“Clay”
In “Clay”, Joyce once again overturns elements of the preceding story. If “Counterparts” presents an abusive work-place, “Clay” begins by telling us about a woman who works in a laundry where she appears to perform her work beautifully and is consequently respected, appreciated, and lauded by her superiors and co-workers. Telling us that “the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers” (82), the narration suggests that everyone offers Maria high praise. This diverts us from noting that Maria must be the laundry’s scullion, and it is not until we ask ourselves some questions about the religious tracts on the walls that we can infer that the place is a charitable rather than an economic institution, possibly a Protestant establishment to support reformed or aging prostitutes, as some critics have suggested.
Maria previously worked for many years as a domestic for a family, and although her station in life is clearly inferior to Farrington’s, she appears blessed by the respect, appreciation, and kindness of colleagues and former employers. The narration offers us a flattering portrait of a special evening in Maria’s life, when she will visit the family she once worked for to enjoy a Hallowed Eve celebration, stopping on the way there to buy delicacies. When she arrives she enjoys their kind attentions, is offered drinks, plays a game with the children, and ends her evening by performing a moving song at their request. The problem with this construction of the evening in the positive spirit of the narrative voice is that there are numerous incidents that suggest an entirely different interpretation: one that infers that Maria is teased and made fun of by her co-workers, treated with little courtesy by shop-persons, offered no seating on the crowded tram except by an old drunk, and subjected to an embarrassing prank by her friends’ children.
When Maria is invited to join in a fortune-telling game that requires her to be blindfolded and select an object on a table, her hand encounters a “soft wet substance” rather than a prayer book or ring to predict her future. The narration never tells us what she touched or what it meant, and the reader is obliged to guess that perhaps it was damp garden dirt, the “clay” in the story’s title, that Maria would fear was excrement or some other vile substance. Fortunately, she remains baffled while the offending object is replaced with the prayer book and Maria’s only sign that the experience might have rattled her a bit is her skipping a verse of I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls, her farewell song on this evening.
In “Clay” Joyce has compressed two entirely opposing stories—the first of a woman who is loved and respected, and the second of a disdained and humiliated one—into a single piece of writing managed by a narration that the reader is urged to both register and distrust.
“A Painful Case”
If “Clay” is the story of an “old maid,” as Maria might have been called in her day, “A Painful Case” tells us about a middle-aged bachelor with a good job as a bank cashier, a very nice room in the suburb of Chapelizod, and an orderly if dull life that appears undisturbed by James Duffy’s lack of companions or friends. But once again, Joyce gives us a story with a double, concealed meaning, which will force the reader to uncomfortably try to guess what the tale is really all about.
Duffy’s few pleasures include the occasional concert, and at one he befriends a married woman and her grown daughter. Mrs. Sinico’s husband and daughter have no objection to her friendship with Duffy. But one night, as their relationship develops and reaches a point of intimacy, Mrs. Sinico takes his hand “passionately” and presses it to her cheek (93). Duffy is shocked and a week later meets Mrs. Sinico in a park to break up with her after a three-hour conversation. As readers, we are more stunned by Duffy’s shock and break-up decision than by Mrs. Sinico’s loving gesture. We are shocked again when four years later Duffy reads a newspaper article describing how Mrs. Sinico was killed by a slow-moving train while crossing a track at night, possibly in an inebriated state. Instead of giving Duffy an acute sense of sorrow, her “commonplace vulgar death” as a drunk “revolted him,” as he “saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous” (97).
It is not until later that evening that, while taking a walk, Duffy begins to ask himself whether “he had denied her life and happiness” (98) and therefore contributed to her possible suicide. All this seems to make “A Painful Case” an adultery narrative on the order of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina who also dies on a train track struck by a train—but in Joyce’s story there is no adultery, and it appears to be the refusal of adultery that causes the tragedy.
Why was Duffy unable to love Mrs. Sinico? This is where the story becomes even more complicated because we are given a single clue that is never discussed or explained but nonetheless turns the story upside down. Two months after breaking up with her, Duffy wrote in his private journal his thoughts that “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse” (94). Was Duffy unable to respond to Mrs. Sinico because he is a latent or closeted homosexual? Except for that single revelation in Duffy’s papers, the narration tells us nothing more about his sexual orientation, and particularly fails to mention whether he spoke to Mrs. Sinico about it during the lengthy conversation right before their break-up.
Why would Joyce keep the cause of Duffy’s refusal to love Mrs. Sinico so mysterious? Two scandals involving Irishmen rocked Ireland at the time of the story’s narration: the adulterous affair of the politician Charles Stewart Parnell and the sodomy trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde. Both adultery and homosexuality were highly charged forbidden relationships in English-speaking countries in the early 20th century, and almost impossible to write about openly—which explains why Joyce published his 1922 Ulysses in France rather than in Ireland or England, and why Dubliners could not have been published had he treated this version of James Duffy’s story openly in “A Painful Case.”
