The Shamrock and the Cross

Eileen P. Sullivan

Description

In The Shamrock and the Cross: Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism, Eileen P. Sullivan traces changes in nineteenth-century American Catholic culture through a study of Catholic popular literature. Analyzing more than thirty novels spanning the period from the 1830s to the 1870s, Sullivan elucidates the ways in which Irish immigration, which transformed the American Catholic population and its institutions, also changed what it meant to be a Catholic in America. In the 1830s and 1840s, most Catholic fiction was written by American-born converts from Protestant denominations; after 1850, most was written by Irish immigrants or their children, who created characters and plots that mirrored immigrants’ lives. The post-1850 novelists portrayed Catholics as a community of people bound together by shared ethnicity, ritual, and loyalty to their priests rather than by shared theological or moral beliefs. Their novels focused on poor and working-class characters; the reasons they left their homeland; how they fared in the American job market; and where they stood on issues such as slavery, abolition, and women’s rights. In developing their plots, these later novelists took positions on capitalism and on race and gender, providing the first alternative to the reigning domestic ideal of women. Far more conscious of American anti-Catholicism than the earlier Catholic novelists, they stressed the dangers of assimilation and the importance of separate institutions supporting a separate culture. Given the influence of the Irish in church institutions, the type of Catholicism they favored became the gold standard for all American Catholics, shaping their consciousness until well into the next century.

Sujets

• 19th Century
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Catholic
• Christianity
• United States

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268093037
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

