Melfi ADMFaded Identity: 30 September 1993Gabriel’s Education and Humanity in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy’s world dissolves as he

confronts a truth and a past he had not yet recognized. Until this confrontation,

Gabriel proudly considers himself triumphant and superior to those around him. As

a result, his self-assured irony collapses when the passionless futility of his life

becomes apparent to him after discussing lost love with his wife. Gabriel fails to

understand either himself or the great romantic passion his wife had once known

until his various delusions develop into near-crippling paradoxes. His rationalized

perspective conflicts violently with his desires, and eventually leads him to despair

and disintegration. This conflict first strikes Gabriel in a single moment that

destroys the identity he had built himself. “The Dead,” then, details Gabriel’s

movement away from structure into a realm of confusion.

Gabriel begins his evening with the same condescending confidence the

reader comes to regard as typical of Gabriel. His intelligence and charisma, the key

elements of his personality, drive him through every interaction all through the

evening. His first conversation at the party is with Lily, the caretaker’s daughter

and house assistant. Lily is also the first of the three women with whom Gabriel has

a conflict, each one becoming successively more serious. With Lily, Gabriel adopts

a smooth, “friendly tone” (178) and makes small talk with her until she surprises

him with a remark that may serve as a synopsis of Gabriel’s aims throughout the

evening. Her declaration that “men [are] only all palaver and what they can get out

of you” anticipates Gabriel’s later discussion at the hotel, where he chatters to his

wife about Freddy Malins while hoping to “crush her body” and to “overmaster her”

(217). The reader quickly surmises Gabriel’s social stratagem when, hoping to

recompense for Lily’s antipathy to men, he patronizingly thrusts a coin into her

unwilling hands.

He continues his condescension while considering the speech he prepared.

His reflections on the speech reveal his conceit and mild arrogance, especially

when he thinks of his audience. He is at least mildly deluded that he is “superior”

to the other members of the party and it is this attitude that later blinds him as he

attempts to understand and “overmaster” his wife. Because he believes “their

grade of culture differed from his,” (179) Gabriel projects his own values onto his

audience and, later, his wife. When he measures the likely response to his speech,

he realizes he should replace lines from Browning with some from Shakespeare. It

is as though he could displace the weakness of the speech onto the members of the

party. He makes this decision not because he believes himself at fault, but rather

because Browning “would be above the heads” (179) of his audience. Even when

he observes the speech might fail, “just as he had failed with the girl [Lily],” he

assigns the blame to his own “superior education” (179).

It is important to note Gabriel’s progression from happiness to despair with

regards to his wife as the evening continues. In tracking this movement, we clearly

see the opposing forces struggling within Gabriel as he simultaneously struggles

with guests at the party. His polished manners are in operation, but he slowly

develops an interest in the outward beauty of his wife. After Lily, but before the

episode with Miss Ivors, Gabriel is near the peak of his pride as he smoothly works

through the party, with his “admiring and happy eyes...wandering from [Gretta’s]

dress to her face and her hair” (180). At this time, the rational and passionate

forces are balanced and Gabriel is able to function, but the balance is tenuous.

The balance begins to shift when Ms Ivors aggressively pursues Gabriel

regarding his status as a West Briton. Miss Ivors seems to be the only character

who understands Gabriel’s methods of social manipulation. Her first question after

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naming him as a columnist for the Daily Express immediately throws Gabriel into

self-doubt and diffidence. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” (188), she asks, and

her target, Gabriel, reels. Miss Ivors exploited a weakness Gabriel believed secret,

and the weakness happens to be in a field in which she is proficient. Gabriel cannot

retaliate as he might with other, less educated people, because Miss Ivors and he

are equals and “their careers had been parallel” (188). His party politicking is

rendered useless in her presence, and he is reduced to “murmur[ing] lamely” (188)

an explanation as “a blush invade[s] his forehead” (189).

By labeling Gabriel a “West Briton.” Miss Ivors strikes another anticipatory

chord in Gabriel’s heart. He does not have the strong ties to Ireland his wife has.

His history with the nation seems at best unpleasant, and at worst sickening. “I am

sick of my own country,” he lashes. “Sick of it” (189). He does not share or admit

to the affection his wife had for the days gone by in Galway, or for the “old Irish

tonality” (210) of the tenor’s voice. In fact, Gabriel speaks little of his roots,

except to mention his mother’s opposition to his marriage and her later sickness

and death. His lack of apparent roots signifies a missing piece, a fragmentation in

his identity, that shatters when his wife speaks glowingly of Galway before Michael

Furey’s death. Gabriel is insistent on negating history as part of his life. “I will not

linger on the past,” (204) he says in his speech. Despite saying this early in the

evening, however, he later finds he cannot escape his wife’s past.

Gabriel’s uneasiness and uncertainty continue to increase as the time for his

speech nears. His rage at Miss Ivors and anxiety over his speech is assuaged only

as he takes control over the party as the unquestioned center of authority. As

carver, he needn’t be political, intellectual, or sympathetic. Carving is a purely

social grace. Without having to balance his mores with his passions, “he felt quite

at ease, for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than to find himself at

the head of a well-laden table.” Discussion of the monks’ sleeping in coffins to

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“remind them of their last end” (201) also foreshadowed some of the company’s

preoccupation with death, and worked into Gabriel’s increasing tension. The goose

having been carved, even Gabriel’s confidence in his rhetorical skills (in which he

once seemed to have so much faith) soon seems to wan, and he returns to a more

conventional fear of public speaking. The tension within him returns, his earlier

rage, tempered by a good meal, returns. By the time he is ready to speak, Gabriel

tries to subdue his anxiety and “lean[s] his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth

and smile[s] nervously” (202). His inner struggle continues.