“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”
The progress from childhood to adolescence to adulthood in the themes of Dubliners takes another turn in this story, which deals not with a single protagonist or narrator but with a collective group of men who work as canvassers during a Dublin election campaign. They get together on a cold and rainy evening in the “committee room” of the Nationalist party. Some of them wear an ivy leaf in their lapels, setting the date of the story precisely as October 6, 1902, the anniversary of the death of the great Irish political leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, who died in 1891 after the revelation of his adultery ended his career.
The story’s plot is simple: all day the men have been trying to stir people to vote for their candidate, and they now hope they will be paid for their work. They are tired, wet, and cold, sitting in a room lit only by a small fire and a couple of candles. They talk about their candidates and their political differences—conversations not easily sorted out by readers unfamiliar with the Irish politics of the day. A basket full of bottles of stout is delivered while they wait, and as the topic is turned to the celebrant of the day, one of the men is asked to recite a poem he wrote about Parnell’s death. The poem’s moving rendition ends the story with a burst of applause, silence, and more stout.
But if the crux of the story is simple, its point is larger and more subtle. Politics mattered intensely in Ireland, a country with a complicated political situation, wide-spread poverty, talk of favoritism and corruption, as well as of hopes for progress and improvement. What this really means, however, is expressed in the condition of the men who appear to have families but no regular jobs: some are missing teeth, have splotches on their faces, leaking shoes, and not enough money to pay their rents. “I expect to find the bailiffs in the hall when I go home,” one of the men says, clearly worried about a rent collector coming to arrest him if he hasn’t paid (105). Politics is talk, we see here, both exalted and committed, empty and deceptive, and sometimes almost promising salvation as the honorable commitment of Joyce’s hero, Charles Stewart Parnell, did f
or so many Irishmen in his day, before the Catholic Church’s attack on his adultery brought him down. But Joyce also underlines politics and the talk that informs and supports it by showing us the stakes in the lives of struggling, ordinary men.
“A Mother”
After the social focus of the previous story, “A Mother” appears at first glance to take us back to such earlier family stories as “Eveline” and “The Boarding House.” But this story also has a social focus—although on the world of art and entertainment rather than politics—and it actually gains much illumination by comparing its theme with issues raised in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”
The reason “A Mother” appears so different is because it begins by giving us a somewhat unflattering introduction to a single character, a Mrs. Kearney, who is described as a strong woman skilled at making sure that everything in her life will serve her advantage. She marries a dull but stable and responsible man, makes sure her daughter gets a good education, shrewdly supports the Irish Revival, and when approached about having her daughter Kathleen serve as the piano accompanist at a series of upcoming concerts, she enthusiastically agrees. A contract is signed stating Kathleen’s salary for her participation, and Mrs. Kearney works hard to promote the event only to find it is poorly organized and attracts little attendance. This alarms her sufficiently that she seeks out the concert managers at the beginning of the last concert to demand that her daughter be paid then and there, which is done only grudgingly and partially.
Before the second part of the concert she asks for the remaining pay again, and is told that the managerial committee will discuss the matter at a later time. When she argues with the men and threatens to withdraw her daughter from the concert, she is publicly reprimanded and denounced (“You might have some sense of decency, said Mr Holohan [. . . . ] I thought you were a lady” [127]). Having received no satisfaction, Mrs. Kearney, along with her daughter and husband, storm out.
The story is narrated in a way that makes the condemnation of Mrs. Kearney by everyone at the concert seem entirely justified, and it is therefore not surprising that critics and readers may feel the same way. But it is here that a possible split in response should be considered, especially if we hark back to the question of pay as it is raised in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” In that story, it seems outrageous that the manifestly poor campaign canvassers might not be paid for their work on a cold and rainy day by politicians who profess to promote and protect the interests of their electorate. Consequently, the reader would be obliged to judge such an outcome to the story quite harshly. But “A Mother” reminds us that the production of art is also work, also labor, and that singers and pianists must also eat and earn a living with their work. So why should the story’s mother be judged harshly for demanding that her daughter’s contract be honored and her work paid?
The story appears to foreground both the necessity of treating art as an economic enterprise as well as an aesthetic one, and the problem of gender equality, that women have a right to be paid for their work as surely as men do. The narrative’s negative descriptions of Mrs. Kearney have, in a sense, pre-judged her in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to judge her demand for her daughter’s pay without pre-judgment, or prejudice.
“Grace”
Like the two previous stories, “Grace” offers a focus on Dublin’s social life, this time with religion in an apparently central role. But a closer look reveals that—like “Ivy Day” and “A Mother”—the theme buried under the actions and discussions is once again money. This is difficult to divine beginning with the mystery of why a man who turns out to be a Mr. Kernan fell down the steps of a lavatory in a bar he visited with two men who are never clearly identified. Was the fall an accident—perhaps caused by drinking too much—or did it have something to do with the occupation of one of the men, Mr. Harford, who appears to work for a possibly unscrupulous moneylender as a “muscle” or enforcer? Did Kernan fail to pay a debt and was he therefore pushed down the stairs to teach him a lesson and to threaten him with future violence if he fails to pay up?
