Tradition, Gender, and Migration in "The Dead," or: How Many People Has Gretta Conroy Killed?

Introduction

In this essay, I want to address two related sets of issues in "The Dead." The first involves the question of the text's embrace and/or critique of cultural nationalism and the forms of Irish tradition produced and valued by cultural nationalism. Critics who take up this question often focus on Gretta's Galway origins, Michael Furey's passionate self-sacrifice, and Gabriel's final "journey westward." The second involves the issue of gender and the argument that Gretta, Lily, and other female figures in the story are victims of male public authority, sexual predation, and masculinist aesthetics. The readings generated by these critical traditions are persuasive, and I will not dispute them. Rather, I will suggest that their narratives are haunted, disrupted, and countered by an additional, and previously unremarked, narrative in "The Dead." This alternative narrative exposes and exploits the gendered cultural meanings of modernity, migration and domestic service, and casts Lily and Gretta neither as emblems of tradition nor as victims. It is also a narrative that Joyce's text and John Huston's 1987 film of "The Dead" share, though they figure it in different ways.

Considerations of how "The Dead" engages with cultural nationalism on the one hand and with gender on the other are not easily separated, of course; the two concerns are often closely linked. In many readings, Gretta emerges as a figure for a particular kind of Irish national identity or tradition. Vincent Cheng sees in Gretta an allegory of colonized Ireland, arguing that she is "a modern-day Lass of Aughrim," and that "Aughrim, its Lass, Gretta, and Michael Furey in the rain all merge into a composite image of the loss of the Irish soul and autonomy to the imperial masters." ¹ For Luke Gibbons, Gretta is allied with a marginalized, fragmented form of national identity or tradition in which "the memories of the vanquished . . . attach themselves to fugitive and endangered cultural forms such as the street ballad." ² In contrast to the abstract national identity offered by print culture, this form of the national—found in fragmented, hybrid bits of oral culture—mixes the personal and political, rather than allegorizing the latter through the former. In his contribution to this volume, Gibbons extends this argument in two important and provocative ways: first, by connecting Gretta to Lily and to the figure of the servant generally, and, second, by casting the servant's story as a national narrative. In what follows, I will also assert the coincidence of Gretta's story and the servant's, but I will argue that some aspects of the servant's story are antithetical to a national narrative, even (or perhaps especially) one that constructs national identity or tradition as fugitive, marginalized, broken and inarticulate.

In doing so, I will also be engaging with a feminist critical tradition that focuses less on the potential national significance of Gretta and Lily than on their status as victims of predatory men, patriarchal power, and narrative obfuscation. My subtitle alludes to Margot Norris's excellent essay, "'Who Killed Julia Morkan?' The Gender Politics of Art in 'The Dead.'" She argues that in Joyce's text the greatest artist is the martyred Julia Morkan, thrown out of the choir by the pope, marginalized by Gabriel and the narrative voice, and dead, as we learn in Ulysses, within months of the party. For Norris, "the narrative itself, the story's 'telling,'" has a "performative function": Joyce, she argues, has "the narrative voice of the story act out the same disavowals of art's oppressiveness that the characters themselves act out." This narrative voice "successfully stifles a series of back answers that it cannot prevent from erupting in the text." As a result, in the text "the ubiquitous oppression of women is both blatant and discounted, unmistakable and invisible...