Text First Set of Lecture/Exam Notes about James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Words from the text appear in red. Critically important terms are highlighted in yellow.

¶1 • “The Dead” is the longest — and the fifteenth and final — tale in James Joyce’s only collection of short stories, entitled Dubliners, which was first published in 1914. The highly influential, American-born poet and critic T.S. Eliot was but one of many heavyweight literary figures to deem “The Dead” a signal literary achievement. Many see it as the greatest short story in the English language — period.

¶2 • A “Christmas-time! Christmas-time!” narrative, “The Dead” constitutes — according to the late Richard Ellmann —Joyce’s “first great song of exile,” for the Dublin-native Joyce composed it while living in self-imposed exile from Ireland in Trieste, a seaport city now in northeastern Italy, and in Rome. Joyce considered the Ireland of his day to be doubly colonized: politically by the British Empire; and religiously by the Roman Catholic Church. “The Dead” features one clearly non- Roman Catholic character, Mr. Browne, described as being “of the other persuasion” — that is, a Protestant. Specifically, he is a member of the Church of Ireland, the Irish equivalent of the Episcopal Church.

The Basic Plot

¶3 • In common with many modern short stories, “The Dead” manifests a simple plot. But there’s a lot more “there there” than first meets the eye! A middle-class, middle-aged Dublin Catholic named Gabriel Conroy is anxious about delivering the postprandial (i.e. after-dinner) speech at his spinster (i.e. unmarried) aunts’ annual holiday “affair” or party. The party consists of: (1) a showcase piano performance by a young, unmarried woman, Mary Jane Morkan; (2) dancing that uses a five-part set dance, Lancers, with a military name; (3) a fancy holiday meal at which Gabriel must carve a “fat brown goose”; and (4) Gabriel’s speech as, in effect, the patriarch or “the man” of the Morkan family. The hosts are Kate and Julia Morkan. Their deceased “elder sister,” Ellen, was Gabriel Conroy’s “serious and matronly” mother; and their deceased brother, Pat, was Mary Jane Morkan’s father. Being orphaned, the young-adult Mary Jane lives with her two aunts; and the party presents an opportunity for her to seek a husband. (Perhaps the professional tenor, Bartell D’Arcy?) Once the party ends, the reader follows Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, to a bedroom they’ve taken at the Gresham Hotel on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin’s main boulevard.

¶4 • At the party, various living women orbit and unsettle the fairly sophisticated Gabriel, principally: (1) his declining aunts; (2) their teenage servant, Lily, twice described as “the caretaker’s daughter”; (3) Molly Ivors, a university-educated school teacher (as Gabriel also is); and, last but not least, (4) Gretta, a native of the Gaelic (i.e. traditionally Irish) West of Ireland — specifically, a county on the Atlantic Ocean called Galway. (By the way: Irish universities were among the world’s first to admit women, such as Molly Ivors.)

¶5 • Having crossing an unusually snowy Dublin after the soiree, Gabriel and Gretta arrive in their Gresham bedroom, with the man keenly desiring sex. However, he discovers that traditional Irish music — a piece called “The Lass of Aughrim” — overheard as Greta was leaving the party has affected her profoundly. Upset, perhaps even traumatized, she cannot engage in sex, and the reader comes to wonder whether their marriage can ever be the same again. The action concludes with Gabriel imagining snow “falling faintly … and faintly falling” across the island of Ireland, including on Greta’s native county, Galway.

1 The Opening or Incipit

¶6 • With its chiasmus (reverse-order repetition of “falling faintly”), “The Dead” has one of the most famous endings in all of English-language literature. Its opening is also pretty renowned. The opening word, phrase, or section of a text is called the incipit. In hand-written medieval manuscripts, the incipit was often presented in an enlarged, elaborately colored format (see the image on the top left of this page). If blue appears, it’s likely that the dye derived from lapis lazuli rock mined in Afghanistan!

¶7 • In the case of “The Dead,” we can consider the entire first paragraph as constituting the incipit, for it contrasts with the second paragraph. While, in a rather formal fashion, the second paragraph calls the hosts “the Misses Morkan,” the first paragraph calls them “Miss Kate and Miss Julia” — not once, but twice. It seems that each paragraph has its own narrator! Who, then, voices the first paragraph or incipit? The first paragraph embeds the answer in its initial sentence; indeed, in its initial word: “Lily.” Lily authors the incipit; that is, Lily is the authority (or, at least, as close as we get to an authority) throughout the incipit. We know this fact for at least four reasons.

¶8 • First Reason • Lily makes a rhetorical or dictional (i.e. word-choice) mistake that a conventional literary narrator wouldn’t. In her first sentence, she deploys the word “literally,” where she should say “figuratively.” Outside the incipit, she tells Gabriel that she’s “done schooling this year and more,” probably meaning that she attended National School (Ireland’s basic state school system) until around 14 or 15 years of age. She’s had enough education to know the fancy word literally, but not its meaning. Second Reason • Essentially, Lily is a servant. Outside the incipit, we learn that she performs “housemaid’s work” for the Morkan sisters. However, in the incipit (i.e. when she’s narrating), she gives herself as authoritative a title as possible: “the caretaker’s daughter.” Furthermore, she highlights the title between a pair of commas, as if deliberately emphasizing it. The lily flower is a symbol or (more technically) an attribute of the Virgin Mary, so “caretaker” here may evoke God, the ultimate caretaker. (St. Patrick’s attribute = shamrock; St. Catherine’s attribute = wheel.) Third Reason • Each time Lily mentions her employers, she uses the form of address that a servant would: “Miss Kate and Miss Julia.” Outside the incipit, note how she addresses the former woman when announcing Gretta: “Miss Kate, here’s Mrs. Conroy.” Fourth Reason • Lily deploys a phrase, “[i]t was well for her,” that broadly follows Irish-language (or Gaeilge) syntax (Bhí an t-ádh aici = “fortune was upon her”). A conventional literary narrator would say, “She was fortunate not to have to ….” English affected by syntactical and other features of Gaeilge is called Hiberno-English due to Hibernia being a Latin name for Ireland. Outside the incipit, we learn that Lily has a working-class Dublin accent: “Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she [Lily] had given his surname.”

¶9 • Throughout his short stories and novels, Joyce regularly writes a paragraph or other unit of text in the manner that the character who dominates that passage would. In other words: If Lily is the focal character, then the passage appears as if Lily had authored it; if Gabriel is the focal character, then the passage appears as if Gabriel had held the pen. The conventional writer fades away in favor of one of her/his characters. This phenomenon is congruent with a loss of trust in authority (government, the church, the military, the media, and the like) in the industrial world of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We speak of the “death of the author” — or perhaps more accurately, the “dearth (or lack) of the author.” No longer should we assume that words on the page constitute absolute truth and possess utter authority.

2 ¶10 • The first critic to remark on how Joyce has a character narrate (in the third person) her/his own focal passages was the Canadian scholar (and former U.G.A. professor) Hugh Kenner. He noticed the practice with respect to a character named Uncle Charles in Joyce’s quasi-autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In a book entitled Joyce’s Voices (1978), Kenner coined the phrase, Uncle Charles Principle, to mean the application of a character’s voice or idiom to that character’s unit or units of text. Kenner explained, “[T]he narrative idiom need not be the [conventional] narrator’s.” With respect to the incipit in “The Dead,” we can assert that James Joyce applies the Uncle Charles Principle to Lily.

Colonial Rape: “The men that is now”

¶11 • After determining that Lily no longer attends school, Gabriel attempts more small-talk with her as she takes charge of his snow-dusted coat in the “little pantry” at street level in his aunts’ home: a “dark, gaunt house on Usher’s Island,” which is a portion of west-central Dublin alongside the south bank of the River Liffey. (The river’s Gaeilge [or Irish-language] name is Life.) He invokes the topic of marriage, but Lily reacts with “great bitterness,” flustering Gabriel, who awkwardly attempts to offer her “a coin” as a tip. In our era of #MeToo, we can perhaps appreciate Lily’s comment about her experiences in central Dublin as a young, unmarried woman: “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” Two questions immediately spring to mind: (1) “What does palaver mean?”; and (2) “Why is Lily so anti-men?”

Above: a portion of the entry for palaver in the Oxford English Dictionary, a resource available online if you’re logged in to the Georgia Southern network. Access it through the G.S. Libraries’ website.

3 ¶12 • Lily likely feels fear and resentment in her everyday life due to the presence in Dublin of vast numbers of young British soldiers, deployed to Ireland by a British government worried that armed Irish revolutionaries might stage a rebellion in support of liberating their country from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (the U.K.) and creating a sovereign republic . Published in 1914, written in 1907, and set (most probably) in early 1904, “The Dead” came before the actual revolution, which began on Easter Monday, April 24th, 1916. As the British soldiers waited for a potential uprising, they sought sexual comfort from prostitutes. Popularly called Monto (after Montgomery Street), Dublin’s Red Light district became the largest in Europe, even importing English women because Irish prostitutes couldn’t meet all the demand from the military. In his most famous and influential novel, Ulysses, Joyce presents a phantasmagoric version of Monto, which he labels Nighttown. For Molly, to leave the house could well mean to be approached for sex by one of “[t]he men that is now” — the British soldiers.

¶13 • One can advance an argument that the text places Lily (whose name suggests the Virgin Mary [see ¶8 above]) in a prostitute-like position. The old aunts oblige her to “attend to” men by (literally) taking off their clothes. Furthermore, at the eye-catching end of paragraphs, they ask her (from the “head” of the phallic staircase) “who had come” and “had Gabriel or Freddy come.” Once Lily “help[s] him [Gabriel] off with his overcoat,” he attempts to reward her service with a coin that, certainly, would have had the head of the British monarch, the soldiers’ commander-in-chief, engraved upon it. It may be that another unmarried woman, Molly Ivors, “[does] not wear a low-cut bodice” so as to signal to any British soldiers on the street that she’s not a prostitute. In fact, to mark herself in public as a type of Irish nationalist, she sports at her collar a “large brooch” with “an Irish device [pattern] and motto [probably a phrase in Gaeilge].” Some literary critics have argued that Lily may be pregnant, perhaps by a soldier. Certain textual specifics can be used to advance that argument, such as the description of her as a “growing girl” and Kate’s remark, “There’s that Lily, I’m sure I don’t know what has come over her lately. She’s not the girl she was at all.”

¶14 • Usher’s Island is not adjacent to Monto; however, Lily would have encountered soldiers on a regular basis because the largest military barracks in Ireland (perhaps even Europe) — the Royal Barracks, Dublin — was situated, on a hill, just northwest of Usher’s Island, across the River Liffey. (Today, that complex houses a unit of the National Museum of Ireland.) Several Dublin landmarks receive mention in “The Dead,” such as “the Wellington Monument” and “the palace of the Four Courts” (the courts of justice); however, the text never acknowledges the huge Royal Barracks, even though its buildings would have been apparent to Gabriel when he “retired into the embrasure of the window” to think (and fret) about his impending speech. Whoever she/he might be at a given moment in “The Dead,” why does the narrator ignore the Royal Barracks? An answer may reside in a characteristic of many twentieth-century short stories, namely, the reader’s being obliged to to be an “active reader” and work out, as a private detective might, several key clues. Typically, nineteenth (Victorian) novels, such as popular texts by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, were long (often serialized over many months in magazines). Their length permitted authors to reveal pretty much every detail to readers. In the faster-paced, sound-bite-y twentieth century, the reader must do more work — must fill in the gaps, using a variety of strategies, the most important of which is close reading. Examples of close reading include paying attention to repeated words and phrases (such as “caretaker’s daughter” and “gas”) and using the Oxford English Dictionary to investigate unusual words (such as “palaver” and “embrasure”).

4 ¶15 • Next-level thinking: Lily as metaphor. We can read any work of literature at the level of plot: “what happens when?”; “who causes what to happen?”; “how do characters act and react?” However, we must also be ready to interpret plot details as (potentially complex) metaphors. Words used to indicate the practice of interpretation include hermeneutics and exegesis. “The Dead” invites us to engage in interpretation, for as the guests are preparing to exit the party, Gabriel observes Gretta coming down the stairs of the Usher’s Island house and wonders to himself, “[W]hat is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of.” Note that this symbol is complex; its components include a woman, stairs, shadow, and music.

¶16 • We’ll return to the listening Greta later, but let’s now focus on Lily. Her anxiety about “[t]he men that is now” can readily be interpreted as symbolic of — or as paralleling — Ireland’s anxiety about British colonization, especially when effected and/or enforced by military violence. Given that Lily faces a real threat of sexual violation by British soldiers (thousands of whom are garrisoned just across the river), we can posit Lily as Ireland, with its (or “her”) land/body and culture/soul at risk of British colonial “rape.” In a poem entitled “Act of Union,” from around 1973, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish writer Seamus Heaney implies the notion of rape to express the relationship between the island of Great Britain as the colonizer and its smaller island neighbor, Ireland, as the colonized. The poem’s voice is Great Britain. Note the sexual innuendo in the highlighted terms from a few selected lines: • “I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder” (line 9); • “I caress | The heaving province [Ulster, Ireland’s northern province] where our past has grown” (lines 7-8); • “I am still imperially | Male …. | The rending process in the colony, | The battering ram, the boom burst from within” (lines 15-18)

Gabriel’s Identity: “she had found out the secret”

¶17 • Generally, it is Gabriel who remarks on major buildings and monuments. Yet, while at the window previewing his after-dinner speech (about “Irish hospitality”), he doesn’t acknowledge the huge, hulking Royal Barracks on the nearby hill. Why ever not? This scene is very short, but it’s very important. To help us dig deeper, we should (initially) note that a word that gets repeated with respect to Gabriel is secret. It appears three times, two of which are the following. • In a state of erotic excitement en route to the hotel, Gabriel recollects past sexual encounters with Gretta: “Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.” • Earlier, he realizes that Molly Ivors has twigged that he is the “G.C.” who authors a “literary column” for the Daily Express newspaper: “[S]he had found out the secret.” The question becomes: Is there something “secret” about Gabriel to be “found out” in relation to the fact that in the “embrasure of the window” passage about him (probably, authored by him), the Royal Barracks and, by extension, the “men that is now” garrisoned there receive no mention? At the window, Gabriel may be contemplating “Irish hospitality” as a theme, but many in Dublin and Ireland had no desire to extend hospitality to British troops and the colonial ideology they not only represented but were trained to enforce at the point of a gun. It’s fascinating that Gabriel’s rehearsal of the “headings” for his speech includes “Irish hospitality, sad memories, … [and] the quotation from Browning.” While the Browning in question is the English poet, Robert Browning (1812-1889), Browning is also the name of a U.S. inventor, John M. Browning (1855-1926), who designed firearms (manufactured by such companies as Colt and Winchester), some of which the British army used.

5 ¶18 • The choice of the noun (or substantive) embrasure seems to accord with the Uncle Charles Principle. Almost certainly, Lily wouldn’t know that architectural term; but the university-educated Gabriel, an aficionado of Robert Browning’s poetry, would. It’s just the kind of word he’d use if given the opportunity to narrate his presence in “The Dead.” The noun embrasure features twice in one of Browning’s most famous and difficult narrative poems: the long work entitled Sordello (1840) — set in medieval Lombardy (northern Italy) — which is divided into six units called “Books.” In one instance, a male warrior protagonist named Salinguerra, wearing a “vest” of “steel,” looks “[t]hrough the embrasure northward” (just like Gabriel!) in an act that reveals his head, distinguished by “comely brown | Large massive locks” of hair: (1) that are “glossy”; (2) that are “divided” by “[a] sharp white line” made by his basnet or helmet; and (3) that “swe[ep] | Curling and fine about [his] brow.” While Salinguerra is “bearded” and Gabriel clean-shaven (or “hairless” in the “face”), their respective hairdos are strikingly similar: “[Gabriel’s] glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.” Simply put: James Joyce’s Gabriel is a modern version of Robert Browning’s warrior Salinguerra (who’s the father of the title character, Sordello). We get a sense of Salinguerra’s ferocity as a combatant from other passages in Browning’s poem. Consider, for example: “Old Salinguerra in the town once more | Uprooting, overturning, flame before [him], | Blood … beneath him.” Worth noting is that Salinguerra fought against forces loyal to the Pope. In “The Dead,” Julia is “fiercely” angry because, in November 1903, Pope Leo X had barred women from singing in church choirs, causing Julia to have to face losing an income stream.

¶19 • If Gabriel is the author of the “embrasure of the window” passage, he could as easily have written “Gabriel … went to the window” as what we actually read: “Gabriel … retired into the embrasure of window.” Deploying embrasure renders the scene military in tone because, in a medieval castle, an embrasure was a wall-opening for shooting defensive arrows. So, is it possible that Gabriel is literally a warrior, just as — to give him a fuller name — Salinguerra Torelli (sometime ruler of the city of Ferrara) was? The answer is “yes,” but a secret warrior. Positioned in what, compellingly, is deemed an embrasure, Gabriel might be interpreted as doing reconnaissance on (i.e. scoping out) a high-value enemy target: the Royal Barracks.

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¶20 • Molly Ivors is an Irish cultural nationalist, part of a movement known in retrospect as the Irish Cultural Revival, which began around the 1880s. Having lost faith with British rule, primarily due to the Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger or potato famine of the 1840s), many Irish wanted to replace British culture and education in Ireland with the native patrimony. Apparently, Molly is committed to the Gaelic League (founded in 1893), which sought to revive Gaeilge, an ancient language (unlike English, which is a modern language). As the son of a man who worked for Dublin’s “Port and Docks” authority, Gabriel understands that English helps Ireland trade internationally; however, just because he has little enthusiasm for reviving Gaeilge doesn’t mean that Gabriel wants Ireland to remain part of the U.K.

¶21 • One can provide evidence that Gabriel is likely a physical-force nationalist. This type of nationalist is committed to using guns and bombs, usually in the context of guerilla warfare advanced by local units (called flying columns) affiliated with a national-level paramilitary organization, oath-bound to secrecy, among other precepts In post-Great Hunger Ireland, the leading oath-bound paramilitary organization acting (as much as possible) in secret was the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.), founded on St. Patrick’s Day of 1858 by James Stephens, among others. It relied for much funding on a sibling organization in America, known as Clan na Gael (“the Irish family”). We use the umbrella term Fenianism (or The Fenians) when referring to these two organizations. Fenianism had little time for negotiating or compromising with the British Empire; it believed that revolution was the only language the Empire would listen to.

¶22 • Military diction permeates “The Dead.” Consider, for example, how the “American apples” at the “center of the [dinner] table” resemble “sentries,” a comparison that may suggest the central support role that Clan na Gael in America provided for the I.R.B. in Ireland. If Gabriel is a member of the I.R.B., he would be obliged to keep the fact secret. In the early twentieth century, the organization’s members included university graduates. Like Gabriel, Patrick Pearse, the I.R.B.’s principal leader during the Easter 1916 Rising, “had taken his degree in the Royal University,” an Irish institution serving mainly Catholics. By contrast with the inebriated Freddy Mallins, Gabriel takes care of his body, as if readying it for revolutionary struggle. He avoids sugary foods: “As Gabriel never ate sweets [dessert] the celery had been left for him.” His “tallish” body is “stout,” an adjective that, here, likely means well-built, even muscular. Certainly, we learn that he “mak[es]” his son “do the dumb-bells” (i.e. lift weights) and “forc[es]” his daughter “to eat the stirabout” — that is, healthy oatmeal. Note the coercive nature of the verbs: make; force. Gabriel is capable — and knows that he’s capable — of physical violence. In a disturbing moment in the hotel bedroom, frustrated that Gretta is proving unresponsive to his lust, he contemplates “overmaster[ing]” his wife. We’ll return to this “mate rape” scenario later, but one should note terms expressing and/or implying violence throughout the relevant passage:

Above: “take her” means “force her to have sex” • Gabriel and Gretta are discussing a small financial consideration (one pound sterling) loaned by Gabriel to Freddy Mallins.

7 ¶23 • Gabriel’s concern with diet and exercise may derive from his involvement in the Gaelic Athletic Association (G.A.A.), founded in 1884 as the first major organization of the Irish Cultural Revival. The text doesn’t make an explicit connection between Gabriel and the G.A.A., but the organization became (and remains) hugely popular. If the Gaelic League focused on reviving Gaeilge, Ireland’s indigenous language, the Gaelic Athletic Association focused on reviving hurling (or hurley) and peile (Gaelic football), plus Ireland’s other indigenous sports. Due to its production of healthy, disciplined young men, the G.A.A. was attractive to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and in 1887 the Brotherhood attempted to take full control of the G.A.A.’s Central Council. After the Easter 1916 Rising, a British Royal Commission of inquiry into its causes identified the G.A.A. as one of four major suppliers of rebels.

¶24 • Whether or not Gabriel participates in the G.A.A., he is manifestly sporty: an advocate of “the dumb-bells” and a participant in long- distance cycling. Contrast Gabriel’s body with Freddy Malins’s, which resembles the simian (ape-like) caricatures of “Paddies” (or Stage Irishmen) that the British cartoon press and comic theater used to unsubtly infer the racial and moral inferiority of the Irish and, thus, justify their colonial subjugation by the superior, fully evolved English: “[Freddy’s] face was fleshy and pallid, touched with color only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips.”

