The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 22 (2011)“Povertiresque”: The Representation of
Irish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America

Mikayo SAKUMA*INTRODUCTION
At the end of his novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) Edgar Allan Poe has his shipwrecked victims encounter a mysterious white object: “And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm
threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded
human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men.
And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of thesnow.”1 The whiteness of the eerie figure, unearthly but imminently real,
overwhelms the crew by its power to appeal and appall. But the fear thatwhiteness causes here lies, perhaps, not so much in its apparent strangenessas in its innate familiarity.
Thirteen years after Poe’s novella, Herman Melville also identifies the
fearful qualities of white in Moby-Dick (1851):[Y]et for all these accumulated associations, with whatever sweet, and honorable,
and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of thishue, which strikes more panic to the soul than redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.2
Copyright © 2011 Mikayo Sakuma. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission
from the author.
*Associate Professor, Wayo Women’s University

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These fictional instances, devoid of the “kindly associations” more generally
attached to the color white in Western culture, are considered in this essay aspart of a significant mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American disquietude;
this could be related to the dramatic rise in European emigration to theUnited States and to the subsequent national anxiety reserved for the disproportionate numbers of impoverished immigrants from Catholic Ireland. Unlike deported slaves, these newly arrived immigrants were as white as theAmerican people, but their way of life and culture were not so much similar
as unfathomable. Fear of whiteness caused by the inscrutable existence ofsuch immigrants will be considered in this account as a cultural concomitantto this historic immigration boom.3 Nineteenth-century American journalism
was often vitriolic in its depiction of Irish immigrants, with an emphasis on
this people’s otherness and on their degraded circumstances. This can partly
be explained by the upsurge in nativism,4 which was manifest in the prejudiced stereotyping directed against immigrants and aimed at marking a clear
division between those born in the United States and recent immigrants. The
latter inevitably suffered various disadvantages despite becoming U.S. citizens, and it is a commonplace of mid-nineteenth-century fiction to find poor
immigrants depicted as living below the national standard. Irish Catholicism, with its significant differences from Protestant Christianity, became astandard source of discrimination against Irish immigrants, furthering thenativist agenda of legitimate origin and racial purity.5 Noel Ignatiev records
that Irish immigrants were not considered to be “white,” with their racial origins distorted and replaced by an iconography of otherness, such as in slurs
against their rustic outfits and anomalous religious practices that easily distinguished them from the style of Anglo-Saxon Americans.6 A racial prejudice, not easily based on skin color, placed Irish immigrants as given to fastidious adherence to Catholic religious beliefs and rituals and to a povertystricken lifestyle. The Irish socioeconomic situation, cultural characteristics,
and religious background resulted in an exaggerated stereotype of Irish immigrants that served to consolidate their poverty. Shunned by a conservative
American citizenry, Irish immigrants were forced to rely on the traditional
Gaelic humble way of life that the majority of them had sought to escape inexile from Ireland. Kerby Miller argues that the Irish emigrants tended todefine themselves as involuntary emigrants and to “accept poverty” as “rewarding in nonmaterial ways.”7 The Irish might have been conceived by nature as spiritually rich in their poverty.
An examination of the Irish in the literature of the American Renaissancepredictably results in subtler and distinct representations of Irish poverty. I

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argue here the ambivalence of Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville’s acknowledgment of the oppressed consciousness of the Irish people as stimulating
American culture. Irish poverty threatened America while at the same time
introducing and revitalizing unconventional cultural forms.
I.

IRISH PAUPERISM AND THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

Writers of the American Renaissance varied images of impoverished Irish
immigrants, and their depictions inevitably reflect a general national anxiety
about race and poverty. Irish immigration became a further major context forthe consideration of racial and cultural identity, in turn testing the general
American response to the ongoing upheaval of the construction of the nation’s identity. The transcendentalists assessed the conditions of the poor in
relation to the culture of benevolence. Henry David Thoreau, while living in
New York City, wrote back to Ralph Waldo Emerson in Massachusetts his
impression of Emerson’s depiction of the degenerated condition of the Irish:“The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins
and pigs and children reveling in the genial Concord dirt, and I should stillfind my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.”8
Thomas Woodson points out Thoreau’s sentimentalism, since Thoreau
clearly identifies the Irish as rustics in a Concord pastoral idyll with an assumed superiority in their innocence.9 In Walden Thoreau argues against thewrong application of charity, and then he deals with the tactlessness of thepoor Irishman, John Field:
Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out John Field,with altered mind, letting go “bogging” ere this sunset. But he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string, and he said it was
his luck; but when we changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too. PoorJohn Field! . . . With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor,
with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam’s grandmother and boggy
ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bogtrotting feet get talaria to their Heels.10

