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holm wrote: "BTW Rasik, I have had similar feelings, and would be very sorry if we have to close up shop because of lack of time or of interest from the majority on this list. I hope that there is a way out of this dilemma - One suggestion is that everybody posts at least once a week. Surely everybody has something or the other to say after reading so many nice stories in Dubliners." Excellent suggestion, Chandra, let everyone try and post once a week. Judging by three or four responses we just received to A Mother, we are improving. We can only urge that people participate much more, and one way of doing it would be to take off at a slight tangent sometimes and discuss I think, issues in a more personal way. How many have met a Mr. Duffy, for example, in their real lives, or a Maria or Mrs. Kearney? How far does Joyce succeed in portraying 'types'? As always a core of people writing regularly can result in a build-up of energy which in turn attracts more responses. A list does not have to be great in numbers; if we have a few active members, we will keep it going. I have no doubt, Chandra, that we will continue. I very much look forward to starting A Portrait and then Ulysses. There is a very good video of A Portrait --I willpost details later. "...Though Rasik sees this mother as The controlling, domineering mother whose children get stifled by her overpowering ways ; I have sympathy for Mrs. Kearney. She is fighting for her right, and to me is symbolic of the corrupt ways in which such committees are managed, of the ways in which such women (or women in general) are taken advantage of. Why did you, Rasik, not chastise Mr. Holohan who obviously did not keep up his word, and tried to "cheat" on the agreement? I feel sorry for Mrs. Kearney as she had lost before she started the fight, because the world is full of characters who say (as at the end of the story)" I do not think there is any suggestion that the Committee in thi story was corrupt.It was incomptent and mismanged the staging of the concerts. With a bit of diplomacy and less aggession, Mrs. Keraney could have done well out of the whole thing for herself and, specially, her daughter. I am indebted to Warren Beck's study "Joyce's Dubliners" for the following riposte to the above. The following passages are from the Beck study: "What to make of Mrs. Kearney should be no problem, since her story is given, in summary but definitely enough to show her motivation and even to account for her moods. It would be possible to see pathos in the life of this woman whose artificially cultivated expectations, the product of a special conditioning within Dublin's larger containment, have been doomed to frustration; but Joyce looks more steadily at the other side of the matter, the ridiculousness of her ambitions, her fantastically compulsive pusuit of them, and her disastrous impingement on others in her clumsy destruction of the possibilities she herself was aiming at. That even this calamity has an air of the bizarre is due to Joyce's subtly droll tone in recounting what went before. Still Mrs. Keraney is maintained as a plain target of satire in that she has played her roles as woman, wife and mother with calculating presumtuousness, as Joyce envisages it. The first paragraph sets the tone in a gradual approach and then a sudden confrontation. mr. Hoppy Holohan 'had been walking up and down Dublin for nearly a month' on his game leg, 'with his hands and pockets full,of dirty peices of paper, aranging about the series of concerts... but in the end it was Mrs. Kearney who arranged everything.' The next two pages sound her out in detail, together with adkjunctive husband and daughter Kathleen.... Though in detail the account lingers on the grotesquely idiosyncratic, at bottom this deservedly a Dubliners story, since here too is the theme of presistent environmental influence, and resultant compusion and self-defeat. Mrs. Kearney had been conditioned in girlhood, and confined thereby, and is now compensating ostensibly seeking her daughter's advancement yet really feeding her own hungers. In this typical situation all that obviates sympathetic response is taht she, herself blindly foolish, so relentlessly troubles others. She differs from Mrs. Mooney, whose life as boarding-house keeper was not easy, and who with such a lively daughter had to accomplish what she could, and promptly, and make it stick for Polly. Mrs. Kearney, on the other hand, is using a compliant husband and daughter in vain pursuit of her own supoerficial aims ingrained even before her marriage. Joyce begins to delineate her with an unendearing stroke; she 'had become Mrs. Kearney out of spite.' Her assets as a young woman were some knowledge of French and music learned in a 'high-class convent,' a pale complexion, and 'ivory manners.' She gave 'no encouragement' to 'ordinary' men but awaited the offer of 'a brilliant life,' meanwhile 'trying to console her romantic desires by eating a great deal of Turkish Delight in secret.' Finally, to silence those who were beginning to predict spinsterhood, she married Mr. Kearney, 'a bootmaker on Ormond Quay,' and 'much older than she.' Joyce immediately sounds the tone that relegates