Irish Immigrants and Canadian Destinies in Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace”

Ecaterina Hanţiu PhDUniversity of Oradea, Romania

MOTTO

Great hatred, little roomMaimed us at the startI carry from my mother's wombA fanatic heart

(W.B. Yeats)

Irish Canadians

Between the years 1825 to 1845, 60% of all immigrants to Canada were Irish; in 1831 alone, some 34,000 arrived in Montréal.

The 2001 census by Statcan, Canada's Official Statistical office revealed that the Irish were the 4th largest ethnic group with 3,822,660 Canadians with full or partial Irish descent or 12.9% of the nation's total population.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Canadian)

The peak period of entry of the Irish to Canada occurred during and shortly after the Great Irish Famine in the mid 19th century; a great number of them settled in the first arriving provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

Starving Irish family during the potato famine

The Great Irish Famine

The Great Irish Famine 1845-1849, had a large impact on Ontario. At its peak in the summer of 1847, boatloads of sick migrants arrived in desperate circumstances on steamers from Quebec to Bytown (presently Ottawa), and to ports of call on Lake Ontario, chief amongst them Kingston and Toronto, in addition to many other smaller communities across southern Ontario.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, OC (born November 18, 1939) – a prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, feminist and activist, she is a winner of the Booker Prize and Arthur C. Clarke Award, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice. Atwood is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history.

Canada and Survival

Atwood argues that “every country or culture has a single and informing symbol at its core” (Atwood, M., Survival, 31) and goes on to identify “survival / la survivance” as the pervading symbol for Canadian literature. She states that Canada perceives itself as a collective victim of colonization, the mental and cultural effects of which have inevitable impact upon literature.

Atwood searched for the "fabled Canadian identity", stating that "Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow."

Alias Grace ALIAS GRACE (1996) used a genuine 19th-century criminal case of Grace Marks, one of the most notorious women in Canada. Grace was imprisoned in 1843, at the age of sixteen, for almost 30 years as an accomplice to the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his mistress, the housekeeper Nancy. Her guilt was never established, but she raised the interest of journalists and researches. Before she was arrested, she tried to escape with another servant, James McDermott to the United States. Atwood first found her story from Life in the Clearings (1853) by Susanna Moodie.

I did indeed come from the North of Ireland; though I thought it very unjust when they wrote down that both of the accused were from Ireland by their own admission. That made it sound like a crime, and I don’t know that being from Ireland is a crime; although I have often seen it treated as such. But of course my family were Protestants, and that is different. (Atwood, Alias Grace,116)

The Tide of Emigration to The United States And to The British Colonies

What follows are extracts from an article printed in the Illustrated London News on Saturday July 6th 1850. It is a contemporary account of the procedure of Emigration from the port of Liverpool to the New World and the Colonies.

The great tide of Emigration flows steadily westward. The principal emigrants are Irish peasants and labourers. It is calculated that at least four out of every five persons who leave the shores of the old country to try their fortunes in the new, are Irish. Since the fatal years of the potato famine and the cholera, the annual numbers of emigrants have gone on increasing, until they have become so great as to suggest the idea, and almost justify the belief, of a gradual depopulation of Ireland… Though many of the Irish emigrants are, doubtless, persons of small means, who have been hoarding and saving for years, and living in rags and squalor, in order to amass sufficient money to carry themselves and families across the Atlantic.

The “Coffin” Ships

The original Dunbrody was a three-masted barque built

in Quebec, Canada, in 1845. She carried many

emigrants to the new world from 1845-1870.

Irish Emigrants on the Mersey, Pictorial

Times, 6 June 1846.

Women, the Domestic World and Meal Preparation in the 19th century

Tree of Paradise Pattern

http://www.owtoad.com/