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Chapter  The Politics of Gender and Art in “The Dead” Although the first sentence of “The Dead” tells us that “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” (), Lily does not complain about her lot. Indeed, that is why she gets on so well with her mistresses, as we learn a little later—“But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers” (). The bourgeois agenda of the narrative voice1 at this moment can be read as an intention to offer a politically complacent representation of the Morkans, one that neutralizes the masterservant relationship at the outset as benign. But once we decode this agenda, we can read in this description of Lily as a pleasing domestic fixture its suppressed truth: the orders are scrupulously checked to make sure that Lily does not steal.2 She is further valued because she has stifled her “back answers” and does not protest the exacting demands made on her by the fussy ladies, even when she is asked to do too much, when she is run off her feet. The narration of “The Dead,” promoting the Philistine ideals of the beautiful, the good, and the true (Adorno ) in its representation of bourgeois society, successfully stifles a series of back answers that it cannot prevent from erupting in the text. Back answers repeatedly disrupt the pretty picture of prosperous and happy domesticity , of social harmony, and of refined culture in the story. Their repressed force echoes in our ears even after they have been silenced by a gold coin, an after-dinner speech, or a change of topic.“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (); “West Briton!” (); “There’s a nice husband for you, Mrs Malins” (); “And if I were in Julia’s place I’d tell that Father Healy straight up to his face. . .” (); “And why couldn’t he have a voice too? . . . Is it because he’s only a black?” (). Joyce dramatizes in “The Dead” the politics of art’s determination to conceal its own politically oppressive functions by raveling a primary narrative text, Gabriel’s story told in what we might call the audible or “loud” text, with a largely silent but disruptive feminist countertext. Joyce uses Gabriel’s altercation with Miss Ivors to raise the central question of the text: whether or not art serves a political function.3 The moment is cleverly double for while the couple’s words concern the politics of nationalism, their engagement, as intellectual and social equals, concerns the politics of gender—“He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years’ standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books” (). Interpretations of “The Dead” have traditionally assumed that Gabriel is right, and that, given Joyce’s quarrels with the propagandistic aims of the Irish revival, he too would have held art above politics.4 But this critical stance colludes with the story’s endorsement of an ideology that holds nationalism to be more properly or literally political than feminism—thereby making Miss Ivors’s “West Briton!” the only back answer taken seriously in, and by, the story. But Joyce’s politics in “The Dead” are not literalized into the form of a polemic, but are rather implicit in the skepticism that the text creates in us toward the “grandiose” phrases and ideological assumptions of its own aestheticist narrative. We must be especially careful, like the women in “The Dead,” not to be seduced by the story’s exceptionally beautiful prose, for its lyrical narrative voice is not “innocent” but rather produces a fair share of male palaver. It effectively promotes a cultural ideology that is especially inimical to the female subject and to the female artist. Joyce therefore repeatedly nudges us to think against the ideological grain of the narration by genderizing ourselves not merely as subjectively female, but as politically feminist, as resisting readers, critics, and skeptics of the text. “The Dead,” composed while Joyce was writing Stephen Hero, internalizes the submerged socially critical influence of Ibsen, who is here overtly...

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