¶25 • Gabriel rebuffs Molly Ivors’s suggestion that he should spend the summer on the Gaeilge-speaking Aran Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of County Galway, by explaining, “[E]very year I go for a cycling tour with some fellows” to “France or Belgium or perhaps Germany.” Molly likely has in mind a Gaelic League language-instruction summer school for adults in a Gaeltacht (or fully Gaeilge-speaking zone). Such schools were coed and gained a reputation for providing opportunities for romantic and even sexual contact. (Perhaps Molly finds the “stout” Gabriel physically attractive?) By contrast, Gabriel’s European cycling vacation is distinctly male, and while the “fellows” he rather cryptically invokes may be regular friends, it’s also possible that they’re I.R.B. associates. Note that in the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries, bicycles were essential to military and paramilitary units. The British army raised its first bicycle unit, a volunteer squad, in 1888. In Ireland, training for revolutionary action could mean developing the ability and stamina to use bikes for infantry, scouting, messengering, first-aid, and other combat-related purposes. For example: during the Easter Rising, one rebel commander dispatched cycle units to destroy critical railway targets. Irish economic and cultural nationalists advocated the purchase of Irish-manufactured brands of bicycle, the two principal ones being Pierce of Wexford Town and Lucania (the John O’Neill manufactory) of Dublin.

8 ¶26 • When (not “if”) we closely read Gabriel’s revelation about his cycling vacation, we note a couple of interesting adverbs: “perhaps” and “awkwardly.” The former immediately precedes “Germany,” the third and final country that Gabriel invokes; and the latter follows shorty after. By contrast with France and Belgium, Germany features with some hesitancy. Why might Gabriel frame Germany with “perhaps” and manifest awkwardness vis-à-vis that country? When Molly responds to Gabriel, she ignores Germany, almost as if she also feels awkward about it. In a way, she replaces Gabriel’s third country, Germany, with his “own land” or Ireland. “Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany,” said Gabriel awkwardly. “And why do you go to France and Belgium,” said Miss Ivors, “instead of visiting your own land?” “Well,” said Gabriel, “it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages [French, Dutch, German] and partly for a change.” In the case of Germany, the “change” to which Gabriel refers may have much to do with Ireland (what Molly calls “your own land.”) For the I.R.B. and a related organization — the Irish Volunteers (founded in 1913, after Joyce wrote “The Dead”) — Germany was a critical source of arms. It’s conceivable that Gabriel’s awkwardness about Germany has to do with wishing to keep secret from Molly the use of the “cycling tour” as a mechanism for him and “some fellows” to negotiate arms-purchases designed to bring about revolutionary “change” in Ireland. Gabriel may be convinced of the necessity of deploying German guns to take aim at the British soldiers stationed in the Royal Barracks, who pose a threat to Ireland (metaphorically understood as a woman), as well as to flesh-and-blood Irish women, not least the supposedly virginal Lily, who has become “bitter” too young in life.

¶27 • The Irish Republican Brotherhood maintained an Armaments Subcommittee to procure weapons. One of the most famous gun-running incidents in the lead-up to the Easter 1916 Rising was the Irish Volunteers’ daylight landing of 1,500 Mauser rifles from Hamburg, Germany, on a private yacht (the Asgard) at Howth Harbor, just outside Dublin, on July 26th, 1914. The deal had been made in Hamburg by Darrell Figgis and Roger Casement, two Irish nationalists who (like Mr. Browne in “The Dead”) were Protestant, not Catholic. However, the operation’s mastermind was Bulmer Hobson, another Irish-nationalist Protestant (specifically, a Quaker). Hobson was a member of the I.R.B.’s Supreme Council and a founding member of the Irish Volunteers. He leveraged the latter to take delivery of the firearms, using bicycles for transportation!

¶28 • In conclusion, let’s connect the dots between Gabriel’s invocation of “Browning” in the “embrasure of the window” passage and the repeated word “Belgium” in the “cycling tour” passage. While Germany constituted a fairly ready source of armaments for Irish rebels, primarily because of the political rivalry between the German and British empires, Belgium was a major producer of guns.

9 ¶29 • John M. Browning may have been American, but a Belgian company, Fabrique Nationale de Herstal (or, simply, F.N.), manufactured many of his designs. Such guns were often called Browning Belgians, and we know that James Joyce was aware of the use of a Browning Belgian (or F.N.) 1900 single-action, semi-automatic pistol in a much-reported political assassination in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, on June 16th, 1904. As we’ll discuss later, the action in “The Dead” most likely occurs on January 5th and 6th, 1904; but Joyce used June 16th of that year as the temporal setting for most of what occurs in his second and most renowned novel, Ulysses (first published in 1922). Joyce fans celebrate him on June 16th each year, calling the day Bloomsday, after Leopold (“Poldy”) Bloom, the central protagonist in Ulysses, a work that also mentions certain characters from “The Dead” (Gabriel, Gretta, Julia, Kate, and Bartell d’Arcy). Ulysses also brings up the Helsinki assassination that made international news on the original Bloomsday.

¶30 • Irish nationalists were conscious of and sometimes in communication with nationalist movements in other regions and countries, such as the region of Bengal in northeast India, which (like Ireland) was colonized by the British Empire. Finland was closer to home and of keen interest. In a nutshell, here’s what happened. As part of Finland’s struggle to become independent from the Russian Empire, a 29-year-old Finnish nationalist named Eugen Schauman assassinated the principal Russian representative in Finland, Governor General Nikolai Bobrikov (aged 65), on the morning of June 16th, 1904, and then (as he had planned) killed himself at the scene. The son of a Finnish senator, Schauman worked as a civil service accountant and enjoyed a reputation for athletics and marksmanship. For decades after Russia acquired Finland (in 1809), it allowed the country considerable autonomy; however, performing as a dictator, Bobrikov attempted to imposed upon Finns Russia’s culture, language, currency, and more. To advance the program of Russification, Bobrikov shuttered numerous Finnish newspapers and oversaw attempts to conscript young Finnish men into the Russian armed services. The assassination occurred in the Finnish Senate building in Helsinki, and historians see it as a crucial step towards Finland’s declaring independence on December 6th, 1917. On the day of Bobrikov’s assassination, the pro-Russian Helsinki police charged the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius with “unwarranted happiness,” and almost immediately Sibelius began crafting a requiem in Schauman’s honor.

¶31 • A comparison between Eugen Schauman and Gabriel Conroy is strengthened if we consider the matter of language. Many saw (and see) Schauman as a first-order Finnish patriot, but he spoke Swedish, not Finnish. Gabriel avers that “Irish [Gaeilge] is not my language,” yet that fact should not exclude him from participation in Irish nationalism. When Gabriel goes on to declare that he’s “sick of [his] own country, sick of it,” he may simply be channeling the chronic frustration that I.R.B. members felt about nationalist efforts that shied away from the gun and bomb. In other words, he may be sick not of Ireland per se but of Irish nationalists sidetracked from the true and immediate priority — national liberation; a sovereign republic — by lesser and/or ineffective forms of nationalism (such as language-revival).

¶32 • As Gabriel and Gretta travel by horse-taxi to the Gresham hotel, they pass the snow-touched statue of the most influential Irish politician of the pre-Great Hunger nineteenth century: Daniel O’Connell (1775- 1847). O’Connell was a native speaker of Gaeilge; however, acknowledging (in 1833) that English was “the medium of all modern communication,” he declared himself ready to “witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish.” Gabriel’s language politics likely accord with O’Connell’s.

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¶33 • Gabriel may address O’Connell’s statue “gaily”; however, the term he articulates, “[g]ood-night,” signals a parting from O’Connell. This breaking away (note that “[g]ood-night” is broken by a hyphen) makes sense in that physical-force nationalists (of whom, we’re arguing, Gabriel is one) deemed O’Connell profoundly problematic because he rejected violence as a means of effecting Irish independence. In 1796, O’Connell asserted that “[t]he altar of liberty crumbles when it is cemented only with blood.” O’Connell pioneered strategies of non-violent resistance for national and political ends, and the examples of his campaigns influenced Frederick Douglass (a direct acolyte), Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. King’s August 1963 March on Washington (where he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech) was modeled on O’Connell’s peaceful mass gatherings, known as Monster Meetings. If Gabriel is building a fighting physique, is engaging in arms-procurement on the Continent of Europe, and is viewing the Royal Barracks as if from an embrasure, then he is taking leave of Daniel O’Connell’s peaceful-resistance ideology. Summary In this unit, we have: (1) rehearsed the basic plot structure of “The Dead”; (2) examined the story’s incipit in terms of the Uncle Charles Principle; (3) revealed why Lily, who may be a symbol of Ireland, is anxious about “[t]he men that is now”; and (4) built an argument that Gabriel has a secret life as a revolutionary — that, most likely, he’s a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (i.e. a Fenian).

•••

11 Text Second Set of Lecture/Exam Notes about James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Words from the text appear in red. Critically important terms are highlighted in yellow.

Dating the Action

¶1 • Can we be precise about when the action in “The Dead” occurs? We know that the party celebrates “Christmas-time,” so we’re within the traditional 12 days of Christmas. We also learn that Freddy Mallins’s “mother made his take the pledge on New Year’s Eve” — that is, become (in anticipation of the new year) what in Ireland is called a Pioneer, an individual oath-bound to “total abstinence” from alcohol. The Temperance or Total Abstinence movement was advanced both in Ireland and among the Irish in the U.S. by an Irish priest named Father Theobald Mathew (just one “t”): “The Apostle of Temperance.” On several occasions on Sunday, January 27th, 1850, that superstar-like figure addressed large crowds in the church (not yet then the cathedral church) of St. John the Baptist in Savannah, Georgia, Here are extracts from a contemporary account: “Congregation chiefly Irish. Some took the pledge”; “[he] administered the pledge to … some hundreds, including the principal Catholics [of Savannah], and many [other] Americans. The church was not capable of containing a single individual more than were in it. Numbers remained outside”; “1,000 [pledge-takers] for the day.” Although Father Mathew died in 1856, his legacy endured. Freddy’s being “screwed” (i.e. drunk) indicates that he’s already fallen off the temperance wagon, but the detail about “the pledge” situates us after New Year’s Eve — that is, between January 1st and the twelfth and last day of Christmas, January 5th.

