Irish Unionism, North of Ireland Protestantism, and the Home

Rule Question in Joyces Dubliners

Richard Rankin Russell
Joyce Studies Annual, 2013, pp. 62-94 (Article)
Published by Fordham University Press
For additional information about this article
Access provided by New School University (12 Oct 2014 22:53 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/joy/summary/v2013/2013.russell.html
Irish Unionism, North of Ireland Protestantism,
and the Home Rule Question in Joyces Dubliners
RICHARD RANKIN RUSSELL
He is not an artist he says. He is interesting himself in politicsin which
he says [he has] original ideas.
Stanislaus Joyce, writing about his brother James in :,c,
1
Innuendo of home rule.
Leopold Bloom (U ;.:,c)
JOYCE, THE POLITICS OF UNIONISM, AND NORTHERN
PROTESTANTISM
Stanislaus Joyces remark in :,c, sets the tone for this essay, noting as it
does Joyces great interest in politics at the time. So does Joseph Kellys
contention in :,, that [b]etween :,c and :,c;, when he was writing
Dubliners and Stephen Hero, Joyce was a political writer . . .
2
Kelly takes
pains to establish Joyces politics in the early :,ccs in order to recover
him as a realist writer; I will focus on Joyces politics to suggest how
particular ctional Protestant characters from the North of Ireland in
Dubliners are analogs for their real-life counterparts (the invocation of a
title from Joyces story collection is purposeful) who would block Home
Rule in the years leading up to the Home Rule crisis in :,:::. Under-
standing his work in the context of the North of Ireland, however,
remains an unnished (even barely started) endeavor for Joyce criticism.
One early intervention has proven salutary for my own work of situating
Joyce in the context of the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland: In a fasci-
nating maneuver, Cheryl Herr traveled to Northern Ireland in :,, to
give a report of the political situation in the province through a Joycean
perspective.
3
Subsequently, Willard Potts has argued in Joyce and the Two
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rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis o,
Irelands that a very important part of Irish Catholic culture is its relation-
ship to Irish Protestant culture.
4
Potts cites accounts from Joyces con-
temporaries Arthur Clery and Constantine Curran to show the profound
separation between Catholics and Protestants that existed both in Ireland
and in the North of Ireland during Joyces day.
5
Potts remains the only
commentator to trace with any persistence the sectarian conicts in
Joyces ction between Catholics and Protestants, but he often does so by
eliding the differences between Anglo-Irish Protestants and Protestants
from the North of Ireland. This proves an unhelpful maneuver given how
Northern Protestant Unionists began to unite in their opposition to
Home Rule during the time Joyce was writing Dubliners and A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man.
The relative lack of interest in Joyces relationship to the majority-
Protestant North of Ireland likely stems from and accords with historians
and literary and cultural critics continuing interest in Irish liberation
movements, particularly varieties of nationalism. Correspondingly, Joyces
relationship to the foundation of modern Ireland has been analyzed from
a variety of approaches, including post-colonialism.
6
One of the preemi-
nent historians of Irish Unionism, Alvin Jackson, has explained that [a]s
in other European countries which have successfully struggled for their
independence, so in Ireland there remains a fascination with the processes
of liberation, and (equally) an understated or embarrassed or unwritten
history of collaboration, compromise and political inertia.
7
The compet-
ing narratives told by republicans and unionists and loyalists (although
there are differences between these two latter designations) play into such
a bias on the part of historians. As Liam ODowd succinctly puts it, If
the story of republicanism is about rebellion, that of unionism and loyal-
ism is about the defense of the state, its Protestant constitution, and its
civilizing role. As such, its personalities and their deeds, although part of
a much broader historical canvas, appear less dramatic and magnetic.
8
Irish Unionism, later Ulster Unionism, remains a relative lacuna in Irish
history, the efforts of Jackson, Patrick Buckland, and other historians of
this complex movement notwithstanding. This omission is unfortunate,
not least because the strength of the Union lay in its capacity for
reinvention.
9
The Union began on January :, :c:, was considerably
diminished with the proclamation of the Irish Free State in :,:: and its
actual institution in :,::, but arguably has survived into the present day
in Northern Ireland. Its uidity and survival make a fascinating study.
Early on, the Union was quickly redened as an instrument of Protestant
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o ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
ascendancy, and was used to expand Catholic and farmer rights after the
:,cs. It was used against itself to dis-establish the Church of Ireland in
:;c, and nally greened at the end of the nineteenth century in prepara-
tion for Home Rulethat is to say, redened in a manner more accessible
to nationalists.
10
As Joyce came of age, however, despite some vestiges of
this uidity in Unionism, the movement was beginning to calcify and
harden. His portraits of Unionists correspondingly capture this growing
stasis and the way in which Protestantism from the North, while far from
monolithic, was moving toward a default identity in order to stop Catho-
lic progress toward Home Rule.
Joyce was always interested in the North of Ireland, even traveling to
Belfast in the fall of :,c, to explore whether he might open a cinema
there,
11
and he was exposed to a range of Protestant representatives of the
North from his early days. For instance, he knew the mild-mannered Mr.
Magee of the National Library, who appears as John Eglinton in Ulysses,
and who has been deemed by Padraic Colum to be sufciently Calvinist
to make him ironic toward the proponents of an Irish nationalism that,
as it seemed to him, would obviously eventuate in a Catholic state. . . .
12
Magee was the subject of two occasional poems by Joyce: the rst, John
Eglinton, my Jo, John, that he co-wrote with Oliver Gogarty in Scots
dialect, and the second, There once was a Celtic librarian, which ends,
But it seems to me/Hes a avor thats more Presbyterian.
13
Joyce clearly held out some hope even as late as :,:c that the more
liberal strand of Unionism might ally with proponents of political nation-
alism to effect Home Rule. In his :,:c essay, The Home Rule Comet,
Joyce notes that the jibes of the warlike Welsh minister [Lloyd George]
pale before the vulgar vituperations of Conservatives like representative
Smith [Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead], and the well-known
lawyer Carson [Sir Edward Carson, the Ulster Unionist leader] and the
director of the National Review, while the two Irish factions, forgetting
their common enemy, have waged underground war in an attempt to
exhaust the gamut of coarse language (CW ::c). Even while he damns
Carson, who would quickly become a hero of Ulster Unionists for his
opposition to Home Rule, he suggests that the two Irish factions, the
nationalists and unionists, have a common enemy in the English. When
he then notes, we nd the cause of Anglican Protestantism and concilia-
tory Nationalism under the guidance of a religious renegade and a con-
verted Fenian (::c), he is referring to Arthur Balfour and William
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rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis o,
OBrien. OBrien was a land agitator, nationalist politician, and journal-
ist who re-entered parliament in :,:c after founding, in the interests of
conciliation and conference with unionists, a new party, the All-for-
Ireland League.
14
While Joyce seems to evince some hope in OBriens
party here, he shortly thereafter criticizes Balfour, whose orthodox army
has met with three consecutive clashes under his vacillating ag (::c),
along with OBrien, who has become what every good fanatic becomes
when his fanaticism dies before he does. Now he ghts in league with the
Unionist magistrates . . . (:::). Joyces hope for a unionist/nationalist
alliance under OBrien is quickly subsumed by his fear that OBrien is in
league with the Unionist magistrates. Moreover, his use of fanatic
here repeats, as we shall see, his similar usage of it in his earlier essay,
Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages, where he refers to the Calvinist
and Lutheran fanatics from across the sea (CW :o:).
Despite the emergence of many Northern Protestants with nationalist
sympathies during this period,
15
Joyces relatively negative attitude toward
Ulster Protestants was likely made worse because of Ulster Unionisms
(represented by Carson) emergence as the dominant force in Irish Union-
ism at this time, and also through his dealing with George Roberts, the
head of Maunsel and Company, who has been described as a refugee
from Belfast of Protestant and Unionist background.
16
In :,::, when
Maunsel and Company still had not made a nal decision on publishing
Dubliners, Joyce wrote a public letter denouncing the company both to
Sinn Fein and to the Northern Whig of Belfast, and sought the opinion of
Henry Blackwood Price, the Ulster Protestant assistant manager of the
Eastern Telegraph Company in Trieste, who would later become the
model for Mr. Deasy in the Nestor episode of Ulysses.
17
The letter,
excluding the controversial passage about Edward VII in Ivy Day in the
Committee Room, to which Roberts rst objected, was published in the
Northern Whig on August :o, :,:: (SL :,;,,). That Joyceby then
known often to disparage Unionists in his essays and ctionsought out
a Protestant publication (despite its early nineteenth-century reputation
as a radical newspaper, sympathetic to Catholic rights) shows his despera-
tion to publish Dubliners by this point in his career.
18
Padraic Colum
relates that when he went with Joyce to George Robertss ofce in the
summer of :,:: to discuss Maunsels refusal to publish Dubliners, Rob-
erts went on being sulky, and His ugly attitude gave Joyce the sense of
an enmity that was deep-seated and irrational.
19
Colum does not explic-
itly state the source of this enmity, but given Robertss objection to the
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oo ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
passage on Edward VII in Ivy Day, his likely cultural and religious bias
against Catholics may well have reared its ugly head here.
20
On the train
back to Trieste after this bizarre meeting with Roberts, Joyce would call
attention to the publishers position as an Ulster-Scotsman by having him
refer to Stepmother Erin and terming him [a] red-headed Scotchman
in his broadside poem Gas from a Burner, which he wrote on the back
of his contract with Maunsel for Dubliners.
21
And within two months, he
would write vituperatively about Unionists in his sub-editorial for the
Freemans Journal, Politics and Cattle Disease (CW :,:). While the
publication history of Dubliners is well-known in Joyce studies, the possi-
bly sectarian nature of Robertss motivation to reject the volume is virtu-
ally unknown. I offer this example of Joyces unpleasant encounter(s) with
Roberts to show just how important to his career was this very negative
interaction with a hostile Protestant from the North of Ireland.
