The Bog of Allen, the Tiber River, and the Pontine Marshes: An Ecocritical Reading of “The Dead”

An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s relationship to other bodies, both human and nonhuman. Gabriel Conroy’s drive toward patriarchal mastery over women and, by extension, nature depends on his denial of his deep connectedness with them. The story moves toward his epiphany of intercorporeal identification with other people, including his wife Gretta, as fellow mortal creatures circumscribed by nature’s most powerful force, time. A related epiphany, not conscious but felt and implicit, is his trans-corporeal identification with aspects of nonhuman nature: snow, water, the Bog of Allen, and the treeless hills of the West where Gretta’s young lover, Michael Furey, lies buried. Thus the breaking down of his psychological defenses against threats to his wished-for mastery leads to an acknowledgment of nonhuman nature as a force both within and outside him—a force that complicates the boundary between Gabriel and not-Gabriel in an even more radical way than his recognition of kinship with other, both living and dead, human beings. This essay also addresses Joyce’s and Ireland’s “bog consciousness,” which it relates to Joyce’s 1906–1907 sojourn in Rome and that city’s notorious “Roman fever,” actually malaria, associated with the Tiber River and the Pontine Marshes.