Walden often highlights the miserable conditions of the Irish, and the text
is frequently constructed around stereotypical racial images. As such it is notpossible to disregard Thoreau’s principle of simplicity when considering themeaning of poverty in Walden. As he conceives of the happiness of the stubborn “bog-trotting” Irish farmers, their simplemindedness is not so much the

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target of censure as the object of tribute.11
Emerson also noticed the emergence of poverty and began to record a degraded urban scenery. His depiction of contemporary Boston is cited by historian Howard Zinn. Zinn stipulates the problem of the poor in antebellum
America using Emerson’s comment: “There is a certain poor-smell in all thestreets, in Beacon Street and Mount Vernon, as well as in the lawyers’ offices, and the wharves, and the same meanness and sterility, and leave-allhope-behind, as one finds in a boot manufacturer’s premise.”12 Emerson’s
perspective contains not only a reformist’s motives but also his moral belief
expressed in his essay “Nature”: “The misery of man appears like childish
petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been
made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him throughthe heavens.”13 Emerson witnesses the poor as both evidence of the need forreformation of the social system and as a means of reinvigorating the nation’s ethics, as in the aforementioned letter to Thoreau: “Now the humanityof the town suffers with the poor Irish, who receives but sixty, or even fifty
cents, for working from dark till dark, with a strain and a following-up that
reminds of negro-driving.”14 Emerson’s observation duly suggests that poor
Irish immigrants suffered a slippage between their racial identity and a degraded economic condition that blacks endured as well.
In the case of Melville, the image of the Irish was largely based on encounters during his transatlantic experience.15 On visiting England as asailor on a merchant ship, he witnessed the misery of Liverpool, whose circumstances are reflected in his novel, Redburn (1849). It features a mysterious Irishman:[T]ill early one morning, in the gray dawn, when we made Cape Clear, the south
point of Ireland, the apparition of a tall Irishman, in a shabby shirt of bed-ticking,emerged from the fore hatchway, and stood leaning on the rail, looking landwardwith a fixed, reminiscent expression, and diligently scratching its back with both
hands. We all started at the sight, for no one had ever seen the apparition before;
and when we remembered that it must have been burrowing all the passage downin its bunk, the only probable reason of its so manipulating its back became
shockingly obvious.16

The otherworldliness of the figure—the use of the ghostly “apparition” andthe repetition of the dehumanizing “its”—prefigure later descriptions of Irish
immigrants in their obscurity and fearsomeness. Melville’s voyage to England should have given him the traditional American experience of Irelandas the first sight of a foreign land. Wellingborough, the protagonist of Red-“POVERTIRESQUE”

51burn, documents such excitement as follows: “Ireland in sight! A foreigncountry actually visible!” However, this is soon made to descend into disappointment: “I peered hard, but could see nothing but a bluish, cloud-likespot to the northeast. Was that Ireland? Why, there was nothing remarkableabout that; nothing startling. If that’s the way a foreign country looks, I
might as well have staid at home” (Redburn, 124). The bathos continues inthe subsequent impression of Wales, the sight of which recalls the banal, familiar scene of rural New York such as “the Kaatskill Mountains on the
Hudson River” (Redburn, 126). High expectations for foreign countries collapse in the recognition of the similarity between Britain and America, andthe disappointment is especially profound as it occurs even before reliableknowledge and experience can ground it. This intriguing paradox becomes afamiliar but important strain in many of Melville’s travel observations, implying the folly of uncertain negotiation of alien culture in ignorance andcondemnation, while holding back from recognizing cultural prejudice as acontemptible moral form in itself.
After embarking at Liverpool, Wellingborough sees the miserable situation of the poor, the most striking event being the death of a mother and herbabies caused by extreme poverty and public negligence, which parallels thesuffering family of Melville’s later short story, “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”(1853). Poverty and misery rise before him, and, in a later grimly ironic passage, most of the poor are finally identified as Irish, with the United States as
their likely destination and savior:
When I thought of the multitudes of Irish that annually land on the shores of theUnited States and Canada, and, to my surprise, witnessed the additional multitudes embarking from Liverpool to New Holland; and when, added to all this, I
daily saw the hordes of laborers, descending, thick as locusts, upon the English
cornfields; I could not help marveling at the fertility of an island, which, though
her crop of potatoes may fail, never failed in bringing her annual crop of men
into the world. (Redburn, 198–99)

