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Zulassungsarbeit
Englisch

Universität Augsburg

Gut (1.7), Prof. Dr. McPherson, 2017

Maren R. ©
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Immigrant Identities in U.S. American Literature:

Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and

T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain


Table of Contents

1Introduction 3

2Multicultural America? The Concepts of Ethnicity and Identity in the American Context 4

2.1Identity: Us vs. Them 4

2.2Ethnicity and Race 6

2.3Americanness 6

2.4Otherness 10

2.5Immigration and Immigrant Identities in Literary History 13

3Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 15

3.1Maggie’s Otherness 16

3.2Violence, Fear and Poverty as Fixed Components of Life 19

4T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain 23

4.1Emphasis on Ethnicity as Otherness in T.C. Boyle 24

4.2Violence and Fear, Borders and Boundaries, Territory and Intrusion 27

5From ‘Melting Pot’ to Multicultural America? 30

5.1Hypocrisy and False Morals 30

5.2Prejudice and Racism 34

5.3Deconstruction of the American Dream 37

6Conclusion 40

7Works Cited 42


Immigrant Identities in U.S. American Literature:

Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and

T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain


  1. Introduction

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame.

With conquering limps astride from land to land

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-handed

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”


Emma Lazarus’s Poem at the Foot of the Statue of Liberty, 1883 (in Gjerde 312)


The United States of America has been and still is often regarded as A Nation of Immigrants (Kennedy). Emma Lazarus’ poem and her “Mother of Exiles [who] glows world-wide welcome” (in Gjerde 312) has many times been taken as the nation’s motto. But is this welcoming attitude to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (Lazarus in Gjerde 312) really a long-standing American trait? And who are these masses?

The present paper aims at identifying representations of immigrant identities in two works of American literature which appeared nearly precisely one hundred years apart: Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, asking where are the similarities, and where lie the differences? At first glance, the selected novels do not seem to have much in common.

Crane’s short novel of 1893 deals with an immigrant family of Irish descent in the slums of New York, Boyle’s 1995 work is set in the outskirts of Los Angeles and brings together two couples who could not be more different: unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and a wealthy white family. However, an analysis will try to show that questions of and struggles with identity, the dreams and hopes of immigrants and the attitudes with which they are greeted by the ‘natives’ remain similar in literary representations throughout this time, also considering the historical and sociological backgrounds at the times of writing.

Author’s positionality shall be regarded and the literary realities of the acceptance of the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants will be challenged.

The above outlined objectives will be met by firstly examining the theories behind some key concepts of immigrant identities in the U.S.A., aiming at representing briefly the positions and discussions of the contexts of Crane and Boyle. The second part of this paper, chapter 3 and 4, will be studying Maggie and The Tortilla Curtain separately, focusing primarily on the representations of the protagonists’ otherness and the ‘realities’ of their lives.

In the fifth chapter they are brought together, examining the authors’ representations, outlooks and, if possible, opinions on issues strongly connected to immigration and building a life in a new country: the ‘clashing’ of values, stereotypes and prejudices, sometimes racism, and the deconstruction of the American Dream, still representing the main pulling force of America .....



Race, in itself a rather problematic term, is also described as socially constructed, because “there are no longer (and may have never been) pure and fixed racial entities” (162). Noel Ignatiev agrees, saying that “no biologist has ever been able to provide a satisfactory definition of ‘race’ […] [hence] [t]he only logical conclusion is that people are members of different races because they have been assigned to them” (1).

Despite this, Halter states that the “realities of race persist as powerful constants in the dynamics of everyday life in the United States […] [as] [r]ace […] still matters, shaping perceptions and influencing behaviors at all levels of society” (162). She farther mentions that the classification of a certain immigrant group or people as a race or an ethnic group is subject to change, depending on historical circumstances (Halter 163).

Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White shows precisely that phenomenon, examining how the Irish went from oppressed to oppressor in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (2), which he explains does not mean that “they all became rich, or even ‘middle class’” (Ignatiev 3), as Crane’s representation in Maggie, written and set at the turn to the twentieth century, shows.


