Joyce Dubliners: IT\'s a Women\'s World Women

Joyce

Dubliners: It's a Women's World

Women are predators, men are the sorry prey, suggests the short story "The Boarding House." Such is James Joyce's overall attitude in his collection of short stories entitled Dubliners. The story that "The Boarding House" is paired with, in a kind of a parallel of the theme of sexual rapaciousness, entitled "Two Gallants," might seem to suggest the opposite, that men such as Lenehan and Corley can be equally pointed in pursuing their sexual desires as Mrs. Mooney and her daughter Polly are upon the hapless border at Mrs. Mooney's establishment. However, the jesting and careless nature of the two young men makes the calculated designs of Lenehan and Corley pale by comparison with the meaty Mrs. Mooney's urge to get her daughter a good husband. The two young men engage in a jest for a night, while the victim of "The Boarding House" will be subjected to a loveless marriage.

Mrs. Mooney, herself "butcher's daughter" deals with cutting and weighing morals in a very concrete, non-abstract fashion. She marries an alcoholic, and leaves Mr. Mooney for good after he attempts to cut her down with a meat cleaver. She becomes instead of a proper wife, a "madam" -- the verbal associations with being a procuress of female favors to men willing to pay for the privilege should not be underestimated by the reader -- only in her case she is tenuously, legally a madam to young men paying fifteen shillings a week for "board and lodgings," ale excluded. But Mrs. Mooney's real occupation as a madam is revealed as the reader is told that she literally farms her daughter out, unlike her son, in search of male companionship that will yield young Polly marriage and stable financial dividends. First, her mother allows Polly to be a typist, then a housecleaner when the first, although more prestigious occupation, seems as though it will not garner the girl a good enough match, and a disreputable "sheriff" only comes around, as a result of the girl's job. (1)

Mrs. Mooney does not think of her girl gaining her own advancement through hard work. Polly seems to have no will or desires of her own, beyond fulfilling her mother's desires for her to get married -- Polly never objects to either male offers, but neither does she resist her mother's constant overseeing and controlling guardianship. Every emotion of Polly's is either calculated or dominated by her mother or both, as Polly "had been made awkward by her [Polly] not wishing to receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to have connived, and Polly had been made awkward not merely because allusions of that kind always made her awkward, but also because she did not wish it to be thought that in her wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother's tolerance." (2) The oxymoron 'wise innocence' shows how much of Polly's appearance of innocence or desire is 'put on' with the transparent (to the reader) intention of snaring men.

Mrs. Mooney does not encourage the girl to work in an office, and would rather she scrub floors, if the latter means she will meet more vulnerable men -- vulnerable to marriage, that is. Only when "things went on so for a long time," without apparent offerings did "Mrs. Mooney began to think of sending Polly back to typewriting, when she noticed that something was going on between Polly and one of the young men. She watched the pair and kept her own counsel... Polly knew that she was being watched, but still her mother's persistent silence could not be misunderstood. There had been no open complicity between mother and daughter, no open understanding, but though people in the house began to talk of the affair, still Mrs. Mooney did not intervene. Polly began to grow a little strange in her manner, and the young man was evidently perturbed. At last, when she judged it to be the right moment, Mrs. Mooney intervened. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind," that this man was 'the one.' (1)

In contrast, the two men of 'Two Gallants," although they may engage in predatory behavior, at least do not do so in such a fashion as calculated and artificial as Polly and her mother. Rather than bringing the cold morals of a cleaver to their lives, they seem to waft in the breeze, even the heavy-limbed Corley. Unlike the women of "The Boarding House," who scarcely speak without machinating designs upon the poor men who pant after Polly, Corley lets loose his words carelessly into the breeze, and even artlessly praises his own rhetorical prowess as 'taking the biscuit.' (1) Although women in "Two Gallants" may desire marriage, men know clearly how to manage such pathetic attempts on the part of women to do so in a way that shows true female intentions, that have nothing to do with desire and love -- "maybe she thinks you'll marry her,' said Lenehan [to Corley]...'I told her I was out of a job,' said Corley,'" thus settling the matter (1-2)