Idea Transcript
Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature
Andrea Bodnárová
Provincialism and its discontents in James Joyce’s Dubliners Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D.
2013
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. ……………………………………………..
Author‟s signature
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Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ 3 Introduction.......................................................................................................................... 4 1. The literary influences in Dubliners ............................................................................. 7 2. Childhood ....................................................................................................................... 15 3. Adolescence ................................................................................................................... 21 4. Adult Life ........................................................................................................................ 26 5. Public Life ....................................................................................................................... 31 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 36 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 38 Summary in English .......................................................................................................... 41 Resumé v češtině .............................................................................................................. 42
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Introduction My thesis, Provincialism and its discontents in James Joyce‟s Dubliners is focused on the literary analysis of Dubliners and the way James Joyce portrays the frustrated citizens of Dublin. The thesis will look at Joyce‟s use of provincialism in connection with the development of his realist aesthetic and its relation to his social and political perspective. The main themes analysed in the thesis connected to provincialism are paralysis, frustration, desire for freedom and passivity. The thesis is divided into five chapters; the first one presenting some of the major Joyce‟s literary influences on Dubliners, the rest each presenting a section of
Dubliners – Childhood, Adolescence, Adult Life and Public Life. The reason why I decided to make such division is that the stories in Dubliners naturally develop a certain intuitive, but also logical connection according to their narrative viewpoint, characters and topics. The childhood stories – “The Sisters”, “An Encounter” and “Araby” all have a child as a first-person narrator; the adolescence stories – “Eveline”, “After the Race”, “Two Gallants” and “The Boarding House” all present adolescent characters stuck at some kind of a life crossroads; adult life stories – “A Little Cloud”, “Counterparts”, “Clay” and “A Painful Case” present an adult person dissatisfied with his/her life and feeling remorse about their past and the public life stories – “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, “A Mother”, “Grace” and “The Dead” each satirize a section of Irish society – politics, culture and religion. “The Dead” functions as a kind of masterpiece epilogue connecting the themes together. Each of these chapters will be focused on one story, using which the main themes and aesthetic will be presented. The first chapter – The literary influences in Dubliners presents some of the major literary influences and their impact and reminders in 4
specific stories in Dubliners. The influences analysed in the chapter are the Celtic Renaissance, Dante Alighieri, the Nineteenth-Century French Novel and Henrik Ibsen. The secondary sources I considered the most important and useful while writing this thesis are Robert Alter‟s Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the
Language of the Novel, Gregory Castle‟s Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Marilyn French‟s Missing pieces in Joyce‟s Dubliners, and Michelle Lecuyer‟s Dante‟s Literary
Influence in Dubliners: James Joyce‟s Modernist Allegory of Paralysis. Robert Alter‟s Imagined Cities analyses the way of depicting urban life by various authors. The chapters I found particularly useful were “Flaubert: The Demise of the Spectator”, “Flaubert: Urban Poetics” and “Joyce: Metropolitan Shuttle”. The chapters are sorted chronologically and they are also tied together according to the literary influences, which helped me find information about Flaubert‟s impact on Joyce‟s work. Gregory Castle‟s Modernism and the Celtic Revival contains a detailed insight into the Celtic Revival movement and its cultural context. It also deals with works of James Joyce; although it is mainly focused on Ulysses, Dubliners are also mentioned and the cultural background of the literary works presented in this chapter makes the concept clear and easy to understand. Marilyn French‟s Missing Pieces in Joyce‟s Dubliners is a detailed analysis of each story in Dubliners; the scheme of the essay is logical and the remarks in it bring psychological states from the stories back to their physical origins. This essay helped me understand certain aspects of the stories better and also formulate some of the thoughts I had myself.
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Michelle Lecuyer‟s Dante‟s Literary Influence in Dubliners is also a very logically structured work, which deals with Dantean parallels in specific stories from
Dubliners. It also provides a detailed background on the state of the research and direct connections between Dubliners and The Divine Comedy. This brought a new level to the perception of the stories and showed me the whole range of Dante‟s impact on Joyce‟s work. In this thesis I aim to create a clear, logical and possibly entertaining overview on Joyce‟s way of presenting the provincialism of the Irish society in Dubliners and its effect on individuals.
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1. The literary influences in Dubliners This first chapter of my thesis is an overview of James Joyce‟s literary influences visible in his works with the focus on Dubliners. Its structure has four parts – the Irish renaissance, the impact of Aristotle and Dante, the influence of the French novel of the 19th century and Scandinavian dramatic realism, mainly Henrik Ibsen. These influences helped to shape Joyce‟s writing style and contributed to the shape of his works we know nowadays. One of the most profound influences is unquestionably the Irish Renaissance, also called the Celtic Revival, which raised the question of nation and nationality. According to Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, “A nation is the same people living in the same place.” (J. Joyce, 1961: 331) This statement somehow mirrors Joyce‟s personal view, as he was an open critic of Revivalism, which made his works relevant in the context of Irish artistic production. The root of the feeling of isolation was the need to separate and the way the patriotic pride was demonstrated. In his book
Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Gregory Castle comments: “the pride and fervor, and most of all the confidence of the men and women who rallied around the United Irishmen in 1798 and later around the Young Irelanders, foundered on sectarianism, which for some revisionist historians was artificially fomented in order to drive a wedge between the Catholic Irish and their Anglo-Irish sympathizers.” (Castle, 8) Castle also views Ireland as a “metropolitan colony” of the British Empire, since both Ireland and England share the same language, urban culture, geopolitical population and legal code. Many of the Anglo-Irish began to feel isolated; among them some of the most important figures connected with the Irish renaissance John Millington Synge and William Butler Yeats: “The Irish, through the later nineteenth century, had 7
