James Joyce’s Elitist Agenda in Dubliners

James Joyce’s Elitist Agenda in Dubliners

By Dr. Billy-Bob Vanderbilt

James Joyce, educated in Elitist European environments like University College in Dublin, and enjoying, for a time, a lavish life in the luxurious accommodations of Paris, clearly had no sympathies for the down-trodden, poor, broken, and abused blue-collar workers of the world. His works, such as Finnegan’s Wake, Ulysses, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have been well loved by Elitist scholars who praise his blatantly condescending literary techniques which stroke the egos of the stuffy academics by highlighting their useless ability to recognize such skills; the very same skills that bludgeon the brains of the reader to a sense of utter inferiority in the complexity of employment. Despite often focusing on common people and their tragic stories, Joyce obviously had no intention of writing for these people penning novels like the 780 page Ulysses, which clearly could not be read within the scant free time available in a common man’s life. Furthermore, Joyce’s suggestive style, which never concisely states the point being made, but instead, goes on and on in elaborate structuring, demanding the reader to think and do work to understand, and even sometimes, feel what his characters are experiencing is completely unsympathetic to those who have had to do enough work already in their lives and don’t need to endure further mental taxation in their leisurely reading. Joyce, being such an Elitist master of language, has been praised for his expertise in revealing the human condition, but his mastery can easily be called into question by his inability to separate his own Elitist agenda from the thoughts of his characters. A good writer, from the very beginning, can separate his or her own objectives and beliefs from the work being produced, but Joyce, in his collection of short stories Dubliners, spills out his hoity-toity intentions. Thus, it is an easily discernable conclusion, requiring no rhetorical devises to defend, that in Dubliners, James Joyce is making a case for his Elitist ideals.

One of the most accessible examples of Joyce’s Elitist ideas comes in the very beginning of his story “Eveline.” The plot centers on a feeble girl (obvious sexist perspective to make her week, and she is in no way a tragic product of abuse and cultural oppression) who can not free herself from an obviously exaggerated harsh home life. Joyce, having the character of Eveline reflect on apparently better times (as Elitists often do) writes:

One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it – not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field… (Dubliners, 29)

The emphasis on the field in this passage is a clear disregard for the needs of working class families. In Joyce’s Elitist writing, an enterprising man of industry taking it upon himself to build affordable housing for factory workers is seemingly a villain depriving children of a green field in which to play. Joyce, here, naively assumes that all children can just run and play as they please, but actually, only children of some means can afford play time, and playing on a green field that could otherwise be occupied with housing for those working is a blatant taunt of low-income workers. In addition, the simple idea of play is utterly Elite. Fun is frivolity and a luxury for those who can afford to reap the benefits from other people’s labor. It’s practically a Marxist dystopia that Joyce is pushing in this passage; assuming children should be able to play and not have to do their fair share of work like everyone else.

Joyce also holds no punches in criticizing those who are not as well spoken. In “The Boarding House,” Joyce writes of a poor ignorant girl who is taken advantage of and impregnated by a careless patron of her mother’s boarding house. The patron, Bob Doran, debates leaving the unfortunate mother-to-be citing one of her faults that might justify his abandonment to be poor grammar. For Doran’s thoughts on the matter, Joyce writes, “She was a little vulgar; sometimes she said I seen and If I had’ve known” (Dubliners, 61). Apparently, bad grammar makes a girl “vulgar,” and thus, undeserving of a reputation-saving marriage. Granted, Doran’s thoughts continue on in the next sentence to wonder, “But what would grammar matter if he really loved her?” “If,” of course, is the pivotal word here, because clearly, Joyce is insinuating that Doran doesn’t love the girl. Any good man would not pick and choose what qualities he’d want to value and scorn in a woman, but would love the woman entirely as she is. Doran, however, as Joyce intends, picks out a simple flaw that he can use to detract from the girl as a person; a highly heartless move on Joyce’s part.

Lastly, as few more examples are even necessary to solidify this point, in his final story, “The Dead,” Joyce leaves the reader with a culminating scene of Gabriel, the main character of “The Dead,” watching snow fall and reflecting on it. Yes, outrageous as it may seem, Joyce, through Gabriel, condones just watching the snow fall, not picking up a shovel to do anything about the obstructive precipitation, but just lazing around in thought. Only an Elitist could value such a thing and try to make it seem beautiful by writing it so scholastically and well refined as Joyce does, stating, “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (Dubliners, 225). Gabriel here even hears the snow falling, faintly as it is, so of course he should infer that shoveling should soon follow. Yet, in this section, Joyce doesn’t even mention any sort of shoveling action. It is as if the author has no idea of the kind of work a snowstorm entails, and that the simple depth of the moment is what should be explored without consideration given to the people who have to work because of it.

Thus, it is as clear as the clearest water under the clearest sky that clearly, in Dubliners, James Joyce developed his Elitist Manifesto, and had no sympathy toward the common person by vilifying a man providing jobs and inexpensive housing to his community, marking poor grammar as a reason to devalue a person, and ignoring the folks who have to earn what money they can through back-breaking snow shoveling. Furthermore, James Joyce must have lacked substantial logic to not foresee the necessity of including shoveling scenes after a snowstorm, as well as not writing a more perfect piece to escape the scrutiny of a crafty critic. After all, only an Elitist would completely ignore a person’s outstanding achievements to highlight miniscule or manufactured flaws.

Reference:

Joyce, James Dubliners. Ed. Terrence Brown. New York: Penguin Books 1992