Abstract
The tense exchange that takes place between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors in James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ is a much debated scene, and has often been read as a conflict between a cosmopolitan stance and radical Irish nationalism. After reproaching him for contributing book reviews to a Unionist newspaper, the nationalist Miss Ivors challenges her friend and fellow teacher Gabriel Conroy on the subject of his choice of destination for the summer holidays:A moment later, Miss Ivors leans into Gabriel’s ear to repeat the insult with which she had taunted him for his reviewing: ‘West Briton!’
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Notes
- 1.
James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 148–149. The phrase quoted in the title of this chapter comes from the story’s closing paragraph, p. 176.
- 2.
See Garry Leonard, Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), and Jennifer Wicke, ‘Joyce and Consumer Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 2nd ed., ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 234–253. For an example of how specific contextualizations of Joyce’s fiction in the context of contemporary Irish print culture can alter our readings of certain texts, see Katherine Mullin, ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina: “Eveline” and the Seductions of Emigration Propaganda’, in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 172–200.
- 3.
For detailed surveys of changing attitudes towards Gabriel Conroy, see Melissa Free, ‘“Who is G. C.?”: Misprizing Gabriel Conroy in Joyce’s “The Dead”’, Joyce Studies Annual (2009), pp. 277–303, and Michael Murphy, ‘“The Dead”: Gabebashing in Joyce Country’, English Studies 81.1 (2000): 41–55.
- 4.
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 256.
- 5.
See Jeri Johnson’s introductory notes to Dubliners, p. xliii.
- 6.
Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 256.
- 7.
Sturgeon Thompson, ‘“Not only Beef, but Beauty…”: Tourism, Dependency and the Postcolonial Irish State, 1925–30’, in Irish Tourism: Image, Culture, and Identity, ed. Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor (Bristol: Channel View, 2003), pp. 275–276.
- 8.
See Vincent J. Cheng, ‘Empire and Patriarchy in “The Dead”’, Joyce Studies Annual 4 (2003), pp. 16–42, and Joseph Valente, ‘James Joyce and the Cosmopolitan Sublime’, in Joyce and the Subject of History, ed. Mark Wollaeger, Victor Luftig and Robert Spoo (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 59–80.
- 9.
Willard Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 92; John Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: a Changeling Art (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), p. 152; Seamus Deane, ‘Dead Ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments’, in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 35; Marjorie Howes, ‘“Goodbye Ireland I’m going to Gort”: Geography, Scale, and Narrating the Nation’, in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, p. 66.
- 10.
Michael Holmes and Alan Roughley, ‘From Dubliners to Europeans? Political Change and Political Paralysis’, in A New and Complex Sensation. Essays on Joyce’s Dubliners (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2004), p. 35.
- 11.
Irish Times, 24 August 1866.
- 12.
Irish Times, 4 May 1901.
- 13.
Irish Cyclist and Athlete, 25 April 1900.
- 14.
James Buzard, The Beaten Track. European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 8.
- 15.
Ulster Herald, 3 January 1903.
- 16.
Howes, ‘“Goodbye Ireland I’m going to Gort”: Geography, Scale, and Narrating the Nation’, p. 66.
- 17.
John Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival, pp. 150–151, 153.
- 18.
Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands, pp. 85–6.
- 19.
Thompson, ‘“Not only Beef, but Beauty…”: Tourism, Dependency and the Postcolonial Irish State, 1925–30’, pp. 275–276, 277.
- 20.
Joyce, Dubliners, p. 148.
- 21.
Aideen Foley and Lawrence William, ‘O’Brien, Kathleen Cruise’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). http://dib.cambridge.org/
- 22.
John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands, ed. Robin Skelton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 70.
- 23.
Irish Independent, 16 August 1905.
- 24.
Oliver J. Burke, The South Isles of Aran (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1887), pp. 102–103, 5, 10.
- 25.
The Pall Mall Gazette, 11 June 1897.
- 26.
Irish Times, 8 May 1897.
- 27.
Weekly Irish Times, 17 December 1904.
- 28.
See Jeri Johnson’s notes to Dubliners, p. 272.
- 29.
Joyce, Dubliners, p. 151. One critic who is willing to grant Miss Ivors a life of her own is John Wilson Foster, who tentatively writes: ‘Neither Gabriel nor we know; probably Joyce himself had not decided’—see Fictions of the Literary Revival, p. 151.
- 30.
See e.g. Free, ‘“Who is G. C.?”: Misprizing Gabriel Conroy in Joyce’s “The Dead”’, and Margot Norris, Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
- 31.
Joyce, Dubliners, p. 147.
- 32.
Joyce, Dubliners, p. 150.
- 33.
Kevin James, ‘“In No Degree Inferior”: Scotland and “Tourist Development” in Late-Victorian Ireland’, in Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century, ed. James McConnel and Frank Ferguson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 14, 20.
- 34.
Katherine Haldane Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 74.
- 35.
See Thompson, ‘“Not only Beef, but Beauty…”: Tourism, Dependency and the Postcolonial Irish State, 1925–30’, Martin Ryle, Journeys in Ireland. Literary Travellers, Rural Landscapes, Cultural Relations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 174–175.
- 36.
Joyce, Dubliners, p. 176.
- 37.
Burke had praised the Aran Islands, ‘where frosts never wither, where snows never rest’—see The South Isles of Aran, pp. 102–103.
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Ingelbien, R. (2016). ‘Yes, The Newspapers Were Right’: Revisiting Tourism in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. In: Irish Cultures of Travel. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56784-0_8
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