A tremendous amount of criticism treated Joyces vexed and complex
relationship to Catholicism, most recently and protably by Roy Gott-
fried and Geert Lernout.
22
But there has been relatively little research
done on Joyces attitude toward Protestantism in its English, Irish, and
particularly Northern Irish strands. Hope Howell Hodgkins has analyzed
Joyces view of the modern Protestant gentleman (represented by Mr.
Kernan) in his short story Grace, concluding that Joyce stood at an
equal distance from Catholic belief and from modern liberal Protestant-
ism.
23
Currently, several critics have begun to examine Joyces attitude
toward different manifestations of Protestantism. For instance, Gottfried
has convincingly established that Joyces interest in Protestantism (partic-
ularly Anglicanism) is consistent with both his attraction to schism and
aestheticism. Gottfried has also insightfully assessed Joyces early interest
in the Apocalypse of Saint John, beginning with his transcription of that
book when he copied it from the King James Version of the New Testa-
ment, and shown how his general literary interest in Protestant texts
serves his early campaign to seize his own freedom and his later efforts
to liberate Irish national consciousness from its dening provincialism.
24
Emily Bloom has argued for a performative reading of Joyces Anglo-Irish
Protestant characters Crofton in Ivy Day in the Committee Room and
Mr. Browne in The Dead, in part to show how Joyces inclusion coun-
tered the absence of members of this community on the Abbey Stage by
the Irish Literary Revivalists.
25
Lernout has traced Joyces fascination with
Protestantism through his lifelong interest in the chequered history of
the catholic church, including the midnineteenth century anti-Catholic
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rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis o;
propaganda movement.
26
Finally, Richard Barlow has recently explored
what he sees as Joyces complex attitude toward the culturally mixed Scots
and Scottish culture in Finnegans Wake, arguing that Joyce was aware of
the links between Irish and Scottish histories and the way these connec-
tions created plural, hybrid societies in each country.
27
Thus far, how-
ever, no one has offered an in-depth exploration of Joyces attitude toward
intertwined strands of Protestantism and Unionist political belief as prac-
ticed in the North of Ireland
On the rare occasions when the issue of Joyces view of Ulster Union-
ism or Northern Irish Protestantism (not always synonymous) is
addressed, there has been a tendency to regard his mostly pejorative por-
traits of Northern Protestants as an extension of his perceived rejection of
both Catholicism and nationalism. Norman Vance, for example, posits
that Joyce equates his rejection of Protestant Unionism with his rejection
of narrow Catholic nationalism in part by having Mr. Deasy in the
Nestor episode of Ulysses blame Jews for Irelands economic problems,
just as the Citizen and some of his cronies blame them in the Cyclops
episode.
28
Similarly, Thomas Hofheinz argues that Joyces rejection of
Northern Irish Protestantism, epitomized by characters such as Mr.
Deasy, actually demonstrates how he blurs the ideological distinctions
of conicting parties in the Irish North and South by viewing them from
his avowedly lower-middle-class perspective as common competitors
scrabbling for the crumbs left by entrenched power and wealth.
29
And
in his reading of both unpublished and published passages from Finnegans
Wake, Bernard McKenna holds that Joyce believed that the supposedly
pure and segregated Presbyterian and Catholic communities in the
North of Ireland actually possess an integrated identity.
30
But such com-
parisons falter in the face of Enda Duffys argument that Joyces Ulysses is
the book of Irish postcolonial independence and Mary Lowe-Evanss
recent argument about Joyces nostalgia toward pre-Devotional Revolu-
tion Catholicism.
31
As it turns out, Joyce does endorse a particular type of
nationalism that is shot through with socialism and has an extremely
complicated, sometimes ambivalent and wistful, attitude toward this ear-
lier form of Irish Catholicism. But as Unionist identity coalesced around
resistance to Home Rule in the early :,ccs, Joyces depictions of Protes-
tants from Northern Ireland such as Alleyne in Counterparts and sym-
bols of Protestant triumphalism such as the statue of King William III in
The Dead became increasingly negative. In Dubliners, there is a darker
tone to his depictions of Northern Protestant characters than we nd in
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o ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
his criticism of nationalist characters (excluding Miss Ivors in The
Dead and the Citizen from Ulysses). He often presents them as belliger-
ent, even bellicose, driven by materialism and power, determined to keep
Catholics in their inferior social and vocational positions.
Joyces Dublin milieu is repeatedly penetrated by gurative and literal
Protestant interlopers from the North whose presence renders many of
Dublins Catholic inhabitants uneasy. The present essay traces this pat-
tern through Clay, Eveline, Counterparts, Ivy Day in the Com-
mittee Room, and The Dead, suggesting that Joyce feared the North
of Ireland as a nightmarish land populated by watchful, hard-hearted
Unionists who would block the institution of Home Rule. Repeatedly in
his ction, Joyce stereotypes Protestants from the North of Ireland as
intransigent, bigoted, and bullying, even though he would subtly and
sympathetically portray other outsiders to the island, nowhere more
movingly than with his Jewish character Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. If, as
he would claim later in :,c; in Ireland at the Bar, the public conceives
of the Irish as highwaymen with distorted faces, roaming the night with
the object of taking the hide of every Unionist (CW :,), after a period
during which he hoped for Protestant accommodation of Home Rule,
Joyce himself turned toward similar distortions in his portrayal of Protes-
tants from the North of Ireland in a veiled attempt to suggest their grow-
ing intransigence toward Home Rule. Always drawn to the power of oral
rhetoric, Joyce often presents the voices of his Northern Protestants as
shrill and demanding and, in the case of Alleyne from Counterparts,
he shows them as watchful manipulators of their Catholic inferiors. As
Cheryl Herr has pointed out, this trait is generally associated with Joyces
surveillance-driven Dublin.
32
NORTH TOWARD DUBLINERS
Joyces ctional portraits of Northern Protestants who were present in
largely Catholic Dublin would quickly concretize what he perceived as
their hardness and militancy, which grew markedly stronger during the
Home Rule crisis in the early :,ccs. He wrote Dubliners in the midst of
a rapid growth in Irish political radicalization and the stories reect this
change and strife, often by negatively showing the rise of hyper-
nationalists such as the mother in Grace, along with (usually pejorative)
depictions of the persistent presence of nancial capital and associated
characters from what is now Northern Ireland. Willard Potts has argued
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rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis o,
that [t]hough the relationship between Catholics and Protestants might
not be considered a major subject in Dubliners, this issue crops up early
in the volume and ultimately gures in over a third of the stories.
33
Potts remains the only commentator heretofore to treat the subject of
sectarianism in these short stories in any depth, and even he badly mis-
leads readers by downplaying the importance of sectarianism in The
Dead, arguing that Joyce does not take, or at least does not treat, seri-
ously . . . the relationship between the two cultures.
34
Potts thus relegates
his analysis of Protestantism in the story to Joyces critique of the unctu-
ous Protestant character Mr. Browne, overlooking Gabriels troubled
response to Miss Ivorss appellation for himWest Britonand his
thoughts of Unionist intransigence in the form of the statue of King Wil-
liam III on College Green in Dublin.
35
Mr. Deasy, from the Nestor
episode in Ulysses, would later epitomize what Joyce had come to feel was
North Protestant resistance to Home Rule and Catholic civil rights by the
early :,ccs. Deasy follows several Protestants from the North of Ireland
that populate Joyces earlier ction, such as the dominating boss Alleyne in
Counterparts and the harsh-speaking student from the North in Ste-
phens class in Chapter , of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Throughout Dubliners, the prosperous economic presence of the North
of Ireland and its majority-Protestant inhabitants contrasts with the pov-
erty of the poorer Catholic Dubliners. Early in Clay, for example,
Maria takes out her purse with the silver clasps and read again the words
A Present from Belfast. She was very fond of that purse because Joe had
brought it to her ve years before when he and Alphy had gone to Belfast
on a Whit-Monday trip (D ,). The purses association with Belfast links
nancial capital with the North, which was then an industrial powerhouse
with its factories and shipyards, in contrast to the largely impecunious,
nancially undeveloped southern part of Ireland. Joyces portrayal of
Deasy in Ulysses also associates that representative of Southern Protestant-
ism with a pocketbook (U :.:c;o,).
Marias benign perspective on Belfast in Clay seems to jar at rst
with another very critical Northern-inected incident in Evelineboth
from the point of view of the protagonist and one commentator. Trevor
Williams has argued that Dubliners dependence on outside agencies,
symbolized by Alleyne in Counterparts, is also exemplied in the devel-
opment of Evelines neighborhood by a Belfast man, one contributory
factor in her spiritual impoverishment.
36
While Williams somewhat
overstates the impact of this housing development on Evelines spiritual
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;c ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
life, its economic and social effect is real. The passage in question occurs
in the second paragraph of the story as she sits at the window and watches
the evening darkness grow. As she stares at the new red houses, she
recalls, One time there used to be a eld there in which they used to
play every evening with other peoples children. Then a man from Belfast
bought the eld and built houses in itnot like their little brown houses
but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue
used to play together in that eldthe Devines, the Waters, the Dunns,
little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters (D :;). While
this Northern developer took what seems like the last green space near
Evelines home, his houses likely were an improvement over the existing
housing stock and may well have led to better living conditions for the
inhabitants. The local housing that is presented in Dubliners usually
emphasizes the squalid poverty of its inhabitants: For instance, Little
Chandler pities the poor stunted houses near the lower quays that
seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the river-banks,
their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupeed by the panorama of
sunset and waiting for the rst chill of night to bid them arise, shake
themselves and begone (D ,,).