The great potato famine (1845–52) enormously accelerated the migration of
the Irish and exacerbated the problem of poverty because of the low wages
available to immigrants. In contrast to other white immigrants to the UnitedStates, the Irish are singled out in Redburn as strangers. While Wellingborough claims that “our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of athousand noble current all pouring into one,” this leads to a world of diversity not united but fragmented:
Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the lan-

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guage they shall speak be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, andScots; and the dweller on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the regions
round about; Italians, and Indians, and Moors; there shall appear unto them cloven tongues as of fire. (Redburn, 169)

In acknowledging racial as well as cultural diversity, Wellingborough sensed
a visionary amalgamation of races as well as a monocultural force that facilitated “the language of Britain,” a monocultural force that provides a way
to restore fragmentation but also contains the possibility of exclusion.17
The mid-nineteenth century saw a transformation of workers’ conditions,and this change also foreshadowed the stratification of cultures and races according to their economic status. The capitalistic eastern portion of thecountry produced prosperous businessmen who became established throughthe security of property, while the working classes were forced to live in
low-quality temporary housing. Zinn, proposing an American history fromthe view of the common people, has pointed out that “ ‘Jacksonian Democracy’ had tried to create a consensus of support for the system to make it secure,” but that “Blacks, Indians, women, and foreigners were clearly outside
the consensus.”18
Melville’s account of the poor in his later stories may be read as having aradical potential in its humorous representation of humanity enduring poverty while revealing the very real social threat arising from destitute conditions.
In his short story “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” the narrator, who is told about the poor man’s diet, is actually entertained at aneedy family’s table: “The mouthful of pudding now touched my palate, andtouched it with a mouldy, briny taste. The rice, I knew, was of that damaged
sort sold cheap; and the salt from the last year’s pork barrel.”19 Later, thenarrator adds his own heartfelt emotion: “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticism
made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and wellfed” (PT, 296). Melville, encountering various forms of poverty through his
travels and voyages, conceived his own philosophical and aesthetic propositions for the poor, as in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities:
If the grown man of taste, possess not only some eye to detect the picturesque inthe natural landscape, so also, has he as keen a perception of what many not unfitly be here styled, the povertiresque in the social landscape. To such an one, notmore picturesquely conspicuous is the dismantled thatch in a painted cottage ofGainsborough, than the time-tangled and want-thinned locks of a beggar, pover-“POVERTIRESQUE”

53

tiresquely diversifying those snug little cabinet-pictures of the world, which, exquisitely varnished and framed, are hung up in the drawing-room minds of humane men of taste, and amiable philosophers of either the ‘Compensation,’ or‘Optimist’ school.20

Melville’s ambivalence continues in his extension of the concept of thepicturesque from contemporary popular aesthetics to an aesthetics of poverty, a humanist gambit that frees us from any political and social accusationand that is in line with Thoreau’s depiction of spiritually uplifting poverty.21
II.

