Not "too much noise": Joyce's "The Sisters" in Irish Catholic perspective - James Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1993 by Thomas Dilworth

There is probably a personal motive behind the old priest's desire that the boy become a priest. The priest's sister Eliza says that "his life was, you might say, crossed" and the boy's aunt agrees, "Yes. . . . He was a disappointed man. You could see that." He may have been disappointed because, as his sister says, "he was too scrupulous always. . . . The duties of the priesthood was too much for him" (17). His mental equilibrium was certainly lost after he dropped and broke a chalice during Mass. But the connotations of the statements "His life was . . . crossed" and "He was a disappointed man" are broad, not limited to a single accident that probably happened relatively late in life.(6) Another, extremely likely reason for a priest's being disappointed and his life being crossed is celibacy.

Whether or not he ever regretted not marrying, he may wish he had a child. He does seem to look to the boy as a substitute son, someone to whom he can pass on his knowledge and his priesthood. If the boy were to become a priest, the old priest could 'live on' in him. In this sense--which is, of course, strictly imaginary--the father finds immortality in the son.(7) In anyone--parent or surrogate parent--the desire to live on in a child is pure egotism. Such a desire would render the boy psychologically useful to the priest, reducing him to a means of alleviating unhappiness.

Desire by the priest to live on in his protege as a father through a son seems to receive symbolic corroboration in the sisters' drapery shop selling "mainly . . . children's booties and umbrellas" (11). Umbrellas suggest contraceptives.(8) The suggestion ironically involves the priest, since celibacy is the oldest and surest form of contraception. The symbolic joining of babies with contraception suggests having children without begetting them.

The priest's desire to live on through the boy has further resonance in images that Joyce scatters throughout the story. One is the boy's trying to think of Christmas (11)--the feast of the Incarnation, a birth from nonsexual conception, and an extension into flesh of the sexless eternal begetting by which "Father and Son are consubstantial" (Ulysses 32). Another significant image is the boy's uncle calling him a Rosicrucian because of the interests he shares with the priest (11). From the uncle's joking accusation it follows that, like the boy, the priest is metaphorically a Rosicrucian--a member of a society claiming to have secret knowledge about the transmutation of metals and the prolongation of life. Before dying, a Rosicrucian was expected to initiate his successor. The priest does initiate the boy, in order to effect a sort of transmutation of identity, that of the boy into that of the priest. Eucharistic transubstantiation is another relevant image--the transformation of one thing into another.

Any ulterior motive diminishes friendship. Friendship is spiritual because its essence is love, one of the three 'theological virtues.' An ulterior motive in friendship seeks to exchange something spiritual for nonspiritual gain. Such an exchange fits the definition of simony. The priest's desire to live on in the boy therefore corresponds to the sin whose name is one of the words the boy savors at the start of the story. It is the sin which the priest confesses in the boy's dream (11). Since the priest is probably unconscious of the simoniac nature of the desire underlying his wish that the boy become a priest, there is probably no sin. (Only consciously intended thoughts, words, or deeds can be sins.) But simony would nevertheless serve as a metaphor for the selfishness of his motive.