Ethnic Competitors in Studs Lonigan

At a public meeting of the "Bug Club," Studs Lonigan and the Fifty-Eighth Street gang learn more about some of the changes happening in their neighborhood. In the wake of the Great Migration of rural blacks to northern industrial centers after World War I, cities like Chicago are experiencing dramatic disruptions. John Connolly, one of the speakers, observes, With their economic rise, the Negroes sought more satisfactory housing conditions. Besides the Black boys were happiest when engaged in the horizontals. That meant an increasing birthrate, and another factor necessitating improved and more extensive domiciles. All these factors ... resulted in a minor racial migration of Negroes into the white residential districts of the south side. Blather couldn't halt the process. Neither could violence and race riots. (408) In Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy, which is populated by many bigots and xenophobes, Connolly's perspective is relatively reasonable. Nevertheless, he plays on a stereotype about black male sexuality to make his ideas about the inevitable demographic changes more credible and familiar to people in the crowd like Studs and his gang who often resort to racist rhetoric themselves. As a staunch patriot, Studs is usually suspicious of "radicals" like Connolly, and he and the gang at first dismiss him as a "nigger lover" (408). Still, Studs admires Connolly for being "big and tough"(409) after he tangles with a heckler and then a policeman. Studs' admiration isn't surprising because much of his own identity is based on a desire to protect his home turf from perceived challengers. Part of Studs' downfall is that he can no longer keep social and cultural boundaries clearly defined as blacks, Jews and others move into the neighborhood. Connolly has both described the demographic pressures facing the Irish-American community ill Studs Lonigan and demonstrated the reflexive bigotry that emerges in the face of such pressures. For Connolly, racism is a rhetorical strategy; for other characters, particularly Studs and his father, racism and ethnic chauvinism are rather desperate means of self-definition and entitlement in the face of a demographic threat. Such intolerance may be abhorrent, but it provides a vocabulary through which the characters can express their frustrations with an economic downward spiral and a general sense of uncertainty about the future. William Shannon points out that one reader has commented of Farrell, "He writes about the people I've spent all my life trying to get away from" (251). Certainly, Studs Lonigan's limited consideration as an ethnic text results, in part, from its unflattering depictions of Irish-Americans.(1) Farrell's characters are sympathetic--the Lonigans are more than capable of genuine compassion--but they also reflect some of the most exclusive and denigrating aspects of American society as a whole. Consequently, the trilogy may not be suited to "celebrating diversity" because it doesn't directly "affirm" ethnic life. Cary Nelson has dubbed the phrase "happy family multiculturalism" to suggests how texts are added to syllabi and course curricula for their affirming messages about ethnic groups. Multiculturalism is often so eager to validate the experiences of groups that have been underepresented in the classroom that ethnic texts are not fully granted the right to be contradictory or to put assimilation in a positive light--this would imply the loss of ethnicity and the text may, therefore, lose its multicultural legitimacy. As Studs Lonigan suggests, however, ethnic identity is rooted in conflict and a give-and-take relationship with the mainstream. Werner Sollors observed a decade ago that "Ethnic writing is equated with parochialism, and ethnic writers who were not parochial are simply classified not as ethnic but as `wholly American'" (243). With the ongoing expansion of the literary canon and the promotion of multiculturalism, ethnic writing has lost much of its "parochial" status, but I would argue we still tend to overplay the distinctions between "ethnic" and "American," particularly the notion that ethnicity is somehow more "authentic," the more it remains isolated from the "mainstream. …