become one of the most deracinated of peoples; robbed of belief in their own future, losing their native language, overcome by feelings of anomie and indifference, they seemed rudderless and doomed.” (Kiberd, 329) James Joyce was probably not as burdened by questions of religious self-determination and authenticity. However, he faced the problems of isolation and marginalization. He remained aloof from the Revival and according to Castle, precisely in this way, he succeeded in redefining it. Joyce‟s work serves as a self-criticism of the Revival‟s way of representing Irish culture with the use of self-reflexivity and counter-narratives. According to Castle, some influential critics of Joyce assume that his antipathy toward nationalism paralleled a similar antipathy toward the Revival. However, along with Yeats, Joyce desired the creation of an imaginary Irish nation and race. “Whereas Yeats did indeed give up, to some extent, „the deliberate creation of a kind of Holy City in the imagination‟ and replace it with images of enduring heroism and not-so-durable authority, Joyce remained faithful to the original conception of the Revival.” (Castle, 174) Unlike Yeats, Joyce chose to create a national literature by engaging in an immanent critique of Revivalism by challenging the theories and practices by which the Irish people are represented. He was not a Revivalist in the sense of trying to preserve the essence of Irish folk life, but remained faithful to the idea, pushing the self-critical impulse from Synge‟s Playboy of the Western World and “exposing the Revival‟s investments in anthropological notions of primitive Irish race.” (Castle, 177) Like Synge, he deconstructs the anthropological methods used to get what was essential and true about the Irish peasant life in production of patently inessential and untrue anthropological fictions on two levels: the first one being an inquiry into the conditions of Dublin and its inhabitants and the second one being a view of 8
disaffected “natives” such as Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead” and Stephen Dedalus in
The Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. He also refuses any authority other than his own “moral nature”, which is emphasised in his letters to Grant Richards: “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass” (Gilbert, 64); the looking glass employs a metaphor used against Synge in the
Playboy controversy: “A reviewer of The Playboy had lamented Synge‟s refusal to represent the Irish realistically, asserting that the Abbey Theatre directors „were expected to fulfill the true purpose of playing – to hold as „twere the mirror up to Nature, to banish the meretricious stage, and give, for the first time, true pictures of Irish life and fulfillment of that pledge.‟” (Castle, 180) In his works, Joyce reveals the vanity of people blinded by the “true pictures” and the consequences of their ignorance. The influence of Dante Alighieri and his Divine Comedy is also an important element in Joyce‟s work. In her master‟s thesis Dante's Literary Influence in
Dubliners: James Joyce's Modernist Allegory of Paralysis., Michelle Lecuyer analyses Dante‟s literary influence in Dubliners and emphasises the allegories mainly between
Dubliners and Inferno. She also states that Dante‟s influence on Dubliners was overlooked for a long time and even if the critics, who do find connections between Dante and Dubliners, tend to interpret them superficially. For example, it has been common for critics to analyse “Grace” as a miniature parody of The Divine Comedy, ever since Joyce‟s brother Stanislaus first suggested this interpretation in 1958: “Mr. Kernan‟s fall down the steps of the lavatory is his descent into hell, the sickroom is purgatory, and the Church in which he and his friends listen to the sermon is 9
paradise at last.” (S. Joyce, 228)1 In the end, critics have tended to identify one-toone correlations, in which a particular story in Dubliners was connected with a particular canto in Inferno, which caused many Dantean connections to be overlooked. Joyce and Dante share a disapproving attitude towards their native cities of Dublin and Florence and often expressed contempt for their inhabitants and institutions. Joyce‟s criticism of the people and institutions of Dublin is informed by Dante‟s similar condemnations of the people and institutions of Florence in the
Inferno. Warren Carrier, one of the first critics to recognize the Dantean influence in Dubliners, wrote in 1965: “In a larger sense, Dubliners, like Dante‟s Inferno, is both literal and allegorical. Joyce is presenting Dublin literally, realistically, but the state of paralysis in which the characters reside is, as it were, the state of souls after death, a state which they merit because of their betrayal of values.” (Carrier, 214)2 According to him, the sinners in both Dante‟s hell and Dubliners do not recognize their sins, but know that they are trapped. This becomes more profound in the second part of
Dubliners as the characters become more and more passive. Cóilín Owens also mentions Dante‟s influence in his chapter “Joyce and Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo and „The Sisters‟”, the author discusses the parallels and differences between these two works, concluding that “the chief was Dante Alighieri” and “In his powers of language, his vision, and his subject, Joyce found a more sympathetic model than Dumas, whose gifts were for dramatic plotting and not for poetic nuance.” (Owens, 26) His conclusion is quite expected, as the influence of Dumas‟ works on Joyce is generally not considered to be of importance. 1 2
Cited in Lecuyer, 9. Cited in Lecuyer, 34.
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The 19th century French novelists also had a great impact on James Joyce‟s writing style. In his essay Flaubert to Joyce: Evolution of a Cinematographic Form, Alan Spiegel analyses the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Joyce‟s works using a cinematic approach and therefore mainly concerning the visual perspective. Flaubert‟s visual perspective established two possible views of the object: the object is rendered in specific time and space, or the object is rendered in perspective. In the first case, the reader is locked in the mind of the beholder, in the second the object is mediated through distortions of an eye that sees like a camera. He describes the experience of seeing as “voluptuous” and manages to project it into his work. A different perspective is shown in Robert Alter‟s chapter on Flaubert in his book Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel, which focuses on the way he describes the urban environment. This is also directly connected with Joyce, as his works are situated in a city and the main connecting theme of Dubliners is the city of Dublin itself. In Flaubert‟s works, everyone is trying to get somewhere; everyone is frustrated by all the others, who are in the way and this also somewhat applies to Dubliners, though the main trait of the majority of the characters
is
passivity
and
self-isolation.
“Flaubert‟s
breakthrough
in
the
representation of the urban realm was to perceive the modern metropolis simultaneously as a locus of powerful, exciting, multifarious stimuli and as a social and spatial reality so vast and inchoately kinetic that it defied taxonomies and thematic definition. The urban crowd as he understood it was the uneasy habitat of the isolate individual.” (Alter, 20) Isolation is also mentioned in Alan Spiegel‟s essay; according to Spiegel, Joyce reveals a close kinship with Flaubert and like him he can also make an object seem to stand apart from the total visual field. “It is the 11
economy of Joyce‟s visual notation, his apprehension of the object within the most constricted of ocular frames that not only distinguishes him from the French master, but from anyone of his (Joyce‟s) predecessors.” (Spiegel, 240) In Ulysses, we view Stephen only in terms of his palm, his elbow and his cuffedge. The deathbed of his mother is represented only by the “bowl of white china” with its contents of “green sluggish bile”, which seemingly does not come together at all, but represents a kind of visual aphorism. In the chapter of Paul Jones „Styling hospitality: Gustave Flaubert and George Moore in James Joyce‟s “The Dead”‟ in the collection of essays James
Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel edited by Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr, the influence of Flaubert is mentioned once again in connection with his collection of stories Trois Contes. In the letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, Pound highlights the first story of the collection, Un coeur simple. The character of this story Victor is a sailor with a “frank, open look”, who entertains by telling stories mixed up with nautical language (Flaubert, 1991: 148), while in “Eveline”, there is a sailor called Frank, who is a narrator of tall, nautical tales. Criticism discussing the links between Flaubert and Joyce used to focus on a sense of “the pervasive affinity of mind and art which places both in a common literary tradition.” (Block, 5)3 According to Jones, Dubliners form part of a wider pattern of French influence on Anglo-Irish literature of the early twentieth century that turned to French models. However, these general accounts overlook some of the traces of Joyce‟s reading of French fiction in the text. One of the most significant differences between Flaubert‟s and Joyce‟s view is the approach to vision. Flaubert is interested in describing the object from the observer‟s angle of vision; Joyce is more interested in the experience of
3
Cited in Jones, 147.
