History Repeating Itself:Men, Masculinities, and "His Story" in the Fiction of Micheál Ó Conghaile Sorcha de Brún (bio) The status of Irish as a minority language and recognition of its broken and often traumatized past give it a distinctly alive, almost virtual sense of reality in contemporary Irish-language letters. This recognition prompts the feeling that, in language as in life, in the words of the poem by Seamus Heaney, "Anything can happen, the tallest things … / Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded" (10). Yet despite its minority status the Irish language is far from overlooked: Irish, or an Ghaeilge, is a feminine noun, and thus it should come as no surprise that in contemporary Irish criticism the female experience and the feminine—in terms of both writers and characters—have been the subject of exploration. To be sure, a number of Irish-language women prose writers and dramatists who began publishing in the 1950s and 1960s have not yet received the critical attention that their works deserve, and this absence of critical attention is all the more striking in an era of Irish-language feminist criticism.1 Nevertheless, writing in 2005, Brian Ó Conchubhair ("Novel in Irish" 227) noted that in the period since 1984 "a little improvement has occurred" with regard to a greater [End Page 17] proliferation of women fiction writers in Irish. Since the publication of his essay the "improvement" mentioned has continued, and there are increasing numbers of women fiction writers in Irish. For all of this slow-growing visibility of female writers in Irish, however, the fact remains that the majority of contemporary Irish-language fiction writers active since the 1980s—in particular, novelists from Irish-speaking regions—have been male. More importantly in the context of this essay and masculinities studies, the writing of these individuals has focused to a large extent on the male subject, on men's life experiences, on their interactions with women, and on various expressions and themes related to masculinity. Among contemporary Gaeltacht fiction writers who explore different versions of masculinity and the male subject, one finds works by Micheál Ó Conghaile, Pádraig Ó Cíobháin, Joe Steve Ó Neachtain, Pádraig Standún, and Pádraig Breathnach. Yet apart from Sarah McKibben's comprehensive study of masculinities in bardic poetry, Endangered Masculinities in Irish Poetry, 1540–1780 (2010), there have been no critical studies of masculinities in contemporary Irish-language prose writing. This absence of criticism contrasts with interdisciplinary critical studies by scholars on Irish masculinities in English-language literature and culture in Ireland (Magennis and Mullan 2011). For instance, Debbie Ging (2013) has carried out critical research on masculinities in Irish cinema, and Brian Singleton (2011) has done work on masculinities in the contemporary Irish theatre. The dearth of critical work on masculinities in Irish-language literature also stands in contrast to critical studies carried out internationally on both the male-authored novel, such as Alice Ferrebe's 2005 study, Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000, and on masculinities and men in other genres. The writer and scholar Alan Titley ("Saol is A Thuistí" 329) has described much of the feminist critique of Irish-language literature that took place in the 1990s and its focus on the dearth of female prose writers in Irish as concerning itself with "cad-nach-bhfuil-ann" (that which does not exist). It is highly contestable whether the dearth of female prose writers in Irish precludes examination and debate about the subject or discussion as to the possible reasons for the lack of female authors. Nevertheless, differences in the representations of men and women in Irish literature have prompted comment in other [End Page 18] studies. For example, Máirín Nic Eoin and Aisling Ní Dhonnchadha (12) noted in 2008 in a study of emigration in Irish-language literature that there was a marked difference between the portrayals of women's and men's experiences of emigration in modern Irish literature: "Tá sé suimiúil freisin go dtagann léiriú na litríochta le fianaise na staire a dhearbhaíonn nárbh ionann meon na mban agus meon na bhfear i dtaobh na...

This thesis will commence by setting the background to the Saintes, in the Caribbean and in London, and will then describe the battle in outline. Chapter Two traces the newspaper coverage of the Saintes and the ensuing celebrations, and provides further political context to assist with the analysis of the interplay between the imperial and local news in England and in Ireland. The final chapter seeks to resolve the apparent paradox which emerged in the reporting and celebrations of the Saintes in Ireland, which enthusiastically celebrated the imperial victory, whilst simultaneously celebrating Dublin’s legislative independence from Westminster. In order to fully assess the impact of the imperial news in Ireland, the third chapter includes an assessment of the information networks at play in the transmission of the news, and the mediating role of the press; and finally, places the reporting of the Saintes in the context of the recent historiography of patriotism in eighteenth-century Ireland.