The Shamrock and the Cross
THE SHAMROCK AND THE CROSS
Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism
EILEEN P. SULLIVAN
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2016 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sullivan, Eileen P., 1941- author.
Title: The shamrock and the cross : Irish American novelists shape
American Catholicism / Eileen P. Sullivan.
Other titles: Irish American novelists shape American Catholicism
Description: Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047725 | ISBN 9780268041526 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 0268041520 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: American fiction-Irish-American authors-History and criticism. | American fiction-Catholic authors-History and criticism. |
American fiction-19th century-History and criticism. | Catholics-
United States-Intellectual life. | Catholic fiction-History and criticism. |
Catholic Church-In literature. | Catholics in literature.
Classification: LCC PS153.I78 S85 2016 | DDC 813/.3099415-dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047725
ISBN 9780268093037
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
To the memory of my parents, Daniel J. Sullivan and Helena O Shea Sullivan, and to the future of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Origins of American Catholic Fiction
Chapter 2 The Irish Americans: Creating a Memory of the Past
Chapter 3 American Anti-Catholicism: The Uses of Prejudice
Chapter 4 Catholics and Religious Liberty
Chapter 5 The Anti-Protestant Novel
Chapter 6 The Church as Family
Chapter 7 The Maternal Priest
Chapter 8 A Woman s Place: Making the Communal Home
Chapter 9 Catholics and Economic Success
Chapter 10 American Politics: Catholics as Patriotic Outsiders
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 2.1 . Title page of Sadlier s very popular novel Bessy Conway , written for Irish domestic servants in American cities.
Figure 2.2 . Title page of Boyce s Mary Lee shows hero Ephraim Weeks unable to manage an Irish pony despite his boasts of superior horsemanship. Courtesy of Wright American Fiction Project, Indiana University Libraries.
Figure 3.1 . Title page of The Arch Bishop , one of a group of Know-Nothing novels of the 1850s, which criticized Catholic priests, especially Bishop Hughes, and extolled the Order of United Americans that defended Protestant institutions. Courtesy of Wright American Fiction Project, Indiana University Libraries.
Figure 3.2 . One of the beautiful illustrations in The Arch Bishop shows a boy rescuing the Bible that a priest-the Confessor-has cast into the flames over the objections of the boy s father. Courtesy of Wright American Fiction Project, Indiana University Libraries.
Figure 3.3 . St. Peter s school in The Blakes and Flanagans is all piety and innocence, compared to the intrigue and fighting characteristic of the public school.
Figure 6.1 . The heroines of McCorry s novel Mount Benedict gaze longingly back at the convent after their first visit. Courtesy of Wright American Fiction Project, Indiana University Libraries.
Figure 8.1 . McElgun portrays Annie Reilly in church on the morning that she and James O Rourke meet by chance. Courtesy of Wright American Fiction Project, Indiana University Libraries.
Figure 9.1 . In this title page, Sadlier shows Simon O Hare, now a lonely sad, old man retired to Ireland, regretting his past betrayals of his heritage for the sake of worldly goods.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people helped and supported me while I worked on this book. The editors and readers at the University of Notre Dame Press provided useful suggestions and constructive criticisms. At Rutgers University, Professors Mary Segers and Lisa Hull gave encouragement and a teaching schedule that provided the time I needed to complete the research and writing. My friends MaryAnn McInerney, Elaine Joiner, Gloria Peropat, Jan Shapiro, and Susan St. John Parsons helped me celebrate milestones, attended my lectures, and generously offered suggestions. Paula Derrow and my friends Gretchen Dykstra, Judith C. Tate, and Frank McInerney commented extensively and cogently on the content and style of various drafts. Betsy Selman-Babinecz provided invaluable encouragement and advice throughout the process. I also thank my family, Mary and Jerome Meli, Patricia and John Prael, Jeffrey and Elizabeth Meli, Laura Meli and Nick Moons, Kathryn and Marc Dunkelman, Maureen Meli and Kevin Hennessy, Elizabeth Prael and James Magee, who attended my lectures, listened to my latest thoughts and fears, read early drafts, and responded to requests for comments. Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of my parents and to the future of their grandchildren and great grandchildren, Tess, Emilia, Cira, Samantha, Helen, and Mae.
INTRODUCTION
This book is a study of the popular fiction written by and for Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Catholics have always relied on stories, which reach the hearts as well as minds of believers, to explain important truths and to illustrate religious and moral life, as shown in the parables of the Gospels and in the exempla or examples that characterized the sermons of medieval preachers. 1 In resorting to popular novels in the nineteenth century, Catholics were simply continuing that tradition. In England, Cardinals Newman and Wiseman wrote popular novels in these years to reach an audience that might not consult their scholarly works. In America, where Catholic writers began publishing novels in the 1820s, popular fiction became increasingly important as the Catholic population grew rapidly but the official infrastructure of priests, parishes, and schools remained largely undeveloped. Between 1840 and 1870, the number of American Catholics increased from about one million to more than six million, mainly because of Irish immigration. In the ten years after 1845 alone, the Irish doubled the American Catholic population. At the same time, there were only about five hundred priests throughout the country in 1840; the number increased to just over two thousand in 1860 and, indicating the need, approached five thousand by 1875. 2
Irish American writers began to dominate Catholic fiction in 1850, helping to fill the gap caused by the church s weak infrastructure. They directed their fiction to Irish immigrants and their children, clearly assuming that a significant portion of the immigrant population was literate in English and that-in the words of Orestes Brownson, a leading Catholic literary critic and novelist of the time-they demanded a literature that addressed their national tastes and peculiarities. 3
When I began my research a decade ago, I was interested in the popular fiction as a source of information about the experience of Irish immigrants in the years immediately following the great famine. I hoped that the novels would serve as an archive for a study of the values and social circumstances of people who had so few opportunities to speak for themselves. The Irish American authors who wrote the novels were a professional elite, of course, but they sought readers among the large numbers of more typical immigrants. I assumed that to interest those readers and make it possible for them to engage with the novels, the authors would create characters whose lives mirrored those of the immigrants and their children in important respects. This assumption proved correct in many ways. The novels describe the immigrants reasons for leaving their Irish homes; their experiences securing employment in America; and their attitudes toward gender roles. Yet, over the course of my research, it became clear that the Irish American writers were part of a tradition of American Catholic-rather than American Irish-popular literature. They used their novels to persuade readers to see themselves as Irish Catholics, a group that linked religion and ethnicity, gave a particular meaning to both aspects of the identity, and emphasized the boundaries that distinguished them from the rest of American society. The novels are best seen as a public record of a conscious effort to define an identity and make it attractive to readers. 4
To illustrate the role of fiction in shaping Irish Catholic identity, I examined the seven most important Irish Catholic novelists who wrote between 1850 and 1873, focusing on their novels dealing with immigrant life in the United States. 5 (See the selected bibliography for a list of the authors and their novels.) Of the seven novelists, six were men; the one woman, Mary Anne (Madden) Sadlier, was the most prolific and popular. Three of the men-John Roddan, John Boyce, and Hugh Quigley-were priests who attended seminaries in Boston, Ireland, and Rome. The others, Charles James Cannon, Peter McCorry, and John McElgun, as well as Sadlier, were professional writers and journalists. Sadlier was married to James Sadlier of the publishing firm. Five of the writers were Irish immigrants, and two, Roddan and Cannon, were the American-born sons of immigrants. All lived in Boston or New York City except for Quigley, who served in parishes in upstate New York, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
The Irish American novelists were generally well known in their time. They wrote novels located in Ireland as well as America, and thei