“NIGGERS TURNED INSIDE OUT”: IRISH IMMIGRANTS
IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

The increasing attention paid to Irish immigrants reflected the radical social and cultural changes of nineteenth-century America and may perhaps
have been based on some more positive feeling, such as a deep-rooted nostalgia for the pastoral life that was an ideal for the people in the new continent. The Irish presence revisited the earliest examples of the pioneer spirit,as they personified the unstable and audacious essence of the American migration movements. In distant and not so distant senses, Ireland was familiar
to the American people, not least through Jonathan Swift’s great anti-British
satire, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which always recalled America’s own political antagonism to England and evoked the triumphant struggle for American independence from British rule. The complex image of Ireland sustainedin the American mind could be congenial as well as opaque and mysterious,
as in Wellingborough’s first impression of an Irishman in Redburn. Ireland
was, to the American people, near as well as far in terms of political circumstance and cultural otherness.
What America was to Great Britain was comparable to what Ireland wasto Great Britain, and, interestingly, even though ethnically and geographically the two countries had few similarities, Ireland appealed to Americans—though at distance. During the beginning of the Westward movement
under the call of Manifest Destiny, plausible justification needed a relevant
historical precursor, and Ireland, which had been conquered by England andhad then been fighting for independence, was a model with double-faced
rhetorical relevance in its rebellious and free spirit. In 1847, during the
Mexican War, Jedediah Auld, Melville’s friend, wrote in his letter to George
Duyckinks and William Allen Butler: “I wish it [the Mexican War] was overfor the sake of humanity and the interest of every section of the country but I

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suppose that a military occupation of the northern portion of Mexico will be
inevitable till we fill it up with the Anglo Saxon & the Saxon stock not forgetting the Gael from old Ireland.”22
Mid-nineteenth-century America faced its first major racial crisis, culminating in the interconnected conflicts surrounding abolitionism and nationalism, which led in due course to the Civil War. In the era of the Mexican War,the transcendentalists were initially opposed to violence. Liberal intellectuals criticized President James K. Polk, who waged a successful but nasty
war, and Emerson cautioned that “devouring Mexico would prove to be likedevouring arsenic—easy to do, but fatal.”23 Imperialistic motives toward
Mexico resulted in outspoken disquietude among literati and their followers,
who throughout the war and in the wake of victory had to undergo virulent
criticism. The war, however, resulted in the acquisition of a vast territory including Nevada, California, Utah, and New Mexico, and much of the newland bore a fortune in natural resources for industrial America. National sentiment was encouraged to acknowledge that the war had been worth winning, as confirmed in the next presidential election, in which the voterschose the Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor. The abolitionists revived themselves and insisted that slavery should not be introduced into the new territories, though some intellectuals agreed that “the United States had the inalienable right to wage wars of conquest.”
Senator Henry S. Foote, who had strongly advocated a war of conquest,
was giving a speech to a large audience in Tammany Hall, and he instanced
England’s history, saying that if the United States did not seize Mexico,England would. An assertive voice from a crowd arose: “If England attempts to annex Mexico, we shall annex Ireland to be even with her.”24 This
provocative remark exploited the received condemnation of the relationshipbetween England and Ireland and extrapolated it to the United States and
Mexico. While some Irish immigrants joined the army in the Mexican War
for and against the United States,25 the vast majority of immigrants came toAmerica because of the potato famine.
For the majority of Americans, the civil disturbance in Ireland was congenial owing to the nation’s self-proclaimed economic and cultural trajectory
away from Great Britain. Nevertheless, the subsequent bitter misfortune ofthe potato famine propelled poor Irish farmers to a situation in the New
World reminiscent of their bitter relations with Britain. In the first wave of
Irish migration, according to Ignatiev, the Irish “were frequently referred toas ‘niggers turned inside out’ ”; they were put in the same category with negroes, whether free or still enslaved, and with whom the Irish might have

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developed a logical sympathy, although in reality they were competing eachother for low wages.26 This created an unpredictable situation, since social
uplift for Irish immigrants, who needed moral recognition “to guarantee
their admittance” to American society, came to be involved in the antislavery movement without mutual appreciation between Irish immigrants andblacks of their exploited status.
The Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell, who had succeeded in getting
equal rights for Irish Catholics, criticized the United States because it stillsustained slavery in spite of the worldwide trend toward emancipation. The
abolitionists manipulated his name as a great supporter of the antislavery
movement and appealed to Irish immigrants to join them. The Irish, however, found themselves in a complex and somewhat indeterminate position
as a result of the social flexibility of their racial status combined with low
economic income and religious differences. This situation, affecting the majority of the Irish diaspora and antagonistic to the socially advanced white
middle-class Anglo-Saxons, has its literary counterpart in the works of Poeand Melville in their anxious representations of indeterminate identity characterized by whiteness, that evokes the problem of new white immigrants
and also reflects the fear of native white Americans threatened by the probable change in their own status.
III.

