SOURCE: Benstock, Bernard. “Exiles: ‘Paradox Lust’ and ‘Lost Paladays.’” ELH 36, no. 4 (December 1969): 739–56.

[In the following essay, Benstock analyzes the structure of Exiles.]

Between the completion of his Portrait and the inception of Ulysses James Joyce undertook to create the only extant drama of his literary career, the enigmatic play entitled Exiles. No Greek maiden between two Norse gods, Exiles is more often thought to be a strange Norse maiden between Grecian gods, an Ibsenesque interlude between Joyce's Icarian-Dædalian and Odyssean transplantations; yet in innumerable ways it bears the indelible imprint of the Irish master and serves a vital function in any critical plotting of the Joycean graph. Oddly enough, the play's significance was most highly rated by Joyce's most important commentator, Joyce himself, who took pains to treat his “lesser” piece with particular care; like the parent of an unfortunate child he favored it with special attention, yearned for its stage production and worried over its translation into other languages. Richard Ellmann records the instances of Joyce's paternal concern: in 1915 Joyce hoped for an Abbey Theatre production of Exiles and a French version in Geneva, and asked W. B. Yeats and William Archer for their aid, as well as commenting on a Russian translation; in 1916 he offered it to the Stage Society in London, sent a typescript to New York, hoped for an Italian production in Rome or Turin and a production in Zurich or Bern; in 1918 he had the play published in England and America; in 1919 he was sending out press notices to Harriet Weaver, writing to Carlo Linati about an Italian translation, and brooding over the failure of the Munich production; in 1920 he was attempting to get it performed in Paris; in 1925 he was expressing delight over the New York production's 41 performances; in 1926 he was urging London friends to see the Stage Society's version and forcing the play upon friends in Paris, asking, “Is it as good as Hauptmann?”² Such concern should give us pause, and a closer examination of the play, though it is seriously dwarfed by its greater siblings, should indicate the significance of its strong family resemblance.

It should be remembered that Joyce has been quoted as saying that the ideas in his writings are simple, but that only the manner of presentation is complicated. In effect, this is not as ironic and flippant as it may seem: it holds true for most of the major pieces, even the Portrait, but by contrast Exiles can then be defined as Joyce's most difficult endeavor. Its structure is deceptively simple; it is a three-act domestic drama involving four people: a central character, Richard Rowan, who acts upon the two women, Bertha and Beatrice, and is in turn acted upon by the rival, Robert Hand. Nothing tangible ever actually happens, except for a possible affair between Bertha and Robert, and even then the play ends with the characters hardly altered in character or situation from what they were when it began. We have met four people, seen the interaction of each upon the other, learned enough of their previous lives to realize that at all points there is something unsatisfactory about their relationships to each other, but most important that each remains isolated within himself, a spiritual “exile.” If this is Ibsen, it is highly watered-down Ibsen, Ibsen without even the semblance of tragedy. More likely, however, it owes its central trauma to Strindberg (whom Joyce did not regard very highly, probably out of loyalty to Ibsen); the doubt which perpetually rankles the central character in The Father is the doubt which obsesses Richard: “I have wounded my soul for you—a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed. I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or to believe.” And yet, if Exiles is Strindberg, it is also highly diluted, Strindberg without hysteria. The complexity of Joyce's play lies in the entanglement of its concepts, concepts that we find do not lend themselves at all easily to paraphrase. Critics who attempt to explain what Exiles is about fall back invariably upon a description of its contents (“it is a play about the return of the exiled artist to his native land”; “it is a drama about man's spiritual isolation from his fellow creatures,” etc.) or engage in vague abstractions to describe a complexity which they attempt to label. Yet every such attempt leaves at least one fragment unaccounted for; every label is destroyed by the exceptions apparent in the work. Exiles defies such categorization because, although perhaps less than a play, it is nonetheless more than the sum total of its parts.

