Abstract
Composed in 1907, “The Dead” by James Joyce is the longest and one of his most discussed short stories. The story provides a slice of Dublin middle class society in the early years of twentieth century. Though the term ‘paralysis’ is never used in the text of the narrative, the idea is a dominant one along with death and decay. Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of the story epitomizes a masculinity in crisis and paralysis. His interactions with people, especially women, reactions to events, participation in the public life attest to this. He emerges as a Eliotian ‘hollow man’ who is empty from inside, feels alienated and lacks essential social qualities. Throughout the narrative he can be seen as going through some kind of crisis, some amount of discomfort and difficulty despite his otherwise well-settled life and comparatively high social standing as a man. A close textual analysis clearly reveals the emotional sterility of his masculinity which incapacitates him to act and react normally. This paper explores the layers of the crisis and paralysis of masculinity in the narrative through a close reading of the character of Gabriel Conroy and thereby underlines the predicament of a divided modern Irish man. In a detailed analysis of his interactions with Lily, a servant, Miss Ivors, a colleague and Gretta, his wife, the first half of the paper shows that Gabriel is a fragile man who cannot tolerate any challenges to his self-assumed mastery and self-righteous authority. The second half examines his relationships with his aunts, cousin and other guests, his general behavioral tendencies and commitment towards his nation. Once again he emerges as a selfish, apathetic, nervous and uprooted man. The paper concludes with a brief note on his paradoxical existence which induces a sense of crisis and paralysis in his life and the im-/possibility of the transformation of this paralytic man into a more living and empathetic human being.
Keywords: Masculinity; Irish; crisis; middle-class; women
Extensively interested in Irish politics and disturbed by the contemporary conditions, James Joyce (1882-1941) once wrote that “The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in [Ireland] do not permit the development of individuality” (Mason and Ellman 171). He mostly blamed debilitating British colonialism, the tyranny of the Roman Catholic church and the very native Irish lethargy, capacity of self-delusion and faithlessness for this paralytic condition in Ireland (Bulson 22-25). Most of his creative works which are set in his native country deal with the stifling conditions that Ireland was experiencing around the turn of the twentieth century. In the short story collection Dubliners (1914), his first published fictional work, he poignantly portrays this condition of servitude and stagnancy. In a much-cited letter to Richard Grant about Dubliners, in 1906, Joyce clearly wrote that “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” (Ellman 132). The collection written between 1904-1907, when Joyce himself was going through an emotional and intellectual crisis in his life and had left Ireland for Europe in search of better prospects, consists of stories which “enact the repetitious cycle of blunted aspirations, and frustrations, of crass materialism, of sexual repression, of drunkenness and moral idiocy” (Schwarz, “Biographical and Historical Contexts” 9). Planned as a cycle of stories, the narratives of the collection cover all stages of human life. Invariably here, “children are depicted as disillusioned, youths as frustrated or trapped, men and women as passive and non-productive, and social groups as completely static” (Walzl 18). These stories are significant for depicting the culturally and politically trapped Irish society at the cusp of a new century, as well as for providing a glimpse of Joyce’s inimitable narrative craftsmanship that he perfected in his later works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922).
Composed in 1907, “The Dead” is the last and the longest story in the collection and has received immense critical attention since its publication. The story is significant not only because of its depiction of the morally sterile and claustrophobic Dublin which had somehow retained some of its old grace of hospitality, but also for its minute naturalistic details, almost deliberate narrative ambiguities and finally an open-ended structure (Ellman, Levenson, Norris, Riquelme, Walzl). The story provides a slice of Dublin middle class society in the early years of twentieth century. As the title indicates, death and decay are the most prominent thematic concerns of the narrative. Though the term ‘paralysis’ is never used in the text of the narrative, the idea dominates the entire plot as we closely watch Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of the story interacting with people, especially women, reacting to events, participating in the public life and reflecting about his personal life. He emerges as an Eliotian ‘hollow man’ who is empty from inside, feels alienated and lacks essential social qualities. Throughout the narrative he can be seen as going through some kind of crisis, some amount of discomfort and difficulty despite his otherwise well-settled life and comparatively high social standing as a man. A close textual analysis clearly reveals the emotional crisis of his masculinity which incapacitates him to act and react normally. This paper is an attempt to explore the layers of the crisis and paralysis of masculinity in the narrative through a close reading of the character of Gabriel Conroy and thereby underline the predicament of a divided modern Irish man. In a detailed analysis of his interactions with Lily, a servant, Miss Ivors, a colleague and Gretta, his wife, the first half of the paper shows that Gabriel is a fragile man who cannot tolerate any challenges to his self-assumed mastery and self-righteous authority. The second half examines his relationships with his aunts, cousin and other guests, his general behavioral tendencies and commitment towards his nation. Once again he emerges as a selfish, apathetic, nervous and uprooted man. The paper concludes with a brief note on his paradoxical existence which induces a sense of crisis and paralysis in his life and the im-/possibility of the transformation of this paralytic man into a more living and empathetic human being.
