Thoreau's "The Shipwreck" (1855): Famine Narratives and the Female Embodiment of Catastrophe

American history books, and, American literature in general, have until very recently reflected a less-than-distinct sense of the Irish Famine.¹ In part, the American reluctance to deal with the Famine may be tied to the fact that the displaced Irish who arrived at United States ports, or who came down later from the St. Lawrence region, arrived in a nation flushed with expansionist optimism; "Manifest Destiny" was a popular new usage in the 1840s. The medieval horrors of the Famine were deeply in conflict with the rugged excitements of a youthful American republic.² Texas statehood, the war with Mexico, and United States' claims in Oregon, preoccupied the press in the mid-1840s.

The squalor of the Great Famine, on the other hand, manifested nature in brute form, the very thing Americans were determined to overcome; and the abjection brought to the fore by the Famine embarrassingly clashed with the ideology of a quaint rural Ireland to which the American Irish themselves often clung, and which they wished to perpetuate—rather than being viewed as part of what Emma Lazarus would later term the world's "huddled masses." Only decades after the occurrence did the Famine become established as the defining Irish-American cultural memory. The Famine, and the emigration experience that was an extension of it, were thus never admitted through the front door into American literature; rather, when the tragedy can be found at all in American letters, it takes place on the fringes. Further, if—as Margaret Kelleher persuasively maintains in her influential The Feminization of Famine—"famine" recalls the feminine and maternal, then the Irish Famine would have been even more at odds with America's masculine expansionist narrative. The Famine's relegation to the background of American literature may also reflect the pervasive kind of reticence that has prevailed in British and, to some extent, in Irish literature as well; the pestilence and accompanying admission of a radical social-structural failure involved in discussing the Famine were "unspeakable," Kelleher notes, broaching the Lacanian pas tout: the point of impossibility in any system.³

Nonetheless, the Famine figures implicitly in many American literary works, and its presence may finally be greater than has been noticed. It is no stretch, surely, to read Walt Whitman's lines in his poem "Old Ireland" (1861), which portray Ireland "crouching over a grave an ancient sorrowful mother," as a reference to the Irish calamity of merely a decade earlier.⁴ Even Liam O'Flaherty's 1934 novel Famine—one of Irish literature's few direct, intensive treatments of An Gorta Mór—gestures, as Kelleher notes, "to Irish-American readers, a community for whom the Famine had become a charter-myth, and who, from the novel's first publication, represented a significant part of O'Flaherty's audience."⁵ Thomas Flanagan similarly remarks that John Ford's Grapes of Wrath (1940) has been called the director's most "Irish" film, and that Ford himself—to whom O'Flaherty dedicated the novel Famine—said of the film that the story was "similar to the Famine in Ireland when they threw the people off the land and left them wandering on the roads to starve—part of the Irish tradition."⁶ Jack Conroy's proletarian novel The Disinherited (1933) likewise bears clear traces of Irish ethnic memory and extends the famine narrative, and its implications, into American space—as does, certainly, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1956).

What may be perhaps the earliest work in this tradition, however, can be found in the midst of the New England literary efflorescence of the 1850s. Famine immigration to the United States coincided precisely with the rise of Transcendentalism and the literary outpouring of the American Renaissance that peaked between 1850 and 1855—years that saw the publication of such classic texts as TheScarletLetter, Moby-Dick, Walden, and Leaves of Grass. Literary reflections of the new Irish presence in New England during this time are notoriously negative, and often mean-spirited, right up until Sarah Orne Jewett's [End Page...