“POVERTIRESQUE”: POSITIONING IRISH CULTURE IN AMERICA

Along with the major social upheavals that followed the twin forces of
emancipation and industrialization came a new interest in alternative ethnicity. In contrast to the more conservative strictures of nativism, an engaged
response to the national quest for identity emerged with an increased awareness of cultural and genetic origins. However, this progressive situation waspreceded by the violence of the antislavery movement, which was excused
as part of a moral agenda, and by the political and philosophical schisms between the North and the South, which led to a major national conflict, theCivil War and reinforced the structures of local communities and social relations. The latter phenomenon, in particular, promoted a sense of communityand eventually made mainstream American society inaccessible to Irish immigrants who had pressing demands for inclusion.
Herman Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, entered New York’s politicalscene and was influenced by O’Connell’s proclamation of the “Year of Repeal” (1843), a call for independence for Ireland. According to Parker, Gansevoort, like politically conscious young Irishmen, was excited by such an

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agenda, since he himself “could see on the docks that the immigrants from
Ireland were overwhelmed and heartbreakingly young—in their teens, intheir early twenties, the surviving youth of Ireland, sent singly across the
Atlantic, not arriving, like stalwart German immigrants, as intact families.”27
Against the wishes of his family, Gansevoort made speeches on behalf of the
Irish at the Great Repeal Meeting in New York and began to commit himself
to his political ambitions. It is quite possible that Herman pondered the political issues that were common to both Gansevoort’s preoccupations and the“Irish question.” The beginnings of Irish immigration foreshadowed thecountry’s political transformation and the turnabout of the American conception of class and race: from this perspective the growing Irish presence
may be considered as a central anxiety-inducing force within American consciousness.28
In Melville’s imagination, Ireland was symbolically partnered with theUnited States as rebels in a quest for freedom. Yet outside literary symbolism, the partnership was fraught: unlike in Ireland, where Catholics form the
majority of the population, in the United States, Protestantism claimed a
special place in the nation’s origins. When nativists finally became more
powerful in the mid-nineteenth century, they excluded Catholics as an alienand belated people.
In Redburn, the Irish widow who prays on the ship’s deck earns the superstitious dislike of the sailors, who define her through the religion she practices:
Meanwhile, Mrs. O’Brien would be standing on the boatswain’s locker—or ropeand tar-pot pantry in the vessel’s bows—with a large old quarto Bible, black withage, laid before her between the knight-heads and reading aloud to her three
meek little lambs.
The sailors took much pleasure in the deck-tub performances of the O’Regans,and greatly admired them always for their archness and activity; but the tranquil
O’Briens they did not fancy so much. More especially they disliked the grave
matron herself; hooded in rusty black; and they had a bitter grudge against her
book. To that, and the incantations muttered over it, they ascribed the head windsthat haunted us; and Blunt, our Irish cockney, really believed that Mrs. O’Brien
purposely came on deck every morning, in order to secure a foul wind for the
next ensuing twenty-four hours. (Redburn, 268)

Mrs. O’Brien’s Catholicism is conveyed within the Protestant anti-Catholic
convention that ascribes witchcraft and, paradoxically, anti-Christian practice (“incantations,” “haunted”) to Catholicism, a slur finally consummated“POVERTIRESQUE”

57

by the anglicized and culturally alienated Irish sailor Blunt. For the Irish,
who were never to see their homeland again, daily spiritual observance wasa psychological means to recall the physical world now available to them
only as a mental landscape, or as an artistic construct, as exemplified by the
Gaelic poets of long ago who chanted of Ireland’s “vivid green field, thebrown and purple shades of its mountains.”29
However, it was to be generations before Ireland’s mental landscapes
were absorbed into mainstream American culture, and, in the meantime, theunfamiliar practices of Catholic Christianity contributed to the social dislocation of the growing Irish diaspora. Indeed, the Irish immigrants can beproposed as the major post-Revolution disturbance to the burgeoning nativist American consciousness, despite their unique overall trajectory fromominous poverty and exclusion to centralized social integration and importance in cultural revitalization.
This confused and complex progress was behind the ambivalence andparadox of transcendentalist aphorisms in praise of poverty, as in the witty
punning in Walden: “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.” Interestingly enough, Thoreau’s poor people are, in most cases, Irish immigrants,
and he depicts them using two conventional methods for endowing carefreerusticity on humanity: praising their simplicity, or caricaturing them as having endearing childishness.
Similarly, Melville extends his aesthetic of “povertiresque” in the Piazza
Tales, a collection of short stories that originally appeared in magazines suchas Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, a publication appealing specifically to the
middle classes, and which contains “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” a humorous account of Irish poverty by an anonymous narrator who lives somewhere in
New England:
I can’t pay this horrid man; and they say money was never so plentiful—a drug inthe market; but blame me if I can get any of the drug, though there never was asick man more in need of that particular sort of medicine. It’s a lie; money ain’t
plenty—feel of my pocket. Ha! Here’s a powder I was going to send to the sickbaby in yonder hovel, where the Irish ditcher lives. That baby has the scarlet fever. They say the measles are rife in the country too, and the varioloid, and thechicken-pox, and it’s bad for teething children. And after all, I suppose many ofthe poor little ones, after going through all this trouble, snap off short; and sothey had the measles, mumps croups, scarlet-fever, chicken-pox, cholera-morbus,
summer-complaint, and all else, in vain! (PT, 270)

