevin dies anyway, a fact MacDonald knows with certainty while on another New York trip. When he goes to catch a train home a homeless man confirms it, by saying the very words Ma always has put on a ribbon for her buried children's caskets: "'Til we meet again!" (All Souls 197). Ma believes her kids are "in a better place, better off than the rest of us" (All Souls 200). Like his mother, MacDonald also finds a thin space between this world and the next. In his case it is a coping mechanism for one loss after another: "Like friends who had moved across the country, the dead were just beyond reach" (Easter Rising 226). Though the Catholic Church building is not where they sought solace in most cases, MacDonald's family's beliefs in the afterlife and the power of prayer, in signs, symbols, and messages from beyond, keep them pushing on when they might otherwise fall apart. MacDonald's memoirs privilege this type of folk belief over the hierarchical constraints of the Catholic Church.

The "Fighting" Irish
The disturbing thing about the use of the angry leprechaun mascot and the nickname "The Fighting Irish" for the University of Notre Dame's sports teams is that it calls to mind one of the most persistent negative images of the Irish in nineteenth century America. The pugnacious, unruly Irishman, unable to control his own "Irish temper" is second only to drunkenness in the pantheon of Irish stereotypes. Native Americans would never themselves choose a whooping red "Indian" mascot for their own sports teams, let alone those sponsored by a prestigious institute of higher learning. In fact, many Native American groups and others sensitive to their plight have been fighting to have such mascots removed from sports teams and their logos around the country ("Ending the Era"). So it is puzzling why Notre Dame, a prestigious university with a strong Irish American heritage, would persist in keeping a fighting leprechaun as its mascot. One senses a great forgetting of the negative stigma involved in being thought incapable of self-rule because of such temperament. Thankfully it is not only trauma that is passed on, but also ways of coping and helping others, not to mention ways of connecting as humans through songs and stories. The contradictions that run through the neighborhood exemplify the dissonance in the Irish-American narrative. Tough faces belie big hearts. Bravado masks poverty.
Screen memories go up where the real story is too painful to bear. There will never be one narrative that tells the whole story of any one people. In studying the gaps in the narrative, however, one can see psychological needs that created it. One can also understand, that if this unique Irish-American experience exists in South Boston, many other Irish-American stories, as many as there are immigrant communities or even individual immigrants, must exist as well. By reading memoirs and fiction of immigrants and their descendants, whether Irish or not, it is possible to grasp just how many different and sometimes contradictory elements go into a diasporic narrative.

Ireland Writes Back: Roddy Doyle, John Ford, and the Construction of the Irish-American Narrative
Because emigration has been a principal trauma of the Irish experience for the past two centuries, it is no surprise that it has often been the subject of contemporary It is on the surface of the habitable earth that we remember having traveled and visited memorable sites. In this way, the 'things' we remember are intrinsically associated with places. And it is not by chance that we say of what has occurred that it took place. It is indeed at this primordial level that the phenomenon of 'memory places' is constituted, before they become a reference for historical knowledge. These memory places function for the most part after the manner of reminders, offering in turn a support for failing memory, a struggle in the war against forgetting, even the silent plea of dead memory. (41) Without a sense of place, in other words, there is nothing to tie memories down, to anchor them. Pierre Nora argues that we are living in a time without memory, as opposed to pre-modern societies that he says lived their memories and traditions.
According to Nora in pre-modern societies there was no distinction between present and past, but now memory has "been swept away by history" (2). The modern sense of history has assigned the past to a prior time, causing us to need what Nora calls "lieux de mémoire" or sites of memory to stand in for "the vast fund of memories among which we used to live on terms of intimacy" (6). Nora argues that "reconstructed history" (6) replaces the memories earlier societies "dwelled among" (2). In theorizing the way people have developed along a pre-modern/modern divide, A new form of nostalgia sought to anesthetize the pain of loss and uprooting by severing the connection with the past as it was actually experienced. Distance, it was found, lent enchantment to the view and, through the healing powers of imagination and hindsight, the past was idealized to the extent that it receded from the present. Memory, then, became a way of disconnecting from, rather than connecting to, the past…. (49) What Gibbons is describing here is at least as much forgetting as it is remembering. It is forgetting a painful past as it happened, and erecting in its place a "memory" that was more pleasant, as Henry Smart sometimes wishes he could do. Sigmund Freud calls such shields from painful memories "screen memories." He says, "In some cases I have had an impression that the familiar childhood amnesia, which is theoretically so important to us, is completely counterbalanced by screen memories. Not only some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained in these memories…. Nash also comments on how return ties into colonialism. She continues, "For the descendants of Famine and post-Famine migrants this return is frequently framed by discourses of colonial dispossession, forced exile and the trauma of displacement" (189). Put in this light, the Irish in America, especially of the generations Nash named, qualify as diasporic people. Their perception, which is at least partially supported by history, is that they were forced from their homes by English colonial policies. This becomes the center of loss on which the Irish-American narrative is based. A trip "home" to Ireland for the ancestors of those exiled is often seen as a healing journey, one that makes up for wounds of the past. If they cannot reclaim Ireland, or their piece of it, in reality, they can at least see the places they were from, taking pictures and maybe a piece of "the ould sod" home with them.
