"Three mortal hour/i~s": female Gothic in Joyce's "The Dead." - James Joyce

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Kelly Anspaugh

There has been surprisingly little critical attention paid to Gothicism in James Joyce's short story "The Dead" (1907). Although it may not be a Gothic text per se - like, for example, Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" - "The Dead" clearly contains many Gothic themes and motifs.1 The time of the tale is Yuletide, the traditional season for telling ghost stories (compare Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"). The initial setting is described as the "dark gaunt house on Usher's Island" (Dubliners 176). Granted that this house has a real-world source in the home of Joyce's great aunts who lived at 15 Usher's Island" (Ellmann 245), it is Joyce who attaches the adjectives "dark" and "gaunt" to the address, thus causing it to resonate with Poe's Gothic "House of Usher." The scene of Gabriel and Gretta Conroy's arrival at the Misses Morkan's Christmas party also has obvious Gothic overtones:

-O, Mr Conroy, said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good-night, Mrs Conroy.

-I'll engage they did, said Gabriel, but they forgot that my wife here takes three mortal hours to dress herself . . .

Kate and Julia came toddling down the dark stairs at once. Both of them kissed Gabriel's wife, and said she must be perished alive and asked was Gabriel with her.

Here I am as right as the mail, Aunt Kate! Go on up. I'll follow, called out Gabriel from the dark. (176-77; emphasis added)

Dark phrases such as "three mortal hours" and "perished alive" have led a number of critics to suggest that the Morkan's party is a dance of the dead (one thinks again of Poe, his "Mask of the Red Death").(2) And if the fleshly guests at this party are all moribund-either literally or figuratively themselves surrounded by a host of lively ghosts. John Kelleher has suggested that the Morkans' party is haunted by many a notable ex-Irishman, and in her essay. "The Ectoplasmic Truthtellers of |The Dead,'" Janet Egleson Dunleavy argues that the third-person narrator of Joyce's story is in actuality four narrators, and that all of these are ghosts.3 The most distinct of Joyce's shades, of course, is Gretta's first love, Michael Furey, who comes back at the end of the story to haunt her husband: "A vague terror seized Gabriel . . . as if . . . some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world" (220). We can see in this passage and the one that follows the Gothic theme of Confusion of Realms, especially the realms of life and death: "His [Gabriel's] soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. . . . His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling" (223). Finally, Gabriel's terminal "snow epiphany," the focus of so much critical controversy, can be seen as a variation on the Gothic theme of Live Burial:(4)

The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. . . . It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly, as dead. (223-24)

The Dark, the Castle, Ghosts, Terror, Confusion of Realms, Live Burial - one could go on identifying Gothic motifs and characters in Joyce's story. In short, the author's knowledge of Gothicism manifests itself on every page.(5)

The above analysis leads to an obvious question: how does Gothicism function in Joyce's story? One of the few readers to hint at an answer is Sheldon Brivic. In arguing against an optimistic reading of Gabriel's epiphany - that is, a reading that discovers in the story's conclusion evidence of Gabriel's escape from moral paralysis(6) - Brivic implies that Joyce incorporates Gothic motifs simply to underscore the darkness of his vision: "'The Dead' is a Gothic story of walking corpses, and its few images of regeneration, such as the cross and thorns in a graveyard on the last page, are ironic and hardly more hopeful than the rebirth of Dracula" (88). Brivic's reading, I think, reveals a woefully inadequate understanding of the Gothic, its history and function in our culture. That the Gothic actually works to support an affirmative ending to Joyce's story, that it does indeed contribute to a theme of regeneration and rebirth, is what I want to argue in this essay. To do this adequately, though, I must first consider recent theories of the relation between Gothicism and feminism.

In the past few years a number of literary theorists have argued that the Gothic tradition is not only female(7) - i.e., consists of novels composed mostly by and for women - but also feminist, or subversive of patriarchal culture. Kate Ferguson Ellis, for example, while recognizing that the Gothic does construct and reinforce bourgeois gender relations (the typical Marxist view), also asserts that it deconstructs those relations through a subversive feminist remainder. Thus "the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century foregrounded the home as fortress, while at the same time exposing ites contradictions" (xi). Ellis goes on to observe that the feminist subtext of the Gothic did not escape the notice of its early male critics, who reacted by disparaging the form, calling it vulgar" or low" - as low, that is, as woman herself. Bradford K. Mudge takes up this thread of Ellis's argument: