1. Chapter 1 James Joyce , Dubliners: City, Theme, and Period
Prepared by: Dr. Hend Hamed
Assistant Professor of English Literature

2. James Joyce: A Biography
James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February, 1882 into a then prosperous family headed by John Joyce.
John Joyce proved an unreliable provider, however, and the family was forced to move to a variety of addresses in Dublin in James’ early years, as finances declined.
The author lived in 23 different home before he left Dublin.
James Joyce was well-educated, mostly at Jesuit schools, and took his degree in modern languages at University College Dublin.

3. James Joyce: A Biography
He went in to attempt a variety of careers, including medicine, teaching, and music (as a singer).
Although none of these ventures resulted in any permanent means of making a living, they did provide Joyce with a broad perspective on modern life and culture.
His most important literary works include Chamber Verse, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, and Ulysses.

4. Dubliners
Dubliners is the only collection of short stories by Joyce and is both a landmark in the development of the genre and a significant city text.
Joyce wanted to present his city to the world because, as he explained in a letter to his publisher, no writer had yet done so, despite the fact that ‘it has been a capital of Europe for thousands of years, it is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire and it is nearly three times as big as Venice’.’
It was published in 1914, but the stories of which the collection is made up were written between 1904 and

5. Dubliners
Each one seems, on the surface, to be a straightforward narrative of moments in the central characters’ urban lives, but closer reading reveals effective stylistic devices and surprises, as well as an extraordinary richness of theme and topic.

6. Dublin and James Joyce
In 1907, when all the stories in Dubliners had been completed, Dublin was a rich mixture of radicalism and conservatism.
The second city in the British Empire, due to its significance, it had lost its own parliament in 1801.
By the early 20th century, the city was a hotbed of nationalism.
The political party Sinn Fein (we ourselves) was founded in 1905, while the British Headquarters at Dublin Castle housed an armoury for men. Read quote on P. 15 at the top.

7. Dublin and James Joyce
From 1880, Dublin had played an important role in the advance of the Gaelic revival that promoted a ‘native’ culture through literature, song, and the Irish language.
The famous poet W.B. Yeats and playwright Lady Augusta Gregory were its leading lights; they founded the Abbey Theatre (Fig 1.2, P. 15), a driving force behind the revival in 1904.
Dublin was also the site of a conservative flank that sought to prioritize a narrowly Catholic agenda, and objected to experimental or innovative works.

8. Dublin and James Joyce
These tensions between old and new, past and present – between what might be described as a backward-looking conservatism and a more forward-looking political and social agenda – complicate Dublin’s relationship to its historical period.
Such tensions erupted in the so-called ‘Playboy Riots’ that broke out at the Abbey Theatre in 1907.
Parts of this diverse city were infamous for their brothels and dissolute quarters, while others housed staunchly conservative ‘purity’ organizations dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of fallen women and the elimination of vice.

9. Dublin and James Joyce
Religious tensions ran high, exacerbated by politics in many instances.
Key businesses lay for the most part in Protestant hands (though the city was over 80 % Catholic), and sectarianism in employment preferment was commonly practiced.
The medical and educational systems were profoundly shaped by religious belief.
Above all else, Dublin was an intimate city, with a population of only 290, 000 in 1901 (London’s was 3.9 million in 1880).

10. Dublin and James Joyce
After its rapid expansion in the 18th century, the city had entered a period pf relative stagnation the loss of its parliament was crucial here.
Joyce describes the city as wearing merely the ‘mask of a capital’.
The removal of much of the city’s aristocracy to London left ‘gaunt, spectral mansions’, empty monuments to previous wealth, and a cultural and financial vacuum – Dublin expanded slowly in comparison with many of her European neighbours, retaining visible links with her rural hinterland.

11. Dublin and James Joyce
It, also, embraced a limited modernity, offering a degree of anonymity and freedom in the manner of cities worldwide.
Dublin was also small enough that people knew the reality of each others’ lives, and shared a common set of social and political references. This fact underpins all the stories in Dubliners.
The characters’ concern that their actions will be observed and commented upon across the city was a reality of Dublin’s life.

12. Dubliners Turn to the contents page of the book.
Use the individual story titles to consider what themes or interest seem to link the stories.
Can you group many of them together in this way?
P. 17/18

13. Dubliners
Joyce’s tendency is to anatomize his city rather than to generalize in broad terms.
The word ‘Dublin’ is absent until the 5th story; the reader gets to know it one view, one character, one story at a time.
Yet, the stories form a sequence and they are most effective when read in this way.
Joyce wrote to his eventual publisher, Grant Richards, stating that: “I have tried to present [Dublin] to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order”.

