[In the following excerpt, Smith explores dichotomies of color and light as essential symbolism in "The Dead. "]

There is one feature of "The Dead" that has gone, for the most part, un-noticed—the possible symbolism in Joyce's various references to color and light. Admittedly they constitute a minor motif until the end of the story, but I submit that they are important, and that if one sees the pattern of meaning implicit in them, he can more fully understand the significance of the snow in Gabriel's vision. That pattern is basically simple—references to pale colors on one hand, references to dark and vivid colors on the other, suggestions as to complementing these opposites, and a final reconciliation of opposites in the whiteness of the snow.¹

"The Dead" opens and closes with pale people in a pale light. Lily is described as "a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still paler."² Joyce is much less specific about Gabriel Conroy's coloring, but paleness as a normal condition is hinted in the fact that Lily's rebuff causes Gabriel to blush. Moreover, "the high colour of his cheeks pushed upward even to his forehead, where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes." These details help to prepare us for the timid, defensive qualities of Gabriel which the story is going to unfold. In their paleness, Lily and Conroy are similar. Where Lily is quite sure that she knows men ("The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you"), Conroy is equally confident that he knows his wife and himself. Also, if Lily is on the defensive for a moment, Conroy is on the defensive for the rest of the story—against his wife's teasing about galoshes, against the importuning of the patriotic Miss Ivors, and, finally, against the memory of Michael Furey.

The last scene of the story is linked to the opening scene by references to light. Conroy tells the hotel porter, "We don't want any light. We have light enough from the street." Joyce tells us that the light is "ghastly"—reminiscent of the light in Lily's pantry. Moreover, some of the details used in the opening scene to describe Conroy are repeated here. After Gretta breaks away from his arms with the first indication that something is wrong, Gabriel follows her, and, in a mirror, catches sight of "his broad, wellfilled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering giltrimmed eyeglasses." In both scenes the references to eyeglasses are ironic: however much they might help vision, they cannot help Conroy to see his inner self clearly. He is confident that he has "light enough," but here, near the end of the story, what remains of the confidence initially shakened by Lily's mild rebuff has only a few more moments to live.

Against Lily and Conroy, this pale pair, can be set characters associated with dark and vivid colors. Conroy's wife, Gretta, is attractive because of the "rich bronze of her hair," and she nourishes the memory of the long-dead Michael Furey—"Such eyes as he had: big dark eyes!" In addition, it is "a dark complexioned young man"—Bartell D'Arcy, the tenor—who, by his singing The Lass of Aughrim, has reminded Gretta of her lost love. Directly or indirectly, all of these dark, colorful people have an unnerving effect upon the pale Gabriel. In that regard, we should not forget Miss Ivors—she of the "prominent brown eyes."

What else do Miss Ivors, D'Arcy, Gretta, and Michael Furey have in common, from Conroy's point of view at least? They are people of action, they are doers. D'Arcy sings powerfully and beautifully (when he doesn't have a cold!), and Miss Ivors campaigns vigorously for Irish independence. Gretta keeps alive the memory of a beautiful love, and Michael Furey courts death itself to say one last farewell to Gretta. Against these four, the pale people seem to lack purpose; they shy away from experience and are constantly on the defensive. Lily tries to rationalize her approaching spinsterhood by maintaining that all men are basically coarse. Similarly, Gabriel spends a good deal of the evening trying to convince himself that his own attitudes and values are the right ones. Even so, the dark characters are not to be considered as necessarily superior to the pale ones. The important thing is that they are different; the important thing is that Gretta, Miss Ivors, D'Arcy, and Michael Furey all live in ways which Gabriel (and, by implication, Lily) cannot understand.

There remain at least four other characters in the story who are of interest in this matter of color and light references—Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia, Mr. Browne, and Freddy Malins. The two women and the two men pair off more or less naturally. Conroy's aunts are always thought of as being together, while Browne and Freddy are the two most prominently mentioned male characters outside of Gabriel himself, and they leave the party together. What is more interesting, however, is that each pair has a pale member and a colorful member. Notice the way in which Joyce describes Aunt Julia: "Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face." Aunt Kate, on the other hand, had a face "like a shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour." This same pattern prevails in the description of the two men. Freddy's face "was fleshy and pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose." By contrast, color is associated with Mr. Browne: in addition to his name, he is described as a "tall, wizen-faced man, with a stiff grizzled moustache and swarthy skin," and he leaves the party "dressed in a long green overcoat."