In the flows and connections that are central to transnational studies, language is a conduit
\nthat facilitates transfers; it allows for the movement of ideas and people across national and
\nlinguistic boundaries. In the case of transnational Irish studies, foreign languages have been
\nboth bridges and barriers: bridges in that they allow access and interaction with nonAnglophone worlds, but also barriers because Irish Studies has generally shied away from
\nnon-English-language investigations. The degree to which transnational Irish Studies has
\nremained Anglophone, even when purporting to be global in nature, is striking.
\n1
\nIrish
\ninteractions with Australia, America, Canada, and Britain have, for obvious reasons,
\ndominated Irish transnational studies, while connections with European and non-Anglophone
\ncountries have historically received little attention.2
\nIn this article I wish to examine
\nexchanges outside of the English-language domain in nineteenth-century Ireland in order to
\nhighlight important alternative dialogues that existed beyond the dominant English narrative.
\nTo illustrate these trends, I will use two case studies of multilingual Irish transnationalism
\nfrom the nineteenth century. The first focuses on translation activity, and the second
\ninvestigates the study of modern foreign languages in this period. Both will serve to illustrate
\nthe currents and circuits between Ireland and Europe that existed in the period and offer new perspectives on an Irish transnationalism that traverses not just national but also linguistic
\nborders.

Transnationalism, Ireland, and The Bell Niall Carson (bio) The relationship between the transnational writer, the national canon, and a “world literature” has particular implications for the study of Irish literature in the twentieth century. There are many good reasons to think more transnationally about Irish literature. While Irish historians and Irish-language scholars have begun to do so in earnest, it is arguable that the study of Irish literature lags behind in this respect.1 The nation-state remains the principal lens through which we study Irish literature.2 The seminal text in this respect has been Seamus Deane’s three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, published at a time when the concept of the nation-state had already been drawn into question.3 Such was the centrality of national identity in defining the scope of Deane’s work that other important social classifications, most notably gender, were omitted from the first three volumes—an omission that would have to be rectified in two subsequent [End Page 171] editions. Although Deane’s work did much to reclaim what could be considered Irish writing, using nationality as a marker is not without its pitfalls. If recent scholarship has helped to reclaim Irishness as central to Samuel Beckett’s writing from internationalist and modernist readings, other critics have been quick to point out the difficulty in pigeonholing authors within any restrictive categorical definitions.4 The transnational could expose a fruitful seam for Irish literary studies to explore, and there are several examples of scholars choosing to approach the work of first- and second-generation Irish writers in a more globalized, transatlantic, or archipelagic context.5 By prioritizing the flow of ideas, attitudes, and cultures over and above those of individuals or of power relationships, transnational literary studies can help to show how artistic production itself is “constructed in the movement between places, sites, and regions.”6 Such a methodology within literary studies need not eschew traditional methods of analysis nor deny the importance of national, gender, or identity politics within a writer’s work. Rather, it is a question of emphasis, a focus on examining the liminal, the gaps, and the transitions within literature in order to paint a broader picture of the ways in which writers and artists have engaged with the world of their time. Seen in this light, Ireland is not just an island on the periphery of Europe and outside the metropolises of London or Paris. Instead, Ireland becomes the center of exchange in a nexus of ideas and texts—one of many nodes in a transnational interchange of artistic expression. Perhaps one of the most obvious ways in which the transnational in Irish literature can be examined is through the burgeoning area of periodical studies. Literary periodicals, or little magazines, are transnational in composition and identity by their very definition. [End Page 172] They are often “worldly” in their outlook, co-created by writers from across the globe, and engaged in debates around art and culture that traverse national boundaries; they offer the ideal format for study of the transnational within Irish literature. The literary magazine has seen a rise in scholarly interest in both Britain and America that has culminated in some substantial contributions to transnational literary studies.7 The scrutiny of Irish literary periodicals has also developed considerably in the previous two decades, and periodical culture itself has become a subject for serious academic debate.8 Ireland’s place in this history, however, remains relatively underexplored. This essay will discuss the Irish literary magazine The Bell (1940–54) in order to trace the transnational element within Irish letters and to show the current of ideas, writers, and debates that flowed across borders within this publication. In doing so, it will focus on the work of its first editor Sean O’Faolain, who set the tone of the magazine as aspiring to the highest global standards and who gave it, in Peadar O’Donnell’s memorable phrase, its “recognisable gait of going.”9 That magazines such as Cyril Connolly’s Horizon (1940–49) would rely on Irish authors such as Louis MacNeice, or that O’Faolain’s first successful venture in fiction would...