Poverty and the Irish are established as congruent issues, and Melville

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consolidates a literary tradition of stereotyping poverty. However, it is worth
noting that here and throughout his short story, material destitution is raised
to a condition of spiritual affluence and granted a hyperbolic divinity. The
eccentric poverty-stricken hero, Merrymusk, lives in a miserable hut withhis family, all of whom suffer from various ailments associated with thepoor. Merrymusk is not specified as Irish, but this is implied in the narrator’sbelief that he originates from Maryland where many Catholic immigrants
had dwelled since the time of colonization. The thematic trope of the pauper’s inner affluence is maintained in the cock, which, in the presence of indigence, has acquired the mythical attributes of a singing chanticleer fromthe narrator addressing the farmyard animal as “the Signor Beneventano”
after the famed opera singer. The narrator is turned down by Merrymusk in
his offer to buy the cock, despite his poverty:“Just the import I first ascribed to his crow, Merrymusk, when first I heard it frommy hill. I thought some rich nabob owned some costly Shanghai; little weening
any such poor man as you owned this lusty cock of a domestic breed.”“Poor man like me? Why call me poor? Don’t the cock I own glorify this otherwise inglorious, lean, lantern-jawed land? Didn’t my cock encourage you? And I
give you all this glorification away gratis. I am a great philanthropist. I am a rich
man—a very rich man, and a very happy one. Crow, Trumpet.” (PT, 286)

Merrymusk’s defiance has the increasing American affluence of industrialization as its context and alludes to the emergence of the new rich and thecult of charity and philanthropy. Charity was not only given to alleviate thesuffering of the poor but also to assuage the consciences of the rich, whowere eager to be reassured of their own spiritual well-being. Susan Ryan, in
her examination of the culture of benevolence, concludes that “[a]ntebellum
charity texts, from the conventional to the radical, revealed that benevolent
projects were always in some sense about power and its pleasure—thepower to give or to withhold, to identify the needy and the deserving, to alter
the distribution of comfort and pain within American society.”30 Ryan’s perception can be extended to include and consider those on the receiving endof the randomly distributed benevolence. Merrymusk’s logic incisively subverts the relationship between the poor and the rich, as the narrator’s sureties
are opposed in divulging the irony of Merrymusk’s peculiar and unexpectedphilosophy. In the narrator’s admiration for the exotic animal, an alternativeof poverty emerges as the enchantment of foreign culture. Through his familiarity with the Italian opera singer, the patronizing narrator cannot predict the truth of the animal’s more mundane domestic origins. As Merry-