14. Dubliners Joyce wrote most about this city after having left it.
He visited Dublin 3 times after 1904, but never returned after 1912.
He was intensely critical of what he saw as the narrow morality of many of its inhabitants.
Declan Kiberd describes him as a ‘world author’, one who ‘cut himself adrift from all cosy moorings, including those of a home city’.
Read quote on P. 19.

15. Childhood:‘The Sisters’: Plot Summary
‘The Sisters’ gives a portrait of the relationship between a nameless boy and the infirm priest Father Flynn. The priest who has been relieved of his priestly duties has acted as a mentor for the boy in the clerical duties of a Catholic priest. The story starts with the boy contemplating Father Flynn's illness and impending death. He is fascinated with interpreting signs and symbols, and their meaning. Later, while the boy eats his dinner, his aunt, uncle, and old Cotter have a conversation in which the boy is informed that the priest has died. The conversation focuses on the priest and his relationship with the boy. That night the boy is haunted by images of the priest, and he dreams of escaping to a mysterious land. The next day the boy goes to look at the announcement that the priest has died, and then wanders about, further puzzling about his dream and about his relationship with the priest. That night the boy and his aunt go to the house of mourning. They view the corpse with Nannie, and then they sit with the sisters Eliza and Nannie. They are offered food and drink, and then Eliza and the aunt carry on a conversation that reveals that Father Flynn had apparently suffered a mental breakdown after accidentally breaking a chalice. The dialogue then trails off.

16. Childhood:‘The Sisters’
Read opening paragraph P. 1
In what ways does Joyce’s narrator begin to convey the ‘colour and tone’ of Dublin?
P. 19/20
We do not learn the name of the youthful narrator, who himself did not know every relevant detail of the story he tells.
Father Flynn’s death itself does not form its climax, though the boy’s feelings for him seem string and genuine.

17. Childhood:‘The Sisters’
From the beginning and that title which deflects readers away from the central, but unnamed, scandal, uncertainty is the predominant tone.
Our narrator is interested, alert and intensely involved in his story – but he is young, and cannot or will not process all that he feels and sees.
He lacks a panoramic vision. The first person point of view limits the matter of the narrative to what the first-person narrator knows, of course, and our narrator might be described as particularly ‘limited’ in some ways.

18. Dubliners: Modernity and Modernism
Dubliners appeared in the same year that the First World War began.
This fact is often noted by critics reading Joyce as part of the fundamental transformations in literature that were characteristic of the period.
‘Modernism in Ireland’ writes the critic Emer Nolan, ‘certainly began with Joyce’.
Modernism, as a literary term, became current around the time Dubliners was published to describe new and experimental literature, including that written by Joyce.

19. Dubliners: Modernity and Modernism
More generally, modernism can also be defined as the aesthetic and cultural reaction to and context of modernity.
In contrast to the planned and more obviously modern cities of continental Europe, Dublin looked in the early 20th century very much as if it had evolved in a haphazard manner. Read quote on P. 22

20. Kiberd
Kiberd suggests that it was, in fact, the complex nature of Dublin that led Joyce to treat it ‘as a site of the modern’ in his work.
It was a city, yet based still on a village structure, and bound firmly at that time to its rural past – permitting both intimacy and anonymity among its inhabitants.

21. Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel regarded the metropolitan city of the early 20th century as the site of a new kind of urban consciousness.
This consciousness was inflected primarily by intimacy – he was interested in the sociology of the senses – and by the psychological effects of city living, especially in busy, crowded spaces.

22. The Flaneur
Modern critics offered the ideal situation for the linked figure of the flaneur, literally a stroller, a wanderer, but also an observer.
This figure was key to the literature of the period, and appears in many guises.
Dublin’s small scale, the open and public intimacy of its streets, provided Joyce with an arena similar in some ways to the boulevards and department stores of Paris, in which the flaneur was particularly susceptible to all the visual and aural stimuli the developing city could offer.

