If you look at anthologies containing the most highly reputed short stories within Western literature, James Joyce’s complicated tale “The Dead” will generally appear somewhere in the collections. This story is actually the concluding chapter in a group of connected tales inside the book Dubliners, and this story looks at the ideas of autonomy and identity with a consideration of imperialism, patriarchy and language, and the ways in which those three elements have influenced life in the twentieth century. There are close connections between those issues and the centuries-long turbulence that has wracked the politics of Ireland, as well as the most relevant social issues during Joyce’s time. Through the story, Joyce makes the claim that words possess a specific power of their own; while the main character in “The Dead” tries to place himself in the context of the British male – the top of the social pyramid in those days – the truth is that the main character lacks power. Even though he would like to differentiate himself from any sort of identification with things Irish and particularly things female, Gabriel Conroy finds that all of these intentions fall apart, as he lacks the ability to communicate with others, find a common ground with his social peers and even to have a positive relationship in his own home. There is a connection between the abject failures of Gabriel Conroy and the ongoing issues that surround the idea of an Irish national identity. The vestiges of the colonial era and patriarchal society are still at work in this story, and they are the foundation of this story of a party set up for the holidays. Chief on the guest list, along with the characters, are a series of conflicts that are just as archetypal as those that bedevil Hamlet, Elizabeth Bennet or even Creon: the battles between female and male, British and Irish, young and old, and victory and loss. The swirling existential winds that these conflicts create within this party lead to Gabriel’s uncertainty of his own identity as a husband and an Irishman.
When Gabriel shows up at the party, he has a chance to be the story’s hero. The aunts who are hosting the party have long lavished Gabriel with their affection, and when he comes to the door, he hesitates before going inside. His aunt invites him into the scene, but he hesitates in the dark, telling his aunt that he will follow her on up. He says, “Here I am as right as the mail, Aunt Kate!” (Joyce, p. 153), but he does not make his way up the stairs yet. Vincent Cheng has noticed that there are issues of imperialism and gender at this point in the story. By comparing himself to the Royal Mail, Gabriel connects himself to a “notoriously imperial institution” (Cheng, p. 349). When Gabriel stands in the unlighted hallway and mentions an institution of the Royal government, it is clear that he uses “both the empire and the male ego” (Cheng, p. 349) in his mind, as evidenced by the word play “as right as the mail (male)” (Joyce, p. 153). Here, Gabriel is (perhaps unwittingly) attempting to set himself up as the figure of rectitude, a trend that continues when he runs into his aunts’ servant, Lilly. She is definitely beneath him in the social circle of the party, and so he feels like he can talk down to her. His suggestion that she should now marry because she is out of school does not find the submissive response he expects, though. Instead, she says, “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (Joyce, p. 154). It looks like Lilly’s experiences with men have been closer to what the lonely typist experiences one night in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. A man does come calling, but he is “one of the low on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire” (Eliot, web). Because she’s already had dinner, “the time is now propitious[as] she is bored and tired” (Eliot, web). This is why he “endeavours to engage her in caresses which are still are unreproved, if undesired” (Eliot, web). Luckily for him, “his vanity requires no response and makes a welcome of indifference” (Eliot, web). When he leaves, she is “hardly aware of her departed lover” and puts on a record to play (Eliot, web). The implication here is that the man is only out for what he can get and has nothing to contribute in return. He does not even take the typist to dinner; instead, he waits until she has her own canned repast and then comes for what he wants. Small wonder, then, that Lilly will not follow Gabriel’s lead and act feminine and demure; his assumption is as tactless as it is ignorant. When Lilly does not follow suit, though, Gabriel’s ship begins to founder; he blushes “as if he felt he had made a mistake” (Joyce, p. 154). He gives her a tip as a way to get the last word, but her “bitter and sudden retortcast[s] a gloom over him” (Joyce, p. 155) which he cannot burst through simply by checking his tie and cuffs. Over the course of the story, Gabriel will become increasingly desperate to reestablish his position as the patriarchal figure in the story, but the beginning of that crescendo takes place here.
Things do not improve once Gabriel enters the apartment. He thinks that he is much more intelligent than those other people in the room, and he tries to show off by “quoting poetry to them which they could not understand” (Joyce, p. 155). He is not in an academic salon, but he still acts as though he is in one, and so his speech becomes a “mistake from first to last, an utter failure” (Joyce, p. 155). It becomes obvious that Gabriel is afraid of language itself, which makes sense because words have a way of defining us, and the more closely Gabriel’s definition is achieved, the more he is found wanting. In the right setting, Gabriel’s richly interwoven speech could have brought him acclaim, but he lacks a sense of occasion and audience. Gabriel’s conundrum is reflective of a larger issue within the country though. He desperately wants to transcend the British notion of the Irishman as a poor, dumb papist, but he cannot quite figure out how to do that while remaining ture to his own identity.
Of course, language is not the only area in which Gabriel struggles. He also struggles when he wants to establish his masculinity in sexual matters too. Gabriel is desperately in love with his wife, a posture that is both poignant and irritating at the same time, if only because of the tightness with which he clings to his feelings. At the end of the night, the climax that comes is not the one that he has been wanting, as his spouse does not end up in his arms. Instead, he learns that his wife has been in love in the past and that this man had passed away because of his feelings for her. The aptly named Michael Fury (because he visits a seemingly arbitrary sort of hell upon Gabriel? Because when Gabriel finds about this ghost from his wife’s past, he slips into fury himself?) would stand outside in the rain and sing outside Gabriel’s wife’s window and eventually died of the consumption that he developed as a result. When Gabriel finds out about this man, the Fury certainly seems on the way as “[a] vague terror seize[s] Gabrielas if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him” (Joyce, p. 191). The illusions that Gabriel holds about himself and about his wife have shattered. He is not the prototypical British male, master of his domain. Instead, he has lost out to the actual hero of the story, the eponymous Michael Fury. The attempts that Gabriel makes to try to climb into that higher social echelon has taken away any sort of power he might have had in his own relationships. He has become the same impotent failure that he feared he would, and it was that fear that made him so. This is Joyce’s comment on the century: the harder Ireland has tried to escape its own perceived identity, the more securely it has cemented itself into that hated position.
Works Cited
Cheng, Vincent J. “Empire and Patriarchy in ‘The Dead.’” Dubliners, ed. Margot Norris, A Norton
Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176735
Joyce, James. Dubliners, ed. Margot Norris, A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2006.
