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Dublinersby James Joyce |
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ClayAn Outline CommentaryBob Williams - © 1999Joe and Alphy are based on William (see 'Counterparts' and Farrington) and John Murray. Joyce made title changes that indicated concomitant changes in emphasis. (Originally titled 'Christmas Eve' Joyce changed it to 'Hallow Eve' before settling on 'Clay' although in a letter to Stanislaus he refers to it as 'The Clay.') The content was thus a shift from an ironic story about William to a more sympathetic one about a cousin, Maria. Costello says of the original of Maria that her name was Maria O'Donohoe. She was the older unmarried sister of Margaret Christina, the older John Murray's (the old fornicator as John Joyce called him) second wife. The father of these two women was William O'Donohoe, hotel owner and suicide like Virag Bloom in Ulysses. Maria died in 1899 of an inoperable tumor. In the October prior to her death in December she had been a guest at a Halloween party given by the younger John Murray's. The Joyces may also have been present. The premonition of death assumes a different resonance in view of these facts. How far Joyce was justified in the unraveling involved in discovering these facts may be reasonably questioned. It grows upon him in his career and it is interesting to find an unmistakable indication of it in a story composed in 1906.The Irish Homestead rejected it and Joyce blamed George Russell. Maria's name, Tindall observes. suggests that she is a kind of Virgin Mary. Her appearance, however, is eminently witch-like and this aspect is furthered by the steaming vats in her place of employment, the Dublin by Lamplight laundry. The peace-maker beatitude appears in the mass for All Saints and in addition has Marian associations. Less convincingly, Tindall suggests that she is a symbol of the Catholic church or, as the Poor Old Woman, Ireland. Like Farrington, she works for north Irelanders and even her purse is from Belfast. Figuratively Joe and Alphy are her sons and Joe, like the original of his character, is a serious drinker. The game choices present Joyce with an opportunity to be sardonic about life in Ireland since two of the choices are death or prayer. The reference to clay links this story to 'A Little Cloud' with its mention of clay in the Byron poem and the reference to Balfe links it to 'Eveline.' Joe is moved by her omission from the Balfe song of the verse about suitors (significant for a woman marked by prayer and death.) He calls for the missing corkscrew, one of the many lost or misplaced items in the story. Before the first sentence is complete we learn that the "her" of the first clause is the "Maria" of the second. As with Eveline, we are inside a mind governed by rule of free association and some factual information needs to be imported. The laundry as the name hints is an unusual one and its objective, the hiring and reform of prostitutes, is only hinted at by the existence of board ladies and the ubiquity of Protestant tracts. We spend a short time with the women of the laundry as they have their tea. Maria is the scullery maid but tonight she leaves the laundry and will go to a party given by Joe Donnelly. When Joe and his brother Alphy were children, Maria had been their nurse. She buys treats before she takes the tram to Joe's. She buys at two shops. Her first purchase is barely recorded but at the second, more exclusive, shop, she is handled roughly by a snobbish clerk. She boards the tram and takes a seat provided for her by "a colonel-looking gentleman" who is tipsy and talks to her. She is flustered by his attentions. She leaves the tram and quickly reaches Joe's home. The party consists of Maria, Joe and his wife, an undisclosed number of Donnelly children and two neighbor girls. Since they later supervise the game, they are probably older than the Donnelly children, the number of whom may be the same as Farrington's, six. Maria's special cake is missing. She asks the children if they had eaten it, by mistake of course. The children, not taken in by this softening of the accusation, resentfully deny it and Maria concludes that she had left it on the tram. She is close to tears at this catastrophe but Joe consoles her and is, her favorite word, 'nice' to her. She takes advantage of this to say a good word for the brother, Alphy, from whom he is estranged. Mrs Donnelly supports Maria but Joe becomes angry and only his position as host and the soothing attentions of the women prevent him from being fully disagreeable. Joe and Alphy, the absent and rival brother, are another of the vopiscan pairs that crop up in Joyce's work. Alphy's very name insists, through its resemblance to alpha, on his priority. The neighbor girls set up a fortune-telling game in which the blind-folded player picks marriage, a religious vocation or death depending on the choice of a ring, a book or clay. Maria plays but her first choice, engineered by the malice of one of the neighbor girls whom Mrs Donnelly scolds, is clay. She chooses again and this time it is a book. Joe asks her to sing. She sings "I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls" but forgets the second verse with its reference to suitors and sings the first verse twice. Joe, his eyes filled with tears, asks his wife to find the corkscrew. Clay: Characters (*mentioned)
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