James Joyce’s The Dead

James Joyce develops strong female characters in his short story “The Dead” and uses them in contrast to the men. The primary contrast is that between Gretta and Gabriel, and while Gretta is described in feminine terms related to the image of the Blessed Virgin, Gabriel is described in the same terms, creating an interesting shift which carries through the story and brings out differing perspectives on male and female.

James Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin, Ireland and died in 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland. He is noted as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century, noted especially for his experiments in language and literary structure and his contributions to the modern novel. His parents were middle-class, and he was educated by Jesuits. Both elements feature in his works, notably in the short stories that make up The Dubliners, the book which is now ended with “The Dead.” His novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not precisely autobiographical, but many of the personal and artistic difficulties faced by the main character, Stephen Dedalus, mirror concerns in Joyce’s young life. As identified as Joyce is with Dublin, however, he left there after graduating from University College in 1902, returning only when his mother was ill and then leaving again after she died. He struggled to support himself and his growing family in France and Italy and worked as a language instructor. The family lived in Zurich, Switzerland while he wrote most of Ulysses (1922) moved to Paris in 1920. Joyce achieved international renown with Ulysses and so gained the financial support he needed to become a full-time writer. Most of his final years were spent on his last work, Finnegan’s Wake, published in 1939. Joyce died of a perforated ulcer in 1941 (“James Joyce” (http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/DC/).

Craig Hansen Werner points out that Joyce began his career as an Irishman who looked toward Europe, but who once he left Ireland for the Continent, he turned back to his native land for inspiration. In the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced all of the major movements of the time, but it did so from the perspective of a conquered province, which placed it outside the mainstream. Joyce followed his father’s point-of-view and attributed the economic and psychological problems of Ireland to the effects of English oppression on the one hand and Irish self-betrayal on the other:

Grounded in profound cultural differences and ancient racial antagonism, the historical animosity between Irish and English provides the central motif of Irish history from the Norman Conquest to the present. From the irish perspective, England has always appeared in the role of arrogant conqueror, devoted to economic exploitation and cultural imposition. To a large extent, the facts — repeated economic depression, abusive absentee landlords, devastating famines, the absence of effective political representation — bear out the Irish complaints (Werner 1-2).

Donald T. Torchiana writes,

Most critics remind us that in Dubliners, his first major publication, Joyce held up a mirror to the average Irishman (Torchiana 1).

Joyce wanted the Irish readers to see themselves in these stories and to recognize their own paralysis, perhaps so they could then do something about it. Torchiana believes that the stories in Dubliners have a particular form and purpose that set them apart:

Dubliners strikes me, then, as a series of representative pictures — or mirror-images, if you will. That is, they catch a permanence in irish life that has a timeless quality as though each detail in any story had about it a built-in significance that no educated native Irishman could really miss and no outsider, armed with a guide to Ireland and a bit of imagination, could fail to detect (Torchiana 2).

The subject is the aforementioned paralysis, and this paralysis enfolds the city and makes all Dubliners victims. This paralysis is moral, intellectual, and spiritual. Tindall points out that the moral center of the book is not paralysis alone but the revelation of paralysis to its victims:

Coming to awareness or self-realization marks the climax of these stories or of most at least; for knowing oneself, as the Greeks knew, is a basis of morality if not the thing itself… The self-realization of Gabriel, the bitterest and most comprehensive of all, is not only the point and climax of “the Dead” but of Dubliners (Tindall 4-5).

James Joyce was not considered a feminist author, and he often denigrated the idea of the “new woman” trying to achieve “social and economic independence at the end of the nineteenth century” Brivic 117). He expressed his views on many of the leading women of his time:

He took a bemused attitude toward Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’s passionate defense of women’s rights. And his own relationship with Nora Barnacle swerved erratically between sexual obsession and filial dependence. “I wonder is there some madness in me,” Joyce wrote to Nora. “Or is love madness? One moment I see you like a virgin or madonna the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half-naked and obscene” (Brivic 117)

Brivic further notes, though, that “it would be a mistake to identify Joyce with his misogynist alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus,” for Joyce as a mature adult “championed the contemporary ‘revolt of women against the idea that they are the mere instruments of men'” (Brivic 117). Brivic further states,

Joyce’s own attitude toward women always remained highly ambivalent. The dichotomy in Joyce’s mind was not, apparently, between virgin and whore, but between narcissistic virgin and phallic mother?

between the untouched and untouchable ingenue and the experienced maternal female. In the guise of a Dublin coquette, the Virgin Mary of Catholicism became for Joyce a nubile temptress, coyly flirting with adult sexuality (Brivic 117).