¶2 • Given the above window of time, by far the most likely candidate-day for the party is the last or twelfth day of Christmas, the evening of which was traditionally celebrated with feasting as Twelfth Night or Epiphany Eve. The next day, January 6th, constitutes the beginning of the ecclesiastical (i.e. Christian church) season of Epiphany, which emphasizes Jesus as the savior of the Gentiles (i.e. non-Jews), such as the so-called three wise men; three kings; or Magi. Among the four canonical gospels, only St. Matthew’s Gospel contains the Epiphany story (which doesn’t give a number of men but does invoke three gifts): “[T]here came wise men from the east … | Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” (Matthew 2:1-2). In Ireland, Epiphany Day is known as Nollaig na mBan (“Women’s Christmas”) or Little Christmas. By longstanding cultural practice, it was a day off for women from household duties. Some have argued that, in their Gresham Hotel bedroom in the early hours of January 6th, Gretta effectively takes Women’s Christmas off from her “conjugal duty” to Gabriel — i.e. her “duty,” as his wife, to have sex with him. Remember, this tale was written in 1907, so it’s influenced by the mores of its day, although it doesn’t always endorse them.

¶3 • During Twelfth Night in medieval Europe, masters and servants — and men and women — often swapped clothing and acted as one another. This social and sexual inversion or “misrule” likely had its origins in the wintertime Saturnalia Festival in ancient Rome, before the Roman Empire became Christian. Joyce probably had in mind Shakespeare’s early seventeenth-century play Twelfth Night, which includes cross-dressing, a love triangle, a forged love letter, a reconciliation between a twin sister and brother, “cakes and ale,” and much music. Its subtitle, What You Will, puns on William, Shakespeare’s first name. Gabriel’s ultimate will or purpose in “The Dead” is to be sexually intimate with his wife; that’s why he’s hired the hotel room, away from the couple’s children. However, what he wills does not transpire.

1 ¶4 • We know that Twelfth Night was performed (with an all-male cast) in London on February 2, 1602, although a published version did not appear until 1623. In a way, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night constitutes a foil for interpreting “The Dead.” We call this phenomenon intertextuality. A good working definition of intertextuality (a word coined by the French scholar Julia Kristeva in the 1960s) is “the shaping of one text’s meaning by another text.”

¶5 • In the hotel bedroom, Gabriel comes to a realization that Gretta loved another man, the late Michael Furey, before she loved him — and that, in the here and now, she continues to love Furey more than she loves him. This conclusion is a big deal, so much so that it could be labeled an epiphany. The Magi realize — or have an epiphany — that the baby Jesus is the savior (who will die for humanity’s sins). For his part, Gabriel realizes that Michael Furey (who Gretta believes “died for me”) is his rival for Gretta’s heart and, thus, a third party in their marriage. To deploy language from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (see the panel to the right): the music — “The Lass of Aughrim” — that Gretta hears when descending the stairs at Usher’s Island after the meal proves to be “food of love,” and it plays on in her mind once she ascends the stairs at the Gresham. Eventually, she reveals the Michael Furey story to Gabriel, who would be justified in speaking the following lines from (the character Viola in) Twelfth Night: “She never told [about] her love, \ But let concealment … \ Feed on her damask cheek. She pined [away] in thought \ … \ … smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?”

¶6 • The word epiphany derives from Ancient Greek, and its earliest sense seems to have had to do with perceiving a divine or supernatural “manifestation” or “insight.” Such an experience was typically sudden and unexpected, although a complex mass of circumstances and feelings, some dating deep into the past, might have had to come together to produce it. Given that “The Dead” is a literary work, we should also consider another Ancient Greek term, anagnorisis, a reference to the moment in a play or other text when a character makes a critical discovery. In his theory of theater, called Poetics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle defined anagnorisis as “a change from ignorance to knowledge.” Gabriel was ignorant about Michel Furey, but in the hotel bedroom he suddenly and unexpectedly progresses into knowledge of him, perhaps even concluding that Gretta’s furious passion for Furey may be a core reason why their marriage devolved into “years of … dull existence together.”

¶7 • Note how late the action in “The Dead” occurs. Towards the start of the text, we discover that “it was long after ten o’clock [at night] and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife” at the Morkan sisters’ party. In other words, most of what happens must occur not on Twelfth Night itself but, instead, after midnight, during the early morning of the next day, the Feast of the Epiphany. As Gabriel and Gretta begin journeying to the hotel, on foot, after the Twelfth Night dance and dinner, the term morning features: “The morning was still dark.”

¶8 • So much for the day or days, but what about the year? There’s a big clue about that, if we revisit a conceit rehearsed in the first set of Lecture/Exam notes. We acknowledged then that interpreting modern tales requires the reader to play private detective, in the mode of Sherlock Holmes. (In his second and most famous novel, Ulysses, Joyce makes the name of that famous fictional detective into an action word: “Sherlockholmesing.”) In a tense moment in “The Dead,” Kate Morkan “fiercely” rebukes her live- in niece (Gabriel’s cousin), Mary Jane Morkan, for defending the decision by Pope Pius X to exclude women from church choirs on the basis that music was part of the holy office, which could only be performed by men. (See the comment at the end of ¶2 above!)

2 ¶9 • The decree was made motu proprio (that is, without consultation) on November 22, 1903, the feast day of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music — and both a woman and a martyr! Here is the text (in English translation) of Section V.13 of the document: [S]ingers in church have a real liturgical office, and that therefore women, being incapable of exercising such office, cannot be admitted to form part of the choir. Whenever, then, it is desired to employ the acute voices of sopranos and contraltos, these parts must be taken by boys, according to the most ancient usage of the Church. Kate’s sister, Julia, has relied for financial security on her job in a church choir: specifically, the position of “leading soprano in Adam and Eve’s,” the popular name for the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is a Roman Catholic church operated by the Franciscan order of friars on Merchants’ Quay (pronounced key; means wharf), very near Usher’s Island. The pope’s November 1903 determination is a “passion”-inducing development and a “sore subject” for Kate, and her outburst about it allows us figuratively to wear our Sherlock Holmes hat and date “The Dead” to after 10:00 pm on January 5th and into the “still dark” morning hours of January 6th, 1904.

Land-and-House Nationalism

¶10 • As we’ve learned, “The Dead” never comments on the Royal Barracks, a huge military base, despite that complex’s sitting on a hill just across the River Life or Liffey from Usher’s Island. In a similar fashion, the text completely omits mention of a profoundly significant, quite recent development in Irish history. More than Pope Leo X’s pronouncement about women’s participation in church choirs, it would have been a hot media topic in November 1903 — hot enough be still resonating in early January 1904, not least in newspapers, such as those on which Mary Jane remarks: “I read this morning in the newspapers [note the plural form] that the snow is general all over Ireland.” The Irish press devoted much of 1903 to what’s generally called the Wyndham Land Act, which was passed by the United Kingdom parliament (“Westminster”) in London on August 14th, 1903, and put into effect on November 1st, 1903. For Ireland, the Wyndham Land Act was a big, headline-grabbing news item in August and, again in November of 1903. It inaugurated a new system or paradigm, and its effects were (like the snow in “The Dead”) general all over the land of Ireland.

¶11 • The incipit of the Wyndham Land Act is reproduced on the left of this page. A senior government administrator named Wyndham was intimately involved in the politics that precipitated it; however, a more formal title for it is the Irish Land Purchase Act of 1903. It was by far the most comprehensive and impactful in a series of Irish land acts passed by the UK parliament in the post-Great Hunger period in an attempt to placate Irish land campaigners. As in most nations under colonization, land nationalism featured in Ireland as a central socio-economic and political concern. Typically, the colonist appropriates (or robs, by force of arms) indigenous lands, constraining the original, native owners to subsist as renting tenants on property they formerly owned. Land nationalism seeks to replace the colonial landlords by restoring the natives (or, at least, their descendants) to ownership, also called proprietorship.

¶12 • As Irish agriculture shifted after the Great Hunger of the 1840s, becoming more cattle-based than crop-based — and becoming increasingly efficient, export-oriented, and profitable — the native tenants wanted, more than ever, to keep their profits rather than continue (sometimes under duress) to submit them to the (often absentee) colonial landlords, who’d been top dog for centuries. Most tenants concluded that owning their own land was the solution; and spurring them forward even more was anxiety about their lack of security of tenure, should another large-scale famine occur.

3 ¶13 • The Great Hunger saw much eviction or ejectment of tenants from their rented farms; however, if you owned the farm (i.e. had absolute security of tenure), you couldn’t be evicted. Especially after 1879, a year in which a new famine seemed possible, the Irish scene became dominated by land politics, known at the time as the Land Campaign or the Land War (really, a war of words or rhetoric, of mass demonstrations, and of parliamentary strategy). The Land League (later renamed the National League) and the Ladies’ Land League were formed to advance and fund these politics, and the organizations established branches not just in Ireland but also in Irish communities abroad, including in Savannah and other Georgia cities. Passage of the Wyndham Land Act in 1903 marked a signal victory for the Land Campaign.

¶14 • According to the scholar Fergus Campbell, the Wyndam Land Act constitutes “revolutionary legislation” because it “fundamentally transformed the nature of land holding in Ireland.” The outcome of the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 and the follow-up Birrell Land Act of 1909 was that 316,000 Irish tenants purchased farms totaling 11.5 million of Ireland’s 20 million acres. Few nations on earth have experienced so large a transfer of land from colonial landlords to native tenants, and even though “The Dead” is an urban text, rural Ireland and its agricultural land and economy permeate it. The Morkan sisters “[rent]” their dwelling from a businessman dependent on Irish farmers, “Mr. Fulham, the corn factor [wholesaler].” Furthermore, due to their almost certainly having lived through the famine, they make high-quality food, such as “diamond-bone sirloins,” a priority, despite their “modest” financial means.

¶15 • But why do the characters not directly address the Wyndham Land Act? In particular, Gretta would seem an appropriate spokesperson, for she all but embodies the rural Irish populace, whose victory the Act primarily was. Arguably, Gretta deserves a social victory. Having dated Michael Furey in “the way they do in the country,” she lost him. What is more, in her own suburban (or half-urban, half-rural) home in Monkstown, just south of Dublin city, she “long” endured her mother-in-law, who once disparaged her for being “country-cute.” In a way, Gretta does assert some rural will by not making her body sexually available in the rented space of the hotel bedroom, a reaction to “The Lass of Aughrim,” a ballad whose villain, Lord Gregory, is an Irish landlord. However, perhaps the most cogent reason why the Wyndham Land Act does not dominate the dinner-table conversation at 15 Usher’s Island on Twelfth Night 1904 is antipathy towards land nationalism on the part of physical-force nationalists, of whom, our last lecture suggested, Gretta’ husband, Gabriel, is one. Many physical-force or unreconstructed nationalists feared that settlement of the land question would radically blunt the average Irish person’s desire to overthrow the British colonial regime. This worry proved well- founded, for as their material circumstances improved due to proprietorship, Ireland’s Catholic farmers — by far the largest coterie in overall population — became less committed to physical-force activism, at least until the late nineteen-teens.

