Drama Criticism | Exiles, James Joyce - Suzette A. Henke (essay date 1990)

Suzette A. Henke (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: Henke, Suzette A. “Interpreting Exiles: The Aesthetics of Unconsummated Desire.” In James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, pp. 85–105. New York: Routledge, 1990.

[In the following essay, Henke provides an analysis of Exiles and its characters.]

Where does desire come from? From a mixture of difference and inequality. … It is inequality that triggers desire, as a desire—for appropriation.

(Hélène Cixous, “Sorties”)

ACT ONE: PASSIO IRASCIBILIS

Exiles, Joyce's single dramatic work, served as an important vehicle for the author's complex, sometimes convoluted investigation of heterosexual and homoerotic desire. Although Exiles may resemble a turn-of-the-century problem play, it offers, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, a provocative exploration of sexual and psychic mobility.¹...

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