Crisis of/in masculinity has emerged as a much-debated concern in the theoretical and research world in last few decades. A wide range of works are available concerning the reality or myth of this crisis vis-à-vis patriarchal structures (Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman; Horrocks; Showalter). Equally good numbers of works are devoted to the representations of crisis of masculinity in various literary and cinematic genres since the early part of twentieth century (Beynon; Knights; Korzeniowska). These critics have enlisted a number of factors which have led to this condition right from women’s liberation movements leading to their larger participation in the sociocultural and political fields, to the economic depression and political oppression challenging most of the modern nations at different points of time. It must be noted that most of the critics who agree that contemporary times have witnessed a sort of crisis in masculinity, agree that this predicament is related to uncertainty of the significance of the masculine roles men are supposed to play (Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman 1). The positive traits commonly associated with maleness in a patriarchal society are heroism, stability, strength, rationality, authority, control over the self and the others, economic stability, and emotional coolness to name just a few. As can be easily understood, volatile modern period did not allow enough stability for such roles to go unchallenged, and modernist literature is full of anti-heroes and unheroic male protagonists.
Joyce’s “The Dead” is a complexly porous and open-ended modernist narrative and any effort to capture its essence in entirety would be a vain exercise. In a very simplistic sense, it can be said to depict the paralytic Irish urban middle-class society at the turn of the century. The narrative is set in one late winter evening around the first week of January, around Miss Julia and Miss Kate Morkan’s annual dance party. The story charts the movements and interactions of the guests and hosts, as they go through the rituals of the party. Though the plot covers less than a span of twelve hours, as most of the characters take trips down the memory lane, a lot gets un/covered within this short time-frame. The protagonist of the narrative, Gabriel Conroy, is the nephew of the Morkan sisters, who arrives quite late in the party with his wife Gretta. The story is stylistically experimental in nature and shows Joyce moving toward the technique of free indirect discourse. Hugh Kenner in his authoritative work Joyce’s Voices (1978) demonstrates that in “The Dead” the narrative idiom is not necessarily the narrator’s (18). According to him, though there is a third person narrator, the first sentences are clearly written from Lily’s point of view and once Gabriel enters the scene, the shift is purely towards his position, and this allows us to see the entire evening from his perspective. Thus, the narrative gives ample opportunity to become privy to the innermost thoughts, feelings and emotional turmoils of Gabriel. Many critics have observed that the narratorial voice of the story promotes the interests and values of the male protagonist of the story and we hardly get to see much from the perspective of female characters (Norris 193). While this is true, the present paper shows that the technique of free indirect discourse actually exposes the fissures in the protagonist's life and personality and lets one identify the moments of crisis of toxic masculinity.
Gabriel Conroy is a man who may be termed as successful from all the apparent standards. He comes from an affluent respectable family, is university educated and settled in a respectable teaching job, something that only a few contemporary Irish men could boast of. Interested in continental literature and languages, he regularly writes for literary magazines and yearly even goes for Europe trips. On the family front, when the story opens, he is married for more than a decade and very much in love with Gretta whom he assumes as his prized possession. Gretta also doesn’t seem to mind his ways and whims too much in daily life. Father of two children he is even the “favourite nephew” (204) of the Morkan sisters and considered very much dependable by his two aged aunts who eagerly wait upon him to arrive and handle the responsibilities of maintaining the decorum in the party and carry on its most important roles. In fact, helping with drunkards like Freddy Malins and vain characters like Mr. Browne, presiding over the dining table, delivering the speech, he is the dominant presence in the party.