¶16 • A couple of notes. In Ireland, the tenant typically had to construct his own home on the rented land; however, that building or “improvement” immediately became the colonial landlord’s property. Thus, the Land League’s rhetoric frequently used such exhortations as: “[K]eep a firm grip on your homesteads and lands.” Given the role of the house as a figure, we should identify house-and-land nationalism (not just land nationalism) in the Irish case. One resistance practice used in the land struggle was the boycott, named after a landlord’s agent or representative, , Captain Charles Boycott, who was deliberately ignored (or boycotted) by the tenants from whom he attempted to collect farm-rents.

4 While just a summary, the following diagram is useful when contemplating Joyce’s critique of nationalism in “The Dead.” After Daniel O’Connell’s death in 1847, the inevitable leadership vacuum combined with the Great Hunger (1845-1849) to threaten his form of constitutional nationalism, known as Repeal: a large-scale effort to repeal or void the Act of Union (which had created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) and, thus, restore self- government to Ireland via an independent Irish parliament in Dublin. After the Great Hunger, a new, charismatic leader emerged to advance constitutional nationalism: Charles Stewart Parnell. His campaign to restore the Irish parliament was labeled Home Rule (as opposed to Repeal). The grandson of an American admiral, Parnell, like O’Connell before him, became known as “the uncrowned king of Ireland.” Joyce and his family were enthusiastic supporters of Parnell, who, by contrast with the Catholic O’Connell, was a member of the Church of Ireland. Parnell led not just the Home Rule movement; he was also one of the founders of the Land League. Furthermore, he was prepared to strategize with the Irish Republican Brotherhood (or Fenians) via an arrangement called the New Departure.

Gaeilge: Blessing & Curse

¶17 • Molly Ivors, as we’ve discovered, represents the cultural-nationalist movement called the Gaelic League, which was founded in 1893 and still exists. Its mission was to de-Anglicize Ireland by reviving the country’s indigenous tongue: the ancient language of Gaeilge. Popular among members (especially not-yet-married members) were Gaelic League summer schools — adult and coed — in remote, Gaeilge-speaking zones, such as the “Aran Isles,” a three-island archipelago technically part of Gretta Conroy and Michael Furey’s native county of Galway, but located “out in the Atlantic.” One notes that “The Dead” almost invariably uses the verb come with a double entendre that includes the sense of sexual orgasm. Thus, we get a sense of the erotic opportunities presented by Gaelic League summer schools in Molly’s entreaty to Gabriel (which also deploys “splendid,” an adjective perhaps associated with “taking posh” in England/English): “‘We’re going to stay there [the Aran islands] a whole month. It will be splendid out in the Atlantic. You ought to come. …[Y]ou will come, won’t you?’ said Miss Ivors, laying her arm hand eagerly on his arm.”

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¶18 • Apparently, Gabriel — a physically and intellectually accomplished man — causes the dancing Molly to become “eagerly” tactile. She thinks he’s hot. Thus, one can legitimately wonder why she refuses to stay for the Morkan Sisters’ Twelfth Night meal. Presumably, that would afford her additional chances to interact with Gabriel, albeit none as intimate or regulated as the dance called Lancers. During that formulaic dance, Molly can control the conversation, knowing that she and Gabriel will partner for a fixed length of time and then separate before rejoining. Consider, for example, one of their time-limited encounters during Lancers; “[W]hen they met in the long chain [a formation within the dance] he was surprised to feel his hand firmly pressed [by Molly].” By contrast with the dance, the meal might oblige her to sit, for an extended period, beside an undesirable instance of Irish manhood, such as the drunk Freddy Mallins or the “dirty old man” Mr. Browne, self-described as “the man for the ladies.” But a more likely anxiety for Molly is the challenge of competing at the table with her clear rival for Gabriel’s affections: his wife, Gretta. Molly has elected to predicate her identity on Gaeilge; however, as Gretta is a native of Co. [county] Galway it’s likely that she’s not a learner of Gaeilge but a native speaker. During Lancers, Molly can control the topic of Gaeilge, but should that element of cultural nationalism surface during the relative free-for-all of dinner conversation, Molly might be exposed as inadequate vis-à-vis Gretta. Arguably, she determines an early exit to be the best way to maintain the upper hand, an action she literally accomplished during the dance, as quoted earlier: She “[lay] her arm hand … on his arm.”

¶19 • To refuse hospitality, as Molly does in declining to “stay for supper,” constitutes a serious breach of social etiquette in Ireland, primarily due to the country’s traumatic memory of the Great Hunger and other, earlier famines, such as the Year of the Slaughter (1740-1741), the cause of a proportionately (but not numerically) greater loss of population than the Great Hunger. As survivors of the Great Hunger — an event whose final year (1849) was just 55 years earlier — the “[o]ld … aunts,” Julia and Kate Morkan, display a kind of sacramental reverence for the potato. The devastation of that dietary staple (specifically, a variety called the lumper potato) by consecutive years of blight was the nutritional, although not the political, reason for the Great Hunger. (A blighted potato is pictured on the left. The cause is attack by an oomycete or fungus-like microorganism called phytophthora infestans.) During the meal, Lily serves “hot floury potatoes” in a way that resembles the distribution of the host during a Roman Catholic mass (i.e. eucharist), namely, from “a dish … wrapped in a white napkin.” Already peeved at Molly due to her denigrating him, when dancing, as a “West Briton,” Gabriel by inference highlights her insult towards his aunts and their food — that is, her act of “go[ing] away discourteously” — when, in his speech, he slams Ireland’s “new generation” as a “hypereducated” coterie that “lack[s] those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day.”

¶20 • One remarks on the precipitous nature of Molly’s “go[ing] away”: her “abrupt departure.” She “[runs] down the staircase,” upon which, later, Gretta will linger, arrested by hearing “The Lass of Aughrim.” Immediately prior to Molly’s engaging with the stairs, Gretta addresses her “frankly,” characterizing her as “the comical girl,” a phrase that may resonate anon when the reader comes to understand Gretta as a tragic woman. While on the stairs, Molly articulates the only two explicit words of Gaeilge in “The Dead”: “Beannacht libh cried Miss Ivors.” Obviously, the reader must interrogate this phrase. Molly could have said something simpler: slán, which means “bye.” Although still an entry-level phrase, beannacht libh is a bit more show-offy. The noun or substantive beannacht translates as “blessing”; and the prepositional pronoun libh translates as “with y’all.” So, in effect, Molly cries, “May a blessing be with y’all.”

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¶21 • Despite his job of “teaching in the college” (i.e. a high school), Gabriel is uncomfortable with public speaking. Before delivering it, he frets that “[h]is whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.” As his anxiety increases, he recalls a source of criticism from his past, which may account for his lack of self-confidence, namely, his judgmental mother: a deployer of “slighting phrases” and a source of “sullen opposition”; in fine, “[a] shadow” over his life. In the event, the speech proves successful, so much so that, in the street-level hallway at 15 Usher’s Island, as the party is breaking up, Gabriel, the reluctant speech-giver, declaims another, impromptu speech, with the topic being his maternal grandfather’s horse, Johnny — specifically, its continually “walk[ing] round the statue,” in central Dublin, of King William III (“King Billy of Orange”), a symbol of the political ascendancy of Protestantism in England and its possessions, including Ireland. If Gabriel injected verve into his dinner-table speech due to his anger against Molly Ivors, then she perhaps was the cause of a blessing (beannacht). The reception to both the dinner-table speech and the unexpected, follow-up “Johnny” speech stimulates Gabriel so much that he progresses from fretfulness not merely to self-assurance but also to sexual arousal. In a manner of speaking, Gabriel becomes “the man.” Walking after Gretta on the snowy sidewalk, in search of a horse-cab, he experiences “blood … bounding along his veins” and determines that he needs “to be alone with her.”

¶22 • If the strong city man Gabriel Conroy feels blessed upon attaining the hotel bedroom, the circumstance shifts therein. He becomes cursed, in so far as Gretta reveals the presence in their marriage of a dead lover: the weak country “boy” Michael Furey. Gabriel had to deliver a speech, a holiday message, to his aged aunts and their guests, but now he’s the recipient of a message. On the original Epiphany, wise men came from the East to a rented stable in Bethlehem. Early on Epiphany of 1904 , a dead man may be said to come from the West of Ireland to a rented hotel room in Dublin. Michael Furey’s sudden, unexpected presence in the hotel room as a kind of ghost or haunting prevents Gabriel from achieving an affirmative answer to the question posed as the last concern in the tale’s incipit paragraph: “who had come.” Due to Gretta’s memory of Michael Furey, Gabriel will not enjoy sexual congress with her; he will not come. Gabriel’s name, chosen by his domineering and scoffing mother, rings true, for in the three major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) Gabriel is the messenger archangel, while Michael is the warrior archangel, the conquering hero, leader of God’s army.

¶23 • Initially in the hotel room (as we’ve already acknowledged), Gabriel becomes so sexually frustrated that he seriously contemplates raping Gretta: “He longed … to crush her body against his, to overmaster her.” He rehearses in his mind the fact that he could “take her as she was” — that is, force her have sex with him despite her not being in the mood. The reader must countenance the possibility that mate rape has been a feature of the Conroys’ marriage. Perhaps the hiring of the hotel room this year was envisioned as a means to begin afresh, to leave behind a history of spousal brutality. In the end, Gabriel successfully resists his sexually violent impulses, his “fever of rage and desire,” and that act of suppression in favor of engaging in conversation with Gretta causes her to compliment her tall husband with both a kiss (which she delivers by “raising herself on tiptoe” to his face-level) and the spoken observation, “You are a very generous person.”

¶24 • When close-reading a literary work, one must pay attention to repeated terms, and in “The Dead” gas is one such term, used invariably in an erotic or sexual context. Consider the following instances of gas.

7 • In the pantry, Gabriel acknowledges Lily as a “growing girl” — that is, a young woman early in her sexual maturity (perhaps even a pregnant woman) — when he observes her in “gas” light. • To criticize Mr. Browne’s regular Christmas-season visits to their home in sexual pursuit of Mary Jane, her unmarried niece, Aunt Kate “archly” states, “[H]e is very attentive. … He has been laid on here like the gas.” • After his two successful speeches, when growing with lust, Gabriel observes Gretta in his aunts’ hallway; specifically, he remarks to himself how “the flame of the gas [light]” illuminates the “rich bronze of her hair.”

¶25 • Things are going well for Gabriel until Gretta presents Michael Furey, the name of whose home village — Oughterard, in Co. Galway — means “upper height.” Gretta may have to stand on tiptoe because Gabriel is tall or high, but Michael commands the upper height. As part of the series of questions that the university- educated school teacher Gabriel asks Gretta about Michael, her first and truest love, he inquires, “What was he?” — in other words, “What profession did he follow?” Given the text’s associating gas with sexuality, even lust, the reader shouldn’t be surprised by her response: “He was in the gasworks.” Molly Ivors may be learning Gaeilge and, thus, know a few standard conversational phrases (such as Beannacht libh), but in delivering the word gas to her husband in the context of gasworks Gretta — very likely a native speaker of Gaeilge — definitively emplaces into the reader’s consciousness a critical instance of a Gaeilge word, namely: geis.