    1. Americanness

In consideration of Halter’s statement that race and ethnicity are still a reality in everyday life in the US, how can American identities be described, how those of the ‘Other’, here mainly Irish and Latino?4 Individual, group and also nation’s identities are symbolic and discursive constructions (Wodak et al.) and “can be contested and changed” (Olneck 204).

Michael Olneck shows that this is particularly true for the United States as it is neither “a patria […] nor an ancient ‘homeland’” (204, emphasis in original) and thus could not necessarily count on the “durability of the nation” (204), which is why he sees “anxiety about holding together” (205) as a founding element in American culture and identity. The fact that the US, from its very beginning, consisted of a very diverse population, whose diversity is to this day increasing still, and, in connection to that, the strong belief in individualism complicates recognition for what is shared, and therefore hinders linking America’s diverse people to one another (Olneck 205).

Nonetheless, there is a sense of Americanness and certain shared values. Important for these are the often linked ideas of “America [being] a nation of immigrants and […] American identity [being] defined […] by a set of political principles, the American Creed” (Huntington 37), first proposed by the Founding Fathers, later on by William Tyler Page and officially recognized by the House of Representatives in 1918:

I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, a democracy in a republic, a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.

I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies. (Page)


The aim of the Creed was to unify the American people through the commitment to these principles that should provide “rhetorical, ideological, and moral resources and guidance” (Olneck 205). Huntington describes, in a simplified matter, how throughout US history, components of identity, such as ethnical, racial and cultural issues, should have been of decreasing importance.

Yet, Americans have not only excluded and discriminated against certain peoples, they have enslaved and massacred others, and limited immigration to regions of favor, mostly north-western Europe (Huntington 49).5 As for America as a Nation of Immigrants (Kennedy), Huntington argues that “large-scale immigration has been an intermittent feature of American life” (46), with peaks and drops in numbers, but in which “over the years, immigrants have played a central, and in some respects, more than proportionate role” (46), while Olneck adds that most Americans can identify with the statement to a certain degree, but at the same time it creates feelings of “permanent flux, loss as well as fulfillment, repeated encounters with strangers, and unsettledness” (205).

To evaluate ‘Americanness’ farther, Halter’s statement, supported by many of her fellow scholars, shall be repeated: in the US and for American identity, race still matters (162). In the introduction to their anthology Growing Up Ethnic in America Maria Mazzziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan also emphasize “the complicated terrain of race and ethnicity” (x) and how both “have shaped the identity of […] .....

Regarding immigration, the idea of the ‘melting pot’ was still the most present, however this will be examined farther in the following chapter. The 1990s held the first realization of America being on its way to becoming a “transnational nation” (Gray 249), again changing its face and state considerably, politically and demographically. America had been able to maintain and farther strengthen its dominance in world politics, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, which led to high self-esteem as a nation, but could not suppress uncertainties and discussions as to how the nation within should be shaped.

Ideals of individualism and freedom as well as multiculturalism were discussed widely (Gary; Tindall/Shi).

Race and ethnicity are hence consciously or unconsciously recognized as important factors of American identity and so are shared values and ideas as the American Creed indicates. Another aspect of these shared values are the ethics of the Anglo-Protestant culture, which again is a stereotype that excludes both religious and none-religious groups (Mazziotti Gillan/Gillan xi), but Huntington argues that supposedly “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values” (61).7 This has been criticized strongly and also raises the topic of assimilation, which will be discussed in the following, but some features of that ‘Anglo-Protestant’ culture as Huntington sees it shall be presented nonetheless, as they in some ways also work towards what is known as ‘The American Dream’.

Huntington lists “individualism and the work ethic […] [and] moralism and the reform ethic” (69-80) as core elements of that culture. The idea that through one’s own responsibility and hard work and by “playing by the rules” (Clinton qtd. in Hochschild 18),8 basically anyone can make a better life for themselves is the central element of the dream of the nation. Few sayings are linked to the United States as much as ‘from rags to riches’.