37
Yet more ominously, Eveline lost some
freedom and a nonsectarian play-space that gathered together a variety of
children (the Waters are English and have now gone back there) because
of the intrusion of the Belfast developer.
Finally, recalling the temporary nature of the housing where Chandler
lives, this reference in Eveline juxtaposes the power of Belfast capital
and the necessity for emigration on the part of many impoverished
Dubliners. She does contemplate leaving because of her fathers abuse and
because of the excitement that Frank generates in her, but also because
she makes relatively little in the Stores (D :). She stays and will suffer
continued torments at the hands of her father, which nonetheless may be
better than the life abroad she would have had with Frank, but other
characters in the stories choose to emigrateto the industrial heartland
of Clydeside and the Lagan Valley: Mr. Kernans sons in Grace have
found work in Glasgow and Belfast.
38
The way in which nancial capital circulates in Eveline and Grace
largely in the hands of Ulster Protestantsand is subtly linked to a
particular religious and political outlook, suggests Joyces understanding
of the intertwined nature of religion, politics, and economics in the Prot-
estant culture of the North of Ireland. Tom Inglis has identied how this
society was founded on a Protestant habitus, a Protestant disposition and
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rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ;:
way of reading the world which united Protestants into a single commu-
nity. As in the Republic, this habitus became a central part of religious
capital which, in turn, became essential to attaining other forms of
capital. . . . [B]eing a good Protestant in the North remained central
within Protestant society to economic, political and social success as well
as to identity, communication and interpersonal relations in everyday
life.
39
When Joyces Northern Protestants are taken out of this commu-
nity and plunged into the Catholic habitus of Dublin, their tendency is
to turn inward and be defensive. Alleyne in Counterparts epitomizes
such an isolated position.
The intertwined nature of sectarianism and contemporary Irish politics
in Counterparts has rarely played a major role in discussions of the
story, and no critic has fully traced this important subtext. Pottss reading
of the supposed similarities between Alleyne and his employer Farrington
is particularly disturbing because although he recognizes how Joyce juxta-
poses these two characters to demonstrate sectarian difference, he
believes that Joyce means his readers to regard their similarities as having
greater importance than the perhaps more obvious differences between
the two men.
40
While certainly Farrington and Alleyne are linked by
their recourse to violence, notably through Farringtons beating of his son
in the conclusion after being verbally abused by Alleyne in the beginning
of the story, the Catholic Farrington, as a colonized subject, is uncon-
sciously imitating his colonizer, the Protestant Alleyne. Pottss willingness
to elide the profound differences between these two characters is startling
because he often traces sectarianism in Joyces ction in a more nuanced
fashion. Perhaps equally unsatisfying is Geert Lernouts claim that there
is hardly any reference to religion in Counterparts besides the boy
offering to say a Hail Mary for his father in return for not being
beaten.
41
In fact, Joyce characterizes the watchful Mr. Alleyne in Counterparts
as a domineering, Protestant, foreign presence in Farringtons Dublin
ofce who threatens verbal and physical violence against his allegedly lazy,
alcoholic employee. In his reading of the rst section of Counterparts
as a parody of the Crucixion with Farrington as a downtrodden Christ
gure, Donald Torchiana observes that Alleyne, the Northern God of
the ofce, looks down literally and guratively on Farrington, whose trip
upstairs to Alleynes ofce has taken him to the place of a skull, Gol-
gotha, for Mr. Alleynes bald skull thoroughly dominates this heaven.
42
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;: ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
Protestants such as Alleyne helped to relegate the vast majority of Catho-
lics to subservient vocations at this time. Terence Brown notes that the
Protestant population of Dublin during the rst decade of the twentieth
century was about :;%, observing further that their near-total control
of law, medicine, banking, business (including brewing and distilling and
biscuit-making) led many Catholics into low-level jobs such as clerking,
serving as a shop assistant or as a low-paid ofcial in some government
ofce.
43
Indeed, after insulting Alleyne and leaving the ofce in the story,
Farrington recalls that Mr. Alleyne had hounded little Peake out of the
ofce in order to make room for his own nephew (D ;,). We might even
be led to see a pattern in which the Protestant Alleyne is slowly replacing
the supposedly lazy Catholics in the ofce with allegedly industrious Prot-
estants, especially with those from the North. Certainly Alleynes willing-
ness to see Farrington as slothful recalls the centuries-old belief on the
part of some Northern Protestants that Catholicism was believed to
induce sloth and slavishness of mind in its adherents, making them inca-
pable of liberty, virtue, and entry to polite society (Elliott :;c;:). Such
a prejudice characterizes colonizers views of the colonized throughout the
world, but it operates with special force in the relationship between the
Northern Protestant Alleyne over the Catholic Farrington in the story.
One veteran commentator on North of Ireland culture and politics, John
Wilson Foster, has quoted Albert Memmis assertion that The mythical
portrait of the colonized includes an unbelievable laziness, and that of the
colonizer, a virtuous taste for action. At the same time the colonizer
suggests that employing the colonized is not very protable, thereby
authorizing his unreasonable wages. Foster notes the aptness of this myth
for Protestant perceptions of Catholics: This is a portrait, varnished
by Lord Brookeborough, of the Catholic, North and South, vestigially
alive today.
44
Alleynes violent activity in Counterparts, his virtuous
taste for action, stands in stark contrast to what he sees as Farringtons
unbelievable laziness, a dialectic of labor and inactivity that dooms
Farrington.
Alleyne even draws a sort of cordon sanitaire around himlikely to
protect himself from the dirty Catholics surrounding him in the ofce.
He occupies an ofce set apart from the others, probably implicitly sug-
gesting both his Calvinist belief in predestination and his rejection of
representative democracy. If Gabriel Conroys polished and shining hair,
glasses, and clean-shaven face would connote his superciality in The
Dead, Alleynes ofce door and immaculate physical appearance signify
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rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ;,
his exalted isolation from the lower ofce workers. Signicantly, his door
plate is polished brass, a blazon of his cleanliness (next to Godliness, as
the old saw goes), whereas the whites of Farringtons eyes were dirty
(;c). Alleyne himself wears gold-rimmed glasses on a clean-shaven
face . . . (;c). His head is hairless and polished (;:). The contrast
bespeaks a particular emphasis, particularly in Northern Ireland, that
many Protestants have placed on cleanliness and maintaining a sparkling
house with a bit of china to contrast with their supposedly unclean Catho-
lic neighbors.
45
Moreover, if Mr. Alleyne is a Northern god, he also can be seen as
another type of lorda somewhat accommodationist Unionist landlord
gure, lording it over the displaced Farrington, even while tolerating him
and giving him limited autonomy. Farringtons name, as Donald Torchi-
ana has pointed out, suggests he is more suited to working the land than
to serving as a clerk in an urban ofce.
46
Thus, the urban Protestant
Alleynes violence and willingness to re the rurally oriented and Catholic
Farrington suggest an analogy between domineering Unionist landlords
and their often-Catholic tenants, particularly the fraught history of such
relationships in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth
century. Ironically, Protestant dominance persisted despite the Land Acts
of :,c, and :,c,, made possible by Westminster under the Union, which
enabled many (usually) Catholic tenants to buy out their (largely Prot-
estant) landlords.
47
Alvin Jackson cites the historian W. E. Vaughans
contention that the Union facilitated the revolution in landed proprie-
torship which occurred in the late nineteenth century; Vaughan has spec-
ulated that an Irish parliament, containing a strong local propertied
element, would have baulked at the kinds of social and contractual change
which Westminster was willing to pursue in Ireland.
48
Even at this point
in Irish history, it garnered support from Irish, particularly Ulster, Prot-
estants, who saw it as a guarantee against Catholic political and economic
supremacy in Ireland. Landlords came to fear the Catholic democracy;
and they were often prepared to accept the creeping reforms imposed by
Westminster as an alternative to the possibly more radical behavior of a
future Dublin assembly.
49
Like these Protestant landlords, Alleyne has
tried to work with Farrington in the past, but a combination of Farring-
tons purposeful shirking of work and mimicking Alleynes accent leads
this Northern Irish gure into verbal violence. This hostility anticipates
the eventual violent offshoots of Ulster Unionism beginning around :,::
with the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force.
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; ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
Although he was a city-dweller throughout his life, Joyce took a special
interest in the essentially feudal land system in Ireland early in his career
and supported the growing tenants rights movement. Dominic Manga-
niello argues that Joyce followed the precedent of Michael Davitt in The
Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (:,c), a book Joyce had with him in Trieste,
and has traced how Blooms position as a backtothelander in the
Cyclops episode of Ulysses was likely Joyces own. The position is mod-
eled on Benjamin Tuckers anarchistic version of the Land League, which
transcended Davitts mere agrarian socialism.
50
Several commentators
have also pointed out that Mr. Deasy in the Nestor episode of Ulysses
is likely named for the Deasy Act, which assigned to landlords ,, per
cent of the improvements made by tenants, without any compensation
for the tenants. Even for the Irish landlord class, it was too brutal and
discriminatory an act ever to be put into effect. . . .
51
Hofheinz has
noted additionally that The Deasy Act reafrmed existing procedures
by which landlords could evict tenants when tenancies expired or before
such time if they were not paying their rents.
52
Alleyne pregures Deasy
as a symbol of Ulster Unionism, particularly in his willingness to evict
Farrington from his property by dismissing him from the job. Joyces
disdain for Unionist attempts to block Irish cattle from English markets
would more fully emerge ve years later in his :,:: essay, Politics and
Cattle Disease, but Counterparts anticipates such a sympathetic stance
toward Irish agriculture by privileging the viewpoint of Farrington, who,
it is suggested, has been displaced from his natural environs of the farm,
while rejecting the stance of the hardheaded urban Unionist Alleyne.