him to an auxiliary yet not unsubstantial position like that Mrs. Kearney herself assigned him: 'His conversation, which was serious, took place at intervals in his great brown beard.' He is 'sober, thrifty and pious' -- another kind of Dubliner from the sometimes cofused , ambivalent, or even distraught ones who appear in some of the other stories. He provides summer vacations for his wife and two daughters at nearby coastal resorts (which Mrs. Kearney does not neglect to report to her friends) and he is laying up 'a dowry of one hundred pounds' for each girl. Apparently too in this area he is amenable, for presumably it had been at his wife's direction that Kathleen had been sent 'to a good convent, where she learned French and music.' Yet she was, in her fashion, 'a good wife' to her unromantyic husband. A single sentence epitomizes her determined performance in the role of one who comforts and commands: 'At some party in a strange house when she lifted her eyebrow ever so slightly he stood up to take his leave and, when his cough troubled him, she put the eider-down quilt over his feet, and made a strong rum punch.'" Skip now, to avoid repeating what was said in my previous message, to the last night of the concerts: "...Mrs.Kearney professes devoted concern for Kathleen'd progress, yet her maternal solicitude turns out to be sheer parental vanityand self-compnsation through her arrangement of modish activities for her daughter. But in the altercation, alleging defense of Kathleen, she is really embarrassing her and alienating people who might have been congenial friends... While Joyce sharply individualizes her, he also makes her something more than unique -- a type of those who are defeated in attempting to impose on outsiders the same egoistic domination which a too deferential family endures. Even in that private area of her absolute matriarchy Mrs. Kearney's power begins to suffer erosion, as is seen in the running conflict backstage, when neither her husband nor her daughter remain fully aligned with her. Theirs are two, and the least severe, of Judgments upon her, and Joyce arranges all these in a pattern of rejections that closes around Mrs. Kearney with a thematic as well as narrative finality. Mr. Kearney's asking his wife to oweer her voice and his noncommittal attitude therafter suggests he had come along fearing the worst and now recognizes it. Kathleen's independently starting onto the stage with Mr. Bell to begin the concert while her mother is still demanding an added four shillings foeshadows Mrs. Kearney's imminent full-scale social failure.. Later when Mr. Holohan appeals to Kathleen and her father, her looking down and moving the point of her new shoe (like her father's stroking his beard) suggests a neutrality bordering on aversion, while her thought that 'it was not her fault' marks an aloofness not unlike the beginning of alienation from her mother...." At a later point, Mr. Holohan said to Mrs. Kearney, 'I thought you were a lady" and walked away abruptly. "A sharper denunciation and dismissal would be hard to imagine, for Mrs. Kearney has thought herself indubitably and even superlatively a lady, from her young womanhood on. But an excess of artificiality has come full circle; the lady overreaches and betrays herself, and destroys a lifelong fabrication, her pose of gentility. it had been in terms of this that she was 'well content' when her daughter's studies (of French and music and Irish as it 'began to be appreciable') brought Mr. Holohan and the contract. Later it is not the eight guineas itself that she cares about but the certifying of her daughter's achieved position as a cultivated young lady, in the pattern set by her mother.... Her reiterated complaint is legalistic, but though eight guineas is her battle-cry, behind that is a complicated matter of prestige, for she herself had negotiated this agreement involving her daughter's status in Dublin's musical world. More representatively, she is the woman so accustomed to having her wayabsolutely in her domestic realm that she cannot desist when she finds the outside world bot so easy to dominate. Like many a social climber, she is defeated by her egotistical lack pf social sense.. This is her utter failure, her being found deficient in the one thing she has most pretended to...." Chandra further wrote: I also wonder at the character of Kathleen, at the docile manner in which she accepts her mother's behaviour. Having been a daughter, and being a mother, I know how one feels ashamed of such scenes, particularly if the scenes are created for one's own sake. I think I agree with that. Here is what Beck says about Kathleen: "Still Kathleen is no Eveline, nor will be a Maria, and her whole life will not necessarily shadowed by this debacle , since people will know what she knew -- 'it was not her fault.'" I note that some of the others on this List have met the type that Mrs. Kearney represents. I think Joyce has done this well with portraits of Mr. Duffy (a life based on denial and absence of emotion) and Maria ( a goody-goody person who cultivates the persona of being 'nice'). It is surprising how many of us meet these types in real life! -- Rasik Shah |
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