According to David Lloyd, "Control of narratives is a crucial function of the state apparatus since its political and legal frameworks can only gain consent and legitimacy if the tale they tell monopolizes the field of probabilities" (Anomolous 6).
Doyle's The Dead Republic plays with who is in charge of this narrative. It is not Henry Smart as a private citizen, as much as he thinks he is for a while: "The Quiet Man and the Provisional IRA-the two faces of Ireland, and they were both invented by me" (193). It is not Hollywood, or Irish America, at least not acting on their own.
They do influence the definition, but they do not own the narrative. It turns out that the Irish-American vision of Ireland comes close to the way Irish nationalists wanted Ireland to be seen: Nationalism had certainly helped to create a new idea of Ireland, which had great and liberating consequences. But it also created a version of Irishnesscompounded of whimsy, romantic populism, Celtic nativity heroisms, and a belief in the salience of the artist in political as well as cultural affairs-which was restricting and as subject to caricature as the old colonialism has been. This was not surprising since the nationalism was a response to the colonialism and since it had been led by the Anglo-Irish section of the people, the colonials themselves. (Deane 203) By the time Eamon deValera's Catholic-dominated government is in charge of a newly independent Ireland, it is hard to call it Anglo-Irish, but that government still, as They did not want to be associated with him. At the same time, Gibbons says complaints about stereotypes came from, "civil reformers in Ireland, whether of the national or imperial stamp, as they sought to integrate the refractory culture of the lower orders into their own narratives of the nation" (15). Gibbons' point is welltaken here. The reaction against these less desirable features of Irishness came mostly from those who, in America, wanted to assimilate into the middle class, and in Ireland from those who wanted to be a "modern" nation and move beyond such backwardness. Gibbons argues that "the most difficult stereotypes to uproot are not those that falsify reality but those that are grounded in truth, and which also go one step further in purporting to show the 'essence' of things" (96). In other words stereotypes might have some grounding in reality, but it is painting them as essential to the national or racial character that is the problem.

Memory and Forgetting in The Dead Republic
In The Dead Republic Henry Smart suffers the forgetting so common to immigrants, who risk losing parts of their past as they spend more years away from home. For Henry it is a literal amnesia, due to ill health after years spent homeless and undernourished. The reader attuned to the theory of memory and forgetting will also see how, away from his community and his native land, Henry would begin to It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge-which gives rise to profound uncertainties-that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (10) In Innisfree, Ford literally does create a fictional village, one that puts his "Ireland of the mind" on screen. On the falseness of this village, Henry remarks with Doyle's characteristic humor: "There was a granite high cross at the top of the road into the Henry says the absence of the house, right down to the walls and the foundation, "felt like another death" (6). He cannot understand why there was no trace of it. The lone standing gate, like Henry's painful wooden leg, is an imperfect prosthetic, but it is much better than nothing. In this scene the wooden leg and the gate are both props that keep Henry up: "I walked back now through the field. My own wooden leg was groaning, protesting, biting into the folded flesh…. But I grabbed the gate and the top rung was there, exactly as cold as it should have been. I'd held that gate before, even if the path from the gate to the house was gone. The gate was real; it felt like sanity" (6) The gate is a prosthetic for memory, to use Bernard Stiegler's term, a reminder of both the fleeting joy of his marriage ceremony and the war that caused it to be performed in haste. Its presence amidst the striking absence of the cottage assures Henry that his memory is not failing him. On his way off the property Henry realizes the house has been purposefully erased by his wife's cousin, Ivan, who would have been the heir to the land and one of the former comrades who ran Henry out of Ireland. Ivan was trying to control the narrative of the War for Independence that would be remembered in those parts, and he was writing Henry out of it: "Ivan had razed the house, then he'd buried it too deep to be remembered" (7).