None of this is made clear in the story, and the focus soon turns to Mr. Power, a friend who kindly offers to take Kernan home to a wife who has been waiting anxiously for her husband to bring her money so that she can feed her family. Power appears to have some sense of what may be going on and therefore arranges with some friends to stage what we would now call an “intervention,” a plan to try to get Kernan to face his drinking problem—presumably the cause of his debts and bankrupted condition—by attending a religious temperance retreat. The men all meet in Kernan’s bedroom where he is recuperating, and turn the discussion to religion, Jesuits, and the preaching of Catholic priests, leading up to a casual mention of the retreat they are planning to attend. Kernan, a Catholic only by marriage, has to be coaxed into joining them, and the story ends with a kindly sermon by Father Purdon at the retreat, urging the men gently to seek to correct their faults and failings and put their accounts with God in order.
The story ends there without letting us know if the retreat worked, although we are predisposed to doubt it. Father Purdon’s account is careful not to condemn but only urges and coaxes, and in a sense, the entire narration has done just that: urge and coax us not to be too hard on Mr. Kernan and to look at the whole business in a positive and encouraging light. The problem is that Kernan’s behavior victimizes his family and others, as we will learn later in Ulysses, where we find out that Mr. Fogarty, a kindly grocer to whom the Kernans owe huge amounts of money, is never repaid and consequently suffers bankruptcy. Money and debts are ugly topics, to be sure, but the story reminds us that they have enormous moral and ethical implications with respect to how they are handled and treated in society. Society, like this narration, prefers not to look at them too closely or deal with them too directly.
“The Dead”
And so we come to the last story in the collection, the ominously titled “The Dead,” which, like “A Mother,” appears to be centered on family—in this case the extended family of Gabriel Conroy, his wife Gretta, his aunts Kate and Julia, and their niece, Mary Jane.
There is also romance in the story, or perhaps its opposite, as the maid Lily would see it when she tells Gabriel Conroy that “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (154)—an effective retort in the event Gabriel might have contemplated making a pass at her. An even more complicated romantic problem besets the married Gabriel and Gretta at the end. And like the previous three Dubliners stories, “The Dead” brings up larger social issues, brilliantly weaving politics, art, and religion together with questions of gender, age, and race.
The plot centers on a holiday party the elderly Morkan sisters and their niece Mary Jane host annually for friends, family, and members of Dublin’s musical society in which the Morkans have played, and continue to play, a role. There are conversations about music and musical performances, all intertwined with a variety of conflicts. Art and politics create problems between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors, a strong supporter of the Irish Revival who taunts him for writing about Browning’s poetry in a conservative newspaper and for preferring to travel to the Continent to improve his French and German rather than to the Aran Isles in western Ireland to retrieve Ireland’s lost Gaelic language.
In general, the story foregrounds the pleasant atmosphere of the party, while treating conflicts between the characters as minor distractions. It is therefore up to the reader to pay attention to the significant stakes in some of the conflicts that erupt. One of the most poignant concerns Aunt Julia, who was recently dismissed from the church choir in which she had sung for many years as the result of a historical papal edict barring women from singing at Catholic services. Julia’s sister Kate is extremely angry about this but is quickly silenced by her niece, and the party continues with dinner. Julia had earlier sung a song so beautifully that the narration calls her voice “strong and clear,” notes that she misses not even
“the smallest of the grace notes,” and says that to “follow the voice, without looking at the singer’s face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure flight” (168). Clearly, Kate is right, and that Julia is a gifted singer who has suffered a grave injustice at the hands of the Church. But both the narration and the characters in the story gloss over this in a move the reader could, and should, construe as both sexist and ageist. A second small incident that repeats this pattern occurs when a guest named Freddy Malins mentions a “negro chieftain” currently singing at the Gaiety pantomime, “who had one of the finest tenor voice he had ever heard” (172). When no one reacts to this, Freddy asks sharply if people assume the tenor cannot have a great voice. “Is it because he’s only a black?” (173). Art is fraught with politics, the reader can infer from these incidents, where at a congenial evening musical dinner party old women and blacks are denied recognition and respect for extraordinary talent on the grounds of gender, age, and race.
The story’s narration brushes these issues aside, and the party ends well. However, one more incident of the slighting of a woman is raised when after the party Gabriel Conroy is moved by seeing his wife on a stair listening to a romantic song. This stirs romantic feelings in him, and on their return to their hotel room, he approaches Gretta only to find that the song reminded her of a young tubercular man who used to sing that tune, and who once stood beneath her window in the rain declaring his love for her shortly before he died. Gabriel has played such a major role not only at the party, but also in his family’s entire life, that his focus is chiefly on his own feelings, including his own romantic feelings, rather than those of others, including his wife. As a result, when Gretta describes being courted by her young lover, a scene with resonances of “Romeo and Juliet,” Gabriel is shaken and for the first time feels overshadowed and demeaned. “He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts,” and as “a piteous fatuous fellow” who had been “idealizing his own clownish lusts” (191). Joyce was a great admirer of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” a drama with a similar marital dynamic in which the husband must confront the fact that he is not the center of his wife’s existence and that he scarcely knows her after years of marriage.
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