¶26 • In Gaeilge, the feminine noun geis is pronounced like the English word gas. While it’s often tough to translate accurately from one language to another, a reasonable definition of geis is “curse” — the opposite of Molly’s beannacht or “blessing.” See how Joyce did that? Let’s take a look at how geis appears in a Gaeilge-to-English dictionary published in 1904 by (among other entities) the Gaelic League. An edited version of the entry appears on the left. At that time, Gaeilge was written and printed in Ireland’s indigenous version of the Roman alphabet. You’ll see that “curse” isn’t given as a definition; however, other dictionaries do include precisely that word under geis. That said, words that could approximate to “curse” do appear in the Gaelic League dictionary: “forbidden custom”; “restriction”; “prohibition.” In ancient Irish legends, a hero who had to achieve a task (e.g., rescue a bunch of captives) was tested not just by the task itself but also by having to endure some kind of restriction or prohibition or curse that made accomplishing the task all the harder. Geis refers to that handicapping restriction, prohibition, or curse.

¶27 • Say I’m a hero and want to assume a false name and wear a disguise in order to accomplish a task in a foreign kingdom. The geis (restriction; prohibition; curse) put upon me might be my having to reveal my true identity if asked my name by a stranger in the kingdom. In the hotel bedroom, Gabriel discovers that he can’t be (or, at least, can’t easily be) a hero in his marriage because a restriction or curse has been put upon him — because a geis is being worked upon him. In the immediate term, Michael Furey constitutes a restriction or curse, for (although just a memory) he effectively prohibits Gabriel from enjoying intimacy with Greta. We could argue that Michael Furey, late of the gasworks, works a geis (pronounced “gas”) on Gabriel Conroy. As part of Ireland’s ongoing Cultural Revival, ancient legends were being reprinted and recirculated in a variety of forms, not least short story collections, stage plays, and children’s books. Thus, the ancient idea of the hero’s geis was becoming mainstream.

8 ¶28 • But there’s more. What, by the end of his questioning, Gabriel may (unintentionally) extract from Gretta is the essence of an admission that, before their marriage, she became pregnant by Michael Furey. In this case, the critical word is “convent.” Until the 1990s in Ireland, convents popularly known as Magdalen Asylums would absorb pregnant but unmarried young women, at least until they had birthed and weaned their infants. In a country that until the late twentieth century permitted almost no birth-control resources (even condoms) and scant sex education, unwed pregnancy was common, but considered a social disgrace. Gretta may have regretted the pregnancy for social reasons.

¶29 Psycho-emotionally, Gretta may have repressed much of the trauma of an early, so-called illegitimate pregnancy, simply in order to push forward in life and attain the status of a middle-class suburban wife and mother. However, the tune and lyrics of “The Lass of Aughrim,” heard on the stairs, trigger recurrence of her trauma, which was compounded by the death of the young father, Michael Furey. A likely scenario is that once she started to became visibly pregnant “about the beginning of the winter,” Gretta’s family or “people” obliged her to leave Galway for “the convent” in Dublin, staging that move out of her “grandmother’s house in Nun’s Island,” a district in Galway city, the capital of Co. Galway. (Nun’s Island is named for a community of Poor Clare nuns, historically housed in a residence called Bethlehem.) Although Gretta desired to communicate with Michael, he was ill (possibly with influenza) and “[she] wouldn’t be let [i.e. allowed to] see him.” A letter from her to him “saying … [she] would be back [in Galway, from Dublin] in the summer” precipitated a surreptitious, Romeo-and-Juliet-like encounter between them in cold rain in her grandmother’s “garden,” an incident that accelerated his death. It could be that, in the old woman’s garden, Michael entreated Gretta to emigrate with him, perhaps to America, imagined as a New World Garden of Eden. (Recall the “American apples” on the dinner table.) Pressed by Gabriel to admit that she “was in love with him [Michael],” Gretta responds, “I was great with him at that time.” While that expression is a Hiberno-English idiom for dating, it echoes the phrase in the King James Bible about the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy: “being great with child” (Luke: chapter 2, verse 5).

¶30 • The text of “The Dead” provides only a snippet of “The Lass of Aughrim,” which Gretta hears while wearing a “skirt” distinguished by “salmonpink panels.” In the collection or “cycle” of Irish mythology known as the Fenian Cycle — from which the nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical-force-nationalist Fenian movement took its name — the leading hero, Fionn (“fair-haired”), gains profound knowledge while still a child by tasting the Salmon of Knowledge. Gretta’s being exposed to the line, “The babe lies cold …,” from “The Lass of Aughrim” may, for her, constitute a harrowing moment of revisiting the tragic knowledge that the first child she conceived, Michael’s child, died — or, at least, died to her due to its being adopted or else raised by nuns in a convent orphanage.

¶31 • It could be that Gabriel inadvertently foreshadows the knowledge that, during “her first girlish beauty,” Gretta became pregnant due to “romance in her life” with Michael. At supper, referring to the availability of dressing for the goose, Gabriel announces: “[I]f anyone wants a little more of what vulgar people call stuffing let him or her speak.” The concluding “let …” clause resembles a portion of the marriage ceremony in the Church of England’s 1559 Book of Common Prayer: “[I]f any man can show any just cause why they [the couple] may not lawfully be joined together [in marriage], let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.” As to the preceding “vulgar … stuffing” clause: it evokes the vulgar or slang use of “stuffed” for sexual intercourse, especially the woman’s becoming pregnant. Gabriel may have committed sexual violence in the marital bed, but when confronted, in the Gresham, with knowledge that his wife was an unmarried mother, he ultimately determines to hold his peace.

9 ¶32 • In conclusion, one might wonder why Gabriel does not act to satisfy his “keen pang of lust” towards his wife but instead opts to ask highly personal questions that provide her with an opportunity to share her past trauma, encapsulated in the word “convent.” As with most everything in this deeply accomplished short story, the reason is hidden in plain sight. When Gabriel adds Germany to the countries he identifies as bicycle-tour destinations, one must contemplate what in the German language an educated individual living in 1904 would want “to keep in touch with.” Well, the simple answer is Sigmund Freud, the Austrian-born, German- speaking psychoanalyst. While several of Freud’s breakthrough works were available in his native German in 1904, no English translations had yet appeared. We must assume that Gabriel has exposed himself to some Freud, particularly Studien über Hysterie (“Studies on Hysteria”), co- written with Josef Breuer and first published in 1895. That work presents the narrative-based therapeutic method known as the Talking Cure. In essence, Gabriel converts the hotel bedroom into a Freudian clinic, where, in semi-darkness, he administers the Taking Cure to Greta, permitting her to re-live enough of her trauma verbally, in a safe space, so as to transcend it. Gabriel might also know other works solely by Freud, such as Psychopathology of Everyday Life, whose original, German- language edition appeared in 1901. In that text, Freud asserts that because “[t]he unconscious … knows no time limit” it is possible to restore “every former state of the memory content.” We know that smells and sounds (such as loud bangs or pieces of music) can trigger traumatic memory, and Freud’s claim is that the psychotherapist can use a question-and-answer technique to guide the distressed individual so that, in effect, she or he becomes a story-teller who narrates the events, long repressed in memory, that caused the original trauma.

¶33 • Clearly, many humanities or humanistic concerns receive deep and nuanced attention in “The Dead.” Other, different interpretations of this short story exist, and we could have explored additional matters rehearsed and critiqued within it. For example: the religious subtexts include the motif of the rented upper room or cenacle. The food-centered party occurs upstairs, suggesting the cenacle in which Jesus conducted the Last Supper before his crucifixion. Scholars hold that, after Jesus’s final ascension into heaven, the Holy Spirit visited his disciples in that same cenacle, bestowing upon them the Gift of Tongues (i.e. the ability to speak multiple languages) in the event celebrated as Pentecost or Whit. In the upper room in the Gresham, Gabriel, who is fluent in several tongues, finds himself visited by a spirit, too: that of Michael Furey, who works a geis — a word in Gaeilge, the tongue that Gabriel claims “is not my language.” Earlier, we acknowledged the notion of intertextuality, and we can exit this discussion by sharing Joyce’s source for the name Gabriel Conroy and for the conceit of snow: an American novel entitled Gabriel Conroy about the California Gold Rush of 1848-1855, written by Bret Harte and first published in 1876.

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10 Text Some Possible Focus Areas for an Essay about Knocknagow • The Knocknagow narrator: voice; personality; biases • How Knocknagow treats physical illness and/or bodily vigor • How Knocknagow presents America (and/or Australia) • Land security and/or insecurity in Knocknagow • Mat Donovan’s embourgeoisement • The middle-class continuum in Knocknagow • The role of traditional Irish music in Knocknagow • Echoes of the Great Hunger in Knocknagow • How Knocknagow presents the Catholic Church in Ireland (and perhaps America, too) • How Knocknagow inscribes sports — or one particular sport (e.g., hurling) • Dating in Knocknagow

Some Core Characters NARRATOR • Unidentified first-person-plural narrator (i.e. “we”) • “[B]eing simply the faithful chronicler of the sayings and doings, joys and sorrows of Knocknagow” (163) ç LAHY FAMILY • Phil Lahy the tailor • His wife: shopkeeper Honor Lahy • Their son: Tommy Lahy • Their chronically ill daughter: Norah Lahy ç DONOVAN FAMILY • “Her [Mrs. Donovan’s] hand … appeared bony and shriveled [because of the Famine?] … the gold wedding ring was now too large for the finger it once fitted tightly enough — which made it necessary for her to wear a smaller ring of brass, as a guard” (153)