Tilly Eggers also notes the prevailing critical view that Joyce is an anti-feminist writer and finds this an unsatisfactory conclusion:

The primary evidence, found in private and literary writings, is Joyce’s use of extreme images of women, as virgins or whores or both, images interpreted as means to avoid recognizing women as individuals, either by elevating or by denigrating them. Because both Joyce and Gabriel perceive women in extremes as either spiritual or sensual and because of the autobiographical nature of the story, critics tend to identify the author exclusively with this male character and to equate their attitudes towards women, disregarding the broader perspective Joyce gives on Gabriel by the story as a whole and particularly by the figure of Gretta (Eggers 24).

Eggers says she is not going to try to defend Joyce as a feminist, “but I believe the categorical charge of anti-feminism directed at Joyce and the easy identification of him with Gabriel have ironically provided the excuse to simplify if not overlook the women in ‘The Dead'” (Eggers 24). She recommends a reconsideration of the virgin imagery in the story as a way to “free readers, female and male, from an obligation which only prevents understanding of his vision of women” (Eggers 24).

J.P. Riquelme finds that the story is dedicated to undoing certain social hierarchies which would have been prevalent and important in Dublin society, and one of these hierarchies is the male over female hierarchy. The primary hierarchies, which Riquelme says are interlocking, are “those involving class, gender, race, colonialism, nationalism, and regional prejudice” (Riquelme 489). By the end of the story, the gender hierarchy will be shifted — not dismantled, but shifted enough to create uncertainty about role levels. Riquelme writes,

Women speak in response to Gabriel’s provocations throughout the story in ways that he neither anticipates nor intends, and their speech causes him discomfort. In effect, his efforts to hear the confirming echo of his own speech backfire, for the women respond effectively in negative ways to the role he plays as a model of male superiority in an imperialistic, class-structured society (Riquelme 489).

Class structure is of great importance to Gabriel, but he is not always able to differentiate class issues from gender issues, as Riquelme notes:

great deal of Gabriel’s anxiety in the story concerns his fear of slipping from the pinnacle that he occupies: that is, his fear that others will not see him as he wishes to be seen. His experiences in turn with Lily, with the nationalistic Miss Ivors, and with his wife indicate to Gabriel and to the reader that the views some others hold about him do not in fact conform to his own (Riquelme 488).

Riquelme cites a moment with Lily and Gabriel as an example:

The first moment includes Lily’s pronunciation of Gabriel’s surname when she asks, “?

Is it snowing again, Mr. Conroy?” Since Joyce renders the statement by standard spelling, the reader has no reason to suspect a nonstandard pronunciation until Gabriel belatedly notes it in thought: “Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and glanced at her”… Unlike the reader, Gabriel has heard not only her individually intended, semantic meaning but the markers of class difference, which are part of a cultural system’s intentions rather than merely the individual’s (Riquelme 489-490).

Some critics see different readings possible for the story, depending on whether the reader approaches “The Dead” as the lat story in The Dubliners or as standing on its own. Florence Walzl is one who says that seeing the story as a conclusion means viewing Gabriel’s epiphany as “a recognition that he is a dead member of a dead society” (Walzl 424). If the story is read on its own, though, Walzl says “the effect is different: the story seems one of spiritual development and the final vision a redemption” (Walzl 424). In both cases, the final epiphany is directly related to the sudden revelation that comes to Gabriel in terms of his relationship with his wife.

Shelley Anspaugh considers the interactions between Gabriel and various women as part of the Gothic roots of the story. She also cites Eggers on the way Joyce uses these interactions and finds that again and again, Gabriel is sexually aroused by Lily, by his wife, only to be rejected a moment later. What sexual arousal creates in Gabriel is the desire to dominate, to assert the male hierarchical role, and rejection pulls him down from that role to a more level one, if not to a subservient one. Anspaugh finds this pattern in the scene where Gabriel and Gretta ar about to leave the party, and when Gabriel sees his wife on the stairs, the image “excites Gabriel, and as they enter their hotel we are told he experiences ‘a keen pang of lust'” (Anspaugh 5).