A major difficulty lies with the quartet of characters with whom we are confronted: they do not quite intermesh at any of the indicated joints. Richard and Bertha, after nine years of life together, have never jelled into an entity recognizable by any conventional sense of such a relationship. Even with their final conversation in Act Three it becomes more apparent than ever that they are confronting each other on at least one level for the first time. It is not merely a matter of incompatibility or the attraction of opposites, but the existence of an incomprehensible law by which they move further apart from each other with every effort they make to move closer. Bertha's attempts to “understand” Richard ironically move her closer to Robert instead; yet Robert's efforts to claim her bring him into alliance with Richard to the extent that he succeeds in actually alienating Bertha; even if his seduction had been successful, she is less his because of it than she had been on the previous evening. Robert and Richard, in turn, have a friendship based upon an agreed set of similarities which they actually do not possess. Robert assumes that Richard shares his enthusiasm for sexual adventure, further assuming an objectivity on Richard's part toward Bertha which he does not really have. Yet Richard professes that Bertha is free to use her own body as she wishes, disclaiming any dictatorial powers in that realm: his declaration of her innate freedom, however, immediately serves as a bond making her responsible to him and ensnaring Robert in his own scheme. And when we look at the relationship of Richard and Beatrice, we perceive its hopelessness from their first conversation. Beatrice's desire for Richard is unabashedly sexual; yet she remains austerely frigid, parrying Richard's attempts at flirtation (pathetically half-hearted attempts at that). Robert is almost incapable of handling Bertha's apparent pliability, having trained himself exclusively in overcoming a woman's reluctance; Richard plays the fool before Beatrice's implacable frigidity because he senses immediately that it demands from him the role of sexual aggressor, an uncomfortable role for him to play considering his self-evolved set of principles regarding the equality of roles in affairs between people. Over the entire contretemps hangs Mr. Duffy's devastating conundrum: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.”

The Richard-Bertha-Robert-Beatrice interinvolvement as such can be profitably paralleled with another quartet of Joycean characters, Eveline, Jimmy Doyle, Lenehan and Bob Doran. In Dubliners these four serve as protagonists in a group of four interrelated stories of young people caught in the paralytic conditions of Ireland. They overlap in many important ways: Eveline and Lenehan are financially poor and thus caught in an economic aspect of the paralysis, while Doyle and Doran to varying degrees have the financial means to declare their freedom, only to be equally ensnared because they have some money; to Eveline marriage represents freedom from her enslavement, for Bob Doran it means the end of his freedom (Eveline then gives up her chance, Bob loses his precious independence); Lenehan and Doyle are destroyed by possessing an already tainted character, while Eveline and Doran, both basically good people, are destroyed because of their goodness. (Such a set of patterns could equally well apply to the next four protagonists in Dubliners, Chandler, Farrington, Maria and Duffy, as well as to the main characters of the central four of the octet, Lenehan, Doran, Chandler and Farrington.) What remains most important is that Joyce chose to encase each one in a story of his own, with the necessary coincidences and interconnections only apparent to the reader who chooses to read between the stories. But the choice of a three-act play to involve four characters means for Joyce the necessity of setting up a common situation for the four, when in Joyce's concepts they exist independent of each other, isolated individuals unable to “connect” (in the sense of connection used by E. M. Forster in Howards End). The demands of the medium are such that they have to interact with each other, while the basic concept fostered by Joyce is that such individuals in such an environment given this sort of situation just cannot interact successfully. There may well be tension in Exiles, but it is always the tension of the individual within himself; the play then understandably lacks dramatic interplay between people despite the plot chosen by its author for such interplay. Each of the four people in Exiles moves through the piece as the central character of his own personal drama (a situation on which Chekhov could capitalize for his own special sort of Russian comedy, but undramatic in the type of non-tragic domestic drama Joyce chose to employ).

Although a handful of critics have offered their lonely applause, the consensus has been that something is not quite right about Exiles. It has been dismissed as a minor effort of a major writer, a weak play by a talent whose strength was exclusively in prose fiction, a traditional exercise lacking in daring by a craftsman whose forte was experimentation, and, most pathetically, an imitative tribute by a disciple to a master he had already outdistanced. But the fault lies not with Joyce but with the very nature of twentieth-century drama, a drama fashioned by the Ibsen Joyce so much admired. Given the limitations of the box stage, the middle-class drawing room whose fourth wall has been removed, the slavish devotion to “reality” which forbids soliloquies, asides and choral odes of commentary, the Joyce mystique is decidedly endangered. Reared in the shadow of Ibsen, Joyce was apparently out of patience with the theatre of the Greeks or the Elizabethans, a theatre still close to the ritualistic nature of drama.

Joyce had obviously chosen to confront his material without naïveté and with his passion for “scrupulous meanness”; his people are bourgeois to the core and no degree of glamorization can hide that salient fact. Beatrice wears “spectacles” to read; Richard carries an umbrella when it rains; Bertha washes her son's face with a saliva-moistened handkerchief; Robert wears a velvet jacket when playing parlor Casanova. And as on June 16, 1904, when nothing particularly extraordinary happened to either Stephen or Bloom or even Molly, again in Exiles nothing particularly extraordinary happened. In a blinding snowstorm in the wilds of mountainous Norway, Rubek and Irene are caught in an avalanche in When We Dead Awaken: on a drizzling evening in suburban Dublin, Bertha returns to her husband from a possible hour of love with Robert Hand. The deep wound in Richard's soul will ache for a while, unperceived by the world without, while Archie may remember that morning for a long time as the morning when he first drove the milkman's horse.