Breath of Novel’s Concerns, as Reflected in Some Quotations DATING THE ACTION • Phil Lahy invokes “that speech of Bishop Hughes’s” in “an American paper” (158) = John Joseph Hughes, County Tyrone-born Bishop — and then Archbishop — of New York (serving 1842-1864) and, earlier, founder of Fordham University; laid cornerstone of New Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) ç EMIGRATION • “‘‘Tisn’t Joe’s fault,’ Mat returned; ‘his lase is out, an’ he’s expecting’ the [eviction] notice every day like the rest of the tinants on the property. As fast as their lases dhrop, out they must go.’” (162) ç MAT’S FREEHOLD • Mat (“the Thrasher”) Donovan on his economic circumstances: “A man ought to be continted [contented]; an’, thanks be to God, I was never in the want uv a shillin’” (139) • Mat rents some land, but also has the freehold (i.e. outright ownership) of a “little ‘garden’” — “his own ‘little spot’” (140) ç ANTHROPOLOGICAL (ETHNOGAPHIC) DIMENSIONS OF TEXT • Billy Heffernan “walked up the hill [from the Lahys’ house] to Mat Donovan’s” (148) à “Mat Donovan’s house was at the top of a hill where two roads met, and the candle in the window was a beacon light” (154) à “neighbors who came in for a ‘shanahus’ [social gathering] of an evening” (154) à The 29 May 1841 edition of the Dublin Penny Journal (vol. 1; no. 48) contains William Carleton’s self-described “paper” “The Irish Shanahus”: “For our own part, we have always loved the rich and ruddy twilight of the rustic hearth” à “The regular Shanahus — the herald and historian of individual families, the faithful genealogist of his long- descended patron — has not been in existence for a least a century and a half, perhaps two. He with whom we have to do is the humble old man who, feeling himself gifted with a strong memory for genealogical history, old family anecdotes, and legendary lore in general, passes a happy life in going from family to family, comfortably dressed and much respected — dropping in of a Saturday night without any previous notice, bringing eager curiosity to and delight to the youngsters of the house he visits, and filling the sedate ears of the old with tales and legends” (DPJ, p. 378) ç MAT’S EMBOURGEOISEMENT • Mat’s socioeconomic rise reflected in his serving as Ned Brophy’s “sidesman” (i.e. best man at NB’s wedding): “it was somewhat unusual for a snug farmer, like Ned Brophy, to pay such a compliment to a ‘labouring man’” (142) • For wedding, Mat obtains “a new blue body-coat with gilt buttons” (143) • Mat on his dating history: “I, that had my fling among ‘em all, an’ never lost a wink uv sleep on account uv any girl that ever was born …. Sally Mockler called me a rag on every bush” (141) • Literacy: “Mat took up the dog-eared book [chez Lahy] and made believe to be reading it” (143) ç MIDDLE-CLASS WEDDING ECOSYSTEM • Ned Brophy’s wedding à Mat (cousin to NB’s mother): “the priest is chargin’ a show of money for marryin’ ‘em” (138) • Tom Maher on NB: “There’s not a dacenter man … for his manes [means; material assets]” (139) • Hiberno-English (English as spoken in Ireland): colloquial idiom; adds so-called local color • Male character to Mat: “Is Ned Brophy’s match settled for certain?” à “[T]here was talks uv id bein’ broke” (142) • “[E]verything else about him [Ned Brophy] was brand new, even to the black silk cravat with a scarlet border” (156) • Ned Brophy recognizes that “[t]wo hundred pounds [his new wife’s dowry] is a fine fortune” (157), but he maintains affection for Norah Lahy and is conscious that her “mother [Honor] is very bitther agin me” (157-158) ç SPORTS • Captain French (son of Major French; both British army officers) better at “throwing the sledge” than any among the “eight hundred men in the regiment” (147) • “[B]y ‘losing a Sunday’ he [Mat] meant losing a dance, or the hurling, or the hunt, which he could only enjoy on the day of rest” (168) ç MUSIC • “Scotch tunes were very popular at Knocknagow” (148), especially “Auld Lang Syne” • Billy Heffernan: “I don’t know how to write music, though I could tell … the names uv the notes wan by wan” (148) • A particular “slow tune so fascinated our good friend, Father Hannigan, who was a bigoted admirer of Irish music, that he left his place behind the mahogany table” (164) çç PEASANT • “the Irish peasant always considering it rude to stare at people while eating” (153) ç SUPERSTITION • “[I]t was generally believed that the ‘Good People’ [fairies] were wont to take their nightly journeys through the air to and from Maurice Kearney’s fort [archaeological remains] over the quarry” (155)

How Ireland Absorbed Knocknagow ¶ FULL TITLE • Charles Joseph Kickham • Knocknagow; or, The Homes of Tipperary (1873) ¶ Novelist, balladeer, journalist, and member of the Fenian leadership, Charles Joseph Kickham: 1828-1882 ¶ In the fifteenth yearly volume of the Irish Monthly (1887), a quoted tribute avers, “No writer has produced more faithful pictures of Irish country life than Charles Kickham. … [H]is memory was filled with the traditions of our land and race.” ¶ In an 1894 article, “What Our Country Folk Read,” the New Ireland Review observes, “Time after time Knocknagow is recommended by one reader to another as the very best novel” ¶ In his book-length study, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Westport, CT: 1997), James H. Murphy asserts, “The key to understanding Knocknagow’s appeal lies in its ability to allow two images of Ireland to coexist. It presents Ireland both as socially riven with conflict and oppression … and as a society of harmony and celebration” ¶ IRELAND’S FIRST FEATURE FILM • An index of Knocknagow’s popularity is the fact that an eight- reel adaptation of the text constituted Ireland’s first feature film, directed in 1917 by Fred O’Donovan and produced by the Film Company of Ireland

Kickham’s Family Background ¶ MULLINAHONE • Kickham always associated with village of his birth and upbringing (where, in addition, he is buried): Mullinahone, near larger settlement of Cashel — a Patrician (i.e. St. Patrick-related) holy site and seat of an archbishop — in County Tipperary ¶ SHOPOCRACY • Eldest child of successful shop-keeping draper John Kickham and his wife Anne (neé Mahony) • Couple an example of the native-Irish, majority-Catholic “shopocracy”: the town-based component of the “agricultural bourgeoisie” that emerged in the socio-economic space between the Anglo- Irish Big House Ascendancy and the peasantry (sometimes called the cottier class) ¶ CORN-TO-HORN SWERVE • Knocknagow effectively dramatizes the acceleration of the “corn-to-horn” (or arable-to-pastoral) transition in Irish agriculture after the Great Hunger (blight-precipitated potato famine) of the 1840s • Addressing a “dragoon” (British soldier garrisoned locally), Billy Heffernan — fresh from an encounter with an evicted or ejected farmer, Mick Brien — laments how “the people” are “bein’ hunted, an’ the whole country turned into pasture for sheep and cattle” (page 265) • One beneficiary of the change is the erstwhile “thrasher,” Mat Donovan, who ends up “making money so fast as a cattle dealer” (page 584) ¶ KICKHAM’S BALLADS • In his ballads, Kickham regularly celebrated Mullinahone’s landscape features: (a) the conical Slievenamon (“mountain of the women”), especially associated with the mythical Irishwoman Gráinne (detailed in Knocknagow); (b) the Anner river ¶ “Slievenamon” • Enjoying the status of the county anthem of Tipperary, Kickham’s ballad “Slievenamon” combines the erotic and the nationalistic • Its speaker desires “[t]o see our flag unrolled / And my true love to enfold / In the valley near Slievenamon” ¶ “She Lived beside the Anner” • Kickham’s ballad “She Lived beside the Anner” expresses anxiety about Irish female emigration to North America: “Oh brave, brave Irish girls, we well may call you brave / Sure the least of all your perils is the stormy ocean wave / When you leave your quite valleys and cross the Atlantic foam / To hoard your hard-won earnings for the helpless ones at home [remittances]” ¶ TEENAGE ACCIDENT • Apparently, Kickham’s parents desired that he become a physician (like Dr. Kiely or the “surgeon” Richard Kearney in Knocknagow); however, at around age 13, a hunting-gun powder accident significantly impaired his hearing and vision. ¶ O’CONNELL & DAVIS (NATION NEWSPAPER) • Two important sources of Kickham’s passion for Irish nationalism: (a) Daniel O’Connell’s Monster Meetings (i.e. mass popular rallies) as part of the Repeal Campaign to void the Act of Union (1800), which shuttered the Irish parliament and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, ruled from Westminster in London; (b) the Nation newspaper, founded in 1842 as the organ of Young Ireland, a movement that respected O’Connell but took issue with his eschewal of violent resistance to British colonial control over Ireland ¶ O’Connell’s nicknames: The Liberator; The Emancipist; The Counselor • When at the port of Liverpool, England, Mat Donovan espies in “a small print-shop” a copy of “the well- known portrait of Daniel O’Connell, ‘the man of the people’”; he discerns in “the ‘Liberator’s’ [i.e. O’Connell’s] face … a smile … full of humor and pathos” (page 588) ¶ DAVIS (“THE CELT”) • Critical to Young Ireland and the Nation was Thomas Osbourne Davis (1814- 1845), an Irish Protestant lawyer who died at just 30 (from scarlet fever) • Under pseudonym “The Celt,” he authored essays and poems (such as “A Nation Once Again” and “The West’s Awake”) that advanced the notion of Ireland as an independent republic • In old age, Kickham recalled his mother’s grief over Davis’s untimely death • Daniel O’Connell’s reaction: “What … a cruel blow to the cause of Irish nationality. … His loss is irreparable” • Samuel Ferguson’s reaction (in verse): “To make Erin a nation yet: / Self-respecting, self-relying, self-advancing / … / … under God to Thomas Davis / Let the greater praise belong!” ¶ HOW KNOCKNAGOW ACKNOWLEDGES DAVIS • On page 110 of our edition of Knocknagow, Grace Kiely explains to the English visitor Henry Lowe that Davis “was an irreparable loss to the country” as a poet “but more as a patriot”: “You can have no idea of how much he was beloved” • Quoting her father, Grace continues, “[H]is influence on the mind of the country will be felt for ever” (page 111). ¶ In Knocknagow, the rather pretentious, snuff-using priest Father Hannigan remarks to Hugh Kearney that ‘[t]here was a ballad in last Saturday’s Nation about that tune [‘The Coolin’]” (page 216) • He reveals that the local physician, Dr. Kiely, “induced me to become a subscriber to the Nation” (page 216)