23. Modernity
Modernity was coined by the French poet Charles Baudelaire ( ) in the mid 19th century.
He defined it as the transient, and contingent, and his writing on the subject was a foundational formulation of the modern in both literature and art.
In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, he focuses on the crowd, on his flaneur’s enjoyment and ownership of his urban surroundings. Read quote on P. 23/4

24. Richard Lehan
What critic Richard Lehan calls the two ‘major themes’ of modernism began to emerge: the artist and the city.
The artist and the city are both related to the flaneur, they converge in the observer who beings a distinct, highly subjective consciousness to the urban, sometimes alienating, settings of modernist fiction and poetry.
One of the best known examples of Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway.
In the case of Woolf, it is a flaneuse and not a flaneur.

25. Modernism and Dubliners
The consumerist pleasures available to the characters in Dubliners are limited. Joyce’s shops are less grand, the range of goods more narrow, the finances of its inhabitants more precarious.
Nonetheless, in Dublin, at the turn of the 20th century, everyone was a flaneur.
In ‘The Sisters’, even the smallest narrator is shown lingering over the ‘theatrical advertisements’ in the shop windows as he wanders, an activity that helps to dispel the ‘mourning mood’.

26. Modernism and Dubliners
Joyce designed the stories in Dubliners to reflect the city’s wide streets as open locations of financial/social exchange as well as their sometimes intimidating possession by individual characters.
With the exception of ‘Eveline’, ‘The Boarding House’ and ‘The Dead’, where the dramas are mainly played out in domestically limited situations, the stories are characterized by constant movement across the city, with men and women both enjoying and literally exercising a new-found freedom – impossible for women in an earlier period.

27. Joyce: A Modernist Author
His choice of an urban themes, and use of the short story genre. The short story was becoming an increasingly popular genre in the period – favoured by publishers in the literary marketplace and the reading public. For modernist writers, focus on this genre was also a very effective way of signaling aesthetic distance from the 19th century novel. Usually much shorter than a novel, the tight focus demanded by a short story made it easier to ‘anatomise’ a city.
His experimentation with the mix between realism and symbolism.

28. Joyce: A Modernist Author
3. The challenge of uncertainty posed by all of the stories in their different ways. 4. His attention to previously taboo subject matter. Joyce struggled to get the collection published because of publisher’s fears of obscenity charges.

29. Adolescence: ‘An Encounter’: Plot Summary
The story involves a boy – the narrator – and his friend Mahony taking a day off from school and going to the shore, to seek adventure in their otherwise-dull lives. As the narrator says, "The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad."

30. Adolescence: ‘An Encounter’: Plot Summary
The episode revolves around their trip and the people that they see. There are enormous social events that the boys witness and the narrator, in an act of maturity, seems to at least be able to notice the situations. For example, the boys are mistaken for Protestants by some local children. The narrator also notices that many of the children are "ragged" and extremely poor.
Near the end of their day, the boys are approached by an older man who gives them an odd feeling. Previously, it seems to the reader that the man had been 'sizing them up' and then began to talk of mundane subjects, such as Sir Walter Scott and young sweethearts.

31. Adolescence: ‘An Encounter’: Plot Summary
At one point, the man excuses himself and it is implied that he touches himself before returning to the boys. He then begins a drawn-out monologue on the subject of whipping and other such corporal punishments. Deeply unsettled, the narrator looks to his friend Mahony for comfort, although he admits to harbouring negative feelings about him.
The tale depicts many aspects of Dublin society at the time - antagonism and violence between Catholic and Protestant communities, Irish poverty, lecherous old men, foreigners and the schooling of boys. The boys encounter all these in this short story, giving us a broad view of Dublin itself.

32. Adolescence: ‘An Encounter’
Describe some aspects of the childhood Joyce is representing here.
What does it add to our developing sense of Joyce’s Dublin?
P. 26/7

33. Adolescence: ‘Eveline’: Plot Summary
A young woman of about nineteen years of age sits by her window, waiting to leave home. She muses on the aspects of her life that are driving her away. Her mother has died as has her older brother Ernest. Her remaining brother, Harry, is on the road "in the church decorating business". She fears that her father will beat her as he used to beat her brothers and she has little loyalty for her sales job. She has fallen for a sailor named Frank who promises to take her with him to Buenos Aires. Before leaving to meet Frank, she hears an organ grinder outside, which reminds her of a melody that played on an organ on the day her mother died and the promise she made to her mother to look after the home. At the dock where she and Frank are ready to embark on a ship together, Eveline is deeply conflicted and makes the painful decision not to leave with him. Nonetheless, her face registers no emotion at all.

