[In the following essay, Benstock discusses the characters and their relationships in Exiles.]

The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 caught the Joyces in Austrian Trieste as British nationals, yet Joyce forged ahead after a lapse in completing A Portrait and beginning the writing of Ulysses, until he was allowed to leave for neutral Switzerland a year later. He interrupted the work on Ulysses, however, to undertake a third dramatic work—and the only one to survive—the play Exiles. Throughout his life thereafter Joyce hovered protectively over his one surviving play, concerned about productions, publications, and translations. On one hand it represented a relic of his probational period as a young writer searching for a medium, writing poems, plays, and stories in his late adolescence; on the other hand it exists as the mature work to which he dedicated himself between A Portrait and Ulysses, and although not exactly an “interlude” between those two masterpieces, it is a transitional work and supplements his attitude toward the status of the writer depicted in the two novels. Exiles interrupts the tracking of the young writer's development to project him into a future role, that of an accomplished and published author returning to Ireland from self-exile in Italy, and as such mirrors both Joyce's position in 1915 (with Dubliners in print and A Portrait in the offing) and an acting out of an imaginary role: called back to Dublin with prospects of recognition awaiting him. The writer in Exiles is named Richard Rowan, but vestiges of Stephen Dedalus still adhere to him.

Joyce's youthful enthusiasm for Henrik Ibsen, for what he oddly called Ibsen's “wayward boyish spirit,” may still cling to Exiles, and the play certainly is in the way of Joyce's homage to the old master of the modern spirit in drama. Like many an Ibsen play (Hedda Gabler, for example) Exiles begins with the homecoming of the main character: Rowan arrives back in Ireland after nine years in Rome, bringing back the woman who had gone into exile with him, but with whom he remains unmarried, and their eight-year-old son. The death of Rowan's mother, and the consequent inheritance from his father's will, has brought him home, to a residence in suburban Merrion—a far cry from the seedy dwellings inhabited by Stephen Dedalus. He picks up just about where he had left off nine years earlier, with his journalist friend Robert Hand as a neighbor, and Hand's cousin and former fiancée Beatrice Justice giving piano lessons to young Archie Rowan. The past is in the process of being recaptured, but the major change in Rowan's status is that he is a published writer for whom Hand is attempting to arrange a position at the university. Knowing what we know about Joyce at this point in his life, Rowan's new advantages are within the realm of wish fulfillment for the poverty-stricken exile unhonored in his native land. Rowan is blessed with a paternal inheritance and a villa, a house servant, and a triumphal reentry into Ireland, with a potential for being honored and rewarded there. With all friends as prospective betrayers, however, and all women as possible sources of literary inspiration, the stage is set for the acting out of various inevitabilities.

Thematically Exiles reveals itself to be within the Joycean mainstream, and its directness as dramatic statement and presentation clarifies various positions taken by Joyce during the early stages of his literary career. A concern with betrayal in multiple ways pervades the play: personal and political, sexual and spiritual, collective and individual. At the center of the complex web is Richard Rowan himself, although by no means the only victim of betrayals, often the betrayer as well, but always at the center of the web. His role in relation to Ireland provides only a minor thread, interlaced with many others: that he went into self-imposed exile from Ireland with Bertha has been considered a betrayal of nation, as well as a defiance of the moral strictures of that nation, so that his return is ambiguously perceived. The belated inheritance gives him a foothold (in the fashionable outskirts of Dublin City), and the offer of a chair in romance languages at the university would give him an entrenched position. Hand's campaign on its behalf is heralded in the first act when Richard is informed of an invitation to dine with the vice-chancellor, and reiterated in the last act: Hand has published a leading article called “A Distinguished Irishman” (E 128).

