The Yankee in Catholic Ireland: Dorothy Gresham’s Dungar Sketches in the Catholic World, 1896–98

Abstract

The Yankee in Catholic Ireland: Dorothy Gresham’s Dungar Sketches in the Catholic World, 1896–98 Marguérite Corporaal (bio) The Catholic World, a periodical founded by the Paulist Fathers in New York in 1865 to cater to a growing Catholic intellectual population, did not specifically address an Irish American readership, but was concerned with Catholicism across the globe. Nonetheless, this monthly periodical published many articles related to Catholicism in Ireland, its North American diaspora, as well as the Irish character and land issues, and not just during its first decade when the Famine generation became socially mobile, but also in the 1890s when—as studies by Charles Fanning and Peter O’Neill show—an Irish American middle class became more visible.1 The Catholic World’s engagement with Ireland becomes clear from various pieces concerned with the history of Irish Catholicism, discussions of Ireland’s land politics and Britain’s rule of the sister isle, Ireland’s industries, the Celtic Revival, as well as travelogues about Ireland’s specific regions.2 An example of the latter is a series of semi-autobiographical sketches by writer Dorothy Gresham, published between August 1896 and April 1898. These sketches focus on the main character’s journey from New York to Dungar, Co. Offaly. Fresh out of school in New York, Dolly travels to see relatives in Ireland she has never visited before. We know next to nothing about the author herself, apart from the fact that she was a regular contributor of fiction to Catholic World, writing stories like “The Delinquents” (July 1896), which addresses religious tensions between communities in Ontario. [End Page 161] The “Dungar” stories appear to have been inspired by the then popular genre of local color fiction, a common genre in the magazine, which aimed to record the traditions, language, and ways of life of a rural community in a specific region,3 and often explored the “the clash between modern and pre- or anti-modern without overly romanticizing or mystifying rural life.”4 Furthermore, scholars like Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have viewed the genre as a tool in the consolidation of shared identities among geographically remote communities.5 This article will explore Gresham’s sketches against the background of the genre’s conventions, while focusing on how these short narratives specifically represent issues of religion and identity formation. “Christmas Day in Dungar” (December 1897) and “The Station Mass” (February 1898), in particular, comment on Irish Catholicism from a US perspective. Furthermore, “Good-By” (April 1898) explores the complex nature of Irish American identity in terms of religious loyalties. The following analyses will investigate religious practice and conflict in Gresham’s “Dungar” tales, in light of concepts such as transnational identity formation and nostalgia. A Past of Religious Persecution That Gresham’s stories tap into the genre of local color fiction is evident from the first episode, “Where the Turf Fires Burn,” published in August 1896. The narrative provides a catalog of local customs such as turf cutting. The greater part of the sketches are, however, devoted to the religious life of the villagers, describing the community’s interaction with the Catholic clergy and mass rituals from the perspective of a Catholic American, the first-person narrator, Dolly. One thing that stands out is the narrator’s recurrent emphasis on Irish Catholics and their past suffering under Ireland’s penal laws, which limited the rights of Catholics. Already when she arrives in Queenstown, Co. Cork (present-day Cobh), Dolly finds that the spires of the Cathedral that “loom above the water” as well as a cross that “shines out over the harbour” are “gloriously suggestive of the trials and victories of those brave children of St. Patrick.”6 “The Station’s Mass,” which describes preparations for mass and confession at a local farmhouse, likewise foregrounds the suffering of Catholics worldwide and specifically in Ireland under the penal laws. The scene of worship is not set in an official church or chapel but a kitchen, just as Catholics during the penal days had to resort to other settings to hold Mass.7 Drawing analogies between the persecution of the first Christians in the Roman empire and the Irish...