Henry, outcast from Ireland, and returning to find no one he knows (at first), is unsure of his memories. His memories are tied to the land but the landscape has changed with the missing house; he finds it "weird" (6). It is disorienting because nothing is there to confirm his memory at first. He is looking for the wall of the cottage. He says, "I'd come to see the wall, maybe put my hand against it, break off a piece of whitewash, put it in my mouth and taste it. But just to see it-that would have been enough. To find its foundation in the grass, to feel it in the sole of my good foot. Proof" (7). Everything else is the same, he says: "The few bits of trees, the yellow furze, even the cows had stayed more or less put, where I'd left them in 1922" The idealized idea of Ireland as an inviolate isle beyond the sea pervades their consciousnesses and shapes their identities. Ireland's four green fields became a compensatory visionary landscape, a lost Eden, for Irish-Americans who forgot the trials of starvation and political repression which their ancestors escaped, for Irish-Americans who refused to believe reports of the hardships and isolation Ireland continued to endure during and after World War II. The romantic dream of Ireland illustrates the latent idealism and vulnerable sentimentality among Irish-Americans but also reveals their susceptibility to denial and deceit. He had no grasp on his own mother tongue. He fought for a free Ireland. He was chased out of that "free" Ireland by those who would be satisfied with less than complete freedom. He lived the life of an exile in America. Returned from exile, Henry becomes an Irish hero, the "republican dead" (182), a "living saint" for the cause of Irish nationalism (250). Henry says himself, that the people "looked at me and saw their country" (175). Henry takes part in his own myth making, or so he thinks; all the while the IRA were using him to advance their own narrative. Together with the government of the Republic, they have invented Ireland. The IRA man tells Henry, "The armed struggle has been about ownership of the definition of Irishness" (313). He says the war was about "The copyright. The brand" (313). When he asks Henry, "Who owns Irishness, hey?" he answers his own question: "Sinn Féin….

Conclusion: Entangled Narratives
What Roddy Doyle does by fictionalizing the creation of The Quiet Man is critique the narrative that John Ford set forth; in doing so he is critiquing the foundation of Irish-American identity, which so often centers on a nostalgia-tinged longing for home. Ireland as the most beautiful place on Earth is our lost birthright, thanks to the Brits and their damned imperialism. So goes the creation story at the start of the Irish-American narrative. Seán Thornton gives us the fantasy that we could go back, reclaim what was lost to us-our cottage, our customs, our language, our beautiful red colleen. Our pints and our songs and our stories. From the opening pages of The Dead Republic, Roddy Doyle's Henry Smart bursts that beautiful bubble created by Ford. In this novel Doyle is trying to rewrite, or at least give massive editing to, the narrative that has been written in the popular imagination of Ireland, especially in Irish America.
And yet The Dead Republic also proposes just how entwined the Irish nationalist and Irish-American narratives are. Even Henry, who was trying to tell the "true" story of his life, eventually realizes he was complicit in letting Ford's version of the narrative make it to the screen. The national and diasporic narratives are different, but codependent; they provide mutual fuel to one another in constant transatlantic exchange going back at least to the 1840s. Emigration is a key feature of Irish history over the past 200 years. It involves profound psychological loss for those who stay and for those who leave. Emigration is a breaking up of the Irish family, a loss of the country's young people, a loss perhaps only eclipsed by the loss of language over the same time period. Even after famines ended in Ireland, emigration continued. Rare would be the Irish family left untouched by it, even to this day. It is no wonder that when contemporary Irish novelists write historical fiction, or of how history haunts the Irish present, they frequently turn to emigration as part of their narrative.