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musk himself says, “I chipped the shell here. I raised it.”
Melville suggests that an internalization or naturalization of foreign culture is enacted. However, with Melville ambivalently maintaining the fastidious distance of a connoisseur, we could define his new perception ofpoverty as a culture of poverty in which the narrator appreciates but suspends any judgment about the force of a subordinate and alien people. The
elements of mischief and masquerade in the name Merrymusk might be readas hinting at deception and accommodating the charge of racial condemnation of a character of putative Irish descent. Conversely, just as Merrymusk
prefigures the prospering Irish immigrant who will climb the ladder of success in America, his representation prepares the reader for a multiculturalsociety in which each culture will be on a road to equal consideration. At the
beginning of the tale, Melville posits the narrator as a typical follower of benevolence with an urgency to help the poor, although he himself suffersfrom the casualties of locomotives, steamers, mortgages, and creditors. Indeed, he too has been collectively victimized by economic expansion. Without having any means to help the poor family other than through his benevolent frame of mind, the narrator witnesses the death of Merrymusk fromputative malnutrition, with the cock crowing to give the last blessing to theremaining family whose deaths are also imminent. The ethereal exuberant
sound has a redemptive effect that leads to the children’s transfiguration:
The pallor of the children was changed to radiance. Their faces shone celestiallythrough grime and dirt. They seemed children of emperors and kings, disguised.
The cock sprang upon their bed, shook himself, and crowed, and crowed again,
and still and still again. He seemed bent upon crowing the souls of the children
out of their wasted bodies. He seemed bent upon rejoicing instanter this wholefamily in the upper air. (PT, 287–88)

The narrator profits emotionally from his goodwill, and the benevolent
code of antebellum society is finally congratulated:
The wood-sawyer and his family, with the Signor Beneventano, lie in that spot;
and I buried them, and planted the stone, which was a stone made to order; andnever since then have I felt the doleful dumps, but under all circumstances crowlate and early with a continual crow.
Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!—Oo!—Oo!—Oo! (PT, 288)

Ultimately, the poor family is glorified and transfigured in place of thebenefactor, and in the universal stress of economic change, the narrator is inturn oppressed by his failure to sustain his own welfare. In a final trium-

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phant irony, his salvation comes from the poor whose sufferings are greaterthan his own. As Melville’s “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” foresightedly suggests,social positioning was far from rigidly prescribed, but was instead dependent on arbitrary political and economic factors.
CONCLUSION
During the Civil War, Irishmen found themselves elevated to “white” status, in most cases prior to improving their conditions of poverty. The transformation of the situation, however, was not caused by an upsurge of Irish
nationalism. Nor did the Irish immigrants suffer the racialist extremities ofextermination like Indians or slavery like blacks. Irish immigration can inpart be examined through the complexities of white intercultural encounter,and through the socioeconomic construction of racial stereotypes.31 Nativism’s negative image of Irish immigrants—poor, rustic, and weird—is bothpreserved and countermanded in the textual ironies of Melville and Thoreau.
Irish immigrants’ way of life could be viewed as having a multiculturalvalue caused by the subversion of cultural values. Their representations of
the poor interrogate the economic exclusionism affecting all racial and cultural minorities in antebellum America and foreshadow the multiculturalawareness of the next century.
NOTES
1Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Penguin
Books, 1982), 882.
2
Herman, Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, Vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville,ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), 189.
3
See Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics
of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3. Anbinder explains the Irish immigration boom: “From 1845 to 1854, some 2,900,000 immigrants landed in United States,
more than had come in the seven previous decades combined” (3). Beginning with the problem of Irish immigrants, he explores the intricacy of nativism and the antislavery movement.
4
Ibid., x–xi. Anti-immigrant sentiment enhanced the popularity of the Know Nothing
movement that was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic.
5
Ibid., xiii. Anbinder explains anti-Catholicism and points out: “The depth of anti-Catholic
sentiment in the United States forms a second theme of this study. . . . Many in nineteenthcentury America believed that Protestantism was responsible for the freedom and prosperity
that the nation’s inhabitants enjoyed. Conversely, Catholicism seemed hostile to everything
they valued.”
6
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8–38. Ignatiev
has analyzed the change in racial positioning of the Irish immigrants in terms of politics innineteenth-century America. His theme is, as his title indicates, “how the Irish became