Masculinity and Nationhood in the East Clare By-Election, 1917 Aidan Beatty (bio) Eamon de Valera won his first electoral victory in East Clare in July 1917. With the wave of executions that followed the Rising, the future taoiseach had already become, almost by default, one of the highest-ranking survivors of Easter 1916. Found guilty of treason, de Valera spent just over a year in various prisons before being released as part of an amnesty in June 1917. His release roughly coincided with the death on 7 June of Willie Redmond, an officer in the Royal Irish Regiment, the brother of John Redmond and the sitting MP for East Clare. The major’s death provided a welcome political opportunity for the reemergent Sinn Féin. With a suspiciously convenient dramatic flair, Robert Brennan, who would later help de Valera found the Irish Press, recalled that as they left Pentonville Prison together on 15 June 1917, “Dev was handed a telegram. It was an invitation to him to contest the East Clare vacancy.”1 In fact, there is some evidence that both Arthur Griffith and Eoin MacNeill had been initially considered, until it was decided that “a Clare man” would be a more suitable candidate. And even then there was some further deliberation before de Valera was agreed upon: Paddy Brennan, a local republican and member of the IRB, was considered; his brother Michael Brennan did not mention this possible candidacy in his memoirs but remembered much strife over the decision. MacNeill was favored by the clergy and by older voters in Clare, but he was distrusted by the Volunteers because of his actions before the Rising. De Valera appears to have been something of a compromise candidate.2 [End Page 141] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Vote for de Valera and the Road to Freedom. Election Poster, 1917, Librarian’s Office, P116. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. [End Page 142] On his release from prison de Valera arrived to a warm reception in Dublin. He then traveled to Limerick, where he courted the support of Edward O’Dwyer, the bishop of Limerick and an important regional and national voice; as Tim Pat Coogan has observed, “deValera knew which side his ecclesiastical bread was buttered on.”3 With episcopal support secured, de Valera visited family and friends in Bruree before moving on to East Clare.4 His electoral opponent there was Patrick Lynch, a king’s counsel backed by the twin forces of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and his well-appointed Clare family. The vote took place on 11 July 1917, with de Valera winning by the strong margin of 5,010 votes to 2,035.5 Voters, Robert Brennan claimed, saw in de Valera a “leader” and “Clare and all Ireland had found a champion worthy of the race. The people of Clare gave this young man, hitherto unknown to them, five thousand votes and only two thousand for his opponent, a well-liked local man whom they had known all their lives.”6 In his biography of “The Man Who Was Ireland,” Coogan provided an almost erotically charged account of the de Valera who came to prominence in the summer of 1917: “Physically, he showed ‘a new rigidity about his mouth and a different thrust of the chin, though he still looked the teacher and scholar. He was clean shaven, his hair was prison-cut like the “croppy boys” of 1798, his skin roughened and sallow.’ He was the embodiment of the legends of 1916, the man the surging crowds wanted to see, to touch, to sing about.”7 The victory of de Valera was imagined as the victory of a resurgent and soon to be independent Ireland. The East Clare election has long been recognized as an important moment in Irish politics: “The political initiative, almost overnight, had passed into the hands of the opponents of the Irish Parliamentary Party,” declared de Valera’s official biographers Pakenham and [End Page 143] O’Neill.8 Moreover, the imagery and tropes used on this occasion would come to dominate Sinn Féin iconography during the War of Independence. This article...