Whatever the merits of Joyce's ability in the drama, and whatever the individual definition he had advanced for the dramatic aspect of literature in A Portrait, Joyce must have found the writing of Exiles an exercise of only a part of his talent. As the “Notes” now appended to the play indicate, there is a drama in Exiles not wholly contained (and not nearly containable) in the three acts of the play proper. Attempting to record the “events” of the drama from the point immediately preceding the climactic moments through the “resolution” of conflict, the Joycean mind found itself moving backward in time, reliving the exposition of the plot to such an extent that the action from opening to closing curtain was unable to recreate for the audience the wealth of vital background information necessary to develop the totality of the drama. Like the G. B. Shaw whose elaborate stage directions he so gently parodied in the Circe chapter of Ulysses, Joyce was the novelist unable (if not merely unwilling) to strait-jacket himself with the conventions of the theatre. So much so, in fact, that the Joycean commentator quite casually tends to accept Exiles as a closet drama with additional stage directions affixed by its creator, an entity which now becomes a non-theatrical Exiles readily acceptable within the logic of the Joyce canon.

A brief cross-section of the play's structure indicates how dependent Joyce remained throughout upon the two-character interplay. Act One, except for a handful of interludes necessary for exposition, to implicate Archie, and to shuffle characters on stage into the necessary twosomes, contains six important exchanges: first Richard and Beatrice, then Beatrice and Robert, and then Robert and Bertha (so that until this central point in the act Richard is only of minimal importance); then Richard goes on to “interview” Robert, Archie, and Bertha in turn. Act Two is classically pure in its organization: three such interviews with no interludes and no overlaps: Robert-Richard; Richard-Bertha; Bertha-Robert. Act Three returns us to the tempo of the first act (sonata-allegro form) with again six important dialogues, opening with one of exposition between Bertha and Brigid; then Bertha and Beatrice for the first time (temporarily interrupted by a brief appearance by Richard), Bertha and Richard (an important central point in the act), and in quick succession: Bertha-Robert, Robert-Richard, Richard-Bertha. “The play,” Joyce notes, “is three cat and mouse acts.”

Psychology-oriented critics have had little success with Exiles, as witness the commentaries of the Little Review panel³ who scratched in shallow sand to find latent homosexuality, sexual frigidity, and the rest of the standard Freudian paraphernalia. Joyce anticipated such expeditions by making the latent obvious, the hidden readily recoverable, and the unmentionable an easy topic of very ordinary conversation. The words “mad,” “strange,” “curious,” and “different” are deployed with casual nonchalance by the very people to whom they are applied; Robert Hand parallels and parodies James Duffy when he comments on “bodily union”: “Affection between man and woman must come to that. We think too much of it because our minds are warped. For us today it is of no more consequence than any other form of contact—than a kiss.” Joyce even duplicates the Freudian elements of his previous work, Act Two of Exiles suggesting “Araby”: the rain “impinging” upon the earth in the short story follows suit, as Robert notes: “The rain falling. Summer rain on the earth. Night rain. The darkness and warmth and flood of passion. Tonight the earth is loved—loved and possessed. Her lover's arms around her; and she is silent. …”; and Bertha, “toying with her wristlet,” reminds us of Mangan's sister being just as innocently yonic as “she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist.” Well-timed and well-placed comments on the realities of existence were already second nature to James Joyce by 1914, and a great deal more was intended when he embarked upon his venture into “domestic drama.”

What Joyce needed for Exiles was something that would give his play dimension, mystery, depth, something to rival the trolls and rat-wives of Ibsen, the ritual magic of great drama in less self-consciously prosaic ages than his own. If psychology were to provide this sort of magic, it would necessarily have to rise above the clinical case-study level, and the enormity of the Rowan ego was developed to assure just that sort of rise: Richard is not only Self, but a constantly expanding and absorbing Self, having swallowed Bertha and Beatrice by the time the play opens, and easily consuming Robert during its course (it is Bertha's “rebellion” against that ego that insures conflict in this “closet” drama). Just the presence of Richard Rowan causes Robert to play the Ibsen “hero.” His “two statues” epigram has the true Ibsen touch of contempt and defiance, and is worthy of the Stephen Dedalus wit, but thereafter he goes on to allow himself to be “Europeanized” by Richard's bandit cigars; in Act Two he admits to Richard, “You are so strong that you attract me even through her,” claims antipathy for both angels and Anglo-Saxons (Dedalus's “two masters” epigram in the first chapter of Ulysses), and even harbors a temptation to write a book; in his suggestion of a power-duel between them he acknowledges: “Richard, you have driven me up to this point. She and I have only obeyed your will. You yourself have roused these words in my brain. Your own words.” At this point Robert comes as close as he ever does in absorbing Richard as the disciple betraying the master by duplicating his function; what he proposes reduces Richard to his level, momentarily creating a pair of Gabriel Conroys attempting to be Michael Fureys. Richard manages to fly by that net too, but the process described in Exiles reveals a Richard Rowan with severely singed wings.

