The American dress: migrant objects in Irish literature

This essay reads the “American dress” as a synecdoche for emigration in Irish literary culture, as a means to explore translocational identities in twentieth-century Irish literature and society, as well as patterns of reciprocal exchange and influence between Ireland and North America. Returned or visiting migrants were marked out from the local community by the difference in their clothing, which often consisted of cast-offs from the wealthy households they worked in as domestic servants. Costume was not the only aspect of performativity and social mobility earlier Irish women migrants gleaned from their new context; theirs tended to be a story of gradual empowerment as they found themselves in (and helped to construct) a social milieu in which they might achieve more than was possible within the limitations of life “back home”. However, there is another side to this picture than the power conferred on the returned migrant by the American dress: a picture of non-assimilation, of repressed memory and experience which is not useful or not understood “back home”. Reading across a range of literary sources from the 1860s to the 2010s, this essay explore such disjunctures in the representation of migrant objects, enlivening the negotiations migrants engage in with “home” and “adopted” cultures in a translocational context.