Irish Incognitos:Transnational Mobility in the National Tales of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson Karen Steele (bio) Irish novelists Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) and Sydney Owenson (1783?–1859) have enjoyed renewed critical attention in the last decade, largely stemming from each author's contribution to Ireland's signature genre, the national tale. Simultaneously a minor fictional form and a major cultural response to the Act of Union (1800), the national tales of Edgeworth and Owenson are also responsive to languages, cultures, and nations beyond Irish shores. Given the heightened scholarly attention to the two authors' initial forays in the genre—Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806)—it is easy to forget this international focus, as well as how their early examples both display and disturb preconceived notions of an "authentic" Ireland for British readers beginning to reacquaint themselves with a neighboring island. Although critics of the national tale have noted the genre's "explicit response to the Irish tour" and its affinity to travel writing, comparatively little attention has been directed to this narrative focus or to the significance of native Irish, rather than English or Anglo-Irish, travelers in these works.1 Nineteenth-century travel writers, in Mary Louise Pratt's words, imparted "a sense of ownership, entitlement, and familiarity" with respect to new landscapes and cultures (3). But mobile Irish protagonists perform quite differently and convey a distinctive message about travelers and their place in the world. Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth's satirical [End Page 94] tale "The Irish Incognito," the penultimate chapter of An Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), illuminates the significance of Irish mobility in the national tale by introducing a persistent motif that captures the unstable, composite, and provisional state of Irishness following the Act of Union. Examining "The Irish Incognito"; Edgeworth's last Irish work, Ormond (1817); and Owenson's O'Donnel (1814), this essay argues that mobile Irish characters ("Irish incognitos") remind readers of the incomplete business of unification. Irish characters' orality—vocal mimicry, singing, adaptive accents, and multilingualism—serves as a marker of their mobility. Yet instead of reinforcing stereotypes (whether positive or negative) of the Celt, such characters contribute to a composite portrait of Irish men and women as cosmopolitan citizens of the world. The life choices and travel patterns of Edgeworth and Owenson undoubtedly influenced their shared interest in such figures. Although deeply concerned with Ireland and its history in distinctive ways, both were also active participants in British and Continental culture. Edgeworth translated the writings of Mme de Genlis, traveled, and met intellectuals and educationalists on her visits to France and Switzerland.2 She also privately experimented with travel writing by penning a version of the home tour in A Tour in Connemara (1833–34, first published in 1950).3 Owenson traveled much more extensively throughout the Continent and published three book-length travel narratives that generated both controversy and lucrative publicity for her writings by revealing her liberal sympathies.4 Edgeworth's and Owenson's gender, moreover, helps to explain why two contemporary authors characterized by such different styles and politics would gravitate to the national tale and to the motif of Irish mobility. Clíona Ó Gallchoir suggests that whereas both Irishness and femininity existed as "unstable positions" in the postrevolutionary, post-Union period, these doubly liminal roles offered each author "the potential to construct a position of unprecedented authority for the woman writer" (7). And as Ina Ferris explains, just as [End Page 95] their gender troubled some of their audience, so too their national tales "unsettled" readers by "straying beyond the conventional borders of fiction" and "targeting landlords and legislators rather than 'fair readers' or idle youths" in their fiction ("Irish Novel" 236). Less well understood is how mobile protagonists, who were performative and discursive, contributed to each author's broader arguments about the unstable position of Ireland and of women—either as subjects or as authors. By incorporating Irish characters who frequently travel into their narratives, Edgeworth and Owenson turned to a growing social practice following Union—the home tour and the Grand Tour. These new patterns of travel enabled them to explore not only Ireland...

Seamus Heaney’s Tender Yeats Terence Brown (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Seamus Heaney with his family, Dublin, 1979. Bobbie Hanvey, photographer. Bobbie Hanvey Photographic Archives, Image Number bh002392, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. [End Page 301] Seamus Heaney was born in 1939, the year in which his eminent poetic predecessor W. B. Yeats had died in the south of France. As a member of a post-Yeats generation of Irish poets, Heaney’s remarkable poetic career was undertaken within a highly developed awareness of Yeats’s towering achievement as one who had lived through a period of violent change in his native country—one, indeed, who had accepted the challenge to poetry as an art that such experience involved. Heaney’s career was therefore marked by a significant critical engagement with Yeats to be explored in this essay, and by an understanding that reveals much about his own sensibility and aeshetic as he too lived through troubled times in Ireland. W. B. Yeats’s poem “Paudeen” was collected in his pamphlet Poems Written in Discouragement (1913) and then in the 1914 and 1916 editions of his volume Responsibilities. As A. N. Jeffares tells us, the manuscript is dated 16 September 1913, so the poem was written during the autumn when the poet was deeply engaged in the controversy surrounding the building of an appropriate gallery to house the pictures Lady Gregory’s nephew Hugh Lane had donated to Dublin city.1 Yeats’s enemy in the matter, William Martin Murphy, had stirred up antagonism against a proposal that the city corporation should fund the gallery. He had also objected to the dismissive reference by Yeats to “Paudeen’s pence” and “Biddy’s halfpennies” in a poem published in the Irish Times on 11 January 1913 under the title “The Gift / To a friend who promises a bigger subscription than his first to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if the amount collected proves that there is a considerable ‘popular demand’ for the pictures.” The poem argued that in choosing to back