The Forging of American Identity Through Struggle and Assimilation in Three Novels on US Immigrants

Abstract

Does being an immigrant make you any less American? This essay introduces you to three fictional protagonists who immigrate to America in the late 19th and early 20th century. Per Hansa, in Ole Edvart Rölvaag’s: Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (1927), Lucia Santa in Mario Puzo’s: The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), and Benjamin B. Mussey’s: Dorah Mahony in: Six Months in a House of Correction: Or, the Narrative of Dorah Mahony who was Under the Influence of the Protestants about a Year, and an Inmate of the House of Correction, in Leverett St. Boston, Massachusetts, Nearly Six Months in the Year of 18—(1835), as it appears in The Exiles of Erin. Introducing lines of the sonnet, “The New Colossus” (1883) by Emma Lazarus interwoven within the beginnings of the chapters, and analyzing the above-mentioned literary works, this essay strives to prove that through their struggles, assimilation, and successes, these individuals have forged their American identity, and therefore are American. It also briefly examines the anti-immigration sentiment that existed both in the 19th century, embodied in the Know-Nothing Party, and contemporarily in Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1975). This essay adventure encompasses the struggle of Norwegian-American, Per Hansa, in the prairies of the west, highlighting the rugged individualism necessary to enable his survival, the sacrificial assimilation of Italian-American, Lucia Santa, in the brutal urban jungle of New York, and lastly the realistic success of Irish-American, Dorah Mahony in New England. Through the literature discussed, this essay will show that it is a basic human right to escape oppression and poverty, and that diversity is the very core of Americanism. Although fictional, these protagonists parallel the life stories of real American grandfathers and grandmothers, and argue the rights of all individuals to claim their American identity.