Moreover, their struggle also symbolizes the contemporary Northern
Unionist opposition to Home Rule. Just as Anne Fogarty has recently
argued that Joyces portrait of the silent Crofton in Ivy Day in the Com-
mittee Room is set at the very moment when Unionism in Southern
Ireland faced the challenges posed by the Home Rule movement,
53
I
would suggest that Joyces characterization of Alleyne allegorizes the chal-
lenges posed by the Home Rule movement to Northern Unionists. In
this reading, Farrington, who merely wants to go his own way and be left
alone (recalling the Sinn Fein motto, Ourselves alone) is repeatedly
hemmed in and brought to heel by the dominating little Alleyne, likely
representing the minority province of Ulster with its majority population
of Protestants opposed to Irish independence. Alleyne is derived from
the Gaelic ail, from which we get Alan, which coupled with in or
yne (for the diminutive) means little rock or even more suggestively,
PAGE 74 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:32:57 PS
rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ;,
headstone.
54
Such an etymology suggests Alleyne as a little rock in Far-
ringtons way and, by extension, a deadly obstacle to Home Rule. This
view of Alleyne accords with Michael Levensons general argument that
for Joyce, colonial subjection . . . is a blocking force so thick and heavy
and ancient that it disables all who live within its encircling shadow.
55
British colonialism is given special force by its association with North
of Ireland Protestantism in Counterparts where Joyce draws on the
stereotypical view of Northern Irish Presbyterians, summed up by
A. T. Q. Stewart, as having a difcult and cantankerous disposition
which is characteristic of a certain kind of political radicalism. This
alleged disposition is compounded by the Northern Protestants recogni-
tion of themselves as a minority in Catholic-dominated Ireland, making
them defensive, intolerant and uncritically loyal to traditions and
institutions.
56
Joyce characterizes Alleyne through his shrill voice and terrible temper.
The entire story turns upon the past linguistic conict between Alleyne
and Farrington, which signies their sectarian animosity. When the story
begins, we are told that [t]he bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker
went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland
accent:Send Farrington here! (D ;c). Alleynes Northern accent has
been a source of fun previously for his employee: Farrington has never
gotten along with him ever since the day Mr. Alleyne had overheard him
mimicking his North of Ireland accent to amuse Higgins and Miss Parker:
that had been the beginning of it (;,;o). Trevor L. Williams observes
that all the modiers in the opening sentence of this story convey the
impression of Alleynes power, a power conrmed in the imperialism of
the imperative mood. . . .
57
Joyce had been meditating on such rhetoric
since he wrote The Study of Languages, where he contrasts the rhetoric
of hardness, which is sufcient for at unraised statements, over
against the language of ideas, which are elevated (CW :;). Alleynes
hard power in conversing with Farrington is also conrmed rhetorically
through his switch from the imperative mood into the interrogative, dur-
ing which he employs a phrase of command common in Ulster at the
time: Do you mind me now? (D ;:; my emphasis).
58
Alleynes temper, moreover, reveals itself in the physiognomy of his
head: The head itself was so pink and hairless that it seemed like a large
egg reposing on the papers (;:). Later, when Farrington fails to copy the
last two letters, Mr. Alleyne began a tirade of abuse that was so bitter
and violent that the man could hardly restrain his st from descending
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;o ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
upon the head of the manikin before him (;). After Farrington insults
Alleyne, his boss ushed to the hue of a wild rose and his mouth
twitched with a dwarf s passion. He shook his st in the mans face till it
seemed to vibrate like the knob of some electric machine (;,). Labeling
Farrington twice an impertinent rufan! Alleyne displays the Unionist
view of the Irish that Joyce critiqued in Ireland at the Bar, where he
remarks, the public conceives of the Irish as highwaymen with distorted
faces, roaming the night with the object of taking the hide of every
Unionist (CW :,). Red in face and violent in both his voice and actions,
Alleyne seems to embody the common Ulster Protestant slogan that
Deasy with his angry white moustache (U :.:) would later voice in
Ulysses: Ulster will ght and Ulster will be right (U :.,,;,). And
indeed, Joyce renders Alleyne a forceful rock upon which Farrington
founders, leading the clerk into a drinking binge that night and nally to
the physical abuse of his son.
Alleynes quivering rage is beyond the pale of ordinary hostility and
accords with David Lloyds description of rage generally as
a most un-Hegelian moment of suspension or stasis whose vertigi-
nous oscillations are set in motion by a reciprocal annihilationthe
annihilation of the subject in the one who rages and the disappear-
ance of the subject in the one who witnesses the obliterating gaze of
the enraged. To be enraged is to be beside oneself, out of oneself; it
is to be possessed by a force that is indifferent to the subject in oneself
and to the subject in another.
59
In confronting Farrington, Alleyne is rendered inhuman and possessed by
the force of his towering rage: He has a dwarf s passion and his st
vibrates like the knob of some electric machine, while Farrington, con-
versely, views Alleyne as a manikin because of his anger. This recipro-
cal annihilation has occurred repeatedly in their relationship. Earlier in
the story, when Alleyne verbally attacks Farrington for the rst time in
the story, Farrington stared xedly at the polished skull . . . gauging its
fragility. A spasm of rage gripped his throat for a few moments then
passed . . . (D ;:). Nowhere else in Dubliners are there such moments of
intense angerreprisals upon reprisals that stem from irrational sectarian-
ism, a process that certainly begins with Farringtons mocking of Alleynes
accent but which is ramped up considerably by the Ulster Protestant
Alleynes clear hatred of the Catholic Farrington.
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rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ;;
The Ulster Unionist Council was founded March ,, :,c, to oppose
Home Rule for Ireland, and Counterparts was nished by July ::, :,c,,
the traditional highlight of Ulster Protestant triumphalism in the North
of Ireland. The Twelfth, as it is commonly known, celebrates King
Williams defeat of James II at Londonderry/Derry in :o,c, and is read as
the defeat of invading Catholics by Protestant defenders. That Joyce n-
ished the story on The Glorious Twelfth, another variation on the
moniker for hard-core Unionists, is almost surely happenstance. How-
ever, the founding of the Ulster Unionist Council earlier in the same year
that he wrote Counterparts must have helped spur his satirical depic-
tion of the Protestant Alleynes peremptory manner and piercing voice.
Alvin Jackson has pointed out that the founding of the Ulster Unionist
Council represented a sea-change in Unionism because [i]t institutional-
ized the bond with the Orange Order, and with the more militant tradi-
tions of Irish Protestantism, along with helping to foster a partitionist
mentality, representing, as it did, only Northern Unionism.
60
Thus,
beginning in :,c,, Irish Unionism effectively and rapidly became Ulster
Unionism, retreating to the stronghold of northeastern Ireland with its
more militant grassroots loyalists and gradually ceding the rest of Ireland
to the nationalists, a defensive, isolated posture that may be reected in
Alleynes lonely ofce perched two oors above his workers. Other politi-
cal elements went into the story, of course: John McCourt argues that
Joyces discussions in Trieste with the members of the Society for the
Protection of Clerks may even have given him the idea for the hopeless
situation in which Farrington, the copy clerk, nds himself in Counter-
parts.
61
No critic to date, however, has argued that the events transpir-
ing in the North of Ireland ideologically inected the battle between
Alleyne and Farrington. Yet Joyce was following events in Ireland, includ-
ing the North, very closely during these years. For example, he would
mention the Belfast riots and cattle-raiding connected with peasant evic-
tions in August :,c; in Ireland at the Bar, along with two violent
deaths in Ireland . . . at the hands of British troops in Belfast, where the
soldiers red without warning on an unarmed crowd and killed a man
and woman (CW :,, :cc). Farringtons ght at work, where he
attempts to repel the verbal volleys of the vehement Alleyne, recapitulates
the type of attacks on Catholics in the North during the early years of the
twentieth century by loyalists, and it reects the history of terrible sectar-
ian violence on both sides.
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; ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
Intriguingly, Alleynes verbal violence and threatened physical violence
toward Farrington, read through the gathering alarm among many in the
Northern Protestant community during this time period that Home Rule
would be Rome Rule, suggests that, despite his dominance, his rage
stems from his fear (especially as a minority in heavily Catholic Ireland)
that he could soon become the colonized. John Wilson Foster, himself
raised in the working-class Protestant community of East Belfast in the
years following Joyces death, has precisely articulated this fear, which
reached a fever pitch as Catholics gained civil rights throughout the twen-
tieth century: The Ulster Protestant, feeling the perpetual threat of being
taken over, already experiences in some sense, and exhibits the symptoms
of, the condition of being colonized. His legendary intransigence is the
anticipation of a calamity.
62
The fragility of Alleynes little egg-
shaped head (D ;:, ;;,) and his overall diminutive stature suggest just
this position of political fragility that he must feel in Catholic Dublin,
despite its being run largely by Protestants at the time. Writing in :,,
Joyces observation in his essay, Force, uncannily anticipates both the
temporary power of a bully like Farrington and the waning power of the
colonizer: When right is perverted into might, or more properly speak-
ing, when justice is changed to sheer strength, a subjugation ensuesbut
transient not lasting (CW :).
63
And indeed, the much larger Farrington, who is tall and of great bulk
(D ;c)perhaps representative of the heavily majority Catholic presence
in three of the provinces of Irelandalso tends toward physical violence,
signifying the growing desire of Irish Catholics in the early :,ccs to seize
what they viewed was rightly theirs. Such a desire was not just sought
after by nascent republican movements like the Irish Republican Brother-
hood. The handbook of the Catholic Association insisted in :,c: that
[t]here is no earthly use in people talking about what our forefathers
suffered for the faith if we today lack the guts to say Boo to any Protestant
in the land . . . we must ght with all our might until we have laid our
hands on as much of the power, place and position of this country as
our numbers, our ability and our unabated historical claims entitle us to
demand.