Nonetheless, behind the public facade of confidence and success, lies a deep sense of insecurity in our protagonist. As the story progresses, we see that the apparent stability of Gabriel is fractured with multiple levels of anxieties. The story plays out on gender conflict, where we see Gabriel getting threatened by women who push back the boundaries of his assumed masculine high-class superiority by having a voice, mind and narratives of their own. In these encounters, Gabriel emerges as a fragile man who can not tolerate challenges and feels petrified at slightest provocations. Morgan Norris aptly observes a pattern in the narrative and writes that “Gabriel Conroy’s party can be said to have been troubled by the unexpected challenges of three women, who confront his complacency in order of increasing intimacy, as servant, colleague and wife” (195). Lily’s retort, Miss Ivors’ questioning and finally Gretta’s revelation of her romantic past one after the other challenge his sense of the self and he falls prey to the extreme levels of doubts about his own identity and position as a man. Allen Tate while praising the narrative techniques used by Joyce notes that in “The Dead” everything is shown and nothing is told. He goes on to compare Gabriel and Gretta and writes, "Gabriel represents the emotional sterility (as contrasted with the “peasant” richness of his wife Gretta), its complacency, its devotion to genteel culture, its sentimental evasion of ‘reality’” (cited in Schwarz 69). In a similar vein, Schwarz says, “Both Gretta and Miss Ivors are more comfortable with themselves than Gabriel and more integrated than he is; they have a healthy self-regard and positive egotism”(70). The discussion that follows attests to the above observations. Unlike Gabriel, who is pretentious, lacks empathy, is unable to connect with people, has problems in communicating his thoughts and feeling, his aunts, cousin, wife and Miss Ivors are much more rooted in traditions and better connected with each other. It is their ease with the self and the others and convictions about world around, which unsettle him. In patriarchal cultures, women generally serve as “looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of women twice its natural size”( Woolf 41). In the present case, frustrated Lily, hyper-educated Miss Ivors and rustic Gretta fall short of this purpose that Gabriel expects them to serve.
The general theme of the crisis of masculinity gets indicated early in the story soon after Gabriel’s arrival at the Morkan’s “dark gaunt house in Usher Island” (199). Taking off his overcoat, “gaily” he asks the caretaker’s daughter, Lily, “I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these days with your young man, eh?” to which with a great bitterness she answers, “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (202). The narratorial tone makes it clear that Gabriel had intended to be friendly with the young girl, whom he knows since her childhood days. However, he is unable to appreciate and understand the bitterness of the young girl who has very limited prospects for marriage in contemporary times and is taken aback by her curt reply. His immediate reaction is noteworthy and indicates his discomfiture, “Gabriel coloured, as if he had made a mistake” (202). One can easily see that Lily’s retort has no personal agenda, still, Gabriel takes it personally and gets jolted completely. As Lily refuses to be charmed by his high position and patronizing tone, Gabriel takes it as a sort of rebuke and in an odd fashion, he tries to compensate the hurt by handing over a coin to this young girl from lower class and in broken sentences calling it a Christmas time ritual. Some critics have even pointed out the possibility of Gabriel’s ulterior sexual intention in this episode where he is all alone with the girl (Norris 200). Even if we reject this possibility, it is obvious that this man displays no social skills and gets unsettled very easily. It is interesting to note that the term ‘palaver’ implies empty talk without essence and hence, hollowness. Ironically though not intended, it comes to suit Gabriel himself who in the rest of the story is seen only playing with words and either producing high sounding hollow speeches or insignificant responses through his half sentences or confused silences. While it is not clear why he feels so disturbed by this retort from Lily, a hint is given right in the beginning of the story when the Morkan sisters and their relationship with their servant Lily is established. The narrator puts it on record that the only thing that the bourgeois Morkan sisters “would not stand was back answer” (200) from their help. Back answer is a mode of resistance, autonomy and independence. Just like his aunts, Gabriel seems to be habituated to passive servitude from a particular class, specially women. As a man from an upper class, he romanticizes the ideas of marriage and in a complacent way assumes that as now Lily has finished her schooling, naturally she will get married. When Lily does not respond as per his expectations, his ego gets hurt and he continues to feel “discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him… ”(203). The incident makes him believe that “he had failed with the girl”(203). Gabriel’s reaction may be linked to the fact that in his secure and prosperous world, he is rarely confronted with such a challenging voice. Coming from servant class, Lily is doubly inferior to Gabriel, and thus her retort leaves an impact on him. Gabriel keeps replaying this incident in his mind long after its over and instead of calling her by name, reduces Lily to “the girl in the pantry”(203). This is a mechanism of trivializing which Gabriel is going to use in the case of Miss Ivors too. Thus, we see Gabriel vacillating between self-doubt to self-aggrandizement over an otherwise trivial and even banal statement. This episode not only underlines Gabriel’s social ineptitude, but also shows his vulnerability to even slightest criticism.
