Moore, Snow, and "The Dead"

Moore, Snow, and "The Dead" Adam Parkes University of Georgia —A few light taps upon the pane made him [Gabriel Conroy] turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.1 JAMES JOYCE'S BIOGRAPHER Richard Ellmann has traced a line of influence that links the ending of "The Dead" to George Moore's novel Vain Fortune (1891). This work, Ellmann writes, is the source of the "dead lover who comes between the lovers, the sense of the husband's failure, the acceptance of mediocrity, the resolve to be at all events sympathetic ,"2 elements that Joyce redeploys and transforms in his early masterpiece (written in 1907 and first published as the final story in Dubliners in 1914). Following Ellmann's lead, other critics have developed both this particular comparison and broader connections, such as the relation between Joyce's study of "moral paralysis" in Dubliners and Moore's volume of stories The Unfilled Field (1903), or that between Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (1888).3 But no one has seen reason for dissenting from Ellmann's remark that "Moore said nothing about snow."4 On the contrary, this pronouncement has been taken as evidence that Joyce's snow exemplifies the "significant amplification" of the material he absorbed from Moore, all the more striking because such a heavy snowfall was (and is) extremely unusual in Ireland.5 265 ELT 42 : 3 1999 As far as Vain Fortune is concerned, Ellmann is quite right. Although there is a suggestion of what would later become Joyce's snowy symbolism when the hero's spurned lover, Emily Watson, drowns herself {"A. faint struggle, a faint cry, and then nothing—nothing but the whiteness of the swans___"), such evidence is too slight to serve as the basis of larger claims about Moore's influence on the younger writer.6 Snow does feature, however, in another novel by Moore, A Drama in Muslin (1886), a work with which Joyce was probably familiar (a letter from his brother Stanislaus suggests that he was).7 In this text Moore's snow has a significance that indicates new possibilities for a reading of "The Dead," with intriguing implications for our understanding of the story's technique and structure, its themes, and its context. The main purpose of this essay is to explore these implications. But I shall also suggest that attention to Moore's extensive revisions of A Drama in Muslin for the new edition published as Muslin in 1915 (that is, the year after the much-delayed appearance of Dubliners) reveals how the connection between these two writers flows not in one but in two directions. It is possible not only that Moore influenced Joyce but also that Moore later revised his text in response to Joyce. ♦ ♦ ♦ A Drama in Muslin, subtitled A Realistic Novel, is what Moore described as a "girl book" dealing, as he explained in a letter to his Dutch correspondent Frans Netscher, "with the question whether English girls (of whom there is now a surplus population of more than two millions) will take professions or continue to consider marriage as the only profession open to them." Moore's depiction of the private and public dramas of his predominantly female cast of characters is set against the...