James Joyce's "The Dead" and Bret Harte's Gabriel Conroy: The Nature of the Feast

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

—Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal," 1729

"Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1914

Toward the end of James Joyce's "The Dead" (1907), Gabriel Conroy's wife Gretta cries herself to sleep after telling her husband about Michael Furey, a childhood friend and victim of consumption who died after facing the cold of a winter night to confess his love for her. Disillusioned by the revelation that she had known the romance of having a man die for her (and that she had carried this secret quietly for years), he watches her sleep, wondering about the girlish beauty that must have inspired such adolescent heroism: "He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death" (234). More than a mere acceptance of the transitory nature of beauty, Gabriel's realization expresses a realism that stands in opposition to the romantic ideal of heroic self-sacrifice that Michael Furey embodies. Michael Furey's disease, moreover, a conventional feature of the romantic personality, personifies a sentimentalized notion of Irish national identity predicated on starvation. References to starvation in Irish literature contemporary with "The Dead," invite speculation about literary representations of Ireland's national trauma, the Great Famine, which so few Irish writers discuss.

In this paper, I argue that Joyce's writing about the Famine is more complicated than critics have previously understood. He, almost anomalously among his canonized Irish contemporaries, discusses the issue of Ireland's starvation and its relationship to Ireland's colonial status. As Vincent Pecora suggests in his remarkable essay "Social Paralysis and the Generosity of the Word: Joyce's 'The Dead,'" Joyce's work is a national and political critique of Ireland's complicity in its own colonization. I find that Joyce's allusions in "The Dead" not only confirm Pecora's reading, but bespeak an even sharper critique than Pecora describes. Within traditional Joyce criticism, "The Dead" is connected to starvation through its references to Dante's Inferno 33; more recently, "The Dead" has been connected to Bret Harte's Gabriel Conroy (serialized 1871; 1875), which also begins with a starvation story. Nevertheless, criticism of these two works with respect to Joyce has overlooked the prevalent theme of cannibalism within them and how it relates to the Morkan feast and to Ireland's colonialism. As Pecora notes, Ireland's oppression is due to an ideology that perpetuates a self-sacrificing tradition among the Irish people. In "The Dead," Joyce faults even more specifically Irish Revival writers, making particular use of W. B. Yeats's "Cathleen ni Houlihan" (1902). These writers, who might be the leaders of Ireland as Joyce implies, refuse to tell the "reality" of Ireland's situation. They inappropriately substitute folklore and fairytales for "truth." Finally, while Joyce talks about the Famine more directly than his contemporaries, he remains a product of his time. His allusions to cannibalism and its relationship to the aftermath of the Irish Famine expose the truth, but they also cloak his meaning. Joyce's difficulties in expressing his feelings about the Famine are such that they can only be framed through the mediation of two other starvation stories. These difficulties serve as a telling indication of the effects of the Famine on the Irish psyche.

Irish Studies scholars are aware of the facts of the Great...