1. Chapter 2 James Joyce , Dubliners: Paralysis, Memory, and ‘The Dead’
Prepared by: Dr. Hend Hamed
Assistant Professor of English Literature

2. Introduction
In this chapter, in addition to the theme of paralysis, we shall be devoting attention to Joyce’s use of memory, and particularly the ways in which it helps to counter the prevalence of paralysis in this collection.
Memory is also important when considering Dubliners with reference to ideas about period.

3. Single Dublin life: Clay: Plot Summary
Maria, a spinster with a minor job in a rescue mission for wayward women, is looking forward to a holiday evening at the house of Joe, whom she nursed when he was a boy and of whom she is still very fond.
She departs for Joe's after attending a tea service with her fellow laundresses, stopping to buy cakes for the Halloween party on the way.
At the bakery, Maria is somewhat maliciously teased by the clerk, who asks whether she wishes to buy a wedding cake, mirroring a similar joke that was made at the earlier tea. 

4. Single Dublin life: Clay: Plot Summary
On a tram, Maria has a bashful encounter with an elderly and drunken man who chats with her.
She is welcomed warmly at the house by Joe’s family, but she is saddened and ashamed to realize that she has left the plumcake she bought for Joe and his wife on the tram, probably due to "flirting" with the man.
Maria is soon enticed into playing a traditional Hallow Eve game with the children in which objects are placed in saucers and a blindfolded player has to pick among them. 

5. Single Dublin life: Clay: Plot Summary
Each object is supposed to have a prophetic significance. One of the objects in the game is a ring, standing for marriage, which Maria failed to get during a similar game (in which objects were baked into pieces of barmbrack) back at the laundry.
At Joe's, Maria once again misses the ring and instead chooses a lump of clay. Everyone goes quiet, because clay stands for death.
Maria is allowed to choose again, however, and this time fetches the prayer-book, indicating a life of spiritual vocation (service at a convent, suggests Joe's wife).  

6. Single Dublin life: Clay: Plot Summary
After drinking some wine, Maria sings the aria "I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls“. She makes what the text refers to as "a mistake" by singing the first verse twice, but nobody corrects her. The omission is significant as the missing verse imagines suitors such as the ones that Maria has not had in her life: 
 I dreamt that suitors sought my hand, That knights upon bended knee, And with vows no maiden heart could withstand, They pledg'd their faith to me. And I dreamt that one of that noble host Came forth my hand to claim; But I also dreamt, which charm'd me most, That you lov'd me still the same.
The story ends with a description of how Joe has been "very much moved" by her song.

7. Single Dublin life: Clay
Maria, the protagonist of ‘Clay’ confirms the limited opportunities available to single women in the city.
In this period, a woman’s destiny was largely regarded as marriage and motherhood, and spinsterhood as a failure.
However, from the turn of the 20th century, increasing numbers of women had begun to press for access to education and to wider employment opportunities, and to envisage lives for themselves beyond marriage.

8. Single Dublin life: Clay
Maria clearly reflects on this as she confidently ‘arranged in her mind all she was going to do and thought how much better it was to be independent and to have your own money in your pocket’, and then moves across the city, buying small treats for her friends.
Dublin was indeed opening itself up to professional and working women: women could attend Trinity College Dublin (from 1904) and the National University (from 1908), and were entering the workforce in large numbers, thanks to wider employment opportunities as secretaries and clerical workers.

9. Single Dublin life: Clay
In ‘Clay’, what kind of narrator does the story have?
From the outset, it seems ‘Clay’ as a 3rd person narrator. ‘
It is reassuringly present throughout the paragraphs on the opening page (for example: ‘Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin’).
These early paragraphs straightforwardly inform us as to several different aspects of Maria’s physical appearance, character and life, in what seems to be a clear omniscient style.