Robert's motives prove suspect, as he admits in the second act, when Richard confronts him regarding his attentions toward Bertha. His interest in arranging a permanent place for his friend includes assuring Bertha's presence as well. He nervously proposes the dinner meeting at the vice-chancellor's, like a panderer arranging an assignation, and Richard, fully aware of Robert's approaches to Bertha, adds to his nervousness by his own casual indifference toward the vice-chancellor and the suggested appointment. In act 2 Richard is rather fiendish in his calculated discomfiting of Robert, arriving at the cottage where Robert is waiting for Bertha just at the hour that Robert scheduled Richard to be at the vice-chancellor's. In act 3 Richard's thrust changes to ironic hauteur. When he is given the newspaper to read about himself he coyly mistakes the intended article to be the one headed “Death of the Very Reverend Canon Mulhall,” but soon manages to locate the one about himself. He reads aloud to Beatrice: “Not the least vital of the problems which confront our country is the problem of her attitude towards those of her children who, having left her in her hour of need. …” He does not pause at the implied criticism of his defection, but stops reading when he notices Bertha's presence. And to Beatrice's innocent statement, “You see, Mr Rowan, your day has dawned at last. Even here. And you see that you have a warm friend in Robert, a friend who understands you,” he is quick to respond: “Did you notice the little phrase at the beginning: those who left her in her hour of need?” (E 129). Joyce is quite exact in his Notes to Exiles: “The play is three cat and mouse acts” (E 156).

Richard is soon able to compound the irony in his treatment of Robert Hand's valedictory leading article, sensitive to the implication also of cowardly self-aggrandizement in the continuing segment, “have been called back to her now on the eve of her longawaited victory.” (Joyce began writing Exiles in the early days of the First World War, the event which allowed Britain to circumvent that supposed victory for nationalist Ireland, the granting of Home Rule.) The insults are enough for Richard Rowan, providing him with the ammunition he needs against Robert Hand, but also against Bertha, who may actually have betrayed him the night before with Robert in the Ranelagh cottage. “Why, then, did you leave me last night?” Bertha asks in her own defense. “In your hour of need,” comments Richard in lieu of an answer (E 133).

The uneasy relationship that Richard feels between himself and Ireland is reflected and refracted at various instances, with those nearest to him and the larger world without. (Proximity is a disquieting factor throughout the play: the Rowan house is apparently adjoined to that of Robert Hand, who lives with his mother, separated by their respective gardens, and Beatrice lives with the Hands as well, a cousin to Robert with whom he once was in love and who still harbors uncomfortable feelings toward him.) Primarily it is as a literary artist that Richard views himself in relation to his nation, and aware of his new prestige, and as someone who—as his old servant Brigid maintains—if he “had to meet a grand highup person he'd be twice as grand himself” (E 117), Richard is pointedly caustic when informed that the vice-chancellor “has the highest opinion of you, Richard. He has read your book, he said.”

RICHARD:
Did he buy it or borrow it?
ROBERT:
Bought it, I hope.
RICHARD:
… Thirty-seven copies have now been sold in Dublin.

(E 44)

Joyce's handling of ironic language is masterful here: in both Robert's “he said” and “I hope” the vice-chancellor's case is undercut, Robert the instrument of his own defeat, and Richard's hand inadvertently strengthened.

As a writer, Richard Rowan has an even more complex entanglement with those around him, particularly in his somewhat mysterious involvement with Beatrice Justice. In her noncerebral approach Bertha is exact in sensing that the “intellectual” woman has an advantage and a hold on Rowan, but Beatrice herself can neither comprehend nor respond to his interest in her. In the opening encounter she is (against her pronounced intentions) in direct contact with him, discomfited by his directness. He confronts her with her absence of twelve days, wants to know if he has acted badly toward her, implies that she is the immediate subject of his new work, and reminds her that her letters to him in Rome established a sort of bond between them. She, on the other hand, seems to admit that giving Archie piano lessons is an excuse for coming to the Rowan house, that she prefers to avoid embarrassing personal questions, and that her former love for Robert was dissipated when she compared him to Richard: “I saw in him a pale reflection of you: then that too faded” (E 21). The tenuous relationship between Richard and Beatrice provides the opening conflict of the drama, yet it disappears early in the first act, not to resurface again until the third, the Richard-Bertha-Robert triangle dominating in the interim.

