This page was created by John Huebner.  The last update was by Ashley Hacker.

Star of the Sea : A Postcolonial/Postmodern Voyage into the Irish Famine

Living Conditions

In a 1993 Marquette Law Review called "The Land-Tenure System in Ireland: A Fatal Regime," Cynthia Smith argues that “to collect as many rents as possible, landlords subdivided the land into a number of small plots which were then allocated to the tenants, forcing them to make their living on very small, yet very expensive, pieces of land” (480). This then indicates that tenants did not own big pieces of land in Ireland and whatever they were given to grow crops on was extremely exploited by the landlords. Smith clearly mentions that the landlords’ goal was to extract as much rent as possible, “[and so they] raised rents at any time and in any amount” (477, 480). The idea of landlords raising rents is also well portrayed by O’Connor. In the letter from one of the tenants to David Merridith, O’Connor remarks that “the tenants’ rents had been raised to a third in February and then doubled at the start of the summer” (241). This is just one way that shows that tenants were not in good conditions, especially economically.

In the 2002 American Historical Review journal article titled “From Famine to Five Points: Lord Lansdowne's Irish Tenants Encounter North America's Most Notorious Slum,” Tyler Anbinder states that “tenants were so desperately poor that they would often nail shut their cabins during the summer and walk a hundred miles or more through the counties in search for work” (358). This notion is evident in O’Connor’s novel. Although many of the characters in the novel walk long miles in search for work and survival, Pius Mulvey is depicted repeatedly as a poor character who wonders from place to place looking for a job. For instance, "[he] walked two hundred miles from his home, Galway, to Belfast" (O’Connor 175).

Works Cited
Anbinder, Tyler. “From Famine to Five Points: Lord Lansdowne's Irish Tenants Encounter North America's Most Notorious Slum”. The American Historical Review 107.2 (2002): 351–387. Web.

O'Connor, Joseph. Star of the Sea. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002. Print.

Smith, Cynthia E. "The Land-Tenure System in Ireland: A Fatal Regime." Marquette Law Review (1993): 469-484. Web.
Researcher/Writer: Kalai Laizer
Technical Designers: John Huebner and Ashley Hacker

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