James Joyce's "A Mother": Women, Power, and Dublin Society

Introduction

What was the social scene in Dublin at the time James Joyce wrote Dubliners, and in particular his iconic short story "A Mother" — one of the most debated tales in the collection? The emphasis in this paper is on the role of women as portrayed by Joyce in "A Mother," and in particular Mrs. Kearney, whose daughter Kathleen is given a strong boost in her education and music career thanks to her mother's persistence and ambition.

Numerous scholarly explanations have been put forward over the years to explain the willful behavior of the story's protagonist, Mrs. Kearney, within the context of Dublin's social scene. This paper takes the position that Joyce created Mrs. Kearney in the image of a nineteenth-century Irish heroine, Anne Devlin, for reasons that will be presented in full.

What the Scholarly Critics Have to Say

Sherrill E. Grace, an essayist in Bernard Benstock's book James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth: Proceedings of the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium, Frankfurt, 1985, suggests that Joyce's portrayal of the women in Dublin, and in particular the women in "A Mother," is the "most neglected of stories" (Grace, 1988, p. 273). Acknowledging that four of the fifteen stories in Dubliners do have central female characters, Grace nonetheless asserts that the women across all fifteen stories are "marginal and marginalized" (p. 273). Moreover, the women take a back seat, Grace continues, because the point of view is "male" and reality is defined "in terms of those activities that exclude women, except insofar as they appear on the borders" (p. 273).

The "borders" Grace alludes to — the "margins of life" — include prostitutes, wives who wait patiently for their drunken husbands to stumble home, or women cast as "old maiden aunts and sisters" (p. 273). There is only one story in Dubliners wherein a female gets to "speak out" about something "of major importance to herself" — in "The Dead" — but even in that story, Grace insists, the revelation fails to lead her husband to a "deeper understanding" of their "separate otherness" (p. 274). So, according to Grace, either Joyce's female characters are in the background, belittled as powerless and passive sidebar figures, or, if they do have a role of substance, they are "monstrous" (p. 274). In "A Mother," Mrs. Mooney has "the sensibility of a meat cleaver" and Mrs. Kearney is "erased," Grace explains.

As to Mrs. Kearney, Grace asserts that the "generally accepted interpretation" is that she is a "mercenary female" determined to control those around her — an interpretation suggesting that Joyce, "with wry irony," has "sanctioned her inevitable defeat" (p. 274). The average critique of Mrs. Kearney holds that Joyce wants no sympathy "wasted" on her, since she has "fallen victim to her own pretensions and greed" (p. 274). Did Joyce present the "utter rout" of Mrs. Kearney at the end of the story to justify his assertion that Dublin is the "center of paralysis?" Grace believes this is true, and furthermore that by excluding a "rebellious woman" like Mrs. Kearney, Joyce is reminding readers how central to our lives the "patriarchal, hierarchic values and structures" are (p. 276).

Martin R. Kearney (apparently no relation to the fictional Mrs. Kearney) explores other scholars' views and finds they do not mirror Grace's position at all. "Early critics" believed that Mrs. Kearney should be seen as "a fright — nothing more, nothing less," Martin Kearney explains in Short Story Criticism (2004, p. 1). Those early critics believed that Mrs. Kearney's comeuppance at the conclusion of the story is due not to Joyce's desire to show Dublin as a center of paralysis, but rather to Joyce's "own reproach for such a greedy, ambitious mother" (p. 1). In other words, pushy, power-hungry women should be put in their place because their bad karma demands it.

A later generation of scholars, including A. Walton Litz, disagreed with their predecessors. Litz suggested that in disposing of Mrs. Kearney, Joyce was actually attacking "the provincialism of musical programs in turn-of-the-century Dublin" (p. 1). The reasoning here is that Joyce was quite bitter after achieving only third place in a singing competition called the Feis Ceoil. Litz further conjectured that when Joyce refused to participate in the sight-reading test that was part of the competition, the judges awarded him the bronze medal due to his reticence. When Litz posited this scenario, other critics joined the bandwagon, Martin Kearney reports.

Critic Ben Collins interpreted the scathing treatment of Mrs. Kearney to mean that Joyce was deeply displeased with the "entire Irish Revival movement"; in that regard, Mrs. Kearney turns out to be "the hero of the piece rather than the villain," Martin Kearney explains (p. 1). More recently, critics have viewed Mrs. Kearney as "a woman with a mind of her own and the wherewithal to accomplish her goals" (p. 1). After all, Mrs. Kearney manages her household effectively and guides her daughter's music career with efficiency — and the "mostly male committee members" of the Eire Abu Society's music program are the ones who victimize her, Martin Kearney points out.

So it is not really her fault that she suffers her comeuppance; rather, the patriarchal society pushes her into powerlessness. She is described late in the story as an "angry stone image" because she has become "literally and metaphorically paralyzed" by brutal chauvinism, Martin Kearney posits. Scholar Linda Page (in a 1995 article referenced by Martin Kearney) describes Mrs. Kearney as "a manipulative selfish matron who emotionally scars her child" (p. 1). Biographer and critic Richard David Ellmann — a well-respected Joyce scholar — took the view that Mrs. Kearney was "a browbeater who is a failure as a mother" (p. 1).

Conclusion

The review of critical scholarship on "A Mother" surfaces a number of credible and well-argued possibilities for why Joyce depicted Mrs. Kearney as he did. This paper supports the notion that Mrs. Kearney and the heroine Anne Devlin have enough in common to justify what Martin Kearney has posited in his essay. Meanwhile, Joyce's story deserves to be taken seriously — unlike critic Mamta Chaudhry-Fryer's claim that Mrs. Kearney "regressed to childish name-calling" and threatened to "take her toys and go home" (Chaudhry-Fryer, 1995, p. 4). Short stories by canonical authors like James Joyce are indeed open to critical interpretation, and it is up to the alert reader to distinguish well-supported, logically grounded scholarship from that which lacks rigor and substance.

Works Cited

Chaudhry-Fryer, Mamta. "Power Play: Games in Joyce's Dubliners." Studies in Short Fiction 32.3 (1995): 319–327.

Grace, Sherrill E. "Rediscovering Mrs. Kearney: An Other Reading of 'A Mother.'" In James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth: Proceedings of the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium, Frankfurt, 1984, B. Benstock, Ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Viking Press, 1967.

Kearney, Martin F. "Robert Emmet's 1803 Rising and Bold Mrs. Kearney: James Joyce's 'A Mother' as Historical Analogue." Short Story Criticism Vol. 64 (2004): 1–6.

Norris, Margot. "Critical Judgment and Gender Prejudice in Joyce's 'A Mother.'" In Cultural Studies of James Joyce, R. Kershner, Ed. New York: Rodopi, 2003.