Cultural Nationalism; Antiquarianism ¶ BELFAST HARP FESTIVAL & RELIQUES OF IRISH POETRY • Kiely is a cultural revivalist, affected by the first (antiquarian) wave of Irish cultural nationalism, which is traceable to the Belfast Harp Festival of July 1792 and Charlotte Brooke’s book Reliques of Irish Poetry of 1788, whose subtitle lists four categories: Heroic Poems; Odes; Elegies; and Songs ¶ WILLIAM WILDE • Henry Lowe reveals that “Doctor Kiely is at present writing a work on Irish antiquities” (page 80) • Kiley may be partially based on the dramatist Oscar Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde • A renowned surgeon, he conducted archeological, antiquarian, ethnographic, and folkloric research • The October 1876 issue of the Journal of the Archaeological Society recognized that William Wilde’s “love of the antique past” and enthusiasm for “the ancient art and architecture of Ireland” resulted in “many valuable relics [being] saved from loss” through emplacement in the Royal Irish Academy’s Dublin museum • William’s wife, Lady Jane Wilde — whose penname was Speranza (“hope”) — contributed nationalistic verse to and sometimes edited the Nation ¶ EROTICALLY CHARGED LITERARY NATIONALISM • Endorsing her father’s cultural nationalism, Grace Kiely participates in a literary circle whose male members include individuals with such monikers as “the ‘Brehon’ [name for the Old Irish or Gaelic legal code] and ‘Shamrock’” (page 450) • On page 32, Grace reveals that “‘Shamrock’ … writes divinely, and … is really a nice fellow” ¶ GAA • The second wave of Irish cultural nationalism would emerge with the 1884 founding (in the town of Thurles, County Tipperary) of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which sought to revivify such native Irish sports as hurling and Gaelic football (or peil) ¶ MUSICAL NATIONALISM • In 1873, the same year as Knocknagow first appeared, P.W. Joyce saw publication of his Ancient Irish Music, which encompassed “one hundred airs hitherto unpublished,” as well as “many of the old popular songs” of Ireland • The volume complemented George Petrie’s 1855 collection The Ancient Music of Ireland, produced under the auspices of the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland ¶ YOUNG IRELAND REBELLION • Across Europe, 1848 emerged as a revolutionary year, known as “The Springtime of the Nations” • Despite the loss of Davis (three years earlier), the Young Ireland movement staged a small, unsuccessful rebellion in the cause of an Irish republic on July 29, 1848 • The location, the village of Ballingarry, County Tipperary, was just six miles north of Mullinahone • When one of the leaders, William Smith O’Brien, came through Mullinahone, seeking support, the 20-year-old Kickham rang the church bell on his behalf • At the time, Kickham was active in a Mullinahone branch of the Confederate Club, the “official organization of Young Ireland” • 1848 was the penultimate year of the Great Hunger (1845-1849) ¶ TENANTS’ RIGHTS • The next year (1849), Kickham supported the newly formed Callan Tenant Protection Society, begun by two Roman Catholic curates, Keefe and O’Shea, in Callan, County Kilkenny (near Mullinahone); however, its failure to effect change turned him towards physical-force nationalism ¶ Knocknagow rehearses a range of challenges endured by Irish tenants • In a telling exchange with Hugh Kearney, Henry Lowe inquires, “Are any of my uncle’s [Garrett Butler’s] tenants served with ejectments [eviction]?”; Hugh responds, “Yes … two very honest and industrious men. I believe they owe some [rent] arrears. There is a good deal of anxiety among the other tenants. … [T]he landlord [Butler, an absentee] ought to come [back to Ireland] and see for himself how things are going on here” (page 126) ¶ NOVEL: SALLY CAVANAGH • Prior to Knocknagow, Kickham’s novel Sally Cavanagh; or, The Untenanted Graves: A Tale of Tipperary (1869) focuses on the landlord-tenant dynamic by having the title character resist her landlord’s insistence that she become his mistress • The cost is homelessness and the Work House (state-sponsored hostel of last resort), where her children die, causing her to turn insane with grief ¶ Kickham did not engage in a simplistic binary: good tenant; bad landlord • He recognized improving landlords, portraying a partial one in Knocknagow: the eligible if eccentric bachelor Bob Lloyd, whose big house (or rural mansion) is Mount Tempe • In his biography of Kickham, R.V. Comerford argues, “Kickham knew that [native-Irish] tenant farmers were quite as diligent and ruthless in clearing laborers and smallholders [i.e. those renting small farms] from the countryside as were the landlords”

Physical-Force (or Unreconstructed) Nationalism Fenianism ¶ FENIANISM: Irish Republican Brotherhood; Clan na Gael • Along with James Stephens and others, Kickham founded, in 1858, the principal successor movement to Young Ireland: the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) • The IRB had a sibling organization in North America • Especially associated with John O’Mahony (a relative of Kickham’s mother), the American entity had two names: the Fenian Brotherhood; and Clan na Gael ¶ O’Mahony’s Chicago-based sister, Ellen O’Mahony, established the Fenian Sisterhood: “a body of ladies, whose object is the attainment of an Irish government for Ireland” • As Head Directress, she declared, “We have nerved our men … to fierce energy. … They [the British establishment] call us rebels, and we glory in the name.” ¶ In time, regardless of location — Ireland, the US, Canada, Britain, or elsewhere — the overall movement came to be called Fenianism ¶ IRISH PEOPLE NEWSPAPER • In 1863, James Stephens established an IRB newspaper, the Irish People, and Kickham moved to Dublin to co-edit it, alongside John O’Leary, who would later become a mentor to the poet and playwright William Butler Yeats • Kickham maintained for the Irish People a secular, anti-clerical stance • In a piece in April 1864, the paper deemed the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin (Dr. Paul Cullen) “an individual enemy of Irish liberty” • Knocknagow offers some criticism of the clergy; for example, Maurice Kearney observes, “[T]he marriage money has something to do with keeping people from getting married. Ned Brophy tells me the priest will charge twenty pounds [about $1,850 in today’s US currency] for marrying him” (pages 82-83) • The text features several decent priests, one of whom (Father McMahon) opines, “Such practices … have the effect of making the people look upon the priest as a tyrant” (page 83) ¶ RAID BY G-MEN • In 1865 — using data supplied by an informer, Pierce Nagle — the so-called G-men of the Dublin Metropolitan Police raided the Irish People’s offices at 12 Parliament Street, Dublin, close to Dublin Castle: headquarters of the British colonial administration in Ireland • Kickham was among the staff-members arrested, although later than the night of the police-raid • A Ladies Committee subsequently formed to support the prisoners ¶ The trial, under William Keogh, was for Treason Felony, with Nagle supplying evidence against Kickham and his fellows • Addressing Judge Keogh, Kickham invoked poetry by Thomas Davis • Convicted to 14 years of penal servitude, Kickham was transported to England: specifically, Pentonville and then Portland and Woking prisons • However, his ill health caused the authorities to release him after three-and-a-half- years rather than have a martyr on their hands • He authored Knocknagow following his March 1869 return to Ireland ¶ KICKHAM IN ENGLISH PRISONS • Kickham weaves into Knocknagow several allusions to prison • Consider, for example, Hugh Kearney’s remark, articulated in the presence of the Englishman Lowe: “I believe there is sadness in all partings. I can fancy a prisoner looking round his dungeon for the last time with a sigh” (page 134) • More direct is the reference to “the human wild beasts with whom the writer of these pages was doomed to herd for years, and among whom at this hour Irishmen, whose only crime is the crime of loving their country, are wearing away their lives in the Convict Prisons of England” (page 395) ¶ MANCHESTER MARTYRS & CLERKENWELL BOMBING • In 1867, while Kickham was still incarcerated, three Fenian activists in Manchester, England, were executed, becoming “the Manchester Martyrs” • Also that year, the Fenian bombing of Clerkenwell Prison, London, caused a major anti-terrorist backlash across Britain ¶ IRB’S SUPREME COUNCIL • From about 1873, Kickham served as president of the IRB’s Supreme Council, opposing Fenian participation in: (a) the Home Rule campaign for the restoration of the Irish parliament (the post-Famine successor to the Repeal movement); and (b) the Irish National Land League and its (largely rhetorical) Land War campaign for improved tenant’s rights and even tenant-proprietorship • To a significant degree, both initiatives were identified with Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant Irish landlord with an American mother ¶ LAND LEAGUE • Knocknagow first appeared in 1873; however, its popularity intensified from 1879, the year of a near-famine that galvanized Irish tenant farmers to organize the Land League, a nationwide movement for tenant rights spearheaded by Parnell and Michael Davitt • In James Joyce’s quasi- autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the female character Dante possesses two brushes: “[t]he brush with the maroon velvet back [is] for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back … for Parnell”

Knocknagow & the Great Hunger ¶ It is challenging to date the action in Knocknagow (possibly the 1850s or 1860s); however, the text manifests some consciousness of The Great Hunger or An Gorta Mór — the potato famine of 1845-1849 — whose immediate cause was “late blight” by phytophthora infestans, a microorganism also known as water mold ¶ Lack of genetic diversity within the lumper variety of potato dominant in Ireland allowed blight to spread broadly and rapidly • Early in Knocknagow, Mary Kearney, conversing with Mat Donovan, remarks, “I suppose [your potatoes] were blighted”; however, Mat responds by insisting, “No .... Every stalk ov ‘em would make a rafter for a house” (page 26) ¶ An episode that repays close-reading begins with the unidentified, third-person-plural narrator stating, “[W]e are not sure whether it be possible to convey by means of the English alphabet the only name ever given to potatoes in Knocknagow. … The nearest approach we can make … is ‘puetas’ or ‘p’yehtes’” (pages 150-151) • Set in Mat Donovan’s home, the scene develops with the production of a meal by Mat’s sister: “Nelly Donovan … ‘threw out’ the [boiled] potatoes on the table, adroitly catching one or two that were rolling away and placing them on the top of the pile” (page 151) • Seated at the table is Mat and Nelly’s widowed mother, whose “bony and shriveled” hand (page 152) perhaps evokes a past famine or famines • “[S]iezing a good-sized potato,” Mat examines its “white and floury” aspect “admiringly”: “There was even something appetizing in the steam that curled up from it” (page 152)

Anthropology (Ethnography) ¶ TAYLOR’S PRIMITIVE CULTURE • To a degree, the Englishman Henry Lowe functions as a field- based anthropologist and/or ethnographer in Knocknagow, discovering and interrogating rural Irish folkways, such as the deployment of the Knocknagow drum at Christmas • In 1871 — two years before Knocknagow debuted — the English anthropologist E.B. Taylor published Primitive Culture (subtitled Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom), which defines culture as “that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom” ¶ GATEKEEPERS • Arguably, Lowe uses members of the Kearney family as what cultural anthropologists engaged in fieldwork call “gatekeepers”: locals who guide the observer to — and authorize her or him within — specific spaces ¶ In the first chapter, Lowe awakens in “best bedroom” of the “not uncomfortable” Kearney domicile, aware of the area’s being “not unknown to fame in connection with ‘agrarian outrages’” (pages 9-10), that is, the agricultural terrorism generally deemed Ribbonism • In The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or, The Story of the Land League Revolution (1904), Michael Davitt invokes “the Ribbon lodges of Ireland,” recognizing their secret, oath-bound character • Double-negative constructions, such as “not uncomfortable” and “not unknown” are examples of the literary figure known as litotes

TEXT SAMPLES ABOUT THE STATION

Mary Kearney explains “the Station” to Lowe Chez Kearney, household says Rosary in kitchen

Parish Priest Fr. M’Mahon, plus two curates: Note each priest’s choice of room: Fr. Hannigan and Fr. O’Neill drawing-room; parlor; kitchen

Fr. Hannigan’s education superior to Lowe’s Text highlights Church greed: marriage fee