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

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Kelly Anspaugh

Whereas Gabriel flirts with Lily, Miss lvors teases Gabriel. An "Irish enthusiast," she scolds her colleague for publishing book reviews in a Protestant rag," calling him a "West Briton." Gabriel is visibly upset by this accusation, and Miss Ivors uses her feminine charms to mollify him: "[she] took his hand in a warm grasp and said in a soft friendly tone: Of course, I was only joking" (188). The duel between the two continues:

Gabriel tried to cover his agitation by taking part in the dance with great energy. He avoided her eyes for he had seen a sour expression on her face. But when they met in the long chain he was surprised to feel his hand firmly pressed. She looked at him from under her brows for a moment quizzically until he smiled. Then, just as the chain was about to start again, she stood on tiptoe and whispered into his car:

- West Briton! (190)

Once again Gabriel has been sexually aroused only to be shot down: "she had no right to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke. She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit's eyes" (190). Miss Ivors robs Gabriel of his masculinity - at one point even calling him an "innocent Amy" (189) - and Gabriel resolves to take his revenge by making a disparaging reference to the "new generation" during his dinner speech. His intended victim, however, leaves the party before dinner, and so in effect has the last word. In tweaking Gabriel about his book reviewing, Miss Ivors is also attacking, if indirectly, bourgeois aestheticism - so Norris's perception that Joyce employs the "politics of general to conduct his self-critique of art in the story."

The third and telling blow to Gabriel's male ego is dealt by his wife Gretta. As the Conroys prepare to leave the party, Gabriel spies Gretta on the stairs, listening intently to Bartell D'Arcy sing "The Lass of Aughrim." This excites Gabriel, and as they enter their hotel we are told he experiences "a keen pang of lust": "He could have flung his arms around her hips and held her still for his arms were trembling with the desire to seize her and only the stress of his nails against the palms of his hands held the wild impulse of his body, in check" (215). Joyce's breathless sentence reproduces the style of what we would today call "Gothic" romance, the formulaic novel of Love (again, evidence of the anti-aestheticism Norris detects).9 Gabriel "longed to be master of her strange mood. . . . He longed to cry out to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her" (217). It is Gabriel, however, who once more finds himself mastered-when Gretta confesses her love for the dead Michael Furey:

A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. (219-20)