Comparing the Women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young M

Characterization of Women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses Joyces depiction of women is characterized by a amply degree of literary self-consciousness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work. The self-consciousness emerges as an awareness of both genre and linguistic expectations. secern highly self-conscious, isolated literary men (or men with literary aspirations) with women who follow more romantic models, even stereotypes. In Dubliners, Joyce utilizes a clichd story of doom love ending in death-physical or spiritual-in A Painful Case and The Dead. The former holds far more to these conventions and can be read as a precursor to the more sophisticated techniques in the latter, which draws the readers attention to the clich only to redirect it. Nevertheless, it is Joyces handiwork here, his subversion of genre, that takes the main stage, and the women in the stories do fade into the accentuate. In A Portrait of the Artis t as a Young Man, he again literalizes a stereotype, the Madonna/whore binary, showing women as nuns, long-suffering wives, or prostitutes. unless this division also serves to highlight one of Stephen Dedaluss primary battles, between Ireland and exile, family and freedom, which results in a call to writing away from domestic responsibility. Ulysses, and especially Penelope, seems to escape these because it is only against genre-there was no preexisting in-bed monologue genre-but it is the most conscious and critical of feminine linguistic construction. Female words (through letters to Bloom) are the constant aural background in Blooms mind, but he fixates on them precisely because of their bad writing (4.414), a... ...him as Molly thinks about him in the present and, most importantly, well subsequently Joyce wrote about him, in the eternal lines of Penelope. Works Cited and Consulted Bidwell, Bruce and Linda Heffer. The Joycean Way A Topographic Guide to Dubliner s and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Johns Hopkins Baltimore, 1981. Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. University of California Berkeley, 1982. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Penguin Books New York, 1975. Peake, C.H. James Joyce The Citizen and the Artist. Stanford University Stanford, 1977. Tindall, William York. A Readers Guide to James Joyce. Noonday Press New York, 1959. Walzl, Florence L. Dubliners. A Companion Study to James Joyce. Ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens. Greenwood Press London, 1984