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white.” Peter Quinn rejects Ignatiev’s premise and proposes instead the thesis: “how the Irish
stayed Irish” (682). Peter Quinn, “The Future of Irish America,” in Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, ed. J. J. Lee and Marion Casey(New York: New York University Press, 2006), 682.
7
Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1985), 132. Miller explains the Irish exodus and points out
the characteristics of the Irish emigrants: “Among the Irish-speaking peasantry, and many
whose families had recently abandoned the old language but not the worldview it expressed,
their culture’s emphasis upon stasis combined with the inertia of accepted poverty to restrain
emigration from self-sufficient, traditional communities where life was tolerable, even rewarding in nonmaterial ways” (132).
8
Henry David Thoreau, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding
and Carol Bode (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 146.
9
Thomas Woodson, “Thoreau on Poverty and Magnanimity,” PMLA 85 (1970): 21.
10
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden; or Life in
the Woods; The Main Woods; Cape Cod, ed. Robert F. Sayere (New York: Library of America, 1985), 489.
11
Woodson, “Thoreau on Poverty and Magnanimity,” 34. Although Woodson admits Thoreau’s limitation by pointing out his tendency toward mythopoetic perception rather than realistic notions, he concludes: “We should judge the aesthetic achievement of his magnanimity, and the aesthetic shortcomings as well.”
12
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 221.
13
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, ed. Robert
E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 221.
14
Woodson, “Thoreau on Poverty and Magnanimity,” 21.
15
See Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence inMelville’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980). Karcher argues
that Melville’s treatment of the victims of oppression and his strong social critique were nurtured by his experience as a seaman. See also Katsunori Takeuchi, “Melville ni okeru Yooroppian Innpakuto: Airisshu Iminn to Aidealizumu no Kaitai” [The European impact in Melville: Irish immigrants and the fall of idealism], Kakenhoukokusho 2008–2010 [Report ofresearch results of the grant-in-aid 2008–2010], http://mstudio.kuas.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/
moodle/. Takeuchi discusses the meaning of Melville’s Irish immigrants in a European context and elucidates the politics of nation and race.
16
Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, vol. 4 of The Writings of Herman Melville,ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago:Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1969), 111. Further citations of thiswork are given in the text.
17
See Timothy Powell, Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American
Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. Powell, trying to reconfigure the American Renaissance, describes the cultural aporia as “the seemingly unresolvableconflict between the multicultural history of the country and the violent will to monoculturalism that prevents the nation from coming to psychological terms with its own ethnic diversity”(4).
18
Zinn, People’s History, 221.
19
Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 295. Further references to this book are cited parenthetically in the text as PT.

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20
Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, vol. 7 of The Writings of Herman Melville,ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), 276–77.
21
See Woodson “Thoreau on Poverty and Magnanimity,” 22. Woodson argues that “moreoften in Walden, Thoreau gives ‘poverty’ a positive, creative meaning.”
22
Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 1, 1819–1851 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996), 535. Parker explores the Melvilles’ relation to the Mexican
War.
23
Barbara Packer, “Emerson, Thomas Cary, and the Mexican War,” Emerson Society Papers
19 (2008): 6.
24
Parker, Herman Melville, vol. 1, 581.
25
See Marc Cramer, “The Fighting Irish of Mexico,” Americas 48 (1996): 8–28. Cramer
discusses the Irish in the Mexican War: General Zachary Taylor “drew many of his enlisted
men from the ranks of immigrants, often impoverished Irish Catholics.” However, interestingly, one of them fled to Mexico and formed a troop called the Saint Patrick Battalion thatmany Catholic Irish immigrants joined. After the defeat of Mexico, they were sentenced todeath (22–27).
26
Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 49. Ignatiev describes the condition of the Irish:“In early years Irish were frequently referred to as ‘niggers turned inside out’; the Negroes,
for their part, were sometimes called ‘smoked Irish,’ an appellation they must have found no
more flattering than it was intended to be” (49).
27
Parker, Herman Melville, vol. 1, 318.
28
See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Irish,” in Making the Irish, 476. Moynihan surveys
the change around the Irish in the nineteenth century and calls it “the green wave.” He notesthat “by 1855, 34 percent of the city voters were Irish. By 1890, when 80 percent of New
York City was of foreign parentage, a third of these (409,924 persons of 1,215,463) wereIrish, making more than a quarter of the total population” (476).
29
Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 9.
30
Susan Ryan, “Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence,” American Literary
History 12 (2000): 685–712. Ryan explicates Melville’s stories in the light of charity society
and racial identity in antebellum America.
31
See Linda Dowing Almeida, “Irish America, 1940–2000,” in Making the Irish, 553.
“Around the phenomenal growth and visibility of St. Patrick’s Day parades across the country in the twentieth century was the transformation of March 17th, from a civic and religious
celebration of ethnicity into a secular and commercial holiday in the American calendar.”