Early Irish Immigrants as the Marginal Men in Moy Sand and Gravel

Abstract

Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), a collection that won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003, reproduces the life of early Irish immigrants in the United States. Migration, as a major social phenomenon, has changed the proportion of ethnic groups within a country with the increasingly frequent population mobility among countries, leading to conflicts among ethnic groups, such as competition in resource allocation, and thus having created one of the world's most pressing social issues. According to Robert Ezra Park , one of the iconic sociologists of Chicago school, migration "involves the change of residence and the breaking of home ties" (Park, 1928: 886) and the migrants' efforts in "striving to live in two diverse cultural groups" (Park, 881). Such issues caught much attention in sociology. In 1928, in his influential paper "Human Migration And The Marginal Man", Park developed the concept of "The Stranger" put forward by Georg Simmel , and coined the term the "marginal man". The "marginal man" refers to "a man on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused" (Park, 892). The concept serves as an important theoretical resource for sociologists to explore the immigrant group as a major cultural phenomenon in the era of globalization.Although applied in multiple fields, for example, in industrial sociology (Patten, 1965) and social psychology (Cheng and Lively, 2009;Lewin, 1939), this concept was originally used to analyze race or ethnic relations in immigration studies. William C. Smith (1934) examined the conditions of the hybrid race in Hawaii as a marginal group, which paved the foundation of field study for Parker's concept of the "marginal man". The theoretical value of the "marginal man" is further defined by several researchers. Aaron Antonovsky (1956) once mentioned the features of marginality as a social situation and explored the differences between the non-marginal people and marginal group in his interview of Jewish men in New Haven in his article "Toward a Refinement of the 'Marginal Man' Concept". Peter A. Johnson (1960) investigated the relationship between the social structures and these marginal men, then concluded that "marginal man" inclined to be a dynamic, transitional category. Recently, researchers represented by Alyssa M. Newman (2021) noticed the gap that exists between the fields of immigration and mixed-race studies, and traced