Through Other Eyes: Nineteenth-Century Irish Women in South America

The gendered cultural discourse of Irish migration reveals many masks that women adopt to conform to the narrow social limits either laid down or confronted by the process of transculturation that they undergo in the non-English speaking lands of South America. This essay turns our sight to the representations of Irish women migrants in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women’s diasporic writing deconstructs the mythic echoes of a Promised Land constructed by men’s migrant narratives which predominantly represent themes of displacement, renewal and success. The various “Irelands” of the diasporic mind and a “new Irishness” are being reimagined and reinvented beyond the seas by Marion Mulhall’s travel writing, William Bulfin’s and Annie O’Rourke’s letters and Anne Enright’s contemporary novel on the nineteenth-century Irish courtesan Eliza Lynch. The Irish migrant women took part in social changes provoked by the coming of modernity. A critical reading of the process of inter/trans-culturality through the eyes of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers would help to understand the late twentieth-century phenomenon of global movements.