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Dublinersby James Joyce |
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The Boarding HouseAn Outline CommentaryBob Williams - © 1999In the hands of Maupassant the short story hurtles to its destination with the force of a cannonball. It conforms to Poe's dictum that the proper subject is one and that everything must contribute to it. In some of the Dubliners stories Joyce adheres to these directives but he is not at his most characteristic and, of course, best when he does so. When, instead of adhering to someone else's practice, he builds his stories up of many small touches and a multiplicity of layers, the best of them subterranean, he manages a special vision as fresh now as when these stories were new. 'The Boarding House,' like many other stories, can be compressed to an anecdote, in this case a 'smoking room' anecdote. A young man, as youth may be considered in Ireland, takes liberties with his landlady's daughter who puts herself in his way to be seduced with the unspoken but essential support of the mother. As a result the man must, under many kinds of pressure exerted by the mother and the threat of physical violence from a brother, marry the daughter.Tindall acknowledges the naturalistic bias of the story but suggests that our focus should be on "the yielding of Polly's absence of mind to awareness." He offers further that "Polly [the daughter] is Corley's female counterpart." Joyce A-Z comments on the temporal structure. The real time of the story takes place between Sunday morning breakfast and noon mass. The gist of the story and its 'points' are in the relevant flashbacks. This implied rebuttal of my anecdotal concept invites us to consider that the story "highlights not the behavior of individuals but the moral concept of that behavior." Joyce drew upon the experience of the younger John Murray (known in Ulysses as 'Red' Murray) who married a woman much younger than he. They had been lodgers. Unlike Polly, however, John Murray's woman was pregnant. (John provided the basis for one of the quarreling brothers in 'Clay,' a fraternal animosity that existed in life as well as in fiction.) The boarding house itself may have been The Waverly House where Joyce lodged for a short time in 1903 when the turmoil of the Joyce household, May Joyce being lately dead, was more than he could endure. Mrs Mooney, the mother of the story, and her wildly incompatible husband were modeled on Annie and Thomas Barnacle, Nora's parents. And Ellmann, quoting Stanislaus, writes that the idea of the story came from a fellow teacher of English in Trieste. In a 1905 letter Joyce outlines, based on what was done and what he knew he would do, his plans for Dubliners. The childhood stories are 'The Sisters,' 'An Encounter' and 'Araby,' written in the same year as the letter. The stories of adolescence are 'The Boarding House,' 'After the Race' and 'Eveline.' The stories of maturity are 'The (sic) Clay,' 'Counterparts' and 'A Painful Case.' The stories of public life are 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room,' 'A Mother' and 'Grace,' finished sometime between October and December. It is in this letter that he writes that the first three stories "are stories of my childhood." Ellmann observes that both 'A Mother' and 'The Boarding House' depict browbeating women, a type that Joyce could not endure. It is interesting to read in this light the feminist essay by Jane E. Miller (The Viking Critical Library edition). This demonstrates how a special interest may swamp any sense of reality. 'The Boarding House' has a very involved and admirable structure. The story unfolds with leisurely deliberation from the bluntly worded opening: "Mrs Mooney was a butcher's daughter." This, and what follows, is a far cry from the opening paragraphs of 'Araby' or 'Two Gallants' but it is like the beginnings of 'The Sister' or 'The Dead.' Mrs Mooney married her father's foreman. She opened a shop for him but after the death of his father-in-law he became a drunkard and one night went for his wife with a cleaver, an instrument that will re-appear. A priest allows her a separation. Another priest, later, performs an opposite office for Mrs Mooney's daughter and her half-victimized lover. Mr Mooney now works for a sheriff. Mrs Mooney sold the butcher shop and with the money set up a boarding house. Her permanent residents are clerks from the city but she has a floating population of tourists and music hall performers. She runs things with aplomb and the resident young men call her The Madam. Her son, Jack, is tough and, as is later stressed, bad- tempered. On