Bertha accosts Beatrice in act 3, positioning her so that she has to admit that she was in some ways responsible for Richard's decision to return to Ireland (“By your letters to him and then by speaking to your cousin” [E 124]). She proves relentless in her dealing with Beatrice, finally accusing her of being “very intimate in this house” (E 125), but most particularly she is perceptive in intuiting the relationship between Richard as a writer and Beatrice Justice: “He passes the greater part of the night in there writing. Night after night. … Yes. He is writing. And it must be about something which has come into his life lately—since we came back to Ireland. Some change. Do you know that any change has come into his life? [She looks searchingly at her.] Do you know it or feel it?” (E 125). Beatrice deflects the accusation with a reminder that Robert is also “intimate” in the Rowan house, but she has been observed in the first scene being made aware of her role as inspiration for Richard Rowan's art, and whereas Bertha is exact in her sense of the artist-subject inter-relationship, Beatrice is neither honest enough nor brave enough to acknowledge the bind. “If I were a painter and told you I had a book of sketches of you you would not think it so strange, would you?” (E 16). Beatrice insists—and Richard admits—that the case is not quite the same.

Richard Rowan claims for himself a unique privilege in this case, making demands upon the woman who serves as his inspiration, subject, muse, critic, and apparently enlarges those demands to include her as a woman—something that Beatrice is unable to accept. As such he reserves for himself dual rights, and maintains that his recompense for unusually excessive claims is the degree of freedom that he grants to Bertha in their “marriage.” He took her away with him nine years before without offering her the sanctity of the marriage rite, knowing that she would have perferred such a rite and its concomitant privileges, and allowed them to live in relative poverty in Rome, rather than accept money from his disapproving mother. He was repeatedly unfaithful and confessed his guilty adventures to her, although she herself remained faithful to him. While in Rome Richard was safe in having Bertha with him and Beatrice as a constant correspondent. Now back in Ireland, both Robert and Beatrice are uncomfortably close, with just the expanse of the two gardens separating them, and Robert is in full attendance on Bertha, while Beatrice is near but “distant.”

The involvement of the Irish writer both with Ireland and with his art is never far from the surface in any Joycean scenario, but the interpersonal entanglements of the people in Exiles dominate the play. The possibility of an evolving love triangle is apparent from the opening scene in which Beatrice proves both drawn to Richard and resolute in her resistance to him that suggests an overpowering psychological frigidity. Although she cannot help being aware of Bertha's central position in relation to Richard, she steers away from ever mentioning her, and it is only late in their conversation that Richard does so when he refers to “me” and “mine.” Beatrice fails to make the necessary connection, asking, “From you and from … ?” so that it is Richard who asserts, “From Bertha and from me and from our child” (E 23-24). Richard also tends to think in terms of a very different triangle, one from the past that he is attempting to dismantle as he interrogates her on her past relationship with Robert Hand:

RICHARD:
Yet that separated me from you. I was a third person, I felt. Your names were always spoken together, Robert and Beatrice, as long as I can remember. It seemed to me, to everyone …
BEATRICE:
We were first cousins. It is not strange that we were often together.
RICHARD:
He told me of your secret engagement with him. He had no secrets from me; I suppose you know that.
BEATRICE:
[Uneasily.] What happened—between us—is so long ago. I was a child.

(E 20)

Richard's reference to childhood revolves full circle to arrive eventually at Beatrice's insistence that she was a child, a factor of innocence (and of innocence lost) that pervades Joyce's Exiles.

Richard is persistent in this enforced dialogue in prizing up the rock, in bringing the past into the present, the distant into the foreground, the secret into the open, just as Beatrice is equally determined to conceal, dissipate, defuse, confine everything to sealed boxes. In the “three cat and mouse acts” Richard is the major cat, a role that he tries to monopolize throughout but may find himself relinquishing before the end. In this scene he is the “attack cat,” except that the mouselike Beatrice, who confesses to a “want of courage,” survives through intransigence. There is little doubt that she is fortified by her dour religion as a “black Protestant,” by a confirmed virginity—of soul as well as of body—and by a brush with death that has left her “convalescent” rather than actively alive: “As I did not die then they tell me I shall probably live. I am given life and health again—when I cannot use them” (E 21). Against such formidable passivity Richard's constant thrusts are unrepelled yet unprevailing, and the mouse slithers away.

