Joyce's Dublin: The World Behind Dubliners

James Joyce set Dubliners in a city he knew from the inside and needed to leave in order to write about. Dublin in 1904, the year the stories are set, was the second city of the British Empire, or so its inhabitants liked to claim. It was also, as John Banville observes in his Rebind commentary on the collection, “just a provincial little town where everybody knows everybody else’s business.” That gap between the city’s self-image and its reality is the engine of every story Joyce wrote.

Understanding the world behind Dubliners does more than add context to the stories; it changes what you see in them. The drunken fathers, the trapped women, the men going in circles between pub and home: none of this is random. It is the precise result of a specific history which includes eight hundred years of colonial occupation, a Church that filled the vacuum left by political powerlessness, and a class structure that mistook respectability for freedom.

The Colonial Wound

Ireland was colonized by the British for almost a millennium. Banville is direct about what this meant in practice. “They had, in the usual almost absent-minded, lackadaisical way, taken everything that we had. It’s said that all the ships in the Battle of Trafalgar were built with Irish oak. This little island was almost entirely covered in forest in the medieval period. The British came. They just cut down all the trees. We didn’t have anything else. We didn’t have coal, we didn’t have gold.”

What colonization left behind was not simply poverty but a particular relationship to agency, a people who had learned, over generations, that decisions were made elsewhere, by others, and that the safest posture was a kind of dreamy acquiescence. Banville puts it carefully: “In a curious way, we quite liked being colonized, because decisions were taken out of our hands.” He is identifying, not celebrating, the psychological damage that made Joyce’s paralysis not a metaphor but a fact of daily life.

The specific wound that runs through Dubliners is the wound of the second city. In ‘After the Race,’ Joyce gives this its most damning formulation. When Jimmy Doyle and his European friends arrive in the city that night, Joyce writes that “the city wore the mask of a capital.” Banville stops on that sentence: “The judgment on Dublin in that is so damning. It wore the mask of a capital. It imagined itself to be a real city, whereas it’s just a provincial little town where everybody knows everybody else’s business.”

Parnell haunts the collection too. Charles Stewart Parnell, the Protestant Irish politician who came closest to delivering Home Rule before being destroyed by a sex scandal in 1890, represents the most devastating near-miss in modern Irish political history. Banville reads Parnell’s fall as the event that sealed Dublin’s paralysis for the generation Joyce was writing about. “What Parnell offered to Ireland,” he says, “was offering Dublin the chance to live up to its own conception of itself. And that’s the most terrible thing you could offer to Dublin, because that would require courage.”

The Catholic Church

Into the space left by political powerlessness moved the Church, and it moved with extraordinary thoroughness. The Catholic Church in Joyce’s Dublin was much more than a religious institution. It was the primary social architecture of everyday life: the confession box, the marriage sacrament, the school system, the relationship between priest and housewife that Banville identifies as one of the book’s central power structures.

“The Catholic Church tacitly encouraged this,” Banville says of the feckless men drinking away their wages. “The Church saw the woman, the housewife, as the seat of power in the home, and the priest would use the housewife as their power base, their representative in the home.” The men went to the pub. The women managed the home. The priest managed the women. And the system reproduced itself with the grinding efficiency of a machine nobody had designed but everyone operated.

What the Church loaded onto children was, in Banville’s reading, extraordinary and more than a little toxic. Preparing for First Communion at seven years old meant learning to distinguish between concupiscence and lust, understanding simony, grasping the metaphysics of the Trinity. “Every seven-year-old boy needs to know the distinction between concupiscence and lust,” Banville says drily. “But this was what the Catholic education did to us.”

Confession, the practice of telling your sins to a priest through a grill in the dark, is one of the recurring institutions in Dubliners. Banville reads it as rudimentary psychiatry: “You tell the priest your sins; you don’t tell him your fears, which is what you tell your psychiatrist.” Mr. Doran in ‘The Boarding House’ goes to confession the morning before he is maneuvered into marriage, comes out feeling cleansed, goes back into the same life that produced the sin. “Everybody knows that you’re going to sin again,” Banville says. “But that little moment in the confessional — these are moments when we are allowed to imagine that we are saintly, that we’re filled with sanctifying grace. And that we’re not bad, squalid little twerps — that we’re really saints in the making. It’s a wonderful ceremony.”

The Social World: Class, Respectability, and Women

The people of Dubliners occupy a precise social position: the petite bourgeoisie, the lower middle class. Clerks, shop assistants, boarding house keepers, music teachers, canvassers. Not quite poor enough to have nothing to lose; not quite secure enough to stop worrying about losing it. The currency of this class was respectability, and the fear of losing it governed almost every decision anyone made.

In ‘The Boarding House,’ Mrs. Mooney engineers her daughter’s marriage to a lodger who has seduced her, knowing that the threat of public disgrace is enough to force his hand. Banville reads this as the entire social logic of the world in miniature: “In this little world of clerks and office workers and shop assistants, respectability was everything. One of the worst words you could use about a family or a person was ‘they’re common.’” Where did this come from? Banville traces it directly to colonization: “The colonizers are always at a higher social rank than we are. We’re common, but they’re the swanks, they’re the swells.”

Women in this world had it worse than men, with less recourse and fewer exits. Banville is unsparing about what domestic service meant for the girls who filled the houses of the petite bourgeoisie: “They got up at five o’clock in the morning. They hauled buckets of coal upstairs to set the fires. They were prey to the young men of the house. They had truly dreadful lives. They would have gone from girlhood to embittered womanhood in the blink of an eye.” Marriage offered a different kind of trap: the trap Eveline sees clearly enough at the gangplank, the trap that Mrs. Mooney has survived and is now re-springing for her daughter.

This is the world Joyce put into fifteen stories, with the precision of a diagnostician and the complicated love of a man who knew he was one of its products. As Banville says, “Joyce loved the petty bourgeois world that he wrote about in Dubliners. He loved it. He despised it in a way, but he loved it. He loved its petty ceremonial. He loved the attitudes of these drunken louts who see themselves as gentlemen. His father was his model throughout.”

That love is what keeps Dubliners from being a polemic. It is not a book about how terrible Dublin was. It is a book about how people live inside the worlds that have been made for them, how they endure, maneuver, deceive themselves, and occasionally, in a moment like Gabriel Conroy’s at the hotel window, see themselves and their world a little more clearly.