It is an oversimplification, but nonetheless germane, to suggest that Richard plays all parts in Exiles. Not content with being the God of the Creation, he “humanizes” himself on occasion to be Christ, refines himself at various instances out of existence to be the Holy Spirit, but most often awards himself the best Milton role of all: Satan. It is with this element, of superimposing allegory upon allegory, that Exiles works its ritualistic magic. But the difficulty of discerning allegory in the naturalistic fabric of the play is due to Joyce's insistence upon including nothing external that would jar the ordinary reality of the events in Exiles, of never allowing the mystery to appear mysterious, an aping of Ibsen that is so sedulous that it is tongue-in-cheek (but then Joyce has disclosed this by having Richard indicate that there “is a faith still stranger than the faith of a disciple in his master. … The faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him”).

The major allegory that emerges is that of the Garden of Eden, an initial clue to which can be suspicioned in the heavy emphasis upon the literal gardens present just off stage in all three acts, and so often utilized during the action of Exiles. There is no more coincidence that Merrion and Ranelagh suburban houses should have gardens than that Stephen Dedalus should walk through St. Stephen's Green or that Dalkey should have a Vico Road; it is merely that Joyce made himself a master of employing the most ordinary for full value. The first indication, early in the first act, sets the Eden incident far back in the past (from which Joyce will eventually rescue it for immediate purpose); Richard reminds Beatrice of her love-pact with Robert when they were children: “It was in the garden of his mother's house. No? He points towards the garden. Over there. You plighted your troth, as they say, with a kiss. And you gave him your garter. Is it allowed to mention that?” It should be noticed that the written stage direction adds considerably to the weight of allusion, since it implies not only the garden beyond, but also Richard's own.

When Robert arrives soon after, Richard avoids seeing him (“I am going out through the garden”); Robert enters carrying his overblown roses, the product of the garden. The ensuing conversation between Robert and Bertha contains several important garden allusions: Robert admits that he couldn't speak to Bertha on the previous evening because there were “too many people on the lawn”; Bertha, anticipating Richard's arrival, imagines that she hears the garden gate, and later actually does, commenting that the “gate opened.” It is obviously Robert Hand who is the Adam of the contemporary instance in Eden (as he had been with Beatrice when they were children—Beatrice serving as Lilith to Bertha's Eve), and during this scene he expresses his romantic desire “to fall,” and in Ibsenesque terms at that: “To fall from a great high cliff, down, right down, into the sea.” Even Archie has his turn playing the part (and his role as the innocent child is not without importance in this context), as he goes out to wait in the garden while Richard betrays him by not fulfilling his promise to gain permission from Bertha for the milkcar jaunt.

It is in Act Two, however, that Joyce allows his Garden of Eden peccadillo actually to be played. Whatever actual “fall from grace” occurs does so on the literal level within the living room of Robert's cottage, but we are never permitted to forget for long that the garden looms large outside as a constant reminder of the allegorical level, while a “standing Turkish pipe” in the room serves as an indication of the Near Eastern setting for the Garden. (The hookah is merely Joyce's latest addition to a theme that reverts back to the first story of Dubliners, the Near East as a motif of the exotic paradise dreamed of as an escape from the prosaic dullness of Dublin: the boy in “The Sisters” dreams of Persia, his counterpart goes to a bazaar named “Araby,” and even Mrs. Kearney as a young girl had stuffed herself with Turkish Delights when suitors were scarce; it is no wonder that Leopold Bloom will contemplate investing in the citrus fields of Palestine and imagine Molly in yashmak and Turkish trousers.) Robert further exoticizes his paradise setting with sprayed perfume. But while Robert deludes himself into believing that it is he who is manipulating the seduction in his cottage, the audience has become actually aware of Richard's satanic function as the Snake in the garden. Robert, in fact, has to endure the discomfort of hiding in the real garden, getting quite wet, while Richard has his turn at organizing the evening's events; unlike Gabriel Conroy, however, Robert has the distinction of braving the elements without benefit of prosaic protection, much as he would have liked having an umbrella—but it is Richard who carries one and manages to avoid getting wet. The love-sick, rain-soaked Robert can for a moment at least imagine himself as a Michael Furey, while Bertha duplicates Gretta by arriving with “neither umbrella nor waterproof.” If rain represents the realities of life, a baptism in the elementals of existence, it is importantly ironic that Richard proves so well protected. Bertha's timid calling in of the drenched and deflated Robert from the wet garden is the tenderest moment of the scene, but the most trenchant comment is Robert's when he says to Richard, “You were watching us all the time?” It has far-reaching significance both for the past and the future, and underscores Richard's dual function as both God and Satan, the latter watching and waiting for his opportunity to tempt and destroy, while the former solicitously watches over Adam and Eve at all times.