The triangle Richard had chosen for himself was one in which he was the only male figure (Robert presumably abandoned in the past as the cousin who faded out of contention). And as long as he and Bertha remained in Italy that triangle remained in force: he dominated Bertha soul and body, and retained access to the mind of the admiring Beatrice. Once he is back (and on several occasions it is emphasized that these past three months have been eventful for him), he has to face the spiritual and physical coldness of Beatrice's refusal to establish contact, and the emergency of a new and threatening triangle involving Robert and Bertha. Although Exiles begins with a feint toward the minor triangle, the drama quickly moves toward the dominance of the major triangle, the minor one nonetheless inexorably bound into the major—a four-cornered triangle. Toward the end of act 3 Robert Hand attempts to extricate himself from the configuration, twice denying his role either in the present or even in the past: “She is yours, as she was nine years ago, when you met her first.” (“When we met her first,” Richard insists [E 139]). Although Robert accepts the corrective, he is never comfortable with it and soon tries to slip back into the granting of primacy to Richard: “Bertha is yours now as she was nine years ago, when you—when we—met her first” (E 141). Whatever may have taken place the previous night at the Ranelagh cottage has resulted in Robert's strange abdication in the morning.

Nor are the two triangles (Richard/Bertha/Beatrice—Bertha/Richard/Robert) ever quite discrete from each other. The conflict that results between the men reaches its climax in the second act and a resolution of sorts in the third; the implied conflict between the women is precipitously brought to the surface by Bertha (Beatrice again reluctant to engage in any direct confrontation), and undergoes an important transformation. All conflicts between parts of this many-headed monster are operative throughout the three cat-and-mouse acts in a drama that strings together some fifteen duologues, five in act 1, three in act 2, and seven in act 3. With Archie and Brigid effecting the transitions between the scenes of hand-to-hand combat, all possible permutations of such interaction are made possible in Exiles.

No sooner has Beatrice extricated herself from Richard's incursions than she falls victim to the combined attentions of Robert and Bertha—probably the only instance in the play when two cats attack simultaneously. Robert is disturbed by having Beatrice witness his arrival with overblown roses for Bertha, while Bertha masks her discomfort by overzealously playing the hostess, insisting that Beatrice stay for tea. Maintaining that it is only Archie's piano lesson that brought her so unexpectedly to the Rowan house immediately upon her return from her visit to her father's house in Youghal, Beatrice is disadvantaged in not having remembered to bring the music for the lesson. Robert presses his advantage when he concludes that Beatrice's trip to Youghal was in the manner of a “retreat,” where she goes “when the protestant strain in her prevails—gloom, seriousness, righteousness” (E 33). Beatrice effects her retreat from the overly cavalier cousin and the overly solicitous hostess by going off with Archie for a short lesson, and escaping afterwards without having to take tea at the Rowans'.

With Beatrice out of the way the primary action of Exiles has a clear field. Robert as amorous pursuer baldly plays his hand, and succeeds in embracing a presumably compliant Bertha, but it is apparent from the beginning that she is toying with him almost maliciously, forcing him to woo with words, cross-examining him with literal questions, and displaying little enthusiasm despite her compliance. The assignation set for that evening at the cottage, Robert remains none too sure of her intentions. “I promise nothing,” says Bertha; “I will wait,” he feebly replies (E 43). They have been interrupted by Richard's return, and the would-be lover finds himself having to stay on and politely encounter the unsuspecting husband to whom he constantly reaffirms his strong friendship. In his guilt Robert is almost as much a wooer of Richard as he was of Bertha, and almost as awkward. All occasions seem to inform against him as Richard inexplicably assumes the role of the playful cat in dealing with his friend, who has ostensibly come to arrange Richard's meeting with the vice-chancellor, and is immediately put on the defensive regarding that dignitary's reading of Richard's book: “Well, the matter is closed for the present,” Robert declares; “You have your iron mask on today” (E 44).

