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

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Kelly Anspaugh

He had never felt like that himself [as Michael Furey felt] towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly, in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. (223)

Gabriel is now at the mercy both of the feminine and of the dead. Indeed, he has died to his male self and, carried back in time, is put in the place of the female. Thus he sees what Gretta saw in the garden that fateful night, and sees it through her crying eyes (Gretta: "The window was so wet I couldn't see so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering" [221]). If the dead Michael is feminized by his association with the Lass of Aughrim, here Gabriel is also feminized: he receives the annunciation that the angel Gabriel had bestowed upon the Virgin Mary.(15) Thus un-manned - or rather become a "new womanly man," as his avatar Leopold Bloom does in the "Circe" chapter of Ulysses(l6) - Gabriel has gained the insight enable him to embrace both his wife and his erstwhile rival. Gabriel's terminal swoon not only echoes Dante's Lethean oblivion before beginning his vita nuova in Paradise (a Paradise presided over by the Virgin Mary), it also anticipates the "equanimity" Leopold Bloom achieves after his cuckold's progress through "Envy, jealousy, [and] abnegation" (Ulysses 732).

We see then that the presence of the Gothic in "The Dead," far from reflecting the infernal world of the earlier Dubliners stories, as Brivic suggests, in fact offers a way out of that world through its implicit feminist critique of patriarchal culture. Brivic admits that in the ending of Joyce's story "there is a faint hint of possible regeneration"; he goes on, however, to claim this hint "is subordinated to the idea of death, which is the primary meaning of the westward journey" (92). My point is that death is not the primary meaning of Gabriel's westward journey, just as it is not the primary meaning of the Gothic. In both cases death is but a preliminary - if necessary - stage in the movement toward rebirth. The conclusion of "The Dead," therefore, rather than looking back to the paralysis and "scrupulous meanness" of the previous Dubliners stories, looks forward to the affirmative feminine endings of Joyce's later novels - forward, that is, to Molly Bloom's fluid "yes I said yes I will yes " ( Ulysses 783 ).

To conclude: Margot Norris once again warns us away from a facile reading of the romantic surface of Joyce's story:

we must be especially careful, like the women in "The Dead," not to be seduced by the story's exceptionally beautiful prose, for its lyrical narrative voice is not "innocent." It effectively promotes a cultural ideology that is especially inimical to the female subject and to the female artist, and Joyce nudges us repeatedly to think against the ideological grain of the narration by genderizing ourselves not merely as subjectively female but as politically feminist, as resisting readers, critics, and sceptics of the text. (481)