Suspicious Readings of Joyce's "Dubliners"

13. Critical Judgment and Gender Prejudice in “A Mother”

Chapter  Critical Judgment and Gender Prejudice in “A Mother” Narration inevitably provides readers of fiction with a lens or filter that manipulates their perception of the virtues and vices, the strengths and weaknesses, the charms and vulgarities of fictional characters. Joyce’s story, “A Mother,” demonstrates how gender ideology can serve as a particularly powerful narrative filter capable of conditioning an entire critical reception. For many years, the dominant response to “A Mother” was shaped by such strong critics as David Hayman and Warren Beck, who read the story as a satire on the selfdefeat of cultural pretensions. In their argument, they took their cue in condemning Mrs. Kearney from the narrative’s own condemnation of the strong woman. Hayman writes, “Despite its public background, ‘A Mother,’ as Joyce later thought of it and as he doubtless intended, is the clearest exposition of the theme of the dominant female, a type he despised, feared and might have married ” (). Warren Beck concurs. “The defeat of Mrs. Kearney is to be fully approved of,” he writes,“especially for its kind of poetic justice in the ruination, by her own excesses, of the very ambitions she most sought to advance” (). But more recently a group of sophisticated gender critics has gradually mounted a complex revisionary project to read “A Mother” against the programming of these early narrative assumptions.1 Jane Miller calls “A Mother” “perhaps the most overlooked and underrated story in James Joyce’s Dubliners” (). By using a different filter equipped with the lens of gender analysis, feminist critics have transformed Mrs. Kearney from virago to victim of a gender ideology that punishes strength and courage in women. This has allowed them, along the way, to reveal the story’s symbolic deconstruction of the male establishment that opposes her. Garry Leonard draws this conclusion most pointedly. “Masculine order has been resoundingly reaffirmed by the conclusion of the story, yet Joyce’s final image suggests that when a woman such as Mrs. Kearney mounts a successful attack against the existence of the committee, the Law of the Father is left with only one shaky leg and a prosthetic Phallus to balance upon” (). By further training their focus on the basis of judgment within and outside the story, these gender revisions have brought new problems with the story’s textual performativity into sharper focus. I will train my own eye on one of these: the function of the review as a product of gender prejudice within the narrative, and within the narration. I am particularly intrigued by the way this story of a musical performance focuses on off-stage or behind-the-scene events, on the backside, as it were, of performance. And I will argue that reviewing—the work we all do as critics—also has a backside, and is also vulnerable to off-stage or behind-the-scenes machinations and manipulations. This behind-the-scenes process may be equated with the extra-aesthetic dimension of art and criticism: the social, the political, the ideological. And I will make the point that in the case of “The Mother” the unseemliness of the spectacle of the strong woman, of an unseemly Mrs. Kearney, is produced by behind-the-scenes attitudes and their manipulations that taint judgment by coming before the evidence, by prejudging , that is, by prejudice. For my point of departure in revisiting “A Mother” I’ll begin with one of the most sophisticated readings of the story I could locate, one that explores the irrepressibility of that which every narrative displaces, and which Jean-François Lyotard has named the differend. This element of undecidability or locus of exemption from adjudication is created by the peculiar nature of narrative as a structure of aporia. I use this term more in the philosophical sense, as a doubt produced by evidence both for and against a proposition. In the case of narration , the structure of aporia is produced because its version of events is obliged to displace other versions of events, to produce a tacit counter-version for every version, a tacit counter-judgment for every judgment that it renders. Joseph Valente ’s brilliant reading of the story in the Winter  James Joyce Quarterly as the intersection of two forms of differend—the colonial and the sexual or gender—creates a powerful impression of giving us the last word on the story, the reading that encompasses or absorbs all other readings. Valente writes: I want to focus here on a narrative wherein this sort...