Every topic of conversation adds to Richard's easy accumulation of subtle victories, especially Robert's unfortunate reference to the past, the clandestine elopement of Richard and Bertha (“How shall I put it? … With a girl not exactly your equal” [E 45]). Robert even risks a direct assault—“It was her own free choice, you will say. But was she really free to choose?” (E 47)—which Richard quickly turns against him, declaring himself the victor: “I played for her against all that you say or can say; and I won” (E 47). The audience is acutely aware that the subject of Bertha is the wrong one at this moment for Robert, and he belatedly shifts to the nostalgic past when the two men shared the Ranelagh cottage for “Drinking and blasphemy” (Robert), “And drinking and heresy” (Richard). Richard turns this safe area also into his field of combat:

RICHARD:
And some others.
ROBERT:
[Lightly, uneasily.] You mean the women. I have no remorse of conscience. Maybe you have. We had two keys on those occasions. [Maliciously.] Have you?

(E 48)

For Robert to admit to no remorse of conscience, to prattle on about his libertine doctrine and claim all women as his “natural” domain, is perceived as weighted with irony by an audience that knows his intentions toward Bertha, but also assumes that Richard does not.

How much more ironic then when the next scene reveals that Richard has known of the approaches from the very first, that Bertha has been openly confiding in her husband at every juncture, and that Richard has been tracking the affair with eager interest. This dialogue of astonishing revelation is the culmination of act 1, in which Richard acts the part of Grand Inquisitor catechizing Bertha relentlessly, and once again insisting on her right to “free choice” when she asks if she should keep the appointment at the cottage. He is calculating, sardonic, coolly casual, and haughty, even capable of righteous indignation, as he cross-examines her, denouncing Robert as “a liar, a thief, and a fool! … A common thief! … My great friend! A patriot too! … A thief—nothing else! … But a fool also!” (E 63). Once the audience is aware of Richard's prior knowledge, the parting between the two men echoes with heightened irony:

ROBERT:
Good afternoon, Richard. We shall meet tonight.
RICHARD:
[Touches his hand.] At Philippi.

(E 54)

And the interim conversation between Richard and his son, once Robert had left, can now be fully appreciated for its ironic reverberations:

RICHARD:
But when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. … It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.
ARCHIE:
But, pappie?
RICHARD:
Yes?
ARCHIE:
How could a robber rob a cow? Everyone would see him. In the night, perhaps?
RICHARD:
In the night, yes.

(E 56)

The cross-questioning of Bertha reveals a Richard capable of exacting his pound of flesh, but at this moment of exalted triumph, denouncing Robert and threatening to pursue him with his denunciation, Richard slips and gives Bertha her long-sought advantage:

BERTHA:
… I see it all!
RICHARD:
[Turning.] Eh!
BERTHA:
[Hotly.] The work of a devil!
RICHARD:
He?
BERTHA:
[Turning on him.] No, you! The work of a devil to turn him against me.

(E 64)

Once Bertha “turns,” the advantage is and remains hers until the curtain. She accuses him of turning Archie against her, of never having loved his own mother, of going out on “rambles in the rain,” neglecting her and the child, of taking advantage of her “simplicity,” and of establishing a relationship with Beatrice that is deterimental to Bertha. “I believe you will get very little from her in return,” she says prophetically, corroborating the sense the audience attained from the conversation between Richard and Beatrice: “Because she is not generous and they are not generous.” When she asks him, “Is it all wrong what I am saying?,” Bertha must be aware of the success of her counteroffensive, and Richard can only concede (“darkly”), “No. Not at all” (E 69). There remains only the realization that he has, in the intensity of the situation, forgotten his promise to Archie to ask Bertha whether he may go out with the milkman in the morning, and he disguises his “betrayal” by granting the permission without consulting her.