Act Three as the aftermath of the Eden fall is primarily preoccupied with evidence of the loss of innocence. (Joyce's choice of the three-act structure, incidentally, permitted him to construct his drama in terms of Hegelian proportions of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, as well as in sonata-allegro form in morning-evening-morning, the second morning serving as both a duplication and a reversal of the previous day's events.) The act opens with the fallen Bertha discovered by the old servant, who for the first time in the play begins to appear as a real character of some importance. Bertha's “fallen state” is visually suggested by her dressing gown, loose hair, and pale, drawn face, as she sits in the “half dark” looking out—at the garden. It is further emphasized by Brigid's behavior: surprised at seeing anyone about at so early an hour, she “blesses herself instinctively,” a gesture which is translated into specific language when she comments, “Merciful hour, ma'am. You put the heart across me.” Joyce gives Brigid an ignorant old woman's facility to make unconscious puns (Eliza in “The Sisters” did the same, in fact, made the same pun: “The duties of the priesthood was too much for him. And then his life was, you might say, crossed”).

The choice of name for Brigid was also no accident; although a common enough Irish name, it is specifically that of the female patron saint of Ireland, St. Bridget, as well as a pre-Christian goddess—and Joyce is to use it again with significance in Finnegans Wake. It is this combined archetypal figure who comes upon the fallen Eve the next morning.

To further suggest the loss of innocence, the basic symbol for Bertha shifts from the moon (which Robert uses as his designation for Bertha, “something beautiful and distant—the moon or some deep music”) through the rain of Act Two to the morning sun. The traditional symbol of chastity, and in this case “distance,” gives way to the symbol of reality and direct contact: “I didn't sleep all night. So I got up to see the sun rise,” Bertha explains; Brigid comments that “It's a lovely morning now after all the rain we had”—a statement pregnant with more than just casual meaning. But most important, Brigid adds that Richard “thinks the sun shines out of your face, ma'am.” Bertha, however, is feeling the full weight of her disenchantment and notes that “that time comes only once in a lifetime. The rest of life is good for nothing except to remember that time.” And when Brigid offers her tea and toast and egg, Bertha significantly refuses the solid food, accepting only the beverage, a gesture we have seen in “The Sisters” and will see again in the Eumæus chapter of Ulysses. The arrival of Archie temporarily relieves the scene, but its purpose is as an important counterpart to Bertha's situation, since Archie still represents innocence and will go on to be an important counter by the play's end.

The effect on Bertha's character of this loss of innocence is minimal, however. It is true that she is twice guilty of the polite lie, first by claiming to Brigid that she had slept badly that night, before admitting that she hadn't slept at all, and then by having Brigid say that she's ill when a visitor arrives—but she remands this lie also. But Bertha has always been guilty of the polite lie, even before her presumed loss of innocence: in Act One she pretends that she assumed Beatrice and Robert had arrived together, when we already have heard from Archie that he and his mother had observed Robert arriving alone. The suspicion that Bertha in reality remains completely unaffected by the previous night's events begins to develop despite the heavy emphasis on “loss of innocence” symbolism in the last act. The careful juggling of sophistry between Robert and Bertha regarding what “truth” to tell Richard is specifically intended to tease and tantalize the audience, and justify Richard's wound of doubt (self-inflicted, however), but it doesn't alter what has been established as firmly irrefutable. During the “seduction,” Bertha states: “But, you see, I could not keep things secret from Dick. Besides, what is the good? They always come out in the end. Is it not better for people to know?” Bertha asserts this as a condition of nature that is permanent, that knows no conditions and is unaffected by sophistry. And so, when Bertha adds in Act Three, “I will tell you the truth, Dick, as I always told you. I never lied to you,” she is not merely arguing her case, but is explaining that same condition of nature by which it is impossible for her to even attempt to deceive Richard. That he is still obsessed with his doubt no longer reflects upon Bertha, then; it is completely an aspect of Richard's guilt, not hers. It is he who is unable to cope with Bertha's innocence; it is he who has voluntarily defied and fallen from grace. For it is essentially Richard Rowan's position as Lucifer that is paramount in Joyce's version of the Eden incident.

