My first introduction to “The Dead” was as a first year student of English. At that time, I read this story in the context of its companion stories contained in Dubliners. I became familiar with such Joycean phrases as “scrupulous meanness” and ” nicely polished looking glass”. However, this is my first reading of “The Dead” in isolation and also as an example of Irish Gothic fiction. I have searched for Gothic elements within the story but found that I was grasping at straws up to the point where Gabriel Conroy becomes entranced with the silhouette of his wife on the turn of the stairs. Earlier potentially Gothic references such as the “dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island”(175) require a liberal interpretation if they are to generate a sense of horror, or even tension. “Usher’s Island” could be an oblique reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher“. However, in his introduction to Dubliners, Terence Brown recounts that Joyce had two great-aunts who ran a “finishing school for young ladies at Usher’s Island”(xiii). Thus, it is more probable that Joyce was making use of a familiar location, just as the two Misses Morkan were reminiscent of his great-aunts. However, Joyce does create a sense of the inevitability of man’s mortality through his portrayal of the elder Miss Morkan, as she bravely sings “Arrayed for the Bridal”. There is something about an aged spinster singing about a young girl preparing for her wedding that induces an element of poignancy, which acts as a harbinger of Conroy’s later morbid contemplation of Death. I found this scene particularly affecting in John Huston’s interpretation of “The Dead”, as the gaunt , birdlike, Miss Julia bravely performs before her audience, with a quivering, fragile voice, which is clearly a remnant of what it once was. Continue reading
“The Dead” : A Story of Two Halves.
02 Sunday Mar 2014
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