The American Dream is what brought so many foreigners to America, and what continues to be an important push-and-pull factor today. The analysis of Maggie and The Tortilla Curtain will question this ideal, arguing whether the American Dream may be exactly that: a dream. As Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy put it:

While it is true that America has produced some rags-to-riches success stories, and that it remains to this day a country where immigrants seek refuge and economic opportunity; the larger historical picture is more complicated and less sanguine. […] Those who were not of the elite propertied class had to struggle for their rights within a capitalistic system that offered opportunity for some, but also exploited, suppressed, and limited the freedom of many others. (xxi)


    1. Otherness

Defining ‘Otherness’ and other identities, more specifically, immigrant identities is only possibly in delimitation to American identity. The protagonists in the literary works discussed here are foreigners or of foreign descent, in Maggie Irish, in The Tortilla Curtain Mexican and thus the attempt of analyzing this perceived and real ‘otherness’ shall be made.

It has been shown that immigration has been a part of the United States throughout its entire history, but has changed over time and still is changing. When comparing the ten primary sending countries of the 1960s (Fix/Passel 25) to the ones today, the only reappearing country is Mexico (CAP Immigration/Nicholson). As people from all over the world come to the United States, making it a highly ethnical diverse country, the agreement on certain common values is undoubtedly an important fact.....

A people who were fleeing religious and “caste oppression and […] material conditions […] comparable to those of an American slave” (Ignatiev 2), who were first cramped into “districts that became centers of crime, vice, and disease […] [where they were] thrown together with free Negroes […] [with whom they] fought […], socialized and occasionally intermarried, and developed a common culture of the lowly” (Ignatiev 2-3) managed to obtain “entry into the white race” (Ignatiev 4).

This shows how ethnicity and race is yet again a factor of identity, and for the Irish was an option to cast off their Otherness. In order to do so, they were willing to betray “their closest social class competitors […]. The newly arrived Irish-Americans judged that the best way of gaining acceptance as good citizens and to counter the Nativist movement was to cooperate in the continued oppression of African Americans” (McDonald).

This behavior was strongly opposed by their fellow Irishmen on the other side of the Atlantic, and a letter published in the Liberator in 1854 said “passage to the United States seems to produce the same effect upon the exile of Erin as the eating of the forbidden fruit did upon Adam and Eve. In the morning, they were pure, loving, and innocent; in the evening, guilty” (qtd. in McDonald).10 In the same matter Ignatiev concludes: “[i]n becoming white the Irish ceased to be Green” (3).

Beth O’Leary, as her name suggests herself of Irish descent, is a little softer with the Irish-American. Her dissertation deals with Irish-American narration throughout the twentieth century, and in her opinion “an Irish identity was given up in America and eventually pieced back together again. […] The Irish-American narrative tells of a rise from poverty and oppression to American comfort and respectability.

There is pride in this rise, but there is also loss” (ii). The Irish the US for her are “a people who have thrived in America despite facing oppression on both sides of the Atlantic, […] a people in diaspora […] [who have] preserved […] a sense of their own ethnic uniqueness when faced with the anxiety of losing themselves in a dull, if profitable, American whiteness” (O’Leary1-2).

People have been coming to the United States form Southern America and the ‘Hispanic’ countries for quite some time now, too, but as attitudes towards how and to which extent immigrants should adapt to American culture have changed notably since the Irish were the ‘new immigrants’, Latino identity seems to be more important for self-perception for members of these groups.

In her book The New Americans? Heather Mohamed questions how “the ‘Latino’ experience” (xiii) shapes the identity and its recognition. Mohamed proposes a “politics-to-identity link” (11), the influence of political debate on identity, outlining a comparison of protests to the 1994 Proposition 187and the 2005 H.R. 4437.11 In 1994 the Latino organizations rallied against the referendum, aiming at creating a sense of unity within the group by promoting foreign flags, the Mexi.....

