Text

theses

To understand the nuances, contradictions, and levels of agency in immigrant and African-American working class communities, this thesis examines the musical theater of Edward Harrigan, an American playwright whose plays were novel for their sympathetic portrayals of working-class Irish immigrants. I analyze three of Harrigan’s popular plays in his Mulligan Guard series, the Mulligan Guard Ball, the Mulligan Guard Nominee, and Cordelia’s Aspirations. Due to Harrigan’s emphasis on realism, the plays offer insight into the complex racial and ethnic negotiations and political machinations of the working class in Gilded Age New York. I contend that they illustrate contestations over shared urban space between the Irish, Germans, and African Americans, where they engage in dialectic relationships that swayed from friendship to animosity, from collaboration to rivalry. The plays also illuminate working-class perspectives of Tammany’s political machine. Juxtaposed against middle-brow representations of the machine in political cartoons by Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler, Harrigan’s works show the machine as an important avenue of social mobility rather than as a threat to American republicanism. Harrigan’s plays show complexity in interethnic relations while offering subtle critiques of Tammany’s excesses and demonstrate the importance of practical politics over ideology for the working class.

ETD_4808

M.A.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Sean Patrick Boyle

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10002600001.ETD.000068804

doi:10.7282/T3W66JC2

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.