Dubliners

• Two Gallants
• Eveline

Comments on 'Dubliners'

Let me start by saying that I think Dubliners is one of the finest things that the English Language has been used for. There are two types of literature that I enjoy:

1. Books and poetry that I enjoy reading because they are fun to read. The narrative is engrossing and the plots involve some sort of escapism or creativity. Most books in this category are what many would call pulp fiction or at least not highbrow reading.

2. The second category is literature that involves an intellectual challenge, and is a work of art in itself. Literature like this has a symbolic structure. You may call it pretentious, and you may consider it ridiculous but whether the artist intended it or not these books have layers of meaning. They have depth. They have meaning that goes beyond provision of temporary enjoyment and escapism.

The rare piece of literature that both excites my senses and caters to my short-term whims AND contains some real significance is a rarity. Dubliners is not this rare piece of literature (although this isn't a bad thing - if the book wants to express stagnancy, the writing becomes stagnant. Dull to read, perhaps, but inside the text is masses of writhing meaning), but it does fall into the second category and is one of the finest examples of a novel that contains depth, and really makes a point.

Joyce hated Dublin. He also was drawn towards it strangely. Observe the part in 'The Boarding House' where Mr. Doran tries to go down the stairs but feels strangely forced back up. That is what Joyce feels like: Dubliners reflects his bizarre love-hate relationship with the city. The book expresses his sadness and pity, but also his disgust and amazement. In fact, it expresses so many things that it becomes a mish-mash of emotion, but that's only because Joyce actually felt like that.

The novel also marked the real beginning of modernist writing, or at least its coming-of-age, and this is another reason why Dubliners is well and truly a piece of art (please don't get me started on the 'is this art' argument: I don't know much, but I do know art when I see it). What is the significance of this? Well, anyone can express a hatred of Dublin; it's how you do it that matters. The narrative is astonishing, and brings us closer to the stream of consciousness that Joyce finally unleashed in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Look at how it is twisted, and how it is at the mercy of the character, for once, not the author. Look at how it moves into the characters' minds, and then back out. Do you think that this happened before the 19th century (and that's not wholly rhetorical: I haven't read enough to know if it didn't)? I doubt it.

Trying to explain why I like this book is like trying to explain to 10 year-olds why Shakespeare is considered to be a half decent playwright. OK, maybe it's not a page-turner, and maybe there's no titillation but just study the text and you'll be stunned. I enjoy the second category of books because I never cease to be amazed by what the human mind is capable of creating, and I mean that sincerely.

I would now like to apologise for the dry tone of the following essays/comments. I have noded them as part of the Node Your Homework thing, but also because among the dissections of language are some of my very own, original ideas that I am proud of. All the essays are mine, and once again, sorry for the slightly uptight style. I have only edited them slightly (mainly to remove obscure references to essay titles). To get the most out of my comments, please read the texts (right here on E2!): I promise you it's worth it.

Discuss the presentation of women in Dubliners

Virginia Woolf referred to the advent of Modernism as a "Renaissance" and this is true considering the social and cultural upheaval that accompanied it. Crucially, however, Modernism began to question dogma and convention.

The female role in Victorian times was clear: women were inferior in body and intellect, and as a result were ignored by literature. Joyce, by often looking specifically at the female form, acknowledged the shift in focus but through his characterization managed to mingle social commentary and satire.

Dubliners shows us how literature often runs ahead of its time by recording the perception and not reality: by carefully showing the reader the legacy of an era of female repression he managed to portray females as they were - free as they might be, their minds (and often their bodies) were trapped, weighed down by history. Joyce also introduced (and questioned) Freudian theory, not only using, but also discussing symbolism.

Women in Dublin live under a patriarchal society in which freedom is merely an illusion. At first glance (both structurally, on the page, and visibly) in The Boarding House, Mr. Mooney dominates the household symbolizing the manner in which a male figure exerts authority in an uncontrollable, slightly unstructured way. "He drank, plundered the till" and "ruined his business."

Yet this power seemingly diminishes and "Ms. Mooney governed the house cunningly and firmly." A female figure appears to hold power, yet looking at the image more carefully we see that Mrs. Mooney and Polly are only free within their house, which has already been dismissed as a symbolic brothel; a house of sin.

The almost farcical desperation of Mrs. Mooney to find a match for her daughter reveals the underlying restriction and banality of their empty world.

Joyce uses the female form most interestingly, I believe, in his examination of symbolism.