Also, denial of or poor access to education and hence to social advancement is seen as a reason for slower assimilation, especially within the Mexican community (Telles/Ortiz qtd. in Croppers 15).12

The Latino and Hispanic immigration waves are not new anymore, yet they still are the new immigrants today. The future will have to show in which ways they will adapt to American society, or rather how concepts of Americanism will change with newer multicultural approaches. The focus of the present paper however lies in the past, analyzing representation and perception of Americanness and Otherness in the 1890s and 1990s, as the goal of the analysis is to show changes and consistencies over time.

In which ways these influence present discussions will not be the subject of this work, but it can be said that concepts always develop with and in differentiation to previous ideas.


    1. Immigration and Immigrant Identities in Literary History

The novels discussed here were published with quite some difference and as has been stated above, the goal of this paper is to look for both similarities and discrepancies in the works of Crane and Boyle. Their respective positions in literary context shall be outlined here to provide for a better analysis and understanding.

Stephen Crane’s Maggie firstappeared in 1893, during a time where America had changed by an incredible degree from an agricultural community before the civil war to a highly industrialized, modern society. On top of that an up until then unknown capitalism evolved in the metropoles of the country that led to extremely wealthy people on the one side, and a growing industrial proletariat, living as the poorest in the slums of the newly developing cities on the other.

The inhabitants of these ghettos were mainly the recently arriving immigrants, hence ethnic and racial conflicts reached a new dimension as well. This induced debates on immigration, and its future as well as the future of the nation (Irving 31). The dramatically deepening social gap led to at times violent protests, yet at the same time the industrialization provoked modernization and new inventions (Fluck 153).

Literature, for example, due to cheaper manufacturing and printing, became available to the masses. Literary production nearly doubled between 1890 and 1900 alone and enabled more variety and broader genres of literature (Fluck 200). Amongst these American Naturalism may be seen as the “most incisive and interesting” (Fluck 205), of which Stephen Cran.....

Neither of the works dealt with here can be classified as ‘only’ immigrant fiction, for Maggie that is mostly because the Johnson children are at least second-generation immigrants, and the immigrant experience is not exclusively what shatters hopes and expectations, as will be shown in the next chapter. T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain fits Boelhower’s description better, yet Boyle does not exclusively concentrate on his immigrant protagonists either.

Boyle’s 1995 novel can be placed in the neo-realistic and post-colonial literature of the 1980’s and 90’s, which includes awareness for a multicultural America, as issues such as race, class and gender were being publicly debated (Hornung 359-360) and world powers were changing quite considerably:

It [1989] was the year the Berlin Wall came down, the year when the world historical map transformed, the year that some said marked the end of history and the beginnings of new world order. […] The Iron Curtain came down in the mind as well as on certain mid-European borders. If the Eighties started with Star Wars, the New Conservatism and Ronald Reagan, […] then it ended with the peace dividend, the crisis of the Gulf, and the shifting and anxious new frontiers that lie beyond the edges of recent political familiarity.

Meanwhile the political agenda of the Nineties includes many of those apocalyptic anxieties – from the plague of AIDS to the fears of ozone holes and global warming – that take us back again to the ends of earlier modern centuries, perhaps especially to the 1890s. (Bradbury 23-24)


Adopting a present day American view, the country has been shaken and maybe changed more drastically in recent years, with terrorism becoming a definite experience for an entire nation, with the change of power from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and now Donald Trump, but undoubtedly the 80’s and 90’s of the twentieth century were also marked by drastic shifts, and Bradbury here already connects them to the time of Crane’s writing.

Literary conventions of the last decades of the twentieth century allowed for experimental forms of art, and multimedia channels grew more important (Hornung 361). Although finished before November 1994 The Tortilla Curtain is often seen in connection to the previously mentioned Proposition 187. Several federal lawsuits were filed against the state in the aftermath, which hindered the enforcement (ACLU), but it shows the attitude and public discussions of the time in which Boyle’s sociocritical novel was published.

Making migration and cultural conflicts, borders and their crossing the subject of discussion is characteristic of Boyle’s work (Hornung 362), and The Tortilla Curtain is no exception, as will be shown in the fourth chapter. To follow a chronological order, Stephen Crane’s Maggie .....


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