Richard's position as Lucifer, however, is predicated upon his position as God and Christ. As God he has already been seen as the dominant ego controlling all others around him (as Bertha indicates, “I am simply a tool for you”), but as Christ specifically he is obsessed with his own suffering: to Beatrice he says, “O, if you knew how I am suffering at this moment! For your case, too. But suffering most of all for my own,” while in Act Two Robert “assures” him: “Do not suffer, Richard. There is no need.” Robert of course serves Richard as Judas (a task assigned at various times to Cranly, Mulligan, and specifically Lynch in relation to Stephen): it is to him that Richard archly comments upon the “faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him,” but Robert misses the point. Instead he talks about eating the “fatted calf” at the vice-chancellor's house that evening, but a few minutes later, when Robert has already left, Archie mentions the milkman's eleven cows (one was sick from having fallen). When Robert notes upon departure, “We shall meet tonight,” Richard adds, “At Philippi.” Again the irony is lost on Robert, who is unaware that Richard is cognizant of his “betrayal”—and that Brutus and Cassius had been quarreling prior to their agreement to meet at the battlefield. Yet it is Robert who so innocently tells Bertha about Richard's desire for deliverance: “All his life he has sought to deliver himself. Every chain but one he has broken and that we are to break. Bertha—you and I.” As a Judas-figure Robert is pathetically ineffectual, however, since the only nemesis for Richard is the woman he loves, and like Gabriel Conroy he is vulnerable in only this Achilles' heel. Richard again admits to Robert: “I longed to be betrayed by you and by her,” but Robert has no way of realizing that the real emphasis in this admission is upon “her.”

Joyce allows himself full range of play, of course, in his personification of his protagonist as Supreme Deity. It is by more than inadvertence that Robert looks at Richard and exclaims, “Lord, when I think of our wild nights long ago …”; or that Bertha looks at Richard and exclaims, “My God, I feel it! I know it!” At a third instance the “accident” is quite apparent, when at a crucial moment in Act Two, Bertha says to Richard: “Dick, my God, tell me what you wish me to do?” No actress on stage could be expected to read “my God” as anything but an expletive, yet no eye seeing the phrase on the printed page can fail to notice the appropriateness of the apposition. Certainly many of the indications of Richard's archetype are intentionally witty, especially in the resurrection motif sounded in Act One: when Beatrice asks, “You will come back?”, Richard replies laconically, “Please God.” When Richard hears demons along the strand in Act Three, there is a suggestion of the temptation of Christ, reinforced by Brigid's reference to him as a “curious bird”—perhaps the Holy Spirit. But the most blatantly hilarious instance occurs in the last act: Beatrice has brought the newspaper with Robert's leading article about Richard; she hands the paper to him, but Richard pretends that he thinks she intends for him to read an article headlined, “Death of the Very Reverend Canon Mulhall.” There is apparently Satanic glee in Richard's suggestion that not only is Christ dead, but God is dead too—and certainly the Church. To counterpoint the more humorous treatment of the theme, however, are several other quite serious instances: Richard's preoccupation with and love for his father, his rejection of his mother (remember that Stephen feels that Christ treated his own mother somewhat with disdain), the various instances at which he is termed “strange,” “mad,” “different”—apparently never really understood—and his power to give “new life.” Add to these Richard's statement to Robert: “I told you that when I saw your eyes this afternoon I felt sad. Your humility and confusion, I felt, united you to me in brotherhood.”