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vision itself. “The passive, affectless eye is also characteristic for a Joycean observer here and throughout his novels and short stories.” (Spiegel, 242) The idea of no assumptions origins from the art for art‟s sake philosophy, whose main idea is that art should be complete in itself and is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function. Concerning other 19th century French novel authors there are many more or less obvious parallels analysed in the collection of essays edited by Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel. In his chapter „Balzacian ghosts in „The Boarding House‟, Benoit Tadié compares Joyce‟s Dublin to Paris once again, this time it is Balzac‟s Paris. According to Tadié, The Boarding
House can be read as a variation on Balzacian narrative – in both cases it works as a site of entrapment by the unseen forces (mostly money) that reconstruct the networks and relations. Both are also poised on as ambiguous social frontier and present “love for sale” theme. A later reappearance of the “Boarding House” in
Finnegans Wake as “boardelhouse” confirms the centrality of the “love for sale” theme. Tadié also compares Flaubert‟s and Balzac‟s narrative; Flaubert reaches point of endless repetition and exhaustion, while Balzac and Joyce work towards a climacteric moment implying dramatic reversal and recognition of the excitement and perils involved. The last influence to be mentioned here is Henrik Ibsen. Besides languages as Italian, French and German, Joyce desired to refine his Norse “so that he might read the great plays in the original.” (Gorman, 13)4 Ibsen‟s devotion to Aristotle and Aquinas also sent Joyce in this direction and the analogy of the Norwegian “National”
4
Cited in Koch, 880.
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revival with the character of the Irish literary revival fifty years later is also striking. Joyce‟s awareness of this is clear in his pamphlet The Day of the Rabblement, dated October 15, 1901. It is a protest against the proposed National theatre for Ireland. According to Vivienne Koch‟s The Influence of Ibsen on Joyce, it took Joyce less than a year after his letter to Ibsen and less than half a year after The Day of the
Rabblement to take first steps toward the self-imposed exile that lasted until the end of his life – “an exile which was never to be softened as was Ibsen‟s, in his old age, by a fervent recall from his countrymen.” (Gorman, 28)
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The influences mentioned in this chapter – the Celtic Renaissance, Dante Alighieri, the Nineteenth-Century French Novel authors and Henrik Ibsen helped to shape James Joyce writing style to the state we read it now. The themes like isolation, frustration, or passivity origin from the conjunction of the cultural aspects – the Irish nationalist movement and works of Joyce‟s predecessors situating their characters in urban environment. Dante Alighieri‟s legacy contributes to the profundity of Joyce‟s works and helps create a complex image of the literary world of James Joyce.
5
Cited in Koch, 884.
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2. Childhood The first part of Dubliners is the childhood stories. “The Sisters”, “An Encounter” and “Araby” are all first-person narratives, where the world is shown through the eyes of children. Because of their young age, the children are not yet completely drawn into the debilitating trap of society and their will and desire to change something is still strong. In this chapter, I am going to focus on “An Encounter” and present the way the strong themes of paralysis and desire for freedom are expressed in this story. The main characters, the unnamed narrator and his companion called Mahony decide to go for an adventure after being introduced to adventure stories and it ends up being their first encounter with the adult world. After a walk through Dublin, which does not end up being such an adventure, they experience one on their way home, when they meet an old strange man. His character is unpredictable and represents the unknown: “At times he spoke as if he were simply alluding to some fact that everybody knew, and at times he lowered his voice and spoke mysteriously as if he were telling us something secret which he did not wish others to overhear.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 26) At the beginning his attitude is liberal, however during the course of the story it suddenly changes to strictness and almost perverse fascination with physical abuse. The narrator is paralysed by this and he feels uncomfortable. In the end he reaches his breaking point and manages to escape this paralysis in a way by leaving the man. However, the effect still lasts: “I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles.” (28) 15
The old man seems similar to Christy Mahon of Synge‟s Playboy of the Western
World, who was praised a hero for supposedly killing his father. They both carry the same kind of vulgarity and crudeness, though unlike Christy, the old man is not perceived a hero. He holds an eerie image, but his appearance and behaviour does not seem unexpected and unfitting. It seems like brute characters like him and encounters with them are quite common in the environment of Dublin and the society accepts it. This acceptance of rudeness and twisted ill-mannered behaviour, which is even emphasised by idolatry in Playboy of the Western World is characteristic of the portrayal of the Irish society at the turn of the century and is central to the resistance ideas of Celtic renaissance. The scene in which the old man approaches the boys is also compared to Dante‟s hell in Inferno. According to Michelle Lecuyer, it is also the physical environment: “Having skipped school in order to fulfil their desire for a real adventure abroad, two young boys, after a long day of meandering through the city, decide to stop and rest in a wide field. (....) Reynolds has identified this sentence as an allusion to the opening of Canto XV, in which sodomites are among the sinners punished in a plain of burning sand.” (Lecuyer, 42) According to Lecuyer, the scene is even more similar to Dante‟s eight circle, emphasised by Joyce‟s repetition of words “slope”, “sloping” and “bank”: “Dante‟s eighth circle, called Malebolge, is a pit consisting of ten separate ditches or valleys called bolgia that hold ten separate groups of sinners who have committed various kinds of fraud.” (43) She also compares the old man to Dante‟s seducers, as “they never stray from their eternally circular path, just as the old man constantly speaks in circles.” (44)
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The fact that the narrator manages to escape in the end is a positive sign, when compared to other stories in Dubliners, where the characters are unable to escape their paralysis. It is a sign of childhood, as children can still develop out of their paralysis and resuscitate. The narrator in “Araby” is also an adventurer in a way, when he decides to go to a market to get a present for a girl he barely knows. According to Marilyn French in Missing Pieces in Joyce‟s Dubliners, “Araby” is crucial to Dubliners because it sums up and builds on the confusing and destructive associations presented in the first two stories – “The Sisters” and “An Encounter” and also shows “a character willing his own blindness, thus leading into the rest of the stories.” (French, 452) Other character traits of the narrator are his overconfidence and vanity – when the old man asks him about the books he read, he says he read them all, even though it is not true: “I pretended that I had read every book he mentioned so that in the end he said: -Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. Now, he added, pointing to Mahony who was regarding us with open eyes, he is different; he goes in for games.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 25) His feeling of superiority towards Mahony is also expressed in the very last sentence: “And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.” (28) The unbroken confidence is visible among all the younger characters and it gets weaker “with age” at the expense of vanity. Even though the later characters are passive, at the same time they still manage to be vain and proud of their non-existing accomplishments. The religious theme also plays an important role in the stories of childhood. The reader is exposed to it right at the beginning in “The Sisters”, with death of the local priest – Father Flynn overshadows the events of the story. The narrator 17
