Comparing the Women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young M

Characterization of Women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the mechanic as a progeny Man, and Ulysses Joyces depiction of women is characterized by a laid-back degree of literary self-consciousness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work. The self-consciousness emerges as an awareness of both genre and lingual expectations. contrasting highly self-conscious, isolated literary men (or men with literary aspirations) with women who follow more romantic models, even stereotypes. In Dubliners, Joyce utilizes a clichd story of doomed love ending in death-physical or spiritual-in A Painful Case and The Dead. The former holds far more to these conventions and can be read as a precursor to the more sophisticated techniques in the latter, which draws the readers attention to the clich only to redirect it. Nevertheless, it is Joyces handiwork here, his subversion of genre, that takes the main stage, and the women in the stories do fade into the background knowledge. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he again literalizes a stereotype, the Madonna/ working girl binary, showing women as nuns, long-suffering wives, or prostitutes. But this division in like manner serves to highlight one of Stephen Dedaluss primary battles, between Ireland and exile, family and freedom, which results in a title to penning away from domestic responsibility. Ulysses, and especially Penelope, seems to escape these because it is precisely against genre-there was no preexisting in-bed monologue genre-but it is the most conscious and critical of feminine linguistic construction. Female words (through letters to Bloom) are the constant aural background in Blooms mind, but he fixates on them precisely because of their bad writing (4.414), a... ...him as Molly thinks about him in the present and, most importantly, healthy after Joyce wrote about him, in the eternal lines of Penelope. Works Cited and Consulted Bidwell, Bruce and Linda Heffer. The Joy cean Way A Topographic Guide to Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Johns Hopkins Baltimore, 1981. Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. University of California Berkeley, 1982. Joyce, pile. Dubliners. Penguin Books New York, 1975. Peake, C.H. James Joyce The Citizen and the Artist. Stanford University Stanford, 1977. Tindall, William York. A Readers Guide to James Joyce. noontide Press New York, 1959. Walzl, Florence L. Dubliners. A Companion Study to James Joyce. Ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens. Greenwood Press London, 1984