Sarah Luria

South Boston

South Boston is a peninsula to the south of Boston that was formerly known as Dorchester Neck or Great Neck. Once pasture, it was developed in 1803 to make room for the increasing number of Boston's inhabitants. It was officially annexed to the Town of Boston in 1804. "South Bridge" was completed in 1805 joining the neighborhood to Boston. One interesting connection to Lowell's poem is that several of South Boston's developers were wealthy Bostonians, such as Beacon Hill's Harrison Gray Otis. Men like Otis made a huge profit by investing in South Boston's lands before they were developed. Shaw and his men marched by the Gray Otis house on Beacon Street as they left Boston and headed off to war.

South Boston provides ideal waterfront still close to Boston. Its Marine Park, where the old South Boston Aquarium was located, as well as its numerous boat clubs and beaches, brought many visitors to South Boston. It may be this bucolic getaway that Lowell would have associated with South Boston. But to more recent readers, the term has other connotations that resonate with Lowell's poem. South Boston is perhaps most famous for being known as "Southie"--a fairly insulated neighborhood, largely Irish working class, that got much press during the 1970s when the city of Boston tried to integrate South Boston's all white schools through forced busing. Terrible riots ensued which helped to give "Southie" a reputation for both class and racial violence. That reputation has largely been altered now as South Boston has become more ethnically diverse and more integrated into the city of Boston as a whole.

Southie resident Michael Patrick MacDonald recently wrote an autobiography, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie (Beacon Press, 1999), in which he describes the town as both a troubled community where organized violence is protected by the "Southie code of silence," but also as "the best place in the world" (Beacon Press Fall 1999 catalog).

These changing associations with the term "South Boston" provides an instructive case for textual interpretation. If we want to interpret the term as Lowell might have meant it (something we can't ever know for sure), then the first meaning, the Sunday getaway meaning, of "South Boston" is most likely. But we aren't wrong, and don't need to repress, other more recent associations that we unavoidably bring to a text. These too can enter into the interpretation process, so long as we recognize that, for Lowell, "South Boston" may have had no connection with the race riots occurring in the South that he later mentions in "For the Union Dead," since the busing riots in South Boston occurred some ten years after Lowell wrote his poem.

Sources:

Anthony Mitchell Sammarco, Images of America: South Boston (Dover, NH: Arcadia, 1996), 6-8.

Beacon Press Fall 1999 catalog

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