contemplates about Father‟s death, paralysis and their relationship. He feels somewhat relieved, but at the same time fascinated by the priest‟s death: “I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 11) This statement, the ambiguous dialogue of the sisters in the end and more straightforward comment of Old Cotter at the beginning of the story: “I have my own theory about it, he said. I think it was one of those... peculiar cases. ... But it‟s hard to say. ...” (8) give an odd air to Father Flynn, similar to the pervert in “An Encounter”; the main difference being relationship with the narrator. “That something may be no more than loss of faith or commitment, may be, since the boy calls him a “simoniac”, a selling out of self to the power of the Church, but it is heightened by the mystery and ellipses to something dark and fascinating and corrupt, something containing overtones of perverse power and sex.” (French, 448) According to French, there is also a narrative connection between “The Sisters” and “An Encounter”, when the narrator of “An Encounter” refuses to look at the “old josser” performing a queer activity and refuses to “let the act or any words for the act enter his consciousness. This boy has, in other words, learned the lesson of „The Sisters‟.” (French, 449) In “An Encounter”, there is also a situation when the narrator and his companion face some ragged boys, who throw rocks at them and yell: “Swaddlers! Swaddlers! thinking that we were Protestants because Mahony, who was darkcomplexioned, wore the silver badge of cricket club in his cap.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 22) The Roman History teacher, Father Butler, also scolds a boy named Leo Dillon for reading American detective stories. French connects this with the old man the boys 18
meet later in the story: “The old man‟s monologue connects sex with both power and punishment. The base for this association is laid earlier in the story, in the boy‟s frightened reaction to Father Butler‟s rebuke of Leo Dillon, in the reference to Mr. Ryan‟s physical punishment of his students, (...)” (French, 449) She also compared the old man‟s language with the dialogue of the sisters in “The Sisters”: “This language is euphemistic and elliptical and has the repetitive ritualistic quality of pornographic writing, which builds by repetition and concentration and circularity and artificial, fantastic reality.” (French, 450) The religious undertone is also present in “Araby”, when at the beginning the narrator comments on the previous tenant, who was a priest and died in the back drawing-room. Some of his possessions were left behind and remind the boy of the priest. According to Marilyn French, the priest even overshadows the language of the story; it is pervaded by religious and liturgical terms and the narrator is trying to overcome an unconscious repression. The notion of freedom and a desire to find it connects all the stories in
Dubliners. In “The Sisters”, the narrator feels somehow free after the death of Father Flynn, but the image of the priest still haunts him and keeps him paralysed. In “An Encounter”, the boys seek freedom by going on an adventure, but they are unsuccessful, when they do not manage to reach the end of their journey and are reminded of the “real world” by meeting the stranger. In “Araby”, the narrator seeks freedom in love and tries to gain affection of a girl by buying her something at the Araby market, but in the end his intentions are spoiled by his uncle. In the end, he feels anger: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” In later stories, the
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emotions of this kind are less open and more suppressed. The childhood stories present a less complicated viewpoint and remedy is still possible.
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3. Adolescence In the adolescent stories – “Eveline”, “After the Race”, “Two Gallants” and “The Boarding House”, the narrative view changes as well as the age of the characters, when compared to the childhood stories. The protagonists face more important, life-changing decisions and their lives become more restricted. Their paralysis is growing stronger and although they can still escape it, it becomes more and more difficult. The focus of this chapter is “The Boarding House” and the way the paralysis leading to inability to revolt forces the characters to succumb to the public opinion and forces them to keep a good public image under all costs. The owner of the boarding house, Mrs Mooney, managed to escape her unfortunate life situation – an alcoholic husband, who ruined their business with his own incompetence, and lives off the boarding house, where she hosts clerks and tourists. “Her underlying motivation is established at the outset with ironical economy: All the resident young men spoke of her as The Madam.” (Spinks, 62) Her daughter Polly helps with the responsibilities and openly flirts with the residents. While planning Polly‟s marriage, Mrs Mooney does not learn from her own mistakes and let Polly marry out of love; she wants her to get to the higher society under all costs. This attitude is similar to Eugéne de Rastignac‟s attitude in Pére Goriot by Balzac. Rastignac bears similarity to Polly (naivity, youth), but also to Mrs Mooney (desire to get to higher class). According to Benoit Tadié, there are also other similarities. “In both cases good grammar and standard expression function as social limitations rather than as assets. Both boarding houses constitute a favorable breeding ground for the development of a heterogeneous and linguistically agile 21
culture which, in retrospect, may be read as a mise en abyme of the urban ethos out of which modernist literature would eventually develop.” (Tadié, 36) Tadié also points out that Joyce‟s boarding house is similarly divided into class of permanent residents on one hand and, on the other hand, what he calls “a floating population made up of tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally, artistes from the music halls.” (Scholes and Litz, 62)6 Mrs Mooney‟s behaviour is similar to a chess player trying to win the game as smoothly as possible, with Polly being her chess piece. Mrs Mooney believes that men should carry the same responsibility as women, but she does not carry any responsibility for her actions: “Mrs Mooney's covert pursuit of her material objective divorces appearance from reality; the boarding house is a place in which frankness seems to be the presiding tone, but where vulnerable bachelors will be seduced and outmanoeuvred.” (Spinks, 62) Her all-seeing eye carefully monitors the situation and she even begins to think of sending Polly back to typist school, as “the young men were only passing the time away: none of them meant business.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 68) However, when Mr Doran appears and is made a likely suitor, Mrs Mooney plays upon his lack of moral nerve to close the deal. The fact that she does not accept any financial payment for her daughter‟s reparation makes marriage an economic commodity in this type of transaction. “One's investment in a good moral image is, after all, a serious business.” (Spinks, 63) The public (moral) image is an important feature of all adolescence stories and it shows the provincialism of the society presented in them. In “After the Race”, Jimmy Doyle fakes his well-being to create a fictional public image in front of his wealthy friends. This charade however ends up 6
Cited in Tadié, 36.
