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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1993 by Thomas Dilworth

Strictly speaking, simony requires mutual consent and is sinful for both source and receiver. For that to be so, the boy, too, would have to diminish friendship through an ulterior motive. His motive might involve what he gains in the relationship: attention, some education, and a father figure. He is, after all, an orphan whose mocking uncle is no mentor to encourage the boy's precocious religious-intellectual interests. If these gains are translated into motives, they seem blameless, but the boy also gains something socially. He reveals himself as an intellectual and cultural snob by despising Cotter as an "old imbecile" (11) and "a tiresome old fool" who "spat rudely in the grate" (10). In switching allegiance from Cotter to the priest, the boy has gained intellectual and social prestige, which, translated into motive, is not a consequence of the boy's psychological deprivation and consequently seems blameworthy. In gaining prestige he resembles the priest.

Because he is a priest, Father Flynn is of the professional middle class. But he was originally working-class like Cotter. The Flynns are from Irishtown, the impoverished section of Dublin south of the Liffey. Through his seminary education--especially since he received it at the prestigious Irish College in Rome--he rose out of his lower-class background, which can still be heard in the faulty grammar and malapropisms of his sister's speech.(9) And by being ordained he acquired the privilege and respect accorded priests in Ireland and elsewhere. Many Irish youths became priests to gain social respectability and comfort. If they did so consciously, they were guilty of simony--as would be fictional Father Flynn if he knowingly became a priest for these reasons. The inclinations of the protagonists of Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist to become priests are, we know, simoniac.(10)

Of the three suggestive terms in the first paragraph of the story, "simony" has been the most problematic for interpreters, convincing many moralists among them that the priest literally committed the sin although they find it difficult to say when or how.(11) His becoming a priest may be the instance of simony that they have sought to discover. Later we shall see that there is evidence to corroborate this.

In the recent past of the narrative, the boy's ulterior motive matches that of the priest. The boy's desire for prestige and the desire to live on in the boy are equally egotistical. They diminish true friendship. Like the priest, therefore, the boy is a simoniac--psychologically and not morally if lacking conscious intention. That may be why, in his dream of the priest confessing simony, he joins "the simoniac" in "smiling feebly" (11).

The ulterior motives of the priest and the boy may be so dominant that their friendship is not genuine. From the perspective of the boy, at least, this is initially suggested by his heartless fascination with the priest's disease when he admits, "I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work" (9). It is also suggested when his uncle announces, "Your old friend is gone," and the boy responds, "Who?" (10)--apparently failing even to recognize the priest as a friend. Even if the boy is guarding private feelings from the unwelcome attention of Cotter, his response is remarkably self-centered.