Whereas Lily unsettles Gabriel’s patronizing attitude and his position as a master in the private space, encounter with Miss Ivors challenges Gabriel’s intellectual and public persona. Miss Ivors is a colleague and friend of Gabriel and the narrator makes it clear that both of them had been equals, first while studying in the university, and then as teachers. However, because of her close association with the Irish nationalist Movement, Miss Ivors sets herself apart from Gabriel. When paired with her during a dance sequence, Gabriel’s first response to her focuses on her being a frank mannered, talkative young lady (213). The ease vanishes when Miss Ivors calls him a “West Briton”, for writing in a pro-British magazine The Daily Express, and says that he should be ashamed of himself for doing so. The charge leaves Gabriel perplexed as he had always thought of himself as a liberal intellectual, a writer of literary reviews and much above petty Irish nationalist politics. Discomposed, we are told that “He didn’t know how to meet her charge” (214). The tag of West Briton feels like an insult to him as it puts him in the category of the traitors in the eyes of the Irish nationalists. Gabriel was an intellectual who was content to suppose that “literature was above politics” (214 ). He had never thought about his cultural location and nationalist affiliations seriously. Miss Ivors forces him to see the relationship between politics and literature. Challenged by Miss Ivors, he gets flustered and the narrator beautifully captures his moment of palsy when, unable to put forth his position distinctly, “He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books” (214). Clearly, his dignity as a professional and intellectual seems compromised here. Provoked by Miss Ivors, Gabriel even says, “Irish is not my language” (216) and immediately after that, “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!”( 215). Here, Gabriel cuts a sorry figure and exposes his hollowness. The irony is this that being an Irish, and living in Ireland, he claims to disown his own language and hates his own nation. Besides, he doesn't even know why? This exposes the shaky nature of Gabriel’s basic foundations. He is a Europeanized Irishman who despite living in his own country, tries to disown his responsibility towards it.
Miss Ivors is a confident person, who treats Gabriel generously despite their political differences. She is a new woman who has an ease about her manners and has her own set of convictions regarding one’s duties towards the nation. In contrast, Gabriel is unable to digest this moment of crisis, and in irritation takes recourse to play the victim card. Rather than seriously thinking about his own uprooted condition, he starts looking at Miss Ivors afresh. He thinks of her as “… the girl or woman, or whatever she was…. she had no right to call me a West Briton before people, even in joke. She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring him with her rabbit’s eyes" (217). This passage reveals how Gabriel's hurt masculinity makes him reduce Miss Ivors to bestiality and picture her as “ungenerous, ungraceful and hypercritical” (Norris 194).
