"The Dead" by James Joyce
Critical Essay #2
In the following essay, Garrett offers six perspectives on "The Dead" by applying the principles of six different literary theories.
BIOGRAPHY. Joyce once said of one section of Ulysses, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." Similarly, he inserted in his writings remnants of his own life and environment, so that scholars scour the details of his experience, and the people and places that he knew, for clues to the meaning of his work.
The most famous example in "The Dead" is the tragic love that Nora Barnacle knew in Galway when she was not quite sixteen years old, before she moved to Dublin, met Joyce, and ran off with him. Joyce was jealous of his dead rival, but Nora remembered the love fondly. In a conversation years later she spoke on the subject of "first love": "There's nothing like it. I remember when I was a girl, and a young man fell in love with me, and he came and sang in the rain under an apple-tree outside my window, and he caught tuberculosis and died." The dead boy had worked for the local gas company in Galway where Nora then lived. Joyce not only used that part of Nora's life as a model, but saw Nora as Gretta. He once wrote to Nora: "Do you remember the three adjectives I have used in "The Dead" in speaking of your body. They are these: 'musical and strange and perfumed."' And the bedroom scene in "The Dead" captures Nora's character. Ellman says that "these final pages compose one of Joyce's several tributes to his wife's artless integrity"; she was "independent, unselfconscious, instinctively right."
Do we understand "The Dead" better when we know these things? Why not? It seems a narrow and exclusive sense of understanding to deny this. Joyce put in the story his wife, his dead rival, his city, his language, and elements of his national history. You could construct an interpretation of the text that ignored his wife, just as you
In the following essay, Garrett offers six perspectives on "The Dead" by applying the principles of six different literary theories.
BIOGRAPHY. Joyce once said of one section of Ulysses, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." Similarly, he inserted in his writings remnants of his own life and environment, so that scholars scour the details of his experience, and the people and places that he knew, for clues to the meaning of his work.
The most famous example in "The Dead" is the tragic love that Nora Barnacle knew in Galway when she was not quite sixteen years old, before she moved to Dublin, met Joyce, and ran off with him. Joyce was jealous of his dead rival, but Nora remembered the love fondly. In a conversation years later she spoke on the subject of "first love": "There's nothing like it. I remember when I was a girl, and a young man fell in love with me, and he came and sang in the rain under an apple-tree outside my window, and he caught tuberculosis and died." The dead boy had worked for the local gas company in Galway where Nora then lived. Joyce not only used that part of Nora's life as a model, but saw Nora as Gretta. He once wrote to Nora: "Do you remember the three adjectives I have used in "The Dead" in speaking of your body. They are these: 'musical and strange and perfumed."' And the bedroom scene in "The Dead" captures Nora's character. Ellman says that "these final pages compose one of Joyce's several tributes to his wife's artless integrity"; she was "independent, unselfconscious, instinctively right."
Do we understand "The Dead" better when we know these things? Why not? It seems a narrow and exclusive sense of understanding to deny this. Joyce put in the story his wife, his dead rival, his city, his language, and elements of his national history. You could construct an interpretation of the text that ignored his wife, just as you