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with his remorse over losing a lot of money in a card game. In “The Boarding House”, there is no open expression of remorse, although Mr Doran is the most insecure character, as his already existing good public image is at stake. The character of Polly resembles Eveline (from “Eveline”), especially in the scene where she sits in her room waiting to be called and dreaming: “Her hopes and visions were so intricate that she no longer saw the white pillows on which her gaze was fixed or remembered that she was waiting for anything.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 75) A similar scene occurs in “Eveline”, when Eveline sits in her room thinking the decision she is about to make and that might change her life. Eveline and Polly both have a very vague notion of marriage; they see it in a romantic way similar to fairy tales. These expectations are similar to Emma Bovary‟s in Madame Bovary, she also expected her marriage to be romantic and then felt dissatisfied with her new life: “Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.” (Flaubert: 2006)7 The difference between Eveline and Polly is that in case of Polly, she is not the one making the decision; it is already made for her by her mother. “For Polly, marriage is the price she must pay to gain some degree of respectability and status, and (hopefully) economic survival; for Bob it is the price he must pay to guard his respectable status and economic survival.” (French, 456) However, Polly seems to keep her face well; she exaggerates her emotions in front of Doran to make him feel guilty and maintains throughout a pose of “wise innocence”: “She understands 7
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exactly why she was brought home to work in the boarding house; she knows that her mother is granting her tacit approval; she knows what she is expected to do with her life.” (French, 456) Mr Doran is the main representative of paralysis in the story; his age of thirty four or thirty five makes him the one to blame for his and Polly‟s incident – he is the mature one. His moral beliefs and conscience prevent him from running away, although at the beginning he thinks about it. Mr Doran is so stressed about worsening his public image that he even visualises losing his job: “The affair would be sure to be talked of and his employer would be certain to hear of it. Dublin is such a small city: everyone knows everyone else‟s business. He felt his heart leap warmly in his throat as he heard in his excited imagination old Mr Leonard calling out in his rasping voice: Send Mr Doran here, please.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 71) Even though he seems to care about Polly, when it comes to worries, he is egocentric and only cares about himself. He is not worried about her integration in his society; he is scared that she would embarrass him with her vulgarity: “He could imagine his friends talking of the affair and laughing. She sas a little vulgar; sometimes she said I seen and If I
had've known. But what would grammar matter if he really loved her?” (72) He also denies responsibility for the incident; it was her who seduced him and his only fault is that he yielded to it. “Bob Doran is somewhat aware of his snobbery and his double standard, if not of his vanity – he clearly believes Polly seduced him out of attraction and affection.” (French, 456) He sees it as a sin and he knows that it needs to be taken care of, but at the same time he wishes to ascend through the roof and fly away to another country where he would never hear again of his trouble”. (74) His paralysis forces him to act the way Mrs Mooney wants him to. The 24
priest to whom Doran confesses also forces him to make amends and attacks his morals. It is questionable, whether the religious morals are stronger than the social ones, but they seem to work together effectively: “The church, state, social, and business worlds all participate in transforming erotic and affectionate feeling leading to sexual union into an economic and political arrangement that stifles away the very feelings it is intended to channel and control.” (French, 457) The future marriage of Bob Doran and Polly Mooney becomes an inescapable constriction that leaves the protagonists unhappy and trapped. The shift from childhood to adolescence becomes visible with the commitments; the children‟s worries are not permanent, however the issues presented in the adolescent stories are likely to have a long-lasting effect. The adolescents are facing an important decision and, unlike the characters in later stories, they can still change their life path. However, their paralysis prevents them from deciding, therefore they go where they are lead, they try to fit in the crowd and keep their public image. Their inactivity leads to inescapable situations, such as unhappy marriage in “The Boarding House”, make-believing in “After the Race”, inability to live a decent life in “Two Gallants” and inability to be independent in “Eveline”.
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4. Adult Life In the stories of adult life – “A Little Cloud”, “Counterparts”, “Clay” and “A Painful Case”, the paralysis and passivity is fully developed and the adult characters lost the drive of adolescent characters. Their lives become monotonous and their inability to leave the stereotype enforces their frustration. Frustration is also the main theme I am going focus on in this chapter and I am going to manifest its impact on “A Little Cloud”. The main character of “A Little Cloud”, Little Chandler, is inwardly frustrated with his life and marriage and feels dissatisfied and stuck in his stereotype. He is meeting his old friend Gallaher, who left Dublin to pursue his journalist career in London. Little Chandler never tries to follow any of his dreams and considers it impossible, as he now has family commitments. His belief, that to succeed in life, one must leave Dublin and Ireland just like Gallaher did, mirrors Joyce‟s personal views: “The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in Ireland do not permit the development of individuality. The soul of the country is weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties, and individual initiative is paralysed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while its body is manacled by the police, the tax office, and the garrison. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland.” (Mason, 171)
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However, in the case of Little Chandler, his location is not his main problem. His frustration is interconnected with his passivity; he always ponders the possibilities, but he always makes excuses why he cannot try any of them. Although he is an adult character, according to Marilyn French, his traits are not that mature: 8
Cited in Delany, 257.
