A different mirror chapter 6 in fleeing “the tyrant's heel", Study Guides, Projects, Research of American literature

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6 FLEEING “THE TYRANT’S HEEL” “Exiles” from Ireland ALIBAN COULD ALSO have been Irish. As we noted in chapter twa, like Caliban, the Irish were disposseased of their island by the English Prosperos. The Irish, too, were depicted and degraded as the “Other”—as “savages,” outside of “civilization,” and “wild.” Fleeing English oppression in the nineteenth century, millions of Irish crossed the Atlantic to America. Thus, the age of Jackson witnessed not only Indian removal and the expansion of slavery, but also the great influx of immigrants frum Ireland. Suddenly, blacks in the North were competing with Irish workers. “Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room perhaps for some newly arrived immigrants, whose hunger and color are thought to give them a title to special favor/.Exedcrick Douglass complained. “White men are becoming house servants, cooks, stewards, common laborers and flunkeys to our gentry.” Then he warned that Irish immigrants would soon find that in taking “our vocation,” they had also assumed “our degradation.” But Douglass found himself empa- thizing with the Irish. During a visit to Ireland in the 1840s, he witnessed the terrible suffering inflicted by the Potato Famine and was “much affected” on hearing the “wailing notes” of Irish ballads that reminded him of the “wild notes” of slave songs?