10. Single Dublin life: Clay: The Narrator
The narrator rarely seems to be ‘omniscient’, however.
The narrative is often filtered through Maria’s consciousness: what we get is her particular view of reality, and events are ordered according to her experience of them.
So, we can hear Maria’s ‘voice’, rather than that of an omniscient 3rd person narrator in these lines… P. 44

11. Single Dublin life: Clay: Free Indirect Style
This technique, which involves a very close correlation between the narrative voice and the voice of a character, is usually known as free indirect style (sometimes called ‘free indirect speech’).
Read David Lodge’s illustration of the difference between free indirect style and other forms of representing characters’ speech and consciousness (P. 45).
One major effect of Joyce’s employment of free indirect style is that there is no narrator passing coming, or making overt moral judgements, on events as they unfold.

12. Single Dublin life: Clay: Free Indirect Style
Joyce switches from 1st person narration as his main characters ‘grow up’, and therefore might reasonably be expected to know more about their world, and their narratives.
By then choosing in later stories to present the action through the consciousness of the older characters, he also denies to his 3rd person narrators the God-like knowledge of the omniscient narrator – and to the readers of their stories any certainty that might go with it.

13. Single Dublin life: Clay: Free Indirect Style
The lack of omniscience and overt moral judgement are, therefore, notable features of all the tales in this collection, and in general, apply to modernist narrative styles.
Writers such as Joyce rejected omniscience, in the main, along with any idea that readers had to be told what to think.
Maria, on whom we rely for the story in ‘Clay’, is carefully positioned on the periphery of life, close to the most important elements of human relationships, yet never a part of them.

14. Single Dublin life: Clay: Free Indirect Style
Filtering the narrative through Maria’s consciousness does not mean that we only see the world of the story through her eyes.
Because Joyce has let us know that her perspective us limited, we are able to see more than she sees, or at least to suspect that her perception of events going in around her is less than acute.
For example, when Maria is at the Halloween party, it seems obvious to us that Joe gets drunk and loses his temper, yet Maria, oblivious, but still filtering the narrative, ‘was delighted to see the children so merry and Joe and his wife in such good spirits’.

15. Single Dublin life: Clay: Free Indirect Style
The limited point of view helps to ensure that frequently in this story – as well as in others – we cannot be wholly certain what is happening.
The Dublin by Lamplight laundry, mentioned in ‘Clay’ was a Protestant institution for so-called ‘fallen women’: unmarried mothers and prostitutes who worked in the laundry in order to redeem themselves.
There were many such organizations in Dublin in this period .
These inmates, in sharp contrast to Maria, are sexual veterans, and their brief descriptions are vividly coloured.

16. Single Dublin life: Clay: Free Indirect Style
These women occupy a diminished position in society’s eyes, and we see them ay a distance thanks to the dominance of Maria’s perspective, but they are vibrant, vital figures, compared with Maria in her drab brown rain cloak.
Her single, independent life seems without joy or pleasure.
She is continually overlooked in the story, in fact.
The ‘colonel-looking gentleman’ who gives up his seat for her therefore precipitates a flood of emotions: flustered by his attention she leaves her independently purchased and carefully chosen present of plumcake on the tram.

17. Single Dublin life: Clay: Free Indirect Style
Maria’s arrival at Joe’s house, viewed through her own eyes, of course, seems one of welcome integration into the family.
In the story’s crucial scene, she takes part in a traditional game to predict the future.
At Maria’s turn, the ‘next-door girls’ have included a dish of clay, to signify death: this is the saucer that Maria selects.
Wrapped in a ‘bandage’ that suggests the linen shroud in which she will be buried, Maria stands helpless until the game is rearranged so that she selects the ‘prayer-book’.
She seems oblivious to the realization among the others that she will face her death alone.

18. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case Plot Summary
Mr. Duffy, a middle-aged bank cashier, deliberately lives in an isolated suburb of Dublin.
He is characterized as very meticulous and ordered and has little social contact.
At a concert one night, Duffy makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Emily Sinico, a married mother.
They start up a relationship that is innocent enough to be condoned by Mrs. Sinico’s husband, who believes the two's discussions revolve mostly around his daughter and the possibility of a relationship between her and Duffy.

19. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case Plot Summary
The two draw closer together, and one night Mrs. Sinico impulsively takes his hand and presses it to her cheek, but Duffy is not pleased at the development and ends their meetings.
Four years later, he reads that Mrs. Sinico has been struck by a train and killed.
The newspaper article, the title of which provides the title of the story, contains an account by her husband, who states that she began drinking two years ago. The details of the accident suggest that she may have committed suicide. 

20. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case Plot Summary
He reacts at first with revulsion, concluding that some inherent weakness led to her drinking and the accident, but he slowly comes to believe that it was his rejection that condemned her to solitude and death.
He reflects on his own loneliness: "No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast."
The story ends with Duffy listening to the silence of the surrounding night atop a hill overlooking Dublin where he and Sinico used to sit down and talk, where he realizes just how lonely he really is.

21. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case
In ‘A Painful Case’, Mr Duffy is a single, lonely man, whose name derives from the Irish for ‘black’ or ‘dark’.
He lives in the suburbs, however, and this less notably urban story is enacted with a far smaller cast that Maria’s.
Who is the ‘painful case’ of the title?
P. 47/48

22. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case: The Theme of Paralysis
The theme of paralysis is employed by Joyce here in a slightly different manner from the way he uses it elsewhere in the collection.
On a superficial level, Duffy seems to be entirely in control of his life, with rigid routines, and a dislike of novelty and disruption.
However, the reader quickly sees that these routines are a protection.
He is paralysed by fear of contact, of what a close friendship might mean in his emotionally impoverished life.

23. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case: The Theme of Paralysis
His peculiar analysis of the impossibility of loving relationships is merely a means of excusing himself from any normal human interaction.
Duffy has been offered one chance at happiness, which he has spurned, and Joyce suggests that he will never have another.
This story is different from the others in the collection also because Mr. Duffy appears to be genuinely heedless as to social expectations.

24. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case: The Theme of Paralysis
Though he is revolted by Mrs. Sinico’s drunkenness, even casting judgement on her fitness to live due to her habits, Duffy rarely considers the possible impropriety of his relationship with her.
His rejection of her is based upon his own bizarre standards rather than society’s attitudes to fidelity in marriage.
In some ways, this makes his pitiful appearance at the story’s end even more pathetic.

25. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case: The Theme of Paralysis
Think about the settings of ‘A Painful Case’, and what they add to your understanding of the Dublin Joyce is representing in the collection.
P. 49
Mrs. Sinico’s passionate gesture – itself painfully modest – brings an end to these developments, proving at the same time how limited Duffy’s adaptation would have been.
He displays no ill effects after their separation, or in fact until he is faced with the newspaper article that related her death.

26. Single Dublin life: A Painful Case: The Theme of Paralysis
Joyce takes a page and a half over this event, reproducing it completely for the reader, signifying its very modern significance to his plot (newspapers’ reporting of scandal caused much public debate).
Once Duffy’s revulsion has been indulged, the way is open to the operation of a more interesting human process that has received very little treatment in the collection so far: memory.

27. Dubliners: Portrait of a City
Read Ezra Pound’s quote on P. 66/67
How does Pound’s point of view as expressed in his review be an accurate reflection of Joyce’s representation of this city?
Does all what Joyce tell us about Dublin hold true of all cities?
P. 67

28. Conclusion
Dublin is without doubt Joyce’s focus in this collection, as is the backward-looking paralysis he believed it central to.
Joyce’s realism in depicting this city at this time, beset by the past and complicated in its relationship to its period as a result, is also unquestionable.
His technique, including the deployment of ambiguity, experimentation with perspective, as well as his interest in representing consciousness, all mark this clearly as a modernist text.