Comparing the Women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the...

Characterization of Women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses Joyces depiction of women is characterized by a high degree of literary self-consciousness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work. The self-consciousness emerges as an awareness of both genre and linguistic expectations. contrasting highly self-conscious, isolated literary men (or men with literary aspirations) with women who follow more romantic models, even stereotypes. In Dubliners, Joyce utilizes a clichà ©d story of doomed love ending in death-physical or spiritual-in A Painful Case and The Dead. The former holds far more to these conventions and can be read as a precursor to the more sophisticated techniques†¦show more content†¦A Painful Case is built on clichà ©s. The story of a misanthropic bachelor who meets an emotionally frustrated wife, develops a bond, then recoils at intimacy could not be more formulaic; she even dies of sudden failure of the hearts action (114). The irony is clear-the suddenness really took place four years earlier. Joyce wrote Dubliners to appeal to both a mass audience and scholars, and A Painful Case seems particularly driven to the popular reader and, with its tale of unrequited love, to female readers. James Duffy is skeptical and irritated by exactly this kind of bland, superficial writing: She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios? (111) Joyce both launches into self-criticism and evades it; by critiquing the method he employs, he demonstrates a self-awareness that lifts his work beyond this middle class production. Duffy, too, practices this self-awareness in conjunction with Joyce. At the end of a token biographical paragraph, all delivered in the third-person past tense, we learn this tidbit: He ha d an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing aShow MoreRelatedJames Joyce and the Dead Essay897 Words   |  4 Pagespublished a part of the Dubliners in 1914. Fifteen stories of his filled the pages within Dubliners the stories are: The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The boarding house, A little cloud, Counterparts, clay, A painful case, Ivy day in the Committee room, A mother, Grace and The Dead. He then went onto write the following novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegan’s Wake (1939). The last story in Dubliners, The Dead, was not