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“His melancholy moods resemble those found in adolescents, who must also repress their anger and desire.” (French, 457) The difference is that he is no longer capable of changing anything: “Paralysis of will leads logically to that of action, for in a society where individuals lack freedom in making the vital decisions of life, the result is frustration and non-productiveness. These characters are already trapped by life, having made constraining choices earlier.” (Walzl, 225) His anger makes him similar to Farrington from “Counterparts”, but unlike him he does not let it out either at home, or in front of Gallaher. As well as Little Chandler, Farrington holds autobiographical features – he is an alcoholic clerk frustrated with his job. When Little Chandler finally meets Gallaher, he feels uninteresting and internally compares himself to the “big world stories” of Gallaher. He feels that the connection with Gallaher makes him connected to Gallaher‟s life: "Every step brought him nearer to London, farther from his own sober inartistic life. A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind. He was not so old – thirty-two.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 80) Little Chandler feels ashamed of his family commitments and dreams of an adventurous life like Gallaher‟s. At first he wants to open to him, but in the end he speaks briefly, which contrasts with Gallaher‟s speech, which is very open and flamboyant. Gallaher knows how to make his stories interesting; he always refers to his life “outside” in a moderately positive way and is not overly emotional about it: “Beautiful? said Ignatius Gallaher, pausing on the word and on the flavour of his drink. It‟s not so beautiful, you know. Of course, it is beautiful...But it‟s the life of Paris; that‟s the thing.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 83) Chandler considers Gallaher‟s life “brave” and admires his courage to leave his hometown and pursue his dreams. Gallaher presents himself as an important adventurer and exaggerates the significance of his 27
tales, which mostly consist of political gossip and experience with loose women in various European capitals: “Go to one of the students‟ balls, for instance. That‟s lively, if you like, when the cocottes begin to let themselves loose.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 84) Even though Dublin is also a capital, its character is more provincial and Gallaher is mocking it, as well as the character of people, who live there. “I‟ve been to the Moulin Rouge, Ignatius Gallaher continued, when the barman had removed their glasses and I‟ve been to all the Bohemian cafés. Hot stuff! Not for a pious chap like you, Tommy.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 83) Chandler feels arrogance in his speech, but it does not weaken his fascination and jealousy of him and his actions. The character of Gallaher is a pseudo-hero similar to the “drunkard idol” or, again, Christy Mahon of
Playboy of the Western World. “Joyce once remarked that Ireland was “an aristocratic country without an aristocracy”; the knights of Dubliners are neither gentle nor gallant, and behind their pretentions to breeding and good manners a mercenary motive usually lurks.” (Delany, 261) According to Michelle Lecuyer, Joyce himself likens Gallaher to Dante‟s Ulysses; just as Dante‟s Ulysses is “Concealed within this moving fire” (Dante, 47)9; Gallaher “emerges after some time from the clouds of smoke in which he had taken refuge.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 85) Despite seeing Gallaher as a hero, at the same time Little Chandler angrily looks down upon him and tries to persuade himself that he is better: “He felt acutely the contrast between his own life and his friend's, and it seemed to him unjust. Gallaher was inferior in birth and education.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 88) Chandler always talks about what he could do, but he never does anything and his situation is only the consequence of his actions. He blames the fate, his surroundings, his timidity
9
Cited in Lecuyer, 63
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and his lack of money for his failures. Marilyn French comments on this: “Chandler cannot read aloud because of shyness; he cannot read silently because of the child; he cannot write because he is in Dublin, he cannot leave because he is married, because there is „the furniture still to be paid for.‟ Many of us create such traps for ourselves, blind to their illogicality.” (French, 458) He dreams of accomplishments, he even invents sentences and phrases from the reviews his book would get. “Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse... A wistful sadness pervades these poems... The Celtic note.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 80) He also expresses hope that he would be more successful, if his name was more Irish looking. His nationalism is ridiculed in the end, when Chandler reads an early poem by a very English poet Lord Byron, which he wrote when he was fourteen years old. “His love of poetry is superficial: not only does he admire a bad poem (something not rare in professional artists) but he blames his diminished interest in poetry on his wife, or at least on his marriage.” (French, 458) Chandler cannot deal with his creative problem because he does not allow himself to express his real desires; he does not look at the world around him. His frustrated epiphany at the end of the story is the only genuine expression of emotion. Little Chandler‟s frustration and insecurity projects itself in the relationship with his wife. He feels that he is no longer important for her and that her attention is now devoted to their son. Gallaher‟s stories about the variety of exotic women stimulate his fantasies and he starts to see his wife as too boring and simple. His ambivalence is symbolised by eyes – he fantasises about dark, exotic eyes of rich Jewesses and imagines them full of passion and voluptuous longing. However, his wives eyes seem to him as cold and impassionate: “Certainly they were pretty and 29
the face itself was pretty. But he found something mean in it. Why was it so unconscious and lady-like?” (J. Joyce, 1988: 91) According to Marilyn French, Chandler‟s real desire is for sexual experience. His poetic inclinations are merely an illusion and a way to release feelings of anger and desire that he cannot deal with in their raw state. This attitude also connects him with the character of Maria in “Clay” – she still thinks of herself as a young girl, still nubile, dependent, and subject to others. Like Little Chandler, Maria retains her adolescent sexuality in childish form, blushing at the mention of wedding cake, sparkling at the thought of getting a toy ring in a children's game.” (French, 460) The mistrust Little Chandler sees in his wife‟s eyes encourages his feelings, when she returns to comfort the baby. His tears of remorse might implicate guilt over his emotional outburst, but also his regret over the events of the day and his life in general. The characters in adult life stories represent the frustration created from the inescapable life stereotype. Their own passivity traps them in unfulfilling life situations, such as the unsatisfying marriage in “A Little Cloud”. The feelings of remorse present in all four stories originate from their past inactivity and the situations the characters are in in this stage of life are the outcome of the crossroads situations the adolescents dealt with in previous stories. However, as the paralysis is too long-term, there is no possible escape anymore.
