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

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Kelly Anspaugh

So the Enlightenment male has been thoroughly deflated by the females around him - a result exactly opposite what bourgeois metaphorics of tumescence leads us to expect. In addition, by having Gabriel see his ludicrous reflection in the mirror (the prime metaphor for art), Joyce may well suggest his own anti-aesthetic project, which is also according to Norris always already an anti-patriarchal project.

In considering Gabriel's triple humiliation, it is important to recognize that Joyce has symbolically structured his tale upon female triads. He hints at this structure in a number of places, most clearly in the following passage:

A red-faced young woman, dressed in pansy, came into the room, excitedly clapping her hands and crying: -Quadrilles! Quadrilles! Close on her heels came Aunt Kate crying: Two gentlemen and three ladies, Mary Jane! -O, here's Mr Bergin and Mr Kerrigan, said Mary Jane. Mr Kerrigan, will you take Miss Power? Miss Furlong, may I get you a partner, Mr Bergin. O, that'll just do now. - Three ladies, Mary Jane, said Aunt Kate. (183-84)

This scene immediately follows one in which the overly-convivial Mr. Browne tries a joke on "three young ladies" beside him who laugh "in musical echo to his pleasantry, swaying their bodies to and fro, with nervous jerks of their shoulders" (183). These three faceless ladies point to other, classical triads. If Gabriel's two aunts and their niece are the "Three Graces of the Dublin musical world" (204) - as Gabriel refers to them in his postprandial speech - then Lily, Miss Ivors, and Gretta may well correspond to the three Fates: Clotho the spinner, Lachesis the weaver, and Atropos the severer - thus, perhaps, Gabriel's reference to "three mortal hour[i]s."(10) In this case, however, what is cut is not Gabriel's lifeline but rather his male pride (a symbolic castration perhaps implied). Gabriel's three chastisers may also function as avatars to the Furies: Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, who punish doers of unavenged crimes: in this case, perhaps, patriarchal crimes against women. Not to be confused with the hideous harpies, the Furies or Eumenides (from the Greek eumenes, "loving, well-disposed") are in fact quite beautiful, which would make the correspondence with Joyce's women all the more apt. Also, of course, there is already a Fury in Joyce's story - Michael Furey, who critics have argued is feminized by his resemblance in character and predicament to the unfortunate Lass of Aughrim.(11)

Lily, Miss Ivors and Gretta may also correspond to a pair of female triads in Dante's decidedly triadic Divine Comedy.(12) In Canto 29 of The Purgatorio, Dante, newly arrived in the Earthly Paradise, glimpses a Heavenly Pageant, at the tail of which is a shining chariot:

Beside the right wheel, dancing in a gyre, three maidens came. The first one was so red she would barely be visible in fire.

The second looked as if both flesh and bone were made of flawless emerald. The third seemed a new snow no slightest wind has blown. (296)