Unlike Lily and Miss Ivors who challenge Gabriel’s patronizing and intellectual persona, Gretta has been mostly in a ‘supportive’ role in Gabriel’s life. As a narcissist, Gabriel constantly needs to feed his ego through approval, and Gretta appears to play this role well. She hardly seems to resist her husband, even when his whims and fancies irritate her. For instance, rather than seriously objecting, she only goes for a banter about Gabriel’s insistence on wearing the goloshes during rains and tells the two aunts that the next thing that her overprotective husband would perhaps get her is “a diving suit” (205). However, Gabriel is unable to even respond to this light-hearted joke well. Already answered back by Lily, his reaction is noteworthy: “Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly” (205). This otherwise insignificant instance confirms our protagonist’s fragile ego. This episode also hints at the fact that Gabriel is so full of himself that he is unable to realize that for someone like Gretta, who comes from rustic Aran Islands, a little rain and snow are not a big deal. Gretta further adds that as a father also “he is really an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom’s eyes at night and making him do dumb-bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout. The poor child! And she simply hates the sight of it” (205). Such over protective ways with his children and wife may be well seen as examples of Gabriel's toxic masculinity, his domestic tyranny. Gabriel, however, remains unconscious of his erroneous assumptions and thinks of such efforts as love and care. In fact, his acquired cosmopolitan tastes and European literary sensibilities make more like a pathetic Irish mimic man.
Gabriel constantly needs a sense of achievement, even if imagined, to overcome his nervousness and boost his confidence. Through her wifely devotion and dedication to household cares, Gretta gives Gabriel a sense of mastery and vindication. Thus, during the party, when a portrait of his mother reminds Gabriel of her opposition to his marriage with Gretta, whom she simply found “country cute”, he seems to take pride in the fact that his choice was not a wrong one and “It was Gretta who had nursed her during all her last long illness in their house at Monkstown”(213). The narrative also gives an indication that while Gabriel remains busy with his job and writing and travelling, Gretta has dedicated herself to the drudgery of household chores , thus, supporting him unconditionally. In fact, Gabriel sees Gretta as a prized possession, someone whom he owns and has every right to control and reshape. It is for this reason that even without a second thought he denies her West Irish connection. When Miss Ivors wants to confirm Gretta’s roots and asks, “She is from Connacht, isn't she?” Gabriel shortly answers “her people are” (215). Miss Ivors’ proposal for a trip to Aran Islands that Gretta really wants to take up, also meets Gabriel’s curt rejection. This reflects his insensitivity towards his wife’s desires and his rejection of her past. He is so much irritated by the proposal which could interfere with his planned trip to Europe, that he pays no heed to Gretta’s one-line retort “There’s a nice husband for you Mrs Malins” (218). In fact, Gretta’s reaction is conveniently ignored by the narrator too. Just as Gabriel wants to dissociate himself with his country and its people, he sees no problem doing the same with Gretta.
In the famous stairs scene, Gabriel’s aesthetic transformation of Gretta into a beautiful painting -“Distant music he would call the picture if he were a painter”(240) and a mysterious symbol -“There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something”(240) may be interpreted as his authoritative fancies. He seems to think of her as a blank page where he can script narrative as per his wish. He not only imagines her to be his creation, but even seeks control over her thoughts and feelings: “He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only the moments of ecstasy” (244). Such lines easily remind us of the Pygmalion myth. The way Gabriel wants Gretta to forget some things, and remember only a few things, the way he would like to recreate her in a painting or a musical piece show how he sees himself in a Pygmalion like power position. Unfortunately, he doesn't realize that Pygmalion is just a myth and that Gretta already has a saga of her own, of which he is completely unaware. It is this revelation which brings up the ultimate crisis and paralysis of his dignity and masculinity.
Even though Gabriel thinks of himself as Gretta’s master, ironically, when he wants to make love to her, he finds himself in a paralyzed condition, he is unable to express his sexual desires to her clearly even within the sanctioned space of marriage. His innermost thoughts emphasize his assumption of mastery and power over her as he thinks of his pride over her " grace and wifely carriage" (246) and his longing to be “ master of her strange mood" (248). But, when it comes to communicating his desires, “He didn’t know how he could begin…” (248). He is literally unable to utter a single sentence coherently to Gretta about what is in his mind. This paralytic hesitancy of Gabriel may be related to his catholic upbringing which encourages sexual repression. Rather, he wants Gretta to understand him, connect with him, and remember what he remembers and desire what he desires on her own and sometime he even misinterprets her gestures and words. The moment of crisis comes when Gabriel realizes that Gretta has been thinking of something very different, that even though he wanted to erase her past connection, there is a chapter from her past life, which is still intact in her memory. When Gretta tells him about her relationship with Michael Furey, Gabriel's masculinity gets its final blow. His responses and reactions to this revelation are noteworthy and reflect the turbulence he goes through. His first reaction is that of anger: “A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins” (250). Knowing that the fellow was working in gasworks only, Gabriel feels “humiliated by the failure of his irony” (251). The disclosure makes him reflect on his own condition. Realization that his relationship with his wife had been grounded in his imagination of what he would have her to be, rather than in a full knowledge of what she is, alters his sense of the self:
A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lust, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of… (251)
When Gretta reveals that perhaps the boy died for her, Gabriel is seized by a “vague terror” (252). He feels being assaulted by some vindictive being (252) and eventually he starts thinking about “how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life” (254). These reactions to Gretta’s past underline Gabriel’s immaturity and fragile ego. Gabriel starts from the basic instinct of anger and moves on to a mood of harsh self-criticism. Whereas Lily and Miss Ivors had challenged his public persona, Gretta’s story flattens out his biggest achievement of personal life, of being the sole master of his wife. He starts trivializing his entire existence and feels ashamed of himself. When he reduces himself to a mere pennyboy, it is the ultimate moment of the crisis of his bourgeois masculinity. He gets hyper critical even of his public persona and very personal sexual desires. Then comes the guilt that perhaps he never loved Gretta with the same intensity as the young boy.
Gabriel displays his immaturity when he takes this affair which took place much before he entered Gretta’s life, as a rejection. He simply forgets the several years of their togetherness as lovers and husband and wife. The episode may also be linked to the trapped nature of Gabriel's existence in the moral religious codes of Ireland where the brides are supposed to be pure and virgin. Ironically while Gabriel rejects the Irish superstitions, and claims to be more enlightened and Europeanized, he seems to be trapped in the same system of values that the wants to reject (Schwarz 119). Gabriel is so caught up between his adopted liberal ideology and ingrained conservative position, that he almost gets immobilized. Though one may see a possibility of transformation in Gabriel after the above moment of self-realization, it seems an unlikely development. His reactions seem to be only reactive in nature. Soon after this, interestingly, Gretta does not seem to him docile and submissive and he gets suspicious that she didn’t tell him the entire story (254). Once more, he uses the defense mechanism of playing victim, as he had done in the case of Miss Ivors.
In all the three cases, narcissistic Gabriel overlooks the fact that others, whether servant, colleague or spouse can act independently of his wishes and his will. Thus, when he comes face to face with the limitations of his manly powers, he goes through paralytic moments of crisis, unable to handle the situation in a socially appropriate manner. A person’s sense of identity and satisfaction generally depends on his relationships and roles. The narrative of “The Dead” projects Gabriel as a self-centred man with superfluous relationships. He is someone who is incapable of connecting with people, society or its causes genuinely. While his aunts are genuinely fond of him, he remains more or less detached towards them. Even in the speech, though he praises them publicly as three graces, privately, “What did he care that his aunts were only two ignorant old women” (219). Irony is this that despite their age his aunts display a life force, a genuineness, zeal and vigour, even if misplaced, something that is completely missing in Gabriel. He is equally apathetic towards his cousin Mary Jane, who was the “main prop” of the Morkan family. He reflects that her academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages, had no melody (211). In a very mean way, he even thinks that the only people following her performance are she herself and Aunt Kate (212). Gabriel doesn't seem to be sincere with most of the people around him. More often than not, he thinks of himself as superior to others, but heavily depends on their approval. For instance, as he thinks of his speech he imagines that the lines from Robert Browning would be “above the heads of his hearers. … the indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture was different from him” (203). Here ‘different’ may also be read as inferior both in terms of class and taste. Constantly suffering from the anxiety of what others would think, Gabriel indulges in bouts of self-doubt and thinks that he would only make himself ridiculous by quoting lines which his audience would not understand, that “They would think that he was airing his superior education” (203). This kind of insecurity about a role he had been playing for years exposes Gabriel’s pathetic confidence level, not simply a moment but a condition of crisis. Trapped between two worlds, one that he wants to inhabit, the Continent, and the other that he is destined to be in, Ireland, this man belongs to nowhere.