Sunday nights at the boarding house he took part in the musical entertainments. So too did his sister Polly. She had worked as a typist at a corn-factor's office. These were plentiful in Dublin apparently since there is one mentioned in 'The Dead.' Her drunken father called everyday to see his daughter and Mrs Mooney had taken her back home. (It is thus early established that Polly is a moveable property if a willing one.) Mrs Mooney very deliberately plans for Polly to trap one of the boarders into matrimony. She sees a relationship developing and allows it to continue. Polly knows that her mother knows that something is going on and continues to entangle the boarder. When Mrs Mooney decides that the time is ripe, she acts according to her nature and deals with the problem "as a cleaver deals with meat." It is a Sunday morning. Joyce describes it in three precise sentences. There is a touch of satire in his description of churchgoers. Mrs Mooney supervises her servant Mary's removal of the breakfast things, telling her to save the scraps of uneaten bread for the pudding on Tuesday, an echo of the action of attendants after the Sermon on the Mount. She has talked to Polly and Polly has told her that she and the boarder have been sexually intimate. Mrs Mooney, who has not yet been to mass, glances at the clock. It is seventeen past eleven. She decides that she has enough time to settle matters with Mr Doran and attend a noon mass. She has no doubt that she will succeed and she takes a moment to think with scorn of those mothers who would settle a matter like this for money. Only marriage will do for Mrs Mooney and she is glad that she has to deal with the spineless Mr Doran instead of with Mr Sheridan or Mr Bantam Lyons, two of her other boarders. Much of her thought revolves around strategic considerations. The burden of public opinion is heavily on her side, so heavily that Mr Doran could easily lose his position. She has spent about twelve minutes in these thoughts and she is ready to summon Mr Doran, satisfied with herself and scornful of those mothers "who could not get their daughters off her hands." Mr Doran is in his room and his thoughts, much less happy than those of Mrs Mooney, have been considering the same topic. He has confessed and the priest has "so magnified his sin that he was almost thankful at being afforded a loophole of reparation," marriage being the loophole and "almost" a very significant word in Mr Doran's thoughts. The present gap between his wants and his obligations is enormous. He feels, and knows that his people will also feel, that he will be marrying beneath him. He recalls that the reputation of the boarding house is somewhat clouded. (How clouded may be guessed by the remarks of the anonymous narrator of the Cyclops section of Ulysses: 12.398 et seq.) A tearful Polly bursts in upon him and, while he unenthusiastically comforts her, he moodily reflects on the way in which Polly seduced him. Mary knocks on his door and asks him to come see Mrs Mooney in the parlor. On the way, thinking sadly of what he must do, he meets brother Jack. They exchange cold greetings and Jack gives Bob a ferocious look, of obvious meaning under the circumstances. After an interruption symbol (a row of dots), we return to Polly. She has dried her eyes and falls into such a complicated reverie of anticipations regarding her future married life that she forgets what she is waiting for. Her mother calls her to the parlor to talk to Mr Doran and then she remembers. "'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry" (Finnegans Wake 115.36). And told with great skill and polish. The balance of narrative focusing is particularly praiseworthy and lifts it out of the type of straight-ahead-smash-the-target naturalism. Of the three connivers Bob seems to be the least reprehensible but this is a sorry bunch of people at best. If Polly is a female Corley, this would make Bob the equivalent of the thieving slavey. The story seems unattached to the others. As if to make up for the absence of priests in 'Two Gallants,' this story contains two of them but it seems otherwise to float rather free. It is based on family history but in Joyce's work this hardly constitutes a distinction. If, as Gifford feels, the consideration of real counterparts to the characters is extra-literary, what are we to make of Bob's reappearance in Ulysses where he is a silly drunk and, as it would appear at Joyce's implication, a drunk as a result of this forced marriage? Are we entitled to this extra dimension? The Boarding House: Characters (*mentioned)
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