aesthetic judgment with financial largesse, a truly aristocratic benefactor would not consider the views of the [End Page 302] common people. Murphy immediately sent a stinging riposte to the Irish Independent, berating the poet for his contemptuous reference to “Paudeen’s Pennies.” If, he wrote, such monies were to be abstracted from Paudeen’s pockets, Paudeen should at least be consulted. So the term “Paudeen” (a diminutive of Padraig, sometimes used as a kind of demeaning collective for the Irish people) was already entered in public exchanges when Yeats wrote and published a poem titled simply “Paudeen.” But I propose that this famous poem contains a notable ambiguity, on which hangs an interpretative issue that can detemine whether we read it as a moment of special benignity in Yeats’s oeuvre or as a particularly severe expression of the elitism that had been at work in his imagination since he had read the works of Nietzsche earlier in the century. The poem begins with the force of a poetic lampoon, with the name Paudeen made to carry the weight of representative status, and to serve as a metonym for an inveterate mental incapacity and for the dark venom of the commercial mind—”our old Paudeen in his shop.” Unbalanced by a surge of emotion, the poet imagines an expressionist landscape of stones, thorn-trees, morning light, and a luminous wind in which a sudden transformation of consciousness takes place—as in “The Cold Heaven” (first published in 1912), with its first line: “Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven.” The structure of “Paudeen” realizes for us this moment of transformation. Its first three lines sketch the lampoon and a contrasting landscape of arduous challenge where the poet flounders until the word “Until.” The poem thereafter sweeps onward with a rhetorical command that effaces any sense of the poet stumbling blind. Like “The Cold Heaven,” it is irradiated by light that induces metaphysical awareness—yet not of dread as in that poem, but of a kind of spiritual transport. This state of mind is summoned for the poet by the sound of a...

“Helping the Guards”: Illegal Displays and Blueshirt Criminality, 1932–36* Dale Montgomery (bio) Formed in February 1932, the Army Comrades Association (ACA) was ostensibly designed to represent the interests of those who had served in the Free State National Army of 1922–24. From the outset, however, the ACA was known for its conservative political stance and opposition both to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and to the main republican party, Fianna Fáil. Eighteen months later, and now under the leadership of General Eoin O’Duffy, recently dismissed as Irish police commissioner by Eamon de Valera, the ACA was renamed the National Guard but better known as the “Blueshirts,” a corporatist movement partially modeled on the Italian Fascist party, or “Black-shirts.” Between 1932 and 1936 the Blueshirt movement constituted one of the most serious domestic threats to Irish democracy following the Civil War. The threat posed by the Blueshirts was manifested both at local and at national level. Locally, Blueshirt public processions exacerbated post-Civil War tensions as opposing communities representing proand anti-Treaty political views competed for territorial and political supremacy. Simultaneously, however, the Blueshirt campaign against the payment of land annuities challenged state authority by disrupting the transport and communication networks. These activities threatened to destabilize the nascent state and forced the Fianna Fáil government, which viewed the Blueshirts first and foremost as a law-and-order rather than political issue, to mobilize the security apparatus. An Garda Síochána and the Irish judiciary, the latter consisting of [End Page 22] both the district courts and the military tribunal, worked effectively, if not harmoniously, in constraining and controlling the organization. The gardaí maintained regular surveillance of the Blueshirts, policed illegality connected to the anti-annuities campaign, and kept public peace during political rallies. They delegitimized Blueshirt activities by narrowly constructing them as criminal acts divorced from any political motive. By contrast, the Irish judiciary practiced a form of social justice through the application of specific forms of judicial punishment designed to reintegrate the individual back into the community. This meant focusing not on the individual propensity to commit crime but rather on the necessity for community peace. This conception of social justice brought the Irish judiciary into frequent conflict with the gardaí, who were focused on eliminating individual criminality in the communities they served. So, while the gardaí maintained a firm stance in the localities, the judiciary prevented the further radicalization of the movement through the limited use of punishment. Disconnected as these policies were, their convergence was remarkably effective in confronting the Blueshirt threat to the state. The Blueshirts, 1932–36 Two weeks after the formation of the ACA, Eamon de Valera led Fianna Fáil, with the support of the Labour party, to electoral victory, thus bringing about the first peaceful transfer of government in modern Irish history and provoking a major change in direction for the ACA. Fianna Fáil was a republican party dedicated to eradicating any residual British political or cultural influences within Ireland. Immediately after coming to power, the government released numerous IRA prisoners. These men galvanized the republican section of the Irish population that had been opposed to the previous Cumann na nGaedheal government for its support of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which was seen by many republicans as a betrayal of the Easter 1916 Proclamation. Anti-Treaty republicans considered former government ministers as traitors to the republican cause and began violently disrupting their public meetings. This in turn led to Cumann na nGaedheal party leaders inviting ACA members to protect these meetings, resulting in direct conflict between the ACA and anti- Treaty republicans. The ensuing street battles led to the blue shirt [End Page 23] being adopted in April 1933 as a specific identity marker, and from this point onward the group was commonly called the Blueshirts. The organization also sought to redefine itself as an explicitly political movement after Eoin O’Duffy assumed the leadership in July 1933. O’Duffy had recently been dismissed as garda commissioner because the Fianna Fáil government did not trust his loyalty. Under his leadership the Blueshirts adopted corporatism as their political philosophy and increased their membership...