Emigration is central to the Irish story, and it also where the Irish-American story begins. Many contemporary Irish novelists explore not only the lives emigrants start overseas, but also how they continue to interact with family members in Ireland, through letters and visits home. Emigrants continue to influence the Irish culture while at the same time their Irishness contributes to their new American (or other national) culture. Roddy Doyle overtly discusses the creation of both the Irish national and the Irish diasporic narratives in The Dead Republic. The most impressive thing about Doyle is that he manages to craft a postcolonial novel that dissects nationalism, diasporic nostalgia, and the destructive effects of colonialism while at the same time being funny. The novel is not without the tragedy of families torn apart, or

CONCLUSION
Writing about the narrative of Irish America in the age of "fake news," "alternative facts," and social media memes offers some interesting challenges and opportunities. Especially in the month of March as I wrap up this project, when the Internet experiences an uptick in "Irish" memes that celebrate drunkenness and "shenanigans," this topic seems more urgent than ever. One particularly egregious set of memes focuses on the myth of Irish slavery, circulating images purporting to be of Irish slaves in the United States and the Caribbean, with captions explaining how bad the Irish had it and that essentially "we are not complaining." The message behind the memes is to target African Americans for complaining about the effects of racism and the legacy of slavery and ask, "'We got over it, so why can't you?'" (Stack). In making this comparison from Irish-American success to still impoverished African American communities, the implication is that there is something inherent in those communities, as opposed to the Irish, that has kept them from rising. Liam Hogan is one of many scholars of Irish history trying to debunk these memes (Stack). Scanning Hogan's Twitter feed one can see he faces an uphill battle, as the memes and articles citing dubious sources about Irish slavery keep coming. They are circulated much faster than he can respond to them all, by people who think they are an accurate reflection of history. Hogan points out their many flaws and how they twist Irish history for racist American ends (Stack). They also of course ignore the ugly and complex history of race in the United States. These memes and "news" stories are the far (or "alt") right extension of a diasporic narrative that recounts with pride the Irish rise from what it sees as the bottom of American society (conveniently eliding actual chattel slavery) to the top.
There is in this insistence on telling the story of the rise from abject Americans, what they never forgot of the Famine was their suffering at the hands of the British. Similarly, the "No Irish Need Apply" signs that come up so frequently in the story of the Irish in America represent the discrimination faced when the Irish immigrants first arrived in their new country. These signs served as symbols of oppression the Irish faced at home and in diaspora, and are seared into the early chapters of the Irish-American narrative, making the rise to American success all the more impressive, even heroic. The notion of "success" is an interesting one to consider as this study comes to a close. Early in his detailed history of the Boston Irish over the last 300 years, Thomas O'Connor remarks that one of the reasons Irish Catholics did not come over to America in large numbers sooner despite poor conditions at home was "they were more inclined to accept their lot in life than to try to rise high or achieve much" (19).
This is a value judgement that depends on the writer's definition of achievement. For the Irish of course had for centuries achieved much in art, music, and poetry. As the "dramatic improvement in the literacy rate" of the Irish thanks to these schools that "dominated education in Ireland" by the last decades of the nineteenth century (Inventing Irish America 28). Meagher discusses these trends in Irish education because they make for more educated immigrants arriving to Worcester by 1900.
What he does not mention is the near erasure of the Irish language as a result of those same schools, and the oral literary tradition that went with it. It is not easy to get outside a mindset of capitalist modernity to see that success can be measured in ways other than financial, or to get out of a colonial mindset to see that there are other types of literacy aside from that of written English, or other ways of teaching aside from a brick and mortar school building. Adapting to these economic, linguistic, and educational changes brought most of the Irish in America upward social mobility and comfort. I do not know any who would trade what they have for what their ancestors gave up, but it is worth re-membering the parts of the story that are left untold, including that there is more than one way to define success.
That some Irish came to the U.S. by choice, that some came as skilled laborers with some financial means, that some who came were Protestants-all of these things are also gaps in the main Irish-American narrative. So, too, are the Irish in America who did not rise, who stayed impoverished and therefore did not fulfill the American Dream. Michael Patrick MacDonald's neighbors in the projects of Southie only get their story told because he tells it. The popular narrative of Irish-American success leaves them out. There are also gaps in the story of how the Irish helped improve working conditions in the United States. Though it is remembered that the Irish were heavily involved in the early labor movement in this country, it is forgotten that those first unions were not exactly "united," in that they excluded non-whites, women, and at times other, newer immigrant groups (Kenny "Labor" 362). It is also conveniently forgotten that any of those labor organizers, now remembered as heroes of the working class, could have had any interest in socialism, which is still treated like a dirty word among Irish Catholics who came of age in the mid-twentieth century, along with many other Americans.
As I wrote this dissertation, and discovered a repetition of characters in midtwentieth century Irish-American fiction involved in radical politics who were painted in such a sympathetic light by their authors, it brought back to mind an exchange with my father that I just thought was funny at the time. It was early in my teaching career and for some reason, though I do not normally discuss my curriculum with him, I mentioned that I was preparing a lesson on Marxist literary theory. He yelled, "That's bad! You can't teach that!" His reaction caught me off guard. I do not think I even probed him for a reason behind his position, since he finds many things "bad," from bacon to driving after dark. I joked with my students about his response. I dismissed it as his being elderly and conservative. He is the definition of "old school." It is only now that I am starting to put together his generation, his Catholicism, his Irish heritage, and his exclamation that anything to do with Karl Marx is bad. My father's generation was not far displaced from generations of Irish Americans who faced discrimination in employment in the United States. My mother remembers her uncle being passed over for promotion at the mill where he worked because he was Catholic.
