The Dead Group

Question:

mo2g
mo2g

What would you consider the nature of masculinity in "The Dead"? 

I believe it would be because the women, during this time period while dependent on the males for their standing in society, the women in many respects are the ones that control the power.  Because masculinity is in all respects respresented by action and in the story, when Gabe finally wants his wife in a sexual manner; he realises that she will never love him like she did her previous boyfriend when she was young; and that Gabe actually never really loved her in that manner; therefore since he can't conquer his wife sexually because she will never love him that way; he has in essence lost his masculinity and therefore has lost his life because he has lost his capacity for action.

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Posted by mo2g on Monday April 13, 2009 at 9:45 AM and tagged with james joyce, masculinity, the dead.

Answers:


  1. kc4u Teacher
    College - Senior

    eNotes Editor

    Masculinity is a consistent area of critical intervention in relation to James Joyce's works. I think one can also add to the theme of moral paralysis in The Dubliners, the theme of emasculation or crisis of masculinity.

    Whether it is A Painful Case or Eveline or The Dead, what Joyce deals with is a problematic relation of the two sexes. The basic pattern is something like this. The masculine patriarchal self ironically enough needs an authorization from its sexual Other, the woman. It is on this authorization of the Other, that their identity depends. The woman has to masquerade in this situation. On the other hand, in most of Joyce's stories, women either fail to authorize or they deliberately do not. Wherever the feminine desire is at work, the man is only perplexed e.g. the end of Eveline. The three encounters in The Dead from Lily to Molly--all bit by bit corrode Gabriel's illusion of a stable selfhood and at the end, he is a dissolved masculine subject; a dead subject at the emergence of the unknowable feminine desire of Molly Ivors.

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    Posted by kc4u on Sunday November 1, 2009 at 3:17 AM