Rites of Passage: The Coffin Ship as Site of Immigrants’ Identity Formation in Irish and Irish-American Fiction, 1855-1885

The statue of Annie Moore and her brothers in Cobh, Ireland, is one of the many lieux de mémoire which seek to crystallise the recollections of the Irish exodus to North America between 1845 and 1900. Scholars have examined the monuments erected to commemorate the massive exodus of 1.8 million Irish to Canada and the United States. Hitherto, however, very little attention has been paid to a transatlantic corpus of fiction, mainly written by the so-called “Famine generation,” which recollects the conditions of Irish immigrants to the New World. These novels and stories, by Irish writers at home who witnessed the outflux of population as well as authors who had migrated themselves to escape starvation and poverty, not only describe their migrant characters’ conditions of departure from the homeland and settlement in North American communities. An equally central role is reserved for the transition from home to diaspora, on-board the so-called “coffin ships.” While the texts remember the fearful realities of poor hygiene and high mortality rates on-board, the voyage also has a symbolic function, featuring as a rite of passage for the characters and their sense of ethnic identity. This article discusses several examples of the iconic image of the coffin ship in Irish and Irish American fiction on immigration, written between 1855 and 1885. In these texts, the storms that the immigrant characters have to endure during their passage at sea prefigure the trials the characters will face in the urban New World. Moreover, the coffin ships represent microcosmic Irish “imagined communities” that function as utopian heterotopia where the cultural clashes experienced in the homeland and the pending assimilation in the New World have to be negotiated