The lives of the main characters in "The Dead" are incomplete in some way; this condition is as true of the dark and colorful characters as it is of the pale ones.³ Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia, Mr. Browne, and Freddy Malins are incomplete too, but the way in which Joyce pairs them up suggests a relationship that is missing in the treatment of the other characters. Despite their individual short-comings, the pale Aunt Julia complements the colorful Aunt Kate, and the pale Freddy complements the colorful Mr. Browne. Joyce wants us to think of these pairs as going together. He wants us to think of "pale" and "dark" complementing each other rather than being antagonistic. He is subtly preparing us, I submit, for the coming together of all colors, all light, all values in the whiteness of the snow at the story's end. That most of the story beforehand shows the pale Gabriel and his world impinged upon by the dark and the colorful should prepare us for a resolution of the two realms of value far more significant than anything suggested in the comparatively static pairings of Kate and Julia, Browne and Malins.

Two other sections of the story obviously deal with color—Gabriel's viewing of the pictures while Mary Jane plays the piano and Joyce's description of the tables covered with food and drink. The pictures start Gabriel's mind into a stream of associations. The "red, blue, and brown wools" of the picture worked by Aunt Julia remind him of the colors in the waistcoat which his mother had once made for him—a coat of "purple tabinet" with "brown satin" lining and "mulberry buttons." Thinking of his mother, Gabriel is distressed when he remembers how she objected to his marriage to Gretta. This passage in turn is tied to the later passage where Gabriel's powers of association work in the opposite direction—from wife to picture instead of from picture to wife. As the party breaks up, Conroy sees his wife at the head of the stairway and he wonders "what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones." There seems to be a pattern here: Gabriel (with whom we have associated paleness) thinks of colors which, in various ways, help to describe three women in his life—his aunt, his mother, his wife. Each of these women is different from—even alienated from—Gabriel and his attitude toward life. Aunt Julia prefers things Irish to things continental; his mother irritated him because she "had once spoken of Gretta as being country cute"; and Gretta herself keeps the secret which epitomizes the alienation between husband and wife.

The most obvious bringing together of color references occurs in Joyce's description of the party table. He mentions a "fat brown goose," "red and yellow" jelly, "blancmange and red jam," and a "green leaf-shaped" dish holding "purple raisins." There are "chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers," "oranges," and decanters of port and "dark sherry." On a nearby piano, pudding can be found in a "huge yellow dish," and, among the bottles of stout, ale, and minerals, some are "black, with brown and red labels," while others are "white, with transverse green sashes." This cluster of color references reinforces a basic theme—the difference between Gabriel and the elements of life around him. While he is "pale," all these colors are associated with the feast, the high point of the party and the ultimate in Irish conviviality. Gabriel partakes and yet does not partake: he cuts the goose and eats after the other guests do, rather than with them. He alone of the male guests refuses Aunt Julia's pudding, but he gets away with it, while the complete outsider D'Arcy is not allowed to refuse the offer of port or sherry. On the surface, then, Gabriel is accepted—he belongs—but we have seen many indications of his alienation from things Irish.

There remains only the snow and what I want is emphasize—its whiteness. Joyce does not mention the snow's color particularly, but he does not have to: snow has instantaneous connotations of whiteness, just as surely as grass is green or blood is red. Along with the color references already discussed, the story mentions snow (whiteness) six times before Conroy's vision. At the outset, Joyce tells us that Gabriel "stood on the mat, scraping the snow from his galoshes," and later he teases Gretta because, in his own words, "she'd walk home in the snow if she were let." Whatever other symbolism might be at work here, 4 the color of the snow itself does not seem important. Toward the middle of the story, however, the whiteness of the snow is specifically linked to Gabriel's frame of mind. Thinking nervously about the after-dinner speech he has to make, Gabriel associates the snow with the possibility of escape from his responsibilities: "How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument." And later, at the beginning of his speech, Gabriel is still thinking of escape in a passage that repeats many of the details of the earlier passage: "People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside. . . . The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres." In these passages Gabriel sees in the snow a promise of release from his problems; by the end of the story he will see in the snow a more mature acceptance of his condition.