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5. Public Life The main difference between the public life stories and the rest of Dubliners is the narrative focus. While the rest of the stories focus on one or two major characters and their point of view, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother” and “Grace” each present and satirise an aspect of Irish society – politics, culture and religion. “The Dead” profits from the discoveries made in the course of writing earlier stories, it connects the aspects together and presents the dullness of the society. To present the overall character of Irish society and its discontents, I chose “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, as politics is probably the most representative and influential section of the public life. The story is centred on members of the Nationalist party meeting, which is supposed to be focused on the upcoming elections and future candidacy of Richard Tierney, the representative of the party. Tierney himself is not present, his character is only mentioned a few times and from the story, the reader gets the impression that his candidacy is not that important. “The story takes place rather than unfold an action; plot and narrative development are replaced by an implicit drama of consciousness.” (Spinks, 69) The men meeting in the room – Old Jack, Mr O‟Connor, Mr Henchy and later Crofton and Lyons do not seem too enthusiastic or even bothered by Tierney‟s political view or any political programme; the only active person is Hynes, who criticises Tierney for betraying the ideals of the party and supporting the British. He now supports Colgan, the representative of the opposition party and a working-class member: “The working-man is not looking for fat jobs for his sons and nephews and cousins. The working-man is not going to drag the honour of Dublin in the mud to please a German monarch.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 136) The other 31
men are indifferent to this accusation and they only agree, when Hynes states that there would not be such a talk “if this man was still alive,” pointing to the ivy leaf on his lapel and thus referencing Charles Parnell. Their indifference and inconsistency in their opinions is enforced later in the story, when Henchy declares, that Tierney is “in favour of whatever will benefit this country. (...) He‟s a prominent and respected citizen and a Poor Law Guardian, and he doesn‟t belong to any party, good, bad or indifferent.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 147) He also concludes that the coming of the King of Britain would actually benefit the citizens of Dublin because of the influx of money into the country. According to Lee Spinks, their passivity and inactivity is strong because “for the assembled company no political action is really possible; their politics is determined by an emotional investment in the past that renders meaningless any present intervention.” (Spinks, 69) The statements of the party members show that their attitude is exactly the same as the attitude of Tierney, the party representative – they are there only for the money. “The story shows political life to be, like marriage, an economic arrangement, and one with short goals, to boot.” (French, 463) Moreover, it seems that the said supporters do not even need money; at first they are impatient because of Tierney‟s promise to pay them for his campaign, but when a boy brings bottles of stout from a pub, they forget about the money and they are satisfied, as long as they can drink. “Porter is the highest good in this world because the people who inhabit this world cannot even aspire to money.” (French, 463) The benefit-hunt is similar to Mrs Kearney‟s attitude in “A Mother”, when she does not care about her daughter‟s musical performance or her presentation; the only thing that matters is
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money. Together with the politician and his supporters from the common folk she represents the indifference and blindness of the Irish nation. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is said to express of Joyce‟s disillusion in politics. The character of Hynes has autobiographical features and represents Joyce‟s loss of political ideals. Hynes is the only character left to hold on to Parnell‟s ideals and the poem he reads in the end marks the ignorance of the rest of the men – they do not realise they are also traitors responsible for the loss the fading of nationalist ideals and yet they applaud. “Parnell had fought and died for Irish independence, yet his sacrifice counts for nothing with the hangers-on of the committee room; for them, the determining fact is that they are all „hard up‟.” (Delany, 262) Gabriel Conroy, the main character in “The Dead” is also accused of being a traitor, by Miss Ivors, when she finds out he is contributing to The Daily Express, a conservative paper. Similarly to Hynes (and Joyce), he is disillusioned and disappointed with his country, but unlike Hynes, he does not feel as the right person to change something. However, Hynes‟ enthusiasm also seems to fade by the end of the story. The supporters of the Nationalist candidate, Mr Tierney, know that he does not care for the ideals of the party and that he will only do what is personally beneficial to him; “that elections merely serve the end of the financial and clerical establishment, and that the ostensible issues are just window-dressing.” (Delany, 262) Their political engagement ends with the money and the free beer they get from it. The original patriotism fades as they discuss trivial things and the strongest connection with the authentic ideals is the Hynes‟s poem, which is more relevant than ever. The sound of the cork popping out of the beer bottle after Hynes finishes reading enforces the irony of the situation. As Mr Henchy says, Parnell is dead, and it 33
is implied that if a new Parnell arose, he would meet the same fate as the original one, “since everyone in the story except Hynes (who is largely a surrogate for Joyce himself) would sell his country - for thirty pieces of silver, for an English title, for four-pence, or for a bottle of stout.” (Delany, 263) During the course of the story, there is a brief appearance of a priest, Father Keon. He looks like “a poor clergyman or a poor actor” (J. Joyce, 1988: 140) and his behaviour is rather confusing. This adds him to the category of inconsistent priests together with Father Flynn and Father Butler. He abruptly leaves, as he does not find the person he was looking for about a business matter. Mr O‟Connor and Mr Henchy discuss him and his behaviour and they conclude that they do not have any verified information about him. “I think he‟s what you call a black sheep. We haven‟t many of them, thank God! But we have a few...He‟s an unfortunate man of some sort.” (J. Joyce, 1988: 142) Father Keon is ambivalent, mysterious and unattached to anything. His instability is similar to the one of the committee room residents and makes the political corruption connected to the church. Mr Henchy concludes, that it might be financially beneficial to become a priest: “I think I know the little game they‟re at, said Mr Henchy. You must owe the City Fathers money nowadays if you want to be made Lord Mayor. Then they‟ll make you Lord Mayor. By God! I‟m thinking seriously of becoming a City Father myself.” (142) The business-church connection is also mentioned in “Grace”, when Father Purdon reads a Scripture text “for business men and professional men” and speaks to them in “a business-like way” (197), though it is possible Father Purdon uses is as a metaphor. The way the Irish society is presented in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” and the other public life stories is provocatively accurate and still up-do-date. In 34
these stories, Joyce faces the most important segments of Irish (and probably any other) society and the conclusion is rather pessimistic. The characters in these stories are indifferent to any higher beliefs and their only desire is to fulfil their probably most basic need – for money. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” presents the demoralised generation that does not care about the old nationalistic ideas anymore and is not capable to reunite against the corruption of the nation.