34. Adolescence: ‘Eveline’: Plot Summary
What is the plot of the story?
P. 27/28

35. From Childhood to Church: ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Eveline’
‘Eveline’ is a good example of Joyce’s interest in Dubliners in conveying the inner consciousness of his characters.
The 3rd person narrator tells us the story almost entirely from Eveline’s point of view; it is her thoughts, feelings and perceptions that we are exposed to.
What matters here is not the action or plot, but the perceptions and psychology of the character.
The plot is anti-climatic and has an uncertain ending.

36. From Childhood to Church: ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Eveline’
Joyce’s refusal to provide his readers with narrative closure or the satisfaction of a happy ending is characteristic of modernist writing.
It conjunction with his subject matter, it suggests by the end of the 4th story that his Dubliners will not go very far, and will not be transformed, despite their dreams.
Joyce manipulates readers’ expectations as to plot while providing his own take on Dublin’s effects on its citizens at this time.

37. From Childhood to Church: ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Eveline’
The constituents Joyce represents in these early stories are respectively, boys and young women.
These are the Dublin inhabitants to whom he is giving a voice, and he does so realistically and without nostalgia for childhood.
The narrator of ‘An Encounter’, for example, is busy growing up, which makes the lack of an evident conclusion to the story a strikingly effective technique.
The boys’ experience is related to Eveline’s, though powerlessness and the sense of paralysis, for example, but there is far less physical expression, the outlook is bleaker, and so the stakes become higher in the woman’s tale.

38. From Childhood to Church: ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Eveline’
This is significant by the fact that she is given a name.
Joyce is most concerned in ‘Eveline’ with examining the tremendous pressures brought to bear upon unmarried women in Ireland in this period.
Through a forceful combination of societal expectations and religious obligations, many women were placed in Eveline’s position, expected to sacrifice any chance of happiness for the good of others.
It was not uncommon for the youngest daughter in the family to remain unmarried, in order to take care of ageing parents, only to spend her own old age alone.

39. From Childhood to Church: ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Eveline’
Religious veneration for the Virgin Mary played a potent part in this expectation, where women were to direct themselves uncomplainingly towards service, seeking their reward in heaven.
In this case, Eveline feels herself further bound by a deathbed promise made to her mother, to keep the family together as long as possible.
In ‘Eveline’, the deathbed scene becomes the death knell for the family’s second female generation.

40. From Childhood to Church: ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Eveline’
The role of the Catholic Church in circumscribing women’s lives is subtly signaled in the story.
As Eveline glances around the room, her eye passes over the photograph of an unnamed priest, and a print of Blessed Margaret Mary Alcoque.
The priest if notable for the fact that he lived in Australia – one peripheral character, then, who managed an escape from the city.
The woman, by contrast, was a member of the 17th century nobility, venerated by the Catholic Church because of her life of extreme sacrifice.

41. From Childhood to Church: ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Eveline’
Eveline has not made that choice (of devoting herself to charitable work and prayer like the woman), but has had it thrust upon her.
She is just as effectively paralysed – growing up in one sense only, while remaining a child, experientially, at the same time.
The theme of paralysis links many of the stories in Dubliners.
The city, as Joyce represents it, seems to possess a particular power to limit individual action: it is the past, in particular, (in the form of family and Church tradition), that holds on to Eveline.

42. From Childhood to Church: ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Eveline’
The obsession with superficial respectability and conformity underlies the hopelessness of their case.
Eveline is unable to defy her father because of his patriarchal authority, just as the boy in ‘An Encounter’ is helpless to run away from the obscurely menacing man who engages him in an uncomfortable and inappropriate conversation.

43. Conclusion
In this chapter, we noted Joyce’s wordplay, and his deployment of dual meanings, in the titles of some of the stories.
The multifaceted ‘gnomon’ was discussed as a key term for the collection and its uncertainties.
Joyce often combines the literal and the symbolic.
We saw that colours are important, and contribute to what is often an intensely visual experience of reading the text.
Joyce signals his themes of paralysis, decay, and corruption, and makes a largely negative assessment of character.

44. Conclusion
Sense impressions more broadly are also vital to his city scape – sounds and smells and physical contact or the experience of its lack.
We have also considered Joyce’s use of different types of narrators, his skill in representing the inner consciousness of his characters, and the way in which his stories seem intent on withholding the pleasures of a tidy resolution of the plot or the gratification of a happy ending.