Joyce writes,

He could have flung his arms around her hips and held her still for his arms were trembling with the desire to seize her and only the stress of his nails against the palms of his hands held the wild impulse of his body in check (Joyce 215).

Anspaugh characterizes this language as “Joyce’s breathless sentence” and finds that it “reproduces the style of what we would today call ‘Gothic’ romance, the formulaic novel of Love” (Anspaugh 5). Anspaugh also uses the Gothic here to suggest male dominance, or at last the image of male dominance. As Joyce puts it, Gabriel “longed to be master of her strange mood…. He longed to cry out to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her (Joyce 217).

This image of the woman on the stairs is singled out by many critics as especially revealing of Gabriel’s character and his attitudes toward women. Eggers refers to this scene and says of Gabriel,

H]e notes the details, such as the woman’s grace and mystery, the color blue of her hat, her elevated position, and her other-worldly attitude, which are traditional associations with the Blessed Virgin that Joyce employs throughout Dubliners. But while Gretta is a human symbol of the Virgin ideal, she is also a composite portrait of women in Dubliners, the symbol of all women. Like many characters in the collection, Gabriel identifies a woman with the Virgin, but unlike any of them he can perceive the woman as spiritually and physically desirable; what Gabriel cannot do is perceive her an integrated person, independent of himself (Eggers 33).

At least, he cannot do this until the end, when he realizes that Gretta does have an existence apart from him, a revelation that makes him question everything in his life and perhaps even sympathize more with the dead than the living. Riquelme points this out when he writes,

At the story’s end, Joyce coordinates the dismantling of Gabriel’s defenses with Gretta’s assumption of the speaker’s role. It would be going too far to claim that male speech and the male gaze are displaced by woman’s speech and the female gaze at the end of “The Dead,” but, at the least, the male’s ignorance about the meaning of the woman’s perspective is partially overcome in a recognition of shared mortality (Riquelme 489).

Gabriel gets a different vision of himself, one which shifts the hierarchy in his mind so that now he is on a level at least below his aunts, giving women the ascendancy in his life. Gretta has just shown him that she also does not exist in the world-vision he had of her but has a life of her own:

shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror (Joyce 219-220).

Joyce brings out differing perspectives on the male and the female through the interactions of Gabriel with several women, including Lily, Mrs. Ivors, and Gretta, as well as in his relationship with his aunts. In the end, these differing perspectives lead to a shift in the perspective of Gabriel himself, altering how he views women and so how he views himself, for he never has been able to see women except as they relate to himself. Whether he can now is open to dispute.

In this last story in The Dubliners, Gabriel has an epiphany paralleling those of other characters in this collection of stories, an epiphany that offers him a revelation about himself on which he may be able to build for a future. For others, such a revelation may mean that they see they have no way out at all. Joyce is not entirely hopeless in his view of the people of Dublin and thus of the world, and he does believe that some will be able to find a way to escape from the paralysis of society and of their own societally-developed souls to achieve a higher level. Gabriel seems to see this revelation as an end, for he looks out on the falling snow and sees himself as one of the dead. He is not dead, though, and might be able to make good use of this experience.

Works Cited

Beja, Morris. “Joycean Psychology.” In Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays, Richard F. Peterson, Alan M. Cohn, and Edmund L. Epstein, 106-129. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

Brivic, Sheldon. “One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners. In Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays, Richard F. Peterson, Alan M. Cohn, and Edmund L. Epstein, 1-14. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

Eggers, Tilly. “What Is a Woman… A Symbol Of?” In James Joyce’s Dubliners, Harold Bloom (ed.), 23-38. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

James Joyce.” DISCovering Biography. Gale Research, 1997. Reproduced in Discovering Collection. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group. October, 2001. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/DC/.

Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (eds.). New York: Penguin, 1976.

Riquelme, J.P. “Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: The Dissolution of the Self and the Police.” Style 25(3)(Fall 1991), 488-505.

Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959.

Torchiana, Donald T. Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986.

Walzl, Florence. “Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of ‘The Dead.'” Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (eds.), 423-443. New York: Penguin, 1976.

Werner, Craig Hansen. Dubliners: A Pluralistic World. Boston: Twayne, 1988.