Gabriel’s speech on the new and old generations is an touches on his own

fundamental dichotomy between “hypereducation” and “humanity” (203), a

dichotomy which we might consider a slightly more complicated Joycean version of

the age-old reason / passion division. He has so rationalized his life, that he is

unable to communicate with those who have less education but more humanity.

When he finally confronts his wife’s great moment of humanity, his hypereducation

is unable to comprehend what has happened or how she feels. Such an event

cannot be rationalized or pigeon-holed, but Gabriel is unwilling or unable to open

his sympathetic side to his wife. This central paradox between his humanity and his

hypereducation is what finally breaks down Gabriel’s identity construct. After his

speech, he will begin to see, although not yet understand, “the humanity...which

belonged to an older day” (203).

It is appropriate that after his depiction of the split between the old and new

generations, Gabriel begins to estrange himself from his wife. Joyce’s method of

interpolating Gabriel’s thoughts into the narrative allows us to witness the

alienation as it occurs. “Gazing up the staircase,” Gabriel sees that

a woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. (209)

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Gretta, at the top of the staircase, is perhaps nearest to what for Joyce may

be a symbol of one deeply human experience: that of reflecting on lost love. Staring

up at her, Gabriel is a world removed from her feelings, her history, her humanity.

He cannot even recognize her as his wife until he has deduced as much from her

clothes. Typical of Gabriel’s binary method of rationalization, he reclassifies her

“terracotta and salmonpink” skirt as “black and white.” She is beyond his realm of

knowing, “a mystery” (210) to him, and in order to fathom her, he must reduce her

to a trope as if she were the subject of a literary column. “What is [this] woman...a

symbol of?” (210) he asks.1

Although the answer to his question leads him to despair by evening’s end,

he is not sufficiently self-conscious to realize how alienated from his wife he has

become. His thoughts become progressively more lustful and run in the opposite

direction from Gretta’s feelings. His thoughts after seeing her on the staircase

grow steadily more sexual, and increasingly chaotic. In Gabriel’s mind, the strife

of the night left with Miss Ivors. He is “proud” as he looks at his wife, and “a

sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart” (212). This joy soon transforms

into a desire, and Gabriel continues to dehumanize his wife and she becomes little

more than a helpless object. “Happy that she is his,” (215) he finds great strength

and “valor” in pondering their most intimate experiences, because he believes no

one else has shared such moments with her. Invigorated by these thoughts,

Gabriel, envision his wife “so frail that he longed to defend her against something

and then to be alone with her” (213) and “moments of their secret life together”

consume his thoughts. The party, good manners, rationalization, seem almost

1“The Dead” as a whole and this passage in particular seem to recall several fundamental notions of structuralism, but at the time the story was written, structuralism had been used mostly for linguistic studies. Joyce’s use of binary systems, of the Gabriel myth, even of Gabriel’s understanding of his wife as a symbol (or “signifier”) as part of a text, hint so strongly at structuralism, one might wonder whether he extrapolated from Saussurean linguistics only to anticipate Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological applications by several decades. A structuralist (if there are any left) might argue that Joyce’s use of these devices was unintentional, and that he only served as a case-in-point of the unconscious construction of binary structures in myth.

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immaterial as Gabriel entertains visions of intimate times “no one knew of or

would ever know of.”

By the time they reach their room, Gabriel has virtually removed himself

from the dullness of his life that simultaneously torments his wife. He equates lust

with passion, and his rational side is nearly overruled while he feels “that they have

escaped from their lives” and have “run away together into a new adventure” (215).

Gretta, meantime, is haunted by her own life and cannot run away. She touches her

husband for support, for compassion, and he is struck by “a keen pang of lust”

(215). The anxiety he felt towards his speech multiplies tenfold as he attempts to

control his “arms trembling with desire to seize” (216) his wife. His desire to take

his wife is so tortuous, his compassion and well-known solicitude vanish, and he is

almost indifferent to her “serious and weary” look. She wants his compassion; he

wants to ravish her.

Gabriel’s rational and passionate sides wrestle inside him, confuse him, each

briefly seizing control of him. He desperately wants her to “come to him of her own

accord” but yearns to “overmaster” (217) her. The dichotomy of Gabriel’s identity

is frenzied and chaotic. He is so caught up in his inner turmoil, he does not notice

her approach until, at last, she kisses him. Certain this is a sign that “the yielding

mood had come upon her” (217), and his rational side feels safe to ask carelessly

why she affected the serious and weary look. He casually approaches the source of

her trauma as though it were foreplay, and is therefore astonished when she breaks

from him. His expression in the mirror “puzzles” him until moments later he learns

his wife’s secret of the dead, and the momentary reflection catches up with him in a

moment of “shameful consciousness” (219). In this negative epiphany, Gabriel sees

himself as “a ludicrous figure...idealising his own clownish lusts...[a] pitiable

fatuous fellow” (219-220). This reality rips through Gabriel’s identity; his irony, his

intelligence, his charisma, his sense of possession, dissipate instantaneously and

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are replaced with nothing. In that moment, “his identity was fading” and the “solid

world itself...was dissolving” (223). In that moment, Gabriel learns the fallacy of his

hypereducation, and the truth of his wife’s humanity.

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