His sense of the self also depends a lot on his looks and he is very careful about his clothes and accessories. His patent leather shoes, his waistcoat to cover his plump body, glossy black hair, gilt rims of glasses and galoshes, etc attest to this idea. However, despite having the best in terms of material possession or outer appearance, he suffers from the fear of disapproval from others. The text is full of words and phrases associated with his discomfort, his vulnerability such as “colored” (202, 214) “anger” (206, 250), “nervous/ly” (205, 216, 230, 251), “discomposed” (204), “undecided” (203), “fear” (203, 248) and “make himself ridiculous”(203, 217) to name just a few. Some of the occasions, as a close reading of the text would reveal, in fact, don’t warrant such reactions. All these underscore the crisis of Gabriel’s masculinity, a masculinity which is associated with values like confidence, strength, control, and stability. Gabriel's discomfort constantly makes him feel alienated from his surroundings. Even when he is at the party he feels and effectively appears to be alone. We see him romanticizing the outside and often longing to escape to the snow-covered Park, across the road from the Morkan house (218). During the party, while others are talking over food, drink and music, he spends most of his time in silence brooding over either how he had been wronged by others or the speech he is going to deliver. His insecurities and his frequent attempts to hide are evident in gestures and phrases like “Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly….”(205); “He coloured and was about to knit his brows…” (214); “Gabriel tried to cover his agitation by taking part in the dance with great energy” (216).
The paradox is this that Gabriel is dominating, yet not confident enough; wants to be the centre of everything but gets uncomfortable with others and seeks solitude too. He seeks fulfillment and a sense of the self in the opinions of the others, yet feels most of them are beneath his position. He constantly feels “that he is being watched, weighed, regarded, out to test and found wanting (Schwarz 112). Gabriel failure lies in his paralytic self-consciousness and superiority complex. This is why he perpetually keeps asserting and critically judging himself and others at the same time. In short, Gabriel is not in a meaningful state of affairs. It is not simply about his relationship with the people around. He is detached to the larger national and cultural causes too. His interaction with Miss Ivors testifies to his confused position and identity in terms of his national affinity. While he lives in Ireland, he claims that Irish is not his language and that he is sick of his country. However, he has no clarity as to why. Here, he seems to be only imitating the English masters blindly. The most ironical episode is that soon after claiming his distance from Ireland, in his grand speech he goes on celebrating Irish traditions and hospitality. He claims not to be involved in politics or nationalist movements, but he writes book reviews for a pro-British newspaper, The Daily Express, and that too only with his initial. All these undermine his maturity as a thinking intellectual. Basically, he is a bundle of paradoxes and as Michael Levenson has categorically summarized, Gabriel is “no more autonomous or coherent than the country that contains him” (170). In other words, “… the sharp pathos in the life of Gabriel Conroy is that he aims to construct an emancipated personal identity, cultured and cosmopolitan, within an unemancipated milieu” (Levenson 174).
Just like most of Joycean narratives, “The Dead” closes with an ambiguity and there is a big debate among the critics on the impact of the evening on Gabriel. For some critics, after realizing his limitations as a lover and a public figure, towards the end of the story, Gabriel seems to be coming out of his confined paralyzed existence and feel one with the larger realities of the world and life. This epiphany has been read as a step towards the suspension of his ego. His decision to undertake the westward journey towards the end of the story is seen as a journey towards “the place where life had been lived simply and passionately” (Ellman, James Joyce: Biography 249). However, another set of critics are quite doubtful about any possibility of such a sudden heroic transcendence of the protagonist. Vincent P. Pecora in an essay titled “The dead and the Generosity of the Word” stresses that Gabriel in no way transcends his limitations. As he appears to be completely assured of the sincerity of his gesture, Pecora is of the view that by the end, the self of Gabriel in “The Dead” is “dissolved into exhaustion and incoherence” (243). These two contradictory readings show that the charm of the story and its protagonist lies in its ambiguity. While the readers may have their own take on the ending of the narrative, “The Dead” remains one of the masterpieces depicting a modern Irish “palaver” man.
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