It is in rebellion against this Christ-like aspect of himself that Richard plays the Stephen-role of Lucifer. The most important aspect of this role is in terms of setting up the fall of Robert and Bertha, which he makes no effort to avert, and actually seems to contribute to by abandoning Bertha in Robert's cottage. The Richard Rowan who insists that every act should be performed with full knowledge and awareness is the Lucifer who attempts to destroy the last vestiges of innocence. It is his spirit that is the wind that threatens the lamp in Robert's room, and finally succeeds in extinguishing it, leaving the innocent couple in neardarkness, a darkness that Richard had already shown an affinity for in his interview with Robert in the previous act: Robert had exclaimed, “Good Lord, how warm it is today! The heat pains me here in the eye. The glare.” Robert's “innocence” is again indicated in the form of address, and his inability to realize that he is in the presence of the devil. Richard, however, does not contradict the existence of heat and pain, but merely reminds Robert that “the room is rather dark, I think, with the blind down.” Twice during the interview Robert drinks whiskey (Richard's spirits) while Richard abstains, and twice Richard lights Robert's cigar. Richard as light-bringer is indicated, the Lucifer aspect which Joyce will go on to pun with in Finnegans Wake: “the luciferant,” “he strikes a lousaforitch,” “Lignifer,” “lausafire,” etc.—so that even when Richard is already absent from the seduction scene, the match that Robert uses to light the lamp is the spiritual presence of that devil. Moreover, Lucifer as the morning star is then present the next morning in the awakening-from-innocence opening of Act Three, most ironically when Beatrice, reading about Richard in the morning newspaper, announces: “You see, Mr. Rowan, your day has dawned at last. Even here. And you see that you have a warm friend in Robert.” Singed by Richard's match, too much in Richard's sun, Robert is warm indeed.

The interview in Act One proceeds well from the dark room and the match: Robert notes that Richard has acted impulsively, that he has a strong sense of pride, that his departure from Ireland has been a “mysterious disappearance,” that he had been guilty of heresy, and that he had “fallen from a higher world … filled with fierce indignation.” But even before this interview, Richard had revealed his horns and hooves: Beatrice finds him cruel, and expresses her fear of him, revealing that she believes that Robert had long since sold out to him: Richard knows his secret about the “engagement” with Beatrice, and she comments to Richard: “I saw in him a pale reflection of you.” Beatrice too is magnetically drawn to Richard; having presumably come to the house to give Archie his music lessons, she admits that she forgot to bring any music.

Richard's sin is undoubtedly pride. Robert states it in Act One, Richard admits it in Act Two, and even Brigid comments on it in Act Three: “But if he had to meet a grand highup person he'd be twice as grand himself.” His rebellion against his mother is the significant act of defiance against authority; his “Please God” is obviously a sneer, and Robert suggests that the devil is quoting scripture when he mentions to Bertha that Richard “quoted the Our Father about our daily bread.” Bertha denounces him as a deceiver, Richard later admitting to Robert that he killed the “virginity of her soul,” claiming also his defiance of nature's law (“What is that to me? Did I vote for it?”). Even his insistence upon individuality and originality (“I don't take my ideas from other people”) is suspect, and it is apparent that his exile from Ireland parallels Satan's expulsion from heaven. Yet again, in many small and often humorous ways, Joyce plays upon the motif with full gusto: when Bertha denounces Richard's scheme (“hotly” is the stage direction) as “The work of a devil,” when Robert notes that Richard was “always a devil for surprises,” when Richard angrily shouts that he's off “to meet the devil's father!”, and when he shouts at Bertha, “What the devil are you talking about her for?” Colloquial language is certainly expected in dialogue, but Joyce made a uniquely fine art of recording what people actually say, while underscoring what they wouldn't dare admit they really mean. Joyce once commented that he found that he could do almost anything he wanted to with language.

Although Richard Rowan aggrandizes for himself the most powerful of prototypes, and attempts to incorporate within his composite image all other people around him, Robert Hand still emerges as a character at least as important as Lynch, Cranly, Mulligan, and Michael Furey—second only to Shaun the Post as a dangerous antagonist. It is Robert who portrays the important Adam; although Richard anticipated him in his original abduction of Bertha from Ireland, we have seen that Robert anticipated even that in his childhood wooing of Beatrice in the garden. Robert as Adam is all-too-human (and serves as an important study for the later acceptance of the erring human being, Bloom in Ulysses, H. C. Earwicker in Finnegans Wake). He pathetically likens himself to a stone, first when he explains his lack of ability to swim to Archie, and later when he fondles the smooth stone as a symbol of beauty. He goes on to half-consciously compare Bertha to that stone (paralleling her then with himself), an indication that he is as wrong about women as Richard—as we shall soon see. A common, natural garden stone, Robert is capable of little significant change (especially compared to Richard's symbolic position as a rowan tree), and the designations “common” and “natural” are often used for him, primarily by Robert himself. In his first interview with Richard he insists that it is “quite natural” to have any woman one fancies, referring to a woman as a “work of nature”; pressing the cool stone to his forehead, Robert abjures thinking, claiming that he feels “too natural, too common.” Still pressing the stone to his head, anally-oriented Robert proceeds to discuss that which all women have in common, admitting that he means that which is “the commonest,” and laughingly refers to himself as “very common today.” Richard concurs, for no sooner has Robert left than he denounces him to Bertha as a “common thief.” In his guilty confrontation with Richard in the second act, Robert compares himself to his roses, twice labeling both as common and old. But he soon recovers his poise sufficiently to defend what he calls “nature's law” again, in fact later even triumphantly brandishing his affirmation of “the eternal law of nature herself.” When Bertha is left alone with him, he offers her what he refers to as his “common simple gift”—that which all men offer all women: the offer is made three times, as if in the form of a ritualistic incantation, the form changing only in the third by a reversal of the adjectives. And in Act Three, Adam banishing himself shrugs off his position as a “natural” man by alluding to himself as a “well trained animal.” At least at one point we feel certain that we have seen this animal before: describing the past nine years ago, Robert comments: “And when you and he went away for your walk and I went along the street alone I felt it”; the association is a grim one, but the Lenehan of “Two Gallants” comes easily to mind. We have seen Lenehan at that instant champing at the bit, yearning to betray the “superior” Corley if he only safely could, and here we find Robert claiming guilt for his “first treason” against Richard, his initial attempt to steal Bertha from him. But Robert's Adam does not emerge unaffected by the encounter in the “garden”; not only is he too retreating into exile, but he has been stained twice that evening, one coat with rain, and the other presumably with Melissa water.