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Conclusion In this thesis, I aimed to create a clear image on Joyce‟s presentation of provincialism and its effect on individuals in the Irish society and on the society as a whole. At first I commented on the literary influences of James Joyce on Dubliners, then I presented the short stories in four chapters – Childhood, Adolescence, Adult Life and Public Life, while focusing on one story in each chapter and presenting the main themes and symbols on it. The main themes that connect the stories and their characters are paralysis, frustration, passivity and desire for freedom; each of them getting stronger as the stories progress and the characters get older. When comparing the childhood, adolescence, adult life and public life stories and chapters, the public life stands out because of its different viewpoint. While the rest is focused on an individual character, the public life stories present segments of the society through the eyes of an outside observer. This way it works as a conclusion, or as a way to show how the themes and their effects presented in the rest of the book work “in real life”. The childhood, adolescence and adult life stories show a certain progress, where paralysis, passivity, but also vanity is getting stronger with the age of the characters. The most influential of the character traits and themes is probably ignorance, which reaches its peak in the public life stories, where the characters only care about their personal benefits and nothing else. The stories of individual characters also seem to get more serious with higher age, but the public life stories and their satiric approach lightens the overall impression. “Each narrative in Dubliners tells a similar tale, of an impulse arrested or else enacted to a
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point where it becomes self-negating: in either case, the gesture of revolt is fated always to have the old, familiar tyranny inscribed in it.” (Kiberd, 330) The childhood stories show the innocence of childhood being exposed to “adult world” situations and emotions such as love, death and perversity. The main theme is paralysis that the children experience, when confronted with these situations, but is much easier for them to overcome it at this point. The young adults in the adolescent stories are forced to be a part of the adult world, but they are not yet ready for it. Their indecisiveness when facing important decisions makes them more paralysed than the child characters in earlier stories. In the adult stories, the paralysis is fully developed, as the characters are bound to their stereotypical lives and escape is made impossible by their own passivity. The characters feel remorse over their past decisions and instead of looking forward (as the characters of the earlier stories), they look into the past and do not realise, that this view makes them paralysed and unable to face real life. In the public life stories, the focus moves from individuals to a more overall view and it shows the general dysfunction of various aspects of the society originating from unsatisfied and paralysed individuals. Their only goal is money as a key to life success and satisfaction. The provincialism Joyce presents in Dubliners serves as a social critique of the Irish society. The literary influences presented in the first chapter also serve as a mode of understanding the text in a different way and also help to understand the whole cultural image and background behind Dubliners. Dubliners is exhibiting Ireland frozen in servitude and hopefully, my thesis managed to show a clear image of the discontents present in it.
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Bibliography Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, Vol. I: Inferno. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2003. Alter, Robert. Imagined Cities : Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel . New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. eBook. Block, Haskell M. "Theory of Language in Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce." Revue
de Littérature Comparée. 35. (1961): 197-206. Carrier, Warren. "Dubliners: Joyce's Dantean Vision."Renascence. 17. (1965): 21115. Castle, Gregory. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. West Nyack, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press , 2001. eBook. Delany, Paul. "Joyce's Political Development and the Aesthetic of Dubliners." College
English. 34.2 (1972): 256-266. Web. 1 Nov. 2012. Flaubert, Gustave. "Madame Bovary." Project Gutenberg. N.p., 25 Feb. 2006. Web. 15 Apr. 2013. . Flaubert, Gustave. Three Tales. Oxford University Press, 1991. Fordham, Finn, and Rita Sakr. James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French
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French, Marilyn. "Missing pieces in Joyce‟s Dubliners."Twentieth Century Literature. 24.4 (1978): 443-472. Web. 1 Nov. 2012. Gilbert, Stuart, ed. Letters of James Joyce. vol. I. London: Faber, 1957. Print. Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years. Ed. Richard Ellman. New York: The Viking Press, 1958. Joyce, James. Dubliners / James Joyce ; the corrected text with an explanatory note
by Robert Scholes and fifteen drawings by Robin Jacques. London: Paladin, 1988. Print. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage-Random, 1961. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage, 1996. Print. Koch Macleod, Vivienne. "The Influence of Ibsen on Joyce."PMLA. 60.3 (Sep. 1945): 879-898. Web. 7 Mar. 2013. Lecuyer, Michelle Lynn. Dante's Literary Influence in Dubliners: James Joyce's
Modernist Allegory of Paralysis. MA thesis. Iowa State University, 2009. Web. Mason, Ellsworth, and Richard Ellmann. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. New York: The Viking Press, 1964. Print. Spiegel, Alan. "Flaubert to Joyce: Evolution of a Cinematographic Form." NOVEL: A
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Summary in English This thesis deals with the criticism of Irish nation and portrayal of provincialism in James Joyce‟s Dubliners. It is divided into five chapters; four of them deal with the four sections of Dubliners – Childhood, Adolescence, Adult Life and Public Life; the fifth deals with Joyce‟s literary influences in Dubliners. It shows the way the short stories are thematically connected and how the themes and characters evolve within the collection. It also comments on how Joyce‟s influences helped shape his critical view on Irish nation and nationalism and how they reflect in
Dubliners. The main themes analysed – paralysis, desire for freedom and passivity are present in all of the stories and reflect the desolation of Dublin, Ireland and the people living there. Each of the four chapters containing literary analysis of Dubliners is focused on one story and presents the themes and motifs on this story, while also mentioning connections with other stories from the same section.
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Resumé v češtině Tato bakalářská diplomová práce se zabývá kritikou irského národa a zobrazením provincialismu v Dubliňanech Jamese Joycea. Je rozdělena do pěti kapitol, čtyři z nich se zabývají čtyřmi tematickými sekcemi Dubliňanů – Dětstvím, Dospíváním, Dospělostí a Veřejným životem, pátá komentuje literární vlivy Joyce při tvorbě Dubliňanů. V práci je prezentován způsob jakým jsou jednotlivé povídky tematicky propojeny a jak se mění myšlení postav v rámci sbírky. Práce taky poukazuje na to, jak se pomocí literárních vlivů formoval Joyceův kritický pohled na irský národ a nacionalismus a jak se tyto vlivy projevují přímo v Dubliňanech. Hlavní témata, kterými se práce zabývá – paralýza, touha po svobodě a pasivita, jsou přítomna ve všech povídkách a odrážejí bezútěšnost Dublinu, Irska a lidí, kteří tam žijí. Každá ze čtyř kapitol zabývajících se literární analýzou jednotlivých sekcí
Dubliňanů je zaměřena na jednu povídku, na které ukazuje témata a motivy a taky spomíná spojitosti s ostatními povídkami stejné sekce.
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