Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes, and the Precarity of Place in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Frank Norris’s McTeague

In the preface to his 1867 book, The Irish in America, Irish politician and writer, John Francis Maguire, explains that the “conflicting and contradictory accounts” detailing the “calamities” Irish immigrants experienced after arriving to the United States, “stimulated” him to such a degree that he was motivated to “ascertain by personal observation” what the “thousands” of Irish “constantly emigrating… from my very door,” were “doing in America.” ¹ Anyone crossing the Atlantic and landing in any American city, Maguire declared, could see “at a glance… the marked difference between the position of the Irish race in the old country and in the new,” ² for the “pernicious tendency of the Irish peasant” in America was to “place himself in a position dangerous to his morals, if not fatal to his independence.” ³ Of particular concern to Maguire were the squalid, overcrowded urban tenement houses in which many Irish immigrants settled after they arrived in America.