But to all important intents it is the woman who triumphs in Exiles. In their own way, both Gretta Conroy and Emma Clery have adequately demonstrated sustained victory and determined staying power respectively, but neither can claim the sort of engulfing dynamism and perpetual endurance of either Molly Bloom or Anna Livia. The combined Bertha-Beatrice victory in Exiles anticipates those later women of power and dimension, although Joyce's ability to diagram the eternal feminine mystery had hardly reached the level here that he later attained. A possible dramatic weakness of the play is that it never quite soars to the heights of conquest suggested in the Molly reverie and the Anna Livia swan-song; Bertha's quiet and delicate victory over the masculine ego in Act Three takes place primarily on the literal level of the drama's actual plot, with little corresponding triumph patterned in the resolution of the play's allegory. Yet the women's victory is exactly that. Not just Bertha, but Beatrice as well has a taste of triumph proportionate to what she ventures: she has summarily dismissed her “earthy” cousin, and has managed to keep his aesthetic counterpart at a stalemate, losing only in that she dares to risk so little. But Bertha sees the battle in all its scope and never relents. She is no mere stone, no mere thing of beauty to be pressed to the forehead and discarded by the male at will: “Do you think I am a stone?” she asks defiantly of Beatrice, refusing to be humbled by superior breeding and education, defending her bastion against the invader, and eventually absorbing her adversary into a feminine alliance. She too lays claim to being natural, defending her “simplicity” in her initial skirmish with Richard. She realizes, however, the strength inherent in her naturalness, and even Richard acknowledges that “there is something wiser than wisdom in your heart.”

It is in her simple statement, “I do things,” however, that Bertha contains the secret of her power. Robert deludes himself when he refers to Bertha as “not exactly your equal,” and asks, “was she really free to choose?” The duel he suggests between Richard and himself proves to be ludicrous, because neither male takes into account Bertha's free will to choose, the active rather than passive aspect of her power, that part of her that “does things.” When Beatrice in her last conversation with Bertha states, “It was only natural I should think …,” Bertha replies, “Ah, yes. Naturally.” As women they are Nature, Bertha specifically the earth, Gaea Tellus, while the men remain only surface manifestations as stone and tree, at best sinking shallow roots or resting heavily. But woman as all-encompassing earth is further augmented by woman as divine spirit, and there can be no doubt that Beatrice's name is intended to suggest Dante's guide through Paradise: “did you feel that what you read was written for your eyes?” asks Dante-Richard, “Or that you inspired me?” Yet divine inspiration is coupled with its natural counterpart, indicated in Robert's praise of Bertha's “divine body.” Richard's strength of ego in the face of such all-enduring opposition rests in his dogged assertion, like God to Moses, “I am what I am.” A lesser ego, a pathetic Moses like the Bloom who will get only a glimpse of the Promised Land, is characterized by the unfinished testament of the Nausicaa chapter of Ulysses: “I am a. …”

Notes

1. Finnegans Wake: pp. 263 and 69. James Joyce's Exiles is available with the added Notes in both the Compass edition in the United States and Jonathan Cape in Great Britain.

2. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 587. See also pp. 414, 415, 417, 420, 425, 429, 436, 467, 476, 488, 502, 581.

3. Samuel A. Tannenbaum, “Exiles, A Discussion of James Joyce's Play,” The Little Review, V (January 1919), pp. 23-25.