“Misted and Married Together”?: Diasporic Consciousness and Textual Form in Nineteenth- Century Irish Emigrant Letters from Australia

Abstract

This essay considers a selection of letters home to Ireland written by Irish emigrants to Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century, extracted from David Fitzpatrick’s acclaimed anthology, Oceans of Consolation (1994). It attends particularly to the descriptions of encoun- ters with other ethnicities and races and to the challenges to the values of home posed by the opportunities of the new environment. Informed by theories of diasporic consciousness, and deploying methods of close tex- tual anaylsis, it seeks to identify the ambivalent and layered nature of cultural encounter, veering as they do between recoil and attraction, even in the same sentence. It attends to the crisis of representation that these encounters often engender, struggling to articulate levels of experience outside the inherited discursive frames and within the straitened and con- servative textual conventions of the “letter home.” In seeking to delineate an emergent diasporic consciousness, it discerns numerous productive and revealing tensions as value systems, and principles of allegiance and affiliation, shift, mutate and conflict. It finds complex compromises between home and away, a deracinated identity that alternately embraces and resists alternate cultures and values and that, often consciously, wagers familiar and familial values against the self-advancement and opportunity promised by capitalist structures in the new colonies.