Before Joyce reaches the story's conclusion, however, he makes two more brief references to the snow—both ironic in their contrast between what Gabriel feels at the time and what he feels after Gretta's revelations. When Gabriel hears Mary Jane repeat the newspaper report that "the snow is general all over Ireland," he little suspects that he will shortly repeat the observation himself under markedly changed circumstances. Likewise, Gabriel's playful reference to "a white man" covered with "patches of snow" as the cab passes the statue on the O'Connell Bridge is an ironic prelude to Gabriel's more serious confrontation with another figure from the dead—Michael Furey.

In various ways, then, Joyce has been preparing us to associate Gabriel's attitudes with references to snow. It is thus appropriate that his closing vision should be dominated by the image of falling snow. His mood at the end of the story is one of acceptance, even resignation; the question that divides the critics is—what does Gabriel accept? What does the snow symbolize? Several critics associate it with death: O Hehir feels the snow "symbolizes death's egalitarian and pervasive presence," while Frank O'Connor calls the snow "death's symbol." 5 Many other interpretations have been offered, but the line of argument I have been pursuing here supplements interpretations made by critics like David Daiches, Richard Ellmann, and William T. Noon, S. J. Daiches sees the snow as a "symbol of Gabriel's new sense of identity with the world," Ellmann sees it as "mutuality .. . a sense that none has his being alone," and Fr. Noon sees it as "the transcendental unity of the dead with the living, and of all nature with all mankind."⁶

All of these latter views have at least one quality in common: the snow represents something comprehensive, something all-inclusive, something that goes beyond Gabriel's awareness of self. Is not the whiteness of the snow a most suitable symbol for this concept? As the story unfolds, we have seen references to Gabriel and paleness, while impingements of one sort or another upon his consciousness were associated with dark and vivid colors. The possibility of opposites being reconciled is suggested in the parings of Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate, Mr. Browne and Fredy Malins. But what is only suggested earlier (when the color and light references are a minor motif) is achieved at the end of the story when the whiteness of the snow assumes major importance. As the color white encompasses all the colors of the spectrum, so too Gabriel comes to learn that life encompasses the pale and the dark, himself and others, "all the living and the dead"—with emphasis on the "all."

¹ Basic to my reading of the story is the fact that what one sees as whiteness (e.g. snow) is a reflection of all light rays in the spectrum. Cf. this definition of "white" in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, Mass., 1961): "the one of the six psychologically primary colors that is characteristically perceived to belong to objects which reflect diffusely nearly all incident energy throughout the visible spectrum" (p. 2606).

² Even Lily's name, of course, is suggestive of paleness. My text is the one found in the Modern Library Edition of Dubliners (New York, 1954 (1926)), pp. 224-288.

³ Cf. Florence Walzl's claim that the characters in the story are "people who live meaningless lives of inactivity" ("Patterns of Paralysis in Joyce's Dubliners" College English, XXII (1961), 228), and Hugh Kenner's suggestion that "in 'The Dead' everybody is dead" (Dublin's Joyce (London, 1955), p. 62).

⁴ Brandon O Hehir maintains that "Joyce has elaborated the significance of Gabriel's galoshes into the symbolic key to his tragic position between his wife and the ghost of his mother" ("Structural Symbol in Joyce's 'The Dead,'" TCL, III (1957), 3-4).

⁵ "Structural Symbol—," p. 12; The Mirror in the Roadway (New York, 1956), p. 29. Cf. Richard Ellmann on the snow as a symbol of death: "It does not seem that it can be death, as so many have said, for it falls on living and dead alike, and for death to fall on the dead is a simple redundancy of which Joyce would not have been guilty" ("The Background of 'The Dead,'" Kenyon Review, XX (1958), 523).

⁶The Novel and the Modern World, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1960), p. 81; "The Background of 'The Dead,'" p. 523; Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, 1957), p. 85.