64
Farringtons rage in the passages from the story cited pre-
viously may well symbolize the new ghting spirit in the air of early :,ccs
Ireland on the part of many Catholics and epitomized by the Catholic
Associations bellicose rhetoric along with the Fenian elements of Sinn
Fein.
65
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rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ;,
There are at least two likely biographical models for Alleynethe rst a
contemporary of Joyces father in business, and the second, Joyces uncle,
William Murray. Ellmann argues that Alleynes character is based on a
man who stole funds from the Dublin and Chapelizod Distilling Com-
pany, where John Joyce worked as secretary. Once John Joyce discovered
Henry Alleyn was stealing from the company, he called a meeting of the
stockholders and Alleyn left the rm. While Ellmann notes that Joyce
liked paying off his fathers scores, Joyce also likely felt he could settle
the score with Northern Protestants, whom he saw as obstacles to Home
Rule (JJ :o). Associating Alleyne not so much with moneyas his fathers
thieving friend was in his mindbut with force led Joyce to write the
passages in the story that witheringly critique this representative of North-
ern Protestantism (the original Henry Alleyn was a Corkman, like Joyces
father). Furthermore, while Joyces uncle was Catholic, his name, Wil-
liam, suggests a further basis to Joyces positioning of Alleyne as a North-
ern Protestant because that name can signify William of Orange and
associated Protestant triumphalism. Morris Beja notes that Stanislaus
points out the tyranny and brutality of Uncle Willie toward his chil-
dren, even recording in a diary entry for :,c how one of his children
promised to say a Hail Mary for him if he did not beat him.
66
Thus,
Joyces corrosive portrayal of the brutal, abrasive Alleyne has a biographi-
cal/etymological basis that reects his lifelong rejection of force and vio-
lence, particularly as practiced by loyalists protesting the trajectory of Irish
Home Rule. In Force, Joyce wrote that Subjugation is almost of the
essence of an empire and when it ceases to conquer, it ceases to be. It is
an innate part of human nature. . . . Politically it is a dominant factor
and a potent power in the issues of nations (CW :). Within seven years,
when writing Counterparts, Joyce would return to this idea, distilling
the essays thesis in the person of Alleyne. Although he also reveals the
infectious power of force in Farringtons climactic beating of his son, the
counterpart of Alleynes verbal abuse of him earlier in the day, Joyce
chillingly traces the origin of force in the story to the Northern Irish
Protestant employer. While Joyce clearly deplores Farringtons abusive
violence, Alleyne is the real villain of the story who manipulates (Catholic)
peons from above with little thought for their well-being.
It is illuminating to contrast the voluble, ofcious Alleyne, a symbol of
Unionist intransigence and domination who communicates with great
ease and clarity through the speaking tube, with Joyces narrative two
years later about the Irish-speaking Myles Joyce in Ireland at the Bar.
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c ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
Myles Joyce cannot make himself understood to the English-administered
court during his murder trial and is summarily sentenced to death. Alley-
nes orders are swiftly obeyed and if they are not, the offending subordi-
nate will be red. His tendency toward aggressive rhetoric adheres to the
Presbyterian poet W. R. Rodgerss portrait of Northern Protestants in his
poem: I am Ulster, my people are an abrupt people/Who like the spiky
consonants in speech/And think the soft ones cissy. . . . An angular peo-
ple, brusque and Protestant,/For whom the word is still a ghting word,/
Who bristle into reticence at the sound of the round gift of the gab in
Southern mouths . . . .
67
Rodgerss poem is not entirely fair, of course,
because there are Protestants in Northern Ireland who supported Catholic
civil rights, in the past and in the present, but it captures the particular
stereotype of representatives of that community upon which Joyce draws
for his depiction of Alleyne in his trial of Farrington. When Joyce
describes the actual legal trial against Myles Joyce, he observes that the
accused seemed stupeed by all the judicial ceremony and despite the
interpreter, who translated only a fraction of his reply from Irish into
English, the old man began to talk, to protest, to shout, almost beside
himself with the anguish of being unable to understand or to make him-
self understood, weeping in anger and terror (CW :,;,). Joyce sees
the gure of this dumbfounded old man, a remnant of a civilization not
ours, deaf and dumb before his judge, as a symbol of the Irish nation
at the bar of public opinion (:,). The displaced Farrington, who nds
himself out of place in the urban milieu of Protestant-dominated Dublin,
is nally provoked, like Myles Joyce, into angry gesticulation and shout-
ing before his judge, Alleyne, and then reduced to smouldering anger
and revengefulness (D c). In beating his son at the storys conclusion,
Farrington falls into another Northern Protestant stereotype of the Cath-
olic Irishthe bellicose drunk. Thus, even as the Home Rule movement
was gathering strength in Ireland, Joyce suggests through his portrayal
of Alleynes treatment of Farrington in Counterparts that Northern
Protestants would remain a signicant obstacle toward Irish independence
in the North and through the positions of power they had assumed in the
capital, Dublin.
In the most ostensibly political story in Dubliners, Ivy Day in the
Committee Room, the character Crofton, who is recalled as a damned
decent Orangeman by Mr. Kernan in Grace (D :,), is termed a
very fat man (::c) and, unusually for Joyces Protestants, silent, both
PAGE 80 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:03 PS
rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis :
because he had nothing to say and because he considered his [nation-
alist] companions beneath him (:::). Once again, the Protestant charac-
ter is associated with wealth, signied by Croftons bulk and his blue
serge clothes (::c). Serge generally signies high-quality woolen woven
clothing and for a time, even had a specic association with Protestants
because Calvinist refugees from the Low Countries during the Wars of
Religion of the late :,ocs included many serge weavers, while many
Huguenot refugees in the early eighteenth century included many silk
and linen weavers.
68
While Crofton does nally observe about Parnell that
Our side of the house respects him because he was a gentleman (::,),
he fails to appreciate the oratorical qualities of Joe Hyness recitation of a
poem entitled The Death of Parnell, atly observing in a terse line of
free indirect discourse that it was a very ne piece of writing (::o).
Rendered as privileged but obtuse, the taciturn Crofton is likely not really
an Orangeman and thus escapes Joyces usual rendering of Protestants as
shrilly voluble and simplistically anti-Catholic, although his girth and
sartorial appearance do demarcate him as Other.
69
The North nally protrudes (or intrudes) even into The Dead, a
story often regarded as a celebration of Irish hospitality and good cheer.
While Joyce does evoke these cultural virtues, The Dead teasingly con-
cludes by subtly guring two different battles that had become key epi-
sodes in Unionist and, particularly, loyalist history as sites of death and
defeat for Catholics. Another way of putting this would be to say that
while the ghost of Michael Furey haunts both Gretta and Gabriel Conroy
at the end of Joyces greatest story, the gurative specters of the Battle of
the Boyne and the Battle of Aughrim also haunt the narrative and serve
as tting nal clues about his attitude toward Northern Protestants in
Dubliners.
After the party given by Gabriels aunts ends, Gabriel recounts an inci-
dent involving Johnny, a horse owned by his grandfather, Patrick Mor-
kan, who circles around the King William of Orange statue in College
Green. Johnny was used to walking repeatedly in a circle to drive the
[starch] mill owned by Morkan, and once when he encountered the
equestrian statue of King Billy, he began to walk round the statue
and embarrassed Morkan (D :c, ::). Potts reads this narrative as part of
Gabriels growing acceptance of his Irish Catholic roots, noting how
through its dependence on Dublin details, Gabriels story is as distinc-
tively Irish as Mr. Browns patter about Mrs. Cassidy because it is based
on Gabriels own family history.
70
And yet to conclude, as Potts does,
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: ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
by arguing that because this story is [i]nfused with the kindly humor
that Gabriel identies as a quality of the older generation, it also signals
an emerging sense of attachment to his people, rather misses the point.
71
Instead, Gabriels attempt to paint his grandfather as a ludicrous gure
exposes his own considerable cultural and religious anxieties, which
revolve around his continuing fear that the obnoxious Irish nationalist
Miss Ivors is rightthat although he is not Protestant, he is nonetheless
a West Briton (D :o,).
The Dutch woodcarver and sculptor Grinling Gibbons (:o:;::)
sculpted the statue of King William on horseback, which represented
him in Roman armor, crowned with a laurel wreath and carrying a trun-
cheon astride his horse,
72
and it was erected by the citizens of Dublin on
the eleventh anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, on July :, :;c:. The
statues Roman armor, laurel wreath, and truncheon signied continuity
between British and Roman imperial power and suggested its resonance
as a symbol of Protestant domination over Catholics. John Gibney argues
that although there were later statues erected of the Hanoverian kings
George I and George II elsewhere in Dublin, William III was undoubt-
edly more signicant than his Hanoverian successors: Here was the
defender of a Protestant constitution conveniently located outside the
building [the parliament house] that most obviously embodied Protestant
ascendancy.
73
Moreover, as Fintan Cullen has pointed out, this royal
statue held an important place in demonstrations of public loyalty to the
Crown. Throughout the eighteenth century, the birthday of William of
Orange on November was celebrated by representatives of the Crown,
city ofcials, and parliamentarians who marched from Dublin Castle
along Dame Street to College Green. Orange banners and ags were
placed around the statue of William and salutations were offered honor-
ing the savior of the constitution.
74
Additionally, annual celebrations
were held around the statue during the July commemorations of the Bat-
tle of the Boyne by a series of Williamite Associations in the early dec-
ades of the eighteenth century, as well as of the Volunteers and the Orange
Society in the :;;cs, and the statue remained a point of controversy
through the nineteenth century.
