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From Kiri: I was getting a bit confused by the silence from the group since I only joined a fortnight ago, so I wrote something about Ivy Day. Sorry if I've jumped the gun and people haven't finished thinking about A Painful Case; and Maureen, sorry if I've stepped on your toes by writing this before you have introduced it properly, but I'm no expert so feel free to put me straight. I think the main link with A Painful Case seems to be Joyce's criticism of an adherence to puritanical moral standards. Parnell was hounded out of political life because of an extra marital affair. Through Joe Hynes's poem at the end of Ivy Day Joyce portrays this moral sanction as a tragedy to the whole of Ireland. And there is little doubt that James Duffy brings a tragedy upon himself and Mrs Sinico by his spineless hiding behind his sense of what other people might think Ivy Day in the Committee Room. Typical of Dubliners this story draws on Joyce's own
experience. Joyce's father had been a paid canvasser for
Parnell. Joyce's father too had fallen on hard times,
following the extra marital scandal which caused the
political death of the prominent Home Rule campaigner. Ivy Day gives a vision of an ugly reality. O'Conner's ugliness - " [his] face was disfigured by many blotches and pimples" is mirrored in the squalor of his existence. O'Conner is a man with political convictions - more than anyone he urges Joe on to recite his poem to Parnell; yet O'Conner must canvass for Tierney , who he worries may not only renege on his political convictions, but may not even pay him. Such is O'Conners poverty that his boots let in the rain and he spends his time by the fire of the Committee room - no warm welcoming blaze: a miserly fire that needs to be coaxed into giving out heat from ashes, and meager supplies of coal . Joyce uses this squalor to offend us, to make us want to imagine a better reality; and to convey the moral criticism of Ireland that motivated his writing of Dubliners. Joyce's central attack is on a political apthy in Ireland at the time. The key to this is the final poem. Following Parnell's death "the nine-year-old Joyce wrote a bitter broadside poem against Parnell's betrayers entitled "Et tu Healy," which John Joyce [his father] had printed." (http://www.jough.com/joyce/bio.htm). The poem itself gives a clear coherent voice to feelings that Joyce, no doubt less well, articulated in his childhood: it speeks of "hypocracy", of "Liberty" as a merely a "dream" and of a "mighty one[Parnell]" whose name was smeared by "Fawing priests" The fictional reality of. In Ivy Day in the Committee Room, underpins this message. The clergy is represented by father Keon - a priest with no parish in a "shabby coat"; and most importantly although,we as readers experience the poems rhetoric there is no fictional crowd of enthralled Irish voters to be stirred into action. Dublin is a place in which the political vision of Joe Hynes, a champion of the working man receives scant recognition. |
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