“Still an Ardent American”: Race and Miscegenation in Louise Imogen Guiney’s “Civil War” Stories

In 1897, the Irish American scholar and poet Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920) included a piece called “On the Ethics of Descent” in her rather eccentrically titled essay collection Patrins: To Which Is Added An Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts of His Late Majesty King Charles the Second. In the essay, Guiney responds to the deeply contradictory attitudes about race and ethnic identity circulating in the United States in the late nineteenth century. At the time, a popular belief in the race sciences fixed and ranked racial groups on a hierarchy of most-to-least civilized. There was also, simultaneously, a growing belief that race was achieved and acquired.¹ Jim Crow legislation, the growth of United States imperialism, and the massive “second wave” of European immigration, comprising primarily Southern and Eastern Europeans, fostered anxieties about racial and ethnic affiliation. The essential racial differences of the “new immigrants,” in particular, became the matter of much public and scientific discourse.² “On the Ethics of Descent” contributed to the debate by rejecting “the science of heraldry” that “exists but to commemorate some personal contact with marvels, and a generative occasion without which the race would not be itself.” Guiney troubles her contemporary culture’s faith in the race sciences, stating that there is

more of superstition than of science in this mode of reckoning: it has no great philosophic bearing, and it is very illiberal. The truth is, we belong, from the beginning, to many masters, and are unspeakably beholden to the forming hands of the phenomena of the universe, rather than to the ties of blood.³

“On the Ethics of Descent” disputes the notion that individuals are defined strictly by bloodlines; it suggests, instead, that “unacknowledged” accidents of the past shape individuals’ lives and actions in important ways. Guiney insists that individual identities are more complicated than any genealogical study or racial pedigree can convey.

The essay’s explicit challenge to the “science” of scientific racism is fascinating because it runs counter to the racial implications of many of the Irish-themed texts, for which the author is best known. Guiney’s biographical sketch of Robert Emmet, the essay “Irish,” and her introduction to the poems of James Clarence Mangan depict romanticized notions of Ireland and link Irishness to martyrdom and heroic failure. These texts fit squarely in the tradition of what Charles Fanning has termed “American Celticism” and they celebrate the Celtic ideal that characterized the Celt as full of “piercing regret,” passion, and “doomed bravery.”⁴ This Irish American brand of Irish cultural nationalism expressed a form of “race pride,” and the highly stereotypical notions of Irishness represented in Guiney’s Irish materials imply a sense of “race” that—in stark contrast to the content of “On the Ethics of Descent”—is fixed, knowable, and innate. To borrow from the present-day scholar of American ethnicity Werner Sollors, “On the Ethics of Descent” challenges the “descent” notions of identity that are foundational to Guiney’s Irish texts.⁵ These competing attitudes toward “race” in her writings bring attention to an understudied dimension of Guiney’s writings; considering her work in this light creates an opportunity to re-evaluate her rarely read short stories—where she mobilizes the conventions of American Celticism to give fictional representation to the attitudes expressed in “On the Ethics of Descent.”

As the daughter of Irish immigrants, Guiney was influenced by and participated in Irish American, Boston Brahmin, and transatlantic literary cultures of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Although she eventually expatriated to England in 1901—a move that often has been interpreted as an act of escapism—she wrote for John Boyle O’Reilly’s Boston Pilot, and maintained an affinity for the conventions of American Celticism, throughout her life.⁶ To more closely examine the representations of race and ethnicity in Guiney’s work, it is helpful to first highlight the specifically masculine nature that Irish race pride took in the prose of her early mentor, O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s little...