The close of James Joyce’s Dubliners strikes a conciliatory note as Gabriel Conroy sleepily watches the snowflakes, his eyes filled with “generous tears” of recognition: “snow was general all over Ireland . . . 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 The sense of integrity and belonging, previously lost in the turmoil of the night, is restored in the image of the snow enfolding the island and levelling off its edges. It mitigates the negatively defined identity to which Gabriel was driven in frustration upon being accused of “West-Britonism”: “O, to tell you the truth . . . I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!”2 Taken aback by how easily his assiduous cosmopolitanism could turn into a vehement denial of everything Irish, including the language, he polarised his after-dinner speech with the ostensible opposition between the tradition of “genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality” and the “hypereducated” young generation that threatens to destroy the latter with its obdurate republicanism.3 Not only does Gabriel’s dilated consciousness and puzzling wave of panoptic nationalism in the closing paragraph round off the story of his own emotional upheaval but it is intended to be an atoning appendix to the rest of the book. In a letter in 1906, Joyce remarked: “Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attractions of the city.”4 A year later, “The Dead” was written to make up for that harshness.
Beneath the peaceful resolution, however, newly apprehended tensions are lurking; Gabriel’s serenity becomes an illusion when we look away from the surface evened out by the snow. As is revealed during the lancers with Miss Ivors, his sense of identity and self-possession are only maintained with a conscious effort. Pieced together, the various challenges to his will and resolution that come up in the story form its leitmotif. As she abandons the scene laughing and bidding him goodbye in Irish, the committed girl leaves a trace of self-doubt in Gabriel. But the radical Molly Ivors is not the only one stirring up disturbing emotions. Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, undergoing a series of transformations, repeatedly forces him to question his role and attitude. As he waits for her to join him after the party, he wonders “what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of.”5 Imagining himself to be a painter, he promptly adapts to the situation, aware that fixing her in that aesthetic posture is the only way he can deal with her elusiveness. Still, the seed of desire has been sown and the sequel becomes an account of Gabriel’s sexual and emotional disappointment, with Gretta receding further west, lost in her memories of a one-time sweetheart. As he observes her transformation from a desired spouse into an allegory—first a Spéirbhean, a beautiful young figuration of Ireland, and then an old hag or Cailleach—Gabriel finds an answer to his earlier question, discovering the source of the distant music that has triggered and accompanied the uncontrollable sequence of changes. For a moment, seized by an indefinite terror, he imagines some “impalpable and vindictive being . . . coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.”6 Indeed, this terrifying being is Gretta as his unknowable other, as the symbol of death itself, and the personification of Éire claiming the lives of young Irishmen for her cause. Gabriel, empty-handed, resembles a poet-admirer from the Gaelic vision poetry tradition (with a message from the now sleeping motherland figure to ponder), and also a West Briton—the subaltern Irishman who begrudges his wife her rural western origin (to Miss Ivors he pretended that it was just “her people” who were from Connacht).7
Like Molly Ivors, whose name and elusiveness are prefigurings of Eileen and the meditations on Tower of Ivory in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Gabriel’s bifurcated identity foreshadows the conflicted identity and troubled sense of belonging that characterises Stephen Dedalus. In foregrounding a self that “was fading out into a grey impalpable world” just as “the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling,”8 “The Dead” not only concludes Dubliners but also paves the way for A Portrait and the theme of fissured national awareness that figures throughout Joyce’s work. It is not that Gabriel would have accepted as his own the republican ideals of Miss Ivors or come to terms with the threatening reminder of Ireland’s “uncivilised” past in Gretta’s origin as a “county cute.”9 Rather, positioned by the window as the imaginary borderline between Anglo- and -Irish, between the living present and the pull of the dead past, he finds reassurance by acknowledging the impossibility of a cosy, ready-made identity and the beneficial yet also disruptive tensions pertaining to that cleft.
As Jacques Derrida writes about his Franco-Maghrebian origin in Monolingualism of the Other, identity, however split or tangled, is never a given and can only be “promised or claimed.” According to Derrida, “[t]he silence of that hyphen does not pacify or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture. It will never silence their memory.”10 The same silent echo resounds in Joyce’s story, most strikingly in the final image of “the snow falling faintly . . . and faintly falling” through the universe.11 The use of this phrase and its inverted form contradicts the connotations of smoothness and repose carried by the snowfall and suggests oscillation. It speaks of the eternal crossings on the threshold between within and without, between west of England and west of Dublin, the living and the dead, between the fringe of the Gaeltacht (a primarily Irish-speaking region, mostly located on the western seaboard of Ireland) and the pale of the anglicised capital. Indeed, in pointing to the contradictions between the pragmatic city and the romantic rural west (including the obvious linguistic connotations), between the proximity of the inaccessible past and the slipperiness of the present, Joyce’s “The Dead” reflects the complexities of Irish political history and the ongoing sense of identity crisis shared by many anglophone and Irish-language writers of the twentieth century.12
Women on the Margin
The experience of being torn apart by multiple affiliations and simultaneously left out on all sides informs the writing of a number of Irish authors of the time when Ireland was striving for an independent cultural, political and linguistic identity. Yet the competing allegiances and antagonistic concepts that Paul Muldoon sums up as “the violent juxtaposition of the concepts of ‘Ireland’ and ‘I,’”13 were still constitutive to the Irish cultural imagination during the final third of the last century and the first decade of the new millennium, the main period covered by the present study. My project aims to show how this motif of cleft cultural and linguistic identity, linked with the concepts of transience and reversibility, features in poetry by Irish women of the time. While I account for the significance of the hyphen for the Anglo-Irish as well as the Irish-language poets, it is not only across the linguistic divide that contradictory tensions are traced. Diachronic in its overall approach, this study also explores the transition by women from the role of poetic subject to that of the subject of poetry and focuses on the shift from the phase in Irish poetry informed by feminist thinking to the next phase which, although clearly defined by the achievements of literary feminism, has abandoned its rhetoric and much of its original agenda.
Between the 1970s and the late ’90s, the Irish poetry scene was entered by a growing number of women whose writing engaged, in various ways, with the contemporaneous feminist discourses. In keeping with the emphasis of second-wave feminism on the individual, these poets searched for an authentic expression of their individual autonomy,14 defined mostly against the backdrop of the prevailing masculinist discourse and the restricting images of femininity in the male tradition and in the public mind. Also, in keeping with literary feminism’s view of women’s writing as an experience—a private or intimate and sometimes non-rational experience—they sought to offer expressions of reality not previously addressed in Irish poetry. “Feminism” and “feminist literature,” of course, are not monolithic categories. Pointing to the difficulty of finding a sound definition of the latter, Rita Felski identifies two bas...