75
In fact, it had been a source of discord
and ill will from the very rst moment it appeared.
76
It was blown up
by Irish republicans in :,:, and was later replaced with a statue of
nineteenth-century Irish patriot and poet Thomas Davis.
Gabriel ostensibly tells the story to make fun of his grandfathers indig-
nation at being forced to drive in a circle round this statue, but taken in
PAGE 82 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:05 PS
rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ,
the context of his own earlier anger at being called a West Briton, it
suggestively reveals his own anxiety about and likeness to a major symbol
of Protestant triumphalism located at the time in the heart of Dublin.
Early in The Dead, Gabriel himself is characterized as a statue covered
in snow: A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his
overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his galoshes; and, as the buttons
of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened
frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and
folds (D :,,). Certainly, this description heightens our appreciation of
Gabriels emotional paralysis, but given his other connections to statues
in the storyboth the Duke of Wellington and King William IIIthis
passage initiates a motif of monumentality that suggests his identication
with and inability to stop pondering the lingering presence of sites of
Protestant/British intransigence scattered throughout Dublin.
Consider Gabriels identication with snowy monumentality as he
muses upon the winter scene outside later in the story to calm the riot of
his emotions stirred up by Miss Ivors before his Christmas dinner speech:
How pleasant it would be to talk out alone, rst along by the river and
then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the
trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument.
How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper table!
(:ooo;). The Duke of Wellington obelisk, the tallest in Europe, com-
memorates the Irish-born war hero of Waterloo and rises :c, feet in Dub-
lins Phoenix Park. It was originally planned for Dublins Merrion Square
but after residents objected, it was built in the park. Gabriels identica-
tion with the obelisks snowy stillness is not simply a desire for passivity,
however; it is an active invocation of British imperialism against the Irish
nationalist advances of Miss Ivors. Dwelling on the Iron Duke must
make him feel more heroic, British and lofty, though he seems to abandon
this stance by the storys conclusion and move toward a pacist stance,
signied by the image of the ubiquitous Irish snow.
77
Just as Joyce used the etymological signicance of Alleynes name to
connote his stony resistance to Catholics in Counterparts, he uses the
statue of King William in The Dead to imply continuing Unionist
intransigence toward Home Rule. In this regard, Richard Tillinghasts
argument that Patrick Morkans social insecurities literally revolve
around the stature [sic] of William of Orange, who secured English domi-
nation over Ireland by his victory of James II at the Battle of the Boyne
in :o,c unfortunately connes the political signicance of this story to
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ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
the past, when in fact it illuminates the continuing personal and public
inuence that Northern Protestantism exerted, politically and culturally,
in contemporary Dublin and indeed on the Home Rule question as a
whole.
78
Miss Ivorss hyperbolic nationalism is thus placed in a dialectical
relationship to this invocation of a symbol of Ulster Unionist resistance
to Irish independence.
The image of circularity evoked by Gabriels story about King William
nally goes beyond personal signicance to resonant publicly and politi-
cally. It suggests both the way in which Ulster Protestants were xated
upon Home Rule and Joyces belief that Ireland would repeatedly circle
round the Home Rule question until its nal resolution. Startlingly, this
image of King Billy eerily presages the arming of many Protestants in
the North of Ireland: ;:,: of them would sign the Solemn League and
Covenant to protect their Protestant version of Ulster in :,:, and ,c,ccc
would join the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force.
79
The statue thus
looks proleptically toward such an army and anticipates Mr. Deasy, the
Protestant gure as a Nestor-like horseman and horse gure in Ulysses,
who twice is described as stepping with gaitered feet (U :.:o, :.;).
While the statue of William of Orange and the memory of Patrick
Morkans circular journey around it haunt Gabriel at the end of the party,
another Protestant victory hovers over Grettas revelation to Gabriel in
the conclusion of The Dead. Following the Battle of the Boyne, the
Battle of Augrhim occurred in County Galway, and dealt the death-blow
to any lingering hopes of recovering a dominant Gaelic culture. Terence
Brown was perhaps the rst critic to note the historical implications of
the songs title sung by Bartell DArcy, The Lass of Aughrim, observing
that Aughrim is the site of the catastrophic Irish defeat at the Battle
of Aughrim (in the Irish tradition the place is known as Eachroim an
airAughrim of the slaughter) in :o,:. He adds, The title of the song
adds therefore a note of national signicance to the ballads affecting tale
of the seduction, betrayal, rejection and death of a young girl.
80
And
Vincent Cheng has also pointed out that while commentators on The
Dead generally assume that the signicance of the song allies it with
the West of Ireland, for the town of Aughrim is about thirty miles from
Galway, the hometown of both Gretta and Nora Barnacle, the town of
Aughrim is actually closely associated with the Battle of the Boyne and
with the subjugation of Ireland by the English.
81
Although neither
Brown nor Cheng pursues this association at length, the implications for
the story are profound: Although Gabriel famously remarks that The
PAGE 84 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:05 PS
rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ,
time had come for him to set out on his journey westward (D :,),
Joyces invocation of Aughrim signals his own growing northern orienta-
tionthat he was looking North during the time of the Home Rule
debate and seeing it as a site of death for the Catholic Irish in their quest
for independence.
Thus, although Gabriel likely experiences a personal rebirth at the end
of the story and may even undergo a sort of conversion that involves a
reassessment of his cultural aims and an acceptance of his Irish Catholic
roots,
82
his warm, imaginative journey toward Aughrim jars with the
obtruding, cold, political signicance of that site for the historical and
contemporary Unionist resistance to Home Rule. By :,co, Joyce would
write Stanislaus that either Sinn Fein or Imperialism will conquer the
present Ireland (SL ::,). He wrote The Dead in the spring of :,c;
after he had returned to Trieste; :,c; was also the year during which he
wrote most of his major essays about the political situation in Ireland.
Joyce returned repeatedly to the image of the Wild Geese, the supporters
of James II who left Ireland after the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim,
referring to them in Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages (CW :;:), as
well as the Aeolus, Cyclops, and Circe episodes of Ulysses.
Ill conclude with a brief consideration of Ireland: Island of Saints and
Sages, where Joyces disdain for the majority-Protestant North is evident,
particularly in the labels he uses for supporters of the Union and Protes-
tants, including those from the North. Early on, when speaking of the
revival of the Irish language by the Gaelic League, he observes, Every
Irish newspaper, with the exception of the Unionist organs, has at least
one special headline printed in Irish (CW :,,). Moreover, in discussing
the intermingling of the old Celtic stock and the Scandinavian, Anglo-
Saxon, and Norman races, he points out that The ancient enemies
made common cause against the English aggression, with the Protestant
inhabitants (who had become Hiberniis Hiberniores, more Irish than the
Irish themselves) urging on the Irish Catholics in their opposition to
the Calvinist and Lutheran fanatics from across the sea (:o:). Citing the
boast of an Irish member of parliament who claimed that he was one
of the ancient race and rebuked his opponent for being the descendant of
a Cromwellian settler (:o:), Joyce notes that to tell the truth, to exclude
from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families
would be impossible, and to deny the name of patriot to all those who
are not of Irish stock would be to deny it to almost all the heroes of the
modern movement . . . (:o:o:). Such heroes of foreign descent
PAGE 85 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:06 PS
o ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
include Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, and Charles Stewart Parnell, this last
perhaps the most formidable man that ever led the Irish, but in whose
veins there was not even a drop of Celtic blood (:o:). Dominic Manga-
niello cites this passage, yet does not mention Joyces excoriation of Irish
Protestants in other parts of the essay, nally basing on this one passage
his claim that Joyce considered attacks on Protestant Irishmen to be [as]
equally misguided as Miss Ivorss attack on Gabriel Conroy writing for
the Unionist Daily Express.
83
Thus, in an otherwise thoughtful and
pioneering study of Joyces politics, Manganiellos conclusion that for
Joyce the battle of the two civilizations was, in effect, pointless, reveals a
blind spot regarding Joyces distrust of Northern Protestants and his par-
ticular brand of nationalism.
84
Joseph Kelly, in his reading of Joyces semi-
nal essay, rst argues that Joyces version of the Irish nation excluded the
Unionists, noting Joyces account of the chilly reception Queen Victoria
received on her trip to Ireland in April :,cc. However, he then maintains
that a thorough reading of Joyces critical writings indicates that he con-
sistently rejected the idea that nations could be dened along racial or
cultural lines, nally citing Manganiellos position that I have just articu-
lated to buttress his claim.
85
Both critics, however, conveniently leave out a reading of the rest of
Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages, which goes on to assault Protestants,
particularly (and understandably) Cromwell, while also (less vociferously)
rejecting Catholicism. Borrowing the sort of language often used about
the Catholic Irish in the English press of the era, Joyce suggests that the
Irish citizen views Cromwell as a savage beast who came to Ireland to
propagate his faith by re and sword. He does not forget the sack of
Drogheda and Waterford, nor the bands of men and women hunted
down in the furthermost islands by the Puritan, who said that they would
go into the ocean or hell, nor the false oath that the English swore on
the broken stone of Limerick (CW :o).
Moreover, Joyce uses the pejorative term settlers throughout the
essay to refer to Protestants who had been planted in or migrated to
Ireland (:o:, :oo, :o,), and as always, his political insight was prescient.
His use of settlers is historically and ideologically accurate. Pamela
Clayton has incisively discussed settler ideology in a book-length study
with special relevance to my argument here. In her preface, she argues
that Settlers are dened not merely as migrants but as groups of people
who establish hegemony over already-occupied territories, set up societies
based on the model of their mother country or original homeland, and
PAGE 86 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:06 PS
rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ;
attempt to maintain domination over the natives. . . . I am conceptualiz-
ing Ulster, therefore, as the remnants of a settler colony, unusual only
in that most of its settler minority has escaped some of the effects of
decolonization, namely dispossession and exile.