My father's parents, as mentioned in the Preface, did not name him after Irish hero Robert Emmet for fear of discrimination he would face when he was born in 1922.
It is not just in my family that the legacy of discriminatory treatment still appeared well into the twentieth century. By 1900, "the dominant trend in Irish-American trade unionism…was away from radicalism and toward conservatism" but it had included a strain of radicalism in the decades before that (Kenny "Labor" 361).
When the mostly Irish Boston police force went on strike in 1919 and the response of the city was to fire them and replace them with Yankees they found more trustworthy, "the Irish of the city viewed these outspoken sentiments as proof that old-time Bostonians continued to regard them as an inferior group, still not fully assimilated after nearly a century" (O'Connor 193). Peter Quinn describes the people in his Irish-American neighborhood of the 1950s as "still in the defensive crouch they'd arrived in during the Famine, still sensitive to the distrust and dislike of real America, to the suspicions about our loyalty and supposed proclivity to raucous misbehavior" (275).
The suspicions around loyalty, traced back at least into the 1700s when Irish Catholicism was seen as incompatible with democracy because of Catholics' allegiance to the Pope (O'Connor 28). That Quinn remembers his community still in a "defensive crouch" speaks again to the haunting legacy of the condition in which the bulk of the Irish arrived in the United States, and their treatment when they arrived. It is this legacy that drives Quinn's mother as well as the characters with social aspirations in the works of Edward McSorley, Mary Doyle Curran, Elizabeth Cullinan, and even Michael Patrick MacDonald's maternal grandparents, to put such a premium on respectability. It is also likely this same legacy that drove Joseph McCarthy to "out" anyone whose political leanings he saw as "un-American." It is this drive for respectability that fuels the change in the American Catholic church. In the 1840s Boston's Bishop Fitzpatrick emphasized the keys to acceptance would be "Americanism, loyalty, and the maintenance of good order" combined with Our Own Kind that socialists were out to bring down the Church. The roots of these fears had been largely forgotten by the time I came of age late in the twentieth century, but there they were, still haunting my father.
It was not just around radical politics that the legacy of early discrimination against the Irish in the United States lingered. In Boston, at least, "the bitter antagonisms of the 1840s and 1850s created a wall of separation that would continue to keep the two communities [Irish Catholics and the Protestant "Brahmins"] at arm's length until well into the second half of the twentieth century" (O'Connor 94).
Thomas O'Connor explains that discrimination based in the "Puritan revulsion of all things Catholic," would not soon be forgotten in Boston. In response, "for generations to come, Catholic children would be reared in the catechism of hate that instructed them never to forget the bigotry of Protestants, who had confined them to institutions and asylums, and the cruelty of the Brahmins, who had posted on factory gates and workshop doors the signs that proclaimed for all to see: 'No Irish Need Apply'" (94).
Again, those signs are cited so frequently in the rhetoric of any conversation about Irish oppression in America that they have to be seen as prosthetics for memory. They are reminders of the overall treatment of the nineteenth century Irish at the hands of a father's worry meter. "You better make sure that's a Catholic Bible," he said. "How would I know?" I asked. He advised, "I would ask a priest." To appease him, I did ask my parish priest the next time I was at Mass, and he assured me that this was a concern of the older generation, that most of the discrepancies between the two Bibles were inconsequential, and that it was doubtful they would be of issue in a preschool Bible anyway. To my father it had been a theological crisis.
The history behind these conversations with my father that I found funny but he found so concerning points to some of what has been forgotten and what has been remembered in the Irish-American narrative. The anxieties that my parents have exhibited over the years, about someone marrying a Protestant or putting their mortal soul in jeopardy by converting from Catholicism to Protestantism or by leaving the Church altogether, or reading a child a children's Bible from the wrong denomination, or even of teaching Marxist literary theory, show the legacy of concerns left to them by their parents who were born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Most people in my generation do not have those same concerns. The Protestant-Catholic divide has lost its sting in a largely secular age. My own students often do not know the difference, even if their families come from Christian traditions. They are a far cry from my parents' generation whose very identity was defined by their faith, a faith that was so tied into the ethnic identity of their parents' and grandparents' generations as they tried to make their families accepted in this country.
All ethnicities and the stories they tell about their group formation are works in progress. The Irish-American narrative is still being written, and Irish-American