The Black Mammy and the Irish Bridget:Domestic Service and the Representation of Race, 1830–1930 April Schultz (bio) In January 1884, Puck magazine featured a full-color, two-panel cartoon entitled “Our Self-Made ‘Cooks’: From Paupers to Potentates.”1 On the left a simian-featured Irish peasant woman in rags is being forcibly ejected from a tumbledown cottage. She is further burdened by her elderly mother and by her emaciated child sleeping on an equally emaciated pig in front of a meager fire. The caption reads, “They are evicted in the old country.” The panel on the right is captioned: “But in America they do all the evicting themselves.” In this rendering, the same ape-like woman now stands tall and imposing in the middle of a well-appointed kitchen, while an Irish cop sits contentedly at the stove stirring his cup of tea under the benevolent gaze of a portrait of the pope. The cook wears not her uniform, but rather a gaudy, overdone version of a stylish waist dress, replete with an oversized red bow and tightly cinched belt. She is holding a book in one large hand and peremptorily ordering her mistress out of the room with the other. Her beautiful employer hesitates in the doorway, also holding a book, clad in a much more modest black dress, but clearly cowed by her commanding cook.2 The Irish cook has taken over the kitchen, though not with her superb domestic skill. Instead, stoking the fears of any nativist readers of Puck, her Catholicism, her misguided [End Page 176] middle-class pretensions, and her policeman suitor represent an Irish immigrant victory over urban domestic space (figure 1). A Fleischmann’s Yeast promotional calendar from the same decade offered a similar middle-class kitchen, but with a very different narrative meaning. At the center of a diamond-shaped overlay framed by a gold filigree and orange maple-leaf design, a Mammy figure stands, confidently stirring something in a skillet. Like her Irish counterpart, she also rules the kitchen, but with appropriate culinary skills and equally appropriate cooking attire, and with the important addition of a scarf wrapped around her head and small gold-hoop earrings—attire suggestive of her African heritage but in no way alarming. Her mistress looks on from the doorway, not in distress or in modest attire, but in familiar elite fashion and in comfortable assurance that all is well cared for in her kitchen (figure 2).3 These two artifacts speak volumes about the contrasting images of the two groups of women who dominated domestic service in America from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s. Representations of both the Irish “Bridget” and the Black Mammy had roots in the early republic and the antebellum periods. While the nostalgic, nurturing image of the Black Mammy was honed and refined from the 1830s on, the peak of her glorification occurred between 1890 and the mid-1920s. This apotheosis accompanied the tremendous growth in the number of black domestic servants in the North.4 In contrast, the notion of the uncivilized, buffoonish Irish Bridget coincided with the earlier dominance of Irish immigrants in these positions.5 Why the [End Page 177] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Our Self-Made ‘Cooks’: From Paupers to Potentates”: Cartoon by Frederick Opper, Puck, 30 Jan. 1884. The caption on the left reads, “They are evicted in the old country…,” and the one on the right reads, “But in America they do all the evicting themselves.” Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Fleischmann’s trade-card promotional calendar, ca. 1880s. Author’s private collection. [End Page 178] contrast? To provide at least a partial answer, this study examines the circulation of images surrounding these two figures from the 1830s through the 1920s. Cartoons, fiction, advice literature, and advertising campaigns that disseminated images and ideas about Bridgets and Mammies rarely squared with the reality of the actual servants’ experiences, so why were such cultural representations necessary at all? And why did they take the particular forms they did? Cultural representations, particularly the exaggerations found in cartoons and advertisements, serve to illuminate anxiety about and...