86
When Joyce argues that
[t]he Irish populace, which is ninety per cent Catholic, no longer contri-
butes to the maintenance of the Protestant church, which exists only for
the well-being of a few thousand settlers (CW :o,), he manages to elide
the presence of nearly a million Protestants living in the northeastern part
of the island and shows his hand. By contrast, when he goes on to casti-
gate Irish Catholicism, variously styled as the coherent absurdity (:o,)
and the Roman tyranny (:;,), he reserves special ire for the incoherent
absurdity that is Protestantism (:o,). Arguing that a Protestant Ireland
is almost unthinkable (:o,), Joyce refuses fully to admit Protestants to a
seat at the table of modern Ireland. Of course, many Northern Protestants
did not want to sit at that table, and this essay has detailed how Joyce
recognizes their obstructive presence in his ction during the run-up to
the Home Rule crisis in :,:::. In ways that are only now beginning to
be recognized, Joyces largely scathing portraits of the Protestant inhabi-
tants of the black North and their piercing voices that he recognizes in
Dubliners were part of his complex and developing nationalism in the
years leading up to the Home Rule crisis and beyond. This ideology con-
tinued to haunt him and his work the rest of his career.
NOTES
:. Qtd. in Dominic Manganiello, Joyces Politics (Boston: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, :,c), :. Manganiello is citing The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce,
ed. George Healy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, :,;:), :fn:.
:. Joseph Kelly, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon (Austin: University of Texas Press,
:,,), :,.
,. Cheryl Herr, Ireland from the Outside, JJQ :. (Summer :,,:), ;;;.
Herr situates Joyces ction in the cultural and political milieu of Northern Ireland,
for example, by retrospectively associating Molly Blooms link with the British colony
of Gibraltar with the British assassination of an active service IRA unit there in the
late :,cs.
. Willard Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands (Austin: University of Texas Press,
:ccc), .
,. Ibid., ,.
o. There is a series of books on Joyce and nationalism beginning in the mid-:,,cs.
For oft-cited examples, see Joyce, Imperialism, and Postcolonialism, ed. Leonard Orr
PAGE 87 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:07 PS
ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, :cc); Joyce, Ireland, Britain, ed. Andrew Gib-
son and Len Platt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, :cco); Semicolonial Joyce,
ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
:ccc); Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, :,,,); Vincent
Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, :,,,); and
Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
:,,). Marjorie Howess Joyce, Colonialism, Nationalism, in The Cambridge Com-
panion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge, :nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, :cc), :,;:, offers a compelling overview of this trajectory of Joycean
scholarship.
;. Alvin Jackson, The Survival of the Union, in The Cambridge Companion to
Modern Irish Culture, ed. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, :cc,), :o.
. Liam ODowd, Nationalism, Republicanism, and Unionism, in The Cam-
bridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, :.
,. Alvin Jackson, The Survival of the Union, ,:.
:c. Ibid.
::. John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, :)o,:):o (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, :ccc), :,.
::. Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (Garden City, N.Y.: Dou-
bleday, :,,), :. Padraic Colum hastens to add, however, that I doubt if anyone
ever heard the manthe librarian or the essayistsay an unfair, let alone a rancor-
ous, word, adding how unfair it was that certain of the wits of Dublin cast [him]
in the role of a drum-beating Orangeman, a dirk-using Border raider, a Bible-guided
Covenanter (:).
:,. Joyce, James Joyce: Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton
Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber & Faber, :,,:), :::, :::. Joyce was
interested enough in Eglintons literary work to have three of his books, Irish Literary
Portraits; A Memoir of AE: George William Russell; and Pebbles from a Brook in his
personal library, according to the list supplied by Thomas E. Connolly, The Personal
Library of James Joyce: A Descriptive Bibliography, :nd ed. (Buffalo: University Book-
store of University of Buffalo, :,,;), :.
:. Kevin Barry, James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, :ccc), ,:n.
:,. See Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland (New York: Overlook,
:cc;), :c,, for a brief discussion of these dissenting voices but also the growing
tendency toward a default, relatively monolithic identity for Unionism.
:o. Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, ,,,. Although I came to
this conclusion on my own, I was pleased to nd it conrmed in Norman Vance,
Irish Literature: A Social History: Tradition, Identity, and Difference, :nd ed. (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, :,,,), which observes that Joyces poor opinion of Ulster
Unionists may have stemmed from his resentment of the caution and cowardice of
George Roberts (:,,).
PAGE 88 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:07 PS
rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ,
:;. John McCourt, The Years of Bloom, :;,.
:. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, cites an approving editorial
from this newspaper in :,c, about the non-sectarian nature of attendees at the Gor-
don Bennett Cup motor car race in Ireland: we see a wonderful blending of the
orange and green. There is about this matter a unanimity of which some people
considered Irishmen to be incapable (qtd. on :c:). The Northern Whig clearly grew
more sectarian in the space of a decade with the acceleration of the Home Rule
question and would have been considered rmly Unionist by the time it published
Joyces letter. For an analysis of the role of the Northern Whig as promoter of an
Ulster Unionist platform by the time the Home Rule crisis began in :,::, see Gillian
McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland
(Cork: Cork University Press, :,,,), ; on the prospect of civil war in the North, ,;
on the sacrice by Ulster Protestants in World War One, ,o and ,;; on the role that
newspapers played in covering and promoting the ceremonial dramas that celebrated
the opening of the Stormont parliament, ,;:.
:,. Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, o.
:c. Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, :, notes that Arthur Grifth formed
the National Council in :,c, to mount a protest against the visit of Edward VII to
Dublin, and this protest, coupled with Joyces relative regard for Grifth, also likely
turned Roberts against Joyce and led him to demand the deletion of the passage
about Edward VII in Ivy Day.
::. Joyce, James Joyce: Poems and Shorter Writings, :c, :c,.
::. See Roy Gottfried, Joyces Misbelief (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
:cc;) and Geert Lernout, Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (London: Con-
tinuum, :c:c).
:,. Hope Howell Hodgkins, Just a little . . . spiritual matter: Joyces Grace
and the Modern Protestant Gentleman, Studies in Short Fiction ,: (:,,,), :o.
:. For Joyce and his interest in the Apocalypse, see Gottfried, Joyces Misbelief,
oo;; for the quoted passage, see ,,.
:,. Emily Bloom, The Protestant Thing to Do: Anglo-Irish Performance in
James Joyces Dubliners and Samuel Becketts All that Fall, Texas Studies in Language
and Literature ,:.: (Spring :cc,), ::o; see especially :, , for a close reading of these
performances. Bloom draws on Julian Moynahans now-classic study Anglo-Irish: The
Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
:,,,) and on Willard Pottss Joyce and the Two Irelands. Moynahans illuminating
account that tellingly leaves out any consideration of James Joyces ction is largely
unhelpful for my purposes in this essay. He focuses on this small minoritys presence
in Catholic Ireland, whereas Calvinist Protestants in what is now Northern Ireland
sometimes outnumbered the local Catholics and had an even more uneasy relation-
ship with them than did the Anglo-Irish, who were almost all Church of Ireland.
Additionally, although the Anglo-Irish certainly lived in urban areas, by and large
they have been associated with the Big House traditionboth culturally and literar-
ilyin the countryside. Examples of what has become a subgenre of Big House
PAGE 89 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:08 PS
,c ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
literature include the ction of Somerville and Ross and Elizabeth Bowen, and Yeatss
dramas such as Purgatory. For the best study of this tradition in the novel throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel
and the Big House (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, :,,).
:o. Lernout, Help My Unbelief, ,,; see this entire section, Militant Protestant-
ism, for more in this vein.
:;. Richard Barlow, The united states of Scotia Picta: Scottish Literature and
History in Finnegans Wake, JJQ .: (Winter :c::), ,c,, ,c,:.
:. Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History, :c:.
:,. Thomas Hofheinz, Joyces Northern Ireland, Re: JoyceText, Culture, Poli-
tics, ed. John Brannigan, Geoff Ward, and Julian Wolfreys (New York: St. Martins
Press, :,,), .
,c. Bernard McKenna, This same prehistoric barrow tis, the orangery: Duel-
ling and Dual Communities in Finnegans Wake LIT: Literature, Interpretation, The-
ory :c.: (Oct. :,,,): :,:, :,:;.
,:. Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses, ,; Mary Lowe-Evans, Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce
and Company (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, :cc).
,:. Cheryl Herr, Ireland from the Outside, ;,,. The apotheosis of such a
gure is probably Matt Gregory from Finnegans Wake :. and ,.,, who has a Belfast
accent, and who, with the other three Old Men, watches Tristan and Isolde make
love (FW :.).
,,. Potts, Joyce and The Two Irelands, o.
,. Ibid., o.
,,. Ibid., o,,.
,o. Trevor L. Williams, No Cheer for the Gratefully Oppressed: Ideology in
Joyces Dubliners in ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners, ed. Rosa M. Bollettieri
Bosinelli and Harold F. Mosher, Jr. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, :,,),
,, :c;no.
,;. Roy Foster, Modern Ireland: :oo:);: (New York: Penguin, :,), ,o,
remarks that The centre of the city was a byword for spectacularly destitute living
conditions, exacerbated by the increasingly sharp division between the spacious bour-
geois suburbs to the south and the central concentration of slum dwellings, especially
on the north side of the Liffey.