Firstly, look at Gabriel's comment in The Dead: "He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of." Joyce asks himself this very question, but at times explores the issue through a presentation of what many Freudian scholars call the "cultural dichotomy" or the "Virgin/Whore dichotomy" (it took me 10 minutes on the chatterbox to deem if this word was suitable for an essay...) - that is, the depiction of women as either a paragon of virtue or sin.

This, of course, is nothing like reality, and the result is confusion. Polly is aptly described as a "little perverse Madonna" singing "I'm a ... naughty girl,/ You needn't sham:/ You know I am." The words "girl" and "sham" are vertically juxtaposed suggesting that the symbols we see (that of Polly as flirtatious, or as completely virginal) are in fact false.

The suggestion of the Virgin Mary being perverse shows us the underlying ambiguity of all symbols, and this theme is explored throughout the book.

What are its implications?

The polarized symbols appear most prominently in Eveline, but in The Dead we see Gabriel's surprise upon realization of the fact that Lily, the "slim, growing girl" is the same "child ... nursing a rag doll" he used to know. The name "Lily" refers to the flower, which was a symbol of the Virgin Mary, and it shows us the fallibility of symbols - like flowers, reality develops and grows, but signifiers for that reality are left behind.

This inability to perceive women as either desirable or innocent, but not both, reflects the manner in which Dubliners have trouble perceiving reality and the underlying physical world.

Oscar Wilde once said "Ignorance is like a delicate flower: touch it and the bloom is gone," and the same is clearly true of symbols; they function reasonably well if one is only using them as placeholder, but the world is clearly not so - this is shown in Eveline where she lives in a state of perpetual uncertainty.

The society that forces her into categories also forces her mind into two states, but the mind is a natural wanderer so images of escape and desire are juxtaposed with ideas of repression and paralysis. The curtains that smell like "dusty cretonne" are thick and rotting, and this suggests an element of sexual frustration, and here another point arises - whether we look at the female form as chaste or libidinous, there is always fertility.

Yet in Dublin there is not only a female aversion to water (the closed umbrellas in the shop window in The Sisters combine this image with a Freudian symbol of phallic rejection) but also a sort of universal impotence.

One might suggest this is simply Joyce removing culpability from the female themselves - perhaps he is suggesting that no matter how hard they try, no matter how much sexuality they give off, they cannot develop.

However this suggestion is flawed because throughout Dubliners the phallic rejection is not a natural phenomenon. It is a conscious act - an active aversion. Females are portrayed as wholly rejecting sexuality, symbolized by water and liquids, and this is why Feminist critics often attack Joyce. However they too are not entirely correct because Joyce also shows males as impotent.

The "queer old josser" masturbating in The Encounter is symbolically wasting his sexuality and potency, and his fertility, his seed, is spilled.

I believe that culpability is not the issue - it is not a question of whether women should be able to break free or whether they are held back by society (it is in fact elements of both) - in fact Joyce does not ask any questions at all: his portrayal of female infertility is rather eulogy of sorts, showing his pity at the wastage and rot inherent in an Irish society that holds outdated prejudices.

Paralysis is of course a major theme throughout Dubliners, but a problem appears when we try to examine Dubliners from a feminist perspective: surely the idea of paralysis seems to be universal, and transcends gender boundaries?

After all, Mr. James Duffy in A Painful Case (a semi-autobiographical character) is an archetypal `Joyce' male: physically dominant yet mentally unstable and wandering, and he too suffers a non-epiphany.

The discrepancy cannot really be resolved, but paralysis is too broad a term to use. First consider conventional images of women: Victorian literature portrayed the female as vulnerable, sensitive, submissive and immobile. Joyce's women are similar, because one of his aims I believe is to deconstruct Romanticism and rubbish its very ideals.

Romantic literature looks closely at the individual and the worth of the individual. Joyce looks at the insignificance of the individual, and brings the female form (which is idolized in Romantic works) back down to earth. The paralysis that Joyce describes takes on many forms, but we can separate it into two types: males seem to suffer a creative paralysis that brings about apathy and ignorance.

In the female form, however, we get a more mental paralysis that brings on feelings of worthlessness and fear. Eveline worries about her physical worth in this world, and is almost threatened by her own ideas (that takes on the form of her dead mother) when desire strikes.

When desire enters the thoughts of males, it has a different effect - Corley in Two Gallants is overcome by thoughts of his future, but when he steps outside the restaurant, the sense of apathy that pervades Dublin enters his mind and leaves him wandering the streets, at a loss.

The important thing to realise is that if symbols, for whatever reason, seem ambiguous and if in describing females Joyce appears to contradict himself, this is his way of commenting on the nature of symbols and labels. A society that attaches labels to categories of people is one that is left confused and repressed, suggests Joyce.