James Joyce’s “Dubliner’s Clay”

James Joyce’s talent in narration and novel work is evident in “Dubliner’s Clay” as he portrays the life of Maria, a special member of Dublin by Lamplight laundry, which is a refuge for the prostitutes of the city (footnote 5, 1134).  In modernistic style, Joyce portrays the nontraditional lifestyles of the city in which women lives independently of men with prose uncensored from vulgarity.

The women of this age is clearly portrayed as hard working and independent as “women began to come in by twos and threes, wiping their steaming hands in their petticoats and pulling down their sleeves of their blouses over their red steaming arms.”  This reminds me of the advertisements during warring times of “Rosie the Riveter” (see  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter).  The independent working women are just one of the drastic differences addressed by modern authors of the twentieth century.  Here, Joyce gives a good example of this theme.

What makes Joyce’s style so modernistic is the uniqueness and unorthodox of his work, which is apparent if we look closely as how he constructed the language to illustrate the characters words without the use of quotes and the way at which he structures them.  The rare references to actual speech are singular lines purposefully placed between paragraphs.  In a way, the seclusion of speech from the rest of the narrating paragraphs could be symbolic of Maria’s independence and seclusion from love and men.

Joyce continues to show Maria as a woman who is past her primes and lack of beauty.  She lives a life full of interaction, only to hide the loneliness within her soul.  Her situation is sad, as we can see that her desires still exists when the author constantly teases her with events and jokes relating to marriage.  For example, Maria’s misery is evident as she is frustrated with the “young men [that] don’t seem to notice her” (1135).  As a result she thinks she “would have to stand in the Drumcondra tram” while waiting to go to Mass.  Her situation becomes worse as she learns that the nice “elderly gentlemen” who befriends her in lieu of the “young men” has only done so as to trick her of her “plume cakes.”  With “shame and vexation and disappointment,… she nearly cried outright” (1136).

Her lack of a companion, in part, may be due to her looks as well as her age.  The author uses fine imagery to illustrate her strangeness as we can imagine her ridiculous features of “small” statue with a “very long nose and a very long chin” that the “tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin” every time she laughs.  The image is almost annoying.  Her appearance is further stressed as this very line is repeated many more times in the story.  She appears to not fit into any member of society.  Although not a prostitute, she works in Dublin’s Lamplight Laundry.  She goes to mass even though she is made fun of by the “next-door” girls.  And the only person who genuinely treats her nice, is the married Joe.  One of her laundry friends even  jokes (as she done so every year before) about her getting the “ring” during her game of Hallow Eves at Mass.

Maria’s final song “I Dreamt that I Dwelt,” represents a resolution to her true feelings as she sings “But I also dreamt, which pleased me most, That you loved me still the same” (1137).  This line does not just represent Maria’s desire for companionship, but also of her desire for those around her to truly love her as she does them.  Only in her dreams does she fulfill this false happiness.  The story of Maria, in a unique way, is representative of the modernist poet, in that Joyce illustrates the imperfect love that secretly haunts Maria through daily experiences filled the vulgarities of life.  In “Dubliner’s Clay,” Joyce does a fine job at portraying the modernistic view of the independent woman and the experience of love’s miseries and imperfections.