,. Trevor Williams, No Cheer for the Gratefully Oppressed: Ideology in
Joyces Dubliners, ,,. For a ne discussion of how northern Irish banks enabled a
ow of capital out of Dublin but largely refrained from letting that capital circulate
in Dublin and the rest of what is now the Republic of Ireland, see Hofheinz, Joyces
Northern Ireland, ,c.
,,. Tom Inglis, Religion, Identity, State, and Society, The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Modern Irish Culture, ;:.
c. Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands, o, ;c.
:. Lernout, Help My Unbelief, ::,.
:. Donald T. Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyces Dubliners (Boston: Allen and
Unwin, :,o), :,, ::.
PAGE 90 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:08 PS
rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ,:
,. Terence Brown, introduction to Dubliners by James Joyce (New York: Pen-
guin, :,,,), xxi, xxii.
. John Wilson Foster, Culture and Colonization: View from the North, in
Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Dublin: Lilliput Press,
:,,:), :oo.
,. See, for example, Christina Reids drama, Tea in a China Cup, Plays: : (Lon-
don: Methuen, :,,;), :o,, whose title signies its exploration of this belief in
working-class Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. Similarly, the poet Derek
Mahon, himself raised in working-class Protestant East Belfast examines this Protes-
tant emphasis on domestic cleanliness in Courtyards in Delft, originally collected
in The Hunt by Night (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, :,:),
,:c. Mahons narrator, who seems to be autobiographical, muses upon the Immac-
ulate masonry, of such Protestant houses, where House-proud, the wives/Of arti-
sans pursue their thrifty lives/Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate (,). Bret
Benjamin, Dirty Politics and Dirty Protest: Resistance and the Trope of Sanitation
in Northern Ireland, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory :c.: (July :,,,): o,o,
explores this dialectic between perceived Catholic contagion and Protestant cleanli-
ness in Northern Ireland (but also nally moves into a global comparative context),
using Mahons poem as a touchstone.
o. Torchiana, Backgrounds, holds that Even Farringtons name, along with his
bulk, points to a country or a farming life that should be his as farrier, farmer, or pig-
breeder (::).
;. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, o:, notes that By :,:, ;,
per cent of occupiers were buying out their landlords with about , million acres
transferred during these years.
. Jackson, Survival, ,:,:.
,. Ibid., ,,.
,c. Manganiello, Joyces Politics, :.
,:. Robert M. Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyces Ulysses
(New York: Oxford University Press, :,o:), :,:c.
,:. Hofheinz, Joyces Northern Ireland, c, is quoting Samuel Clark, Social
Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, :,;,), :;,.
,,. Anne Fogarty, Parnellism and the Politics of Memory: Revisiting Ivy Day in
the Committee Room, in Joyce, Ireland, Britain, ed. Andrew Gibson and Len Platt
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, :cco), ::. I cite the full passage in which
Fogartys remark appears in note o,, which follows.
,. See, for example, Surnames behind the Name, http://surnames.behindthename
.com/, accessed January :,, :c::. There is some evidence that the name goes back to
those Bretons who fought alongside William the Conqueror, a suggestive genealogy
for Alleyne, the contemporary Northern Protestant, who likely looks back to William
of Orange as a hero for his faith and politics.
,,. Michael Levenson, Living History in The Dead, Dubliners, updated and
rev. ed. by Scholes and Litz (New York: Viking/Penguin, :,,o), ,,.
PAGE 91 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:09 PS
,: ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
,o. A. T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, :o):)) (Belfast:
Blackstaff Press, :,,;), ,.
,;. Trevor Williams, No Cheer for the Gratefully Oppressed, ,.
,. Richard Wall, An Anglo-Irish Dialect Glossary for Joyces Work (Gerrards Cross,
UK: Colin Smythe, :,o), notes that mind here signies heed, which is com-
mon in Ulster (,c).
,,. David Lloyd, Rage against the Divine, South Atlantic Quarterly :co.:
(Spring :cc;): ,,,.
oc. Alvin Jackson, Irish Unionism, :,c,:,::, in Nationalism and Unionism:
Conict in Ireland, :,:)::, ed. Peter Collins (Belfast: Institute for Irish Studies,
:,,o), :.
o:. John McCourt, The Years of Bloom, oo.
o:. John Wilson Foster, Culture and Colonization: View from the North, :;:.
o,. For a careful and insightful reading of this early, fragmentary essay that argues
it demonstrates Joyces earliest grappling with an issue that would become a major
abiding concern throughout his career: physical force, see Greg Winston, Joyce and
Militarism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, :c::), ,; ,,.
o. Qtd. in Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, .
o,. Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands, :;, explores the militancy of Catholic
Revivalists at this time, epitomized by D. P. Moran, who believed that Irelands
main problem was not its relationship with England, as traditional Irish nationalism
and [Arthur] Grifth maintained, but the relationship between Irish Protestants and
Catholics (:). Joyce did not share Morans militant Irish nationalism, but he was
certainly aware of its rise since he likely read Morans essays in Finlays New Ireland
Review during his time at University College, Dublin, and owned a copy of Morans
baldly propagandistic novel, Tom OKelly (:,c,) (:,).
oo. Morris Beja, Farrington the Scrivener: A Story of Dame Street, in Dubliners
Norton Critical Edition, ed. Margot Norris, Text ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wal-
ter Hettche (New York: Norton, :cco), ,::,.
o;. W. R. Rodgers, from Epilogue: The Character of Ireland, in W. R. Rod-
gers: Poems, ed. and introduction by Michael Longley (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery
Press, :,,,), :co.
o. See Serge, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge for a brief but telling sectarian
history of this cloth.
o,. Terence Brown argues in his notes to Joyce, Dubliners, ,c:, that Kernans
terming Crofton decent in this context suggests acceptable, not inclined to make
too much of his Protestantism, or to press sectarian points. The fact that Crofton
was willing to attend a sermon delivered by the Catholic Father Tom Burke further
suggests that he is not an Orangeman by membership, because attendance at such an
event (and indeed his support of the Nationalist candidate in Ivy Day in the Com-
mittee Room) would have made a true-blue Orangeman liable to expulsion from his
lodge. As he also points out, the term Orangeman was sometimes used in Dublin
to refer simply to a Protestant with Unionist sympathies who may have no links with
PAGE 92 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:09 PS
rui uoxi iuii quisri ox i x ounii xiis ,,
the Orange lodge whatsoever (,cc). See, however, the subtle argument about Crof-
ton representing Unionist anxiety during the growing Home Rule movement made
by Anne Fogarty, Parnellism and the Politics of Memory, ::. Fogarty holds that
the fact that Croftons speech is deected and indirect and also echoes the truculent
prompt given by Henchy immediately beforehand Isnt that ne? What? (D
:,:)makes his summation even more equivocal than it appears at rst glance to be.
She posits, The ventriloquized voice of the Dublin Protestant loyalist is thus cap-
tured at the very moment when Unionism in Southern Ireland faced the challenges
posed by the Home Rule movement, which threatened to dissolve links with Britain,
and also began to lose control of county government. Croftons polite assent hence
masks but also gestures toward the struggle of this political minority to maintain its
position in a reordered Irish polity.
;c. Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands, ,o.
;:. Ibid., ,o.
;:. Yvonne Whelan, The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Land-
scape: Monuments to British Monarchs in Dublin before and after Independence,
Journal of Historical Geography :. (:cc:): ,:.
;,. John Gibney, Review of Protestant Dublin, :o:;o: Architecture and Ico-
nography by Robin Usher (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, :c::), Reviews in History ::;
(July :c::), http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/::;, accessed September ,,
:c::.
;. Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland, :;,o:),o (Cork:
Cork University Press, :,,;), oco:.
;,. Yvonne Whelan, The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Land-
scape, ,:o.
;o. Anne Kelly, Von Nosts Equestrian Statue of George I, Irish Arts Review
Yearbook :: (:,,,), :c,, citing an anonymous essay in Dublin Penny Journal IV, Nov.
::, :,,, :;;. See Whelan, The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Land-
scape, ,:o:;, for a catalog of attacks on the statue, which included smearing it with
lth, stealing the Kings truncheon, and painting it black.
;;. Greg Winston, Joyce and Militarism, :;o, persuasively claims that Gabriel
emerges between the pillars of British and Irish militarism, represented by the Wel-
lington Monument and Molly Ivors, respectively, to forge an alternate path. Win-
ston sees the nal image of the snow being general all over Ireland (D ::,) as
overwhelming even this most potent personication [the Wellington Monument]
of imperial and patriarchal conquest, showing that the most hardened social and
cultural elements are not beyond the realm of pacication (:;o).
;. Richard Tillinghast, Finding Ireland: A Poets Exploration of Irish Literature
and Culture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, :cc), :,.
;,. Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster: A History (New York: Basic Books,
:cc:), :,;.
c. Brown, Joyce, Dubliners, ,:,.
:. Vincent Cheng, Empire, Patriarchy, and The Dead, in Dubliners (Norton
Critical Edition. New York: Norton, :cco), ,,, ,,,.
PAGE 93 ................. 18502$ $CH3 11-26-13 07:33:10 PS
, ii cuaio iaxxi x iussiii
:. Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands, ,o.
,. Dominic Manganiello, Joyces Politics, :,.
. Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, singles out this particular statement
by Manganiello for critique: But Joyce cannot be as unproblematically enlisted for
an aloof, enlightened cosmopolitanism as Manganiello would believe: His rejection
of Revivalism is a characteristic gesture of the world of native Catholic nationalism
the world within which he was brought up. It can be argued that his effective exclu-
sion of Anglo-Irish culture from his ction indeed parallels its exclusion by nativist
nationalism ().
,. Joseph Kelly, Our Joyce: from Outcast to Icon, :.
o. Pamela Clayton, Enemies and Passing Friends: Settler Ideologies in Twentieth
Century Ulster (East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, :,,o), xiii.
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