Dubliners Revelation, Sexuality, and Epiphany

Dubliners Revelation, sexuality, and epiphany in James Joyce's Dubliners The collection of short stories entitled Dubliners by James Joyce weaves together tales that chronicle awakenings or epiphanies that occur during the protagonist's exploration of his or her sexual life. In "Araby," for example, the story is told from a young man's perspective. The narrator is infatuated with Managan's sister, and he imagines her to be a pure and untouchable being, apart from ordinary sexual desire. Because she is pure, the boy mistakenly sees his desire for the girl as pure.

This is evident as "Araby" begins almost immediately stressing the heavily Christian, Catholic nature of the boy's upbringing: "North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free." The girl's image is infused with images the boy has evidently gleaned from religious books and iconography, even though there is a strong undercurrent of sexual desire in his emotions: "Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance....We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks...These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes." Although he notices how "Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side," he tells himself that he regards her like the Holy Grail, pure and unsoiled by the common hordes: "Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand." Over the course of the story, the boy learns that sexuality, commerce, and the street are all fused together, and that his sexual desire is not pure, nor is the object of his adoration.

The boy experiences an epiphany at the Araby fair, a fair that Managan's sister expresses an intense desire to attend, although she cannot because she must attend a retreat with her convent school. Finally, the boy thinks he has a chance to play a gallant knight in shining armor to his pure 'chalice' of a young woman, and promises to bring her something from the fair.

However, immediately, he learns that desire and commerce are fused: he must wait patiently for his uncle to give him a florin for the fair. When he arrives at Araby, he finds himself in a cheap, half-full marketplace where people with English accents are selling trinkets. Disgusted with the fact that his beloved could long to go to such a place, and frustrated with the lack of romance of his mission, he leaves the Araby fair, his illusions shattered.

He sees that Managan's sister is not pure but also that his gallantry was tainted with self-interested, sexual desire: "I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity." The sexual revelation of "Araby" is a revelation of displacement -- the young man learns about his impure desires lurking within his heart and the heart of the girl with which he was infatuated. However, in "The Dead," a similar sexual awakening occurs between a much older couple, not in the bedroom, but at a part.

Gabriel, the individual through whom most (although not all) of the story is told realizes that he is not his wife's first love. After a party held by two older aunts, he learns that a man died for the love of his wife -- he realizes how little he knows the woman he married, despite their long-term union.

Despite the fact that they have (presumably) known one another sexually, there is a deep and sensual side to her that he has never really understood, a longing for the dead Michael Furry whom she never married: "While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him.

He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead." Not all of Joyce's sexual revelations are as dark as "Araby" and "The Dead," however.

In the Boarding House," the sexual revelation of the main protagonist is treated in a far more comic fashion -- sexuality becomes the crude vehicle of upward mobility for Mrs. Mooney, the owner of a boarding house. Mrs. Mooney's daughter Polly has been having an affair with one of the borders, Mr. Doran, and Mrs. Mooney manipulates Mr. Doran into proposing to the girl, even though he has little respect for her class and level of education.

The implied prostitution of the arrangement is hinted at when it is said that all of Mrs. Mooney's boarders called her 'the Madam.' Sexuality, as in "Araby" is linked to commerce, and without money there is no real 'discourse' of a full sexual exchange. Mr. Doran fears losing his position if the affair is disclosed, and Polly and her mother use the young woman's sexuality as a means of upward mobility. Sexuality is displaced onto money and vice versa through the institution of marriage. Mrs.

Mooney speaks of the loss of her daughter's virginity like an unpaid debt: "there must be reparation made in such case. It is all very well for the man: he can go his ways as if nothing had happened, having had his moment of pleasure, but the girl has to bear the brunt. Some mothers would be.