Act 2 is clinical and classical in its economy and precision: in the Ranelagh cottage the three principals converge (minus Beatrice, Archie, and Brigid) for what has all the possibilities of a showdown. The setting suggests both a confining enclosure of claustrophobic intensity and a remoteness from the Merrion parlor where one feels that home life, a workplace, and a neighborhood alleviate the tensions of the love affair. Yet there is a comic touch to the bachelor's lair in which Robert awaits his prey, playing Wagner on the piano and spraying the room with perfume in tense anticipation—and comic irony in the appearance of Richard in lieu of Bertha. The scheme to get Richard out of the way by arranging the dinner at the vice-chancellor's has backfired for Robert, but he attempts both to put a good face on it and get Richard out before Bertha arrives. Richard dallies with him for only a few moments before leveling his accusations and revealing his full knowledge. The initiative is certainly his, and Robert has litle choice but to capitulate and at least feign contrition. It is a fascinating display of Richard's serene vindictiveness, and yet somehow the balance of power unmistakably shifts halfway through: “What a lesson! Richard, I cannot tell you what a relief it is to me that you have spoken—that the danger is passed. Yes, yes. [Somewhat diffidently.] Because … there was some danger for you, too, if you think. Was there not?” (E 77). (Throughout Exiles Joyce shows himself skillful in the crafting of his stage directions and the placement of his ellipses.)

Robert has invariably revealed himself as a bumbler, Richard the prestidigitator, yet Robert cannot but be credited with knowing exactly what he is now doing in manipulating the counters, in turning disaster into a stalemate from which he can maneuver more easily than his adversary. He follows up his disconcerting question by speaking “bravely,” presumably congratulating Richard on speaking out before it proved too late, “Until I had come to like her more and more (because I can assure you it is only a lightheaded idea of mine), to like her deeply, to love her. Would you have spoken to me then as you have just now? [Richard is silent. Robert goes on more boldly.] It would have been different, would it not?” (E 77). What Robert eventually proposes is a competition between them (“A duel—between us?”, Richard asks, almost with incredulity):

ROBERT:
[With growing excitement.] A battle of both our souls, different as they are, against all that is false in them and in the world. A battle of your soul against the spectre of fidelity, of mine against the spectre of friendship. All life is a conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice. Will you, Richard? Have you the courage? Even if it shatters to atoms the friendship between us, even if it breaks up for ever the last illusion in your own life?

(E 89)

That this sort of “romantic” sophistry can actually prevail against Richard's “classical” casuistry seems incredible, yet Robert has softened up his opponent before throwing down the gauntlet by flattering Richard's strength, playing on his self-doubt, insisting on the doctrine of a woman's free choice that Richard himself had advanced, and giving him plenty of opportunity to confess his own feelings of guilt regarding Bertha. Richard never quite accedes to the duel, but has trapped himself into a laissez-faire position: “Together no. Fight your part alone. I will not free you. Leave me to fight mine” (E 90).

Onto this field of disarray Bertha makes her entrance, first confronting her husband and then her prospective lover. The men have so whittled away at each other that both are easy marks for her serene strength. The nominal trophy of their contention, Bertha has a will of her own, dealing first with Richard, while Robert hides in the rainy garden. Richard's triumph in bearding the lion in his den she reduces to insignificance: “I knew you could not remain away. You see, after all you are like other men. You had to come. You are jealous like the others.” And even his masculine assertion (“I had to protect you from that”) she dismisses with ease: “That I could have done myself” (E 92). Her self-assurance, however, is anything but ironclad, and in an indecisive moment she pleads, “Why do you not defend me then against him? … Dick, my God, tell me what you wish me to do?” But that is precisely what Richard Rowan cannot do. The compact with Robert that he had backed himself into prevents him from making decisions for anyone but himself. “There is something wiser than wisdom in your heart,” he tells her, and allows her to make her own way. “I will remain,” she says—“dreamily” (E 96).

With the rain-drenched and apprehensive Robert she plays both the role of the solicitous mother and the coy seductress, bringing him back to at least a semblance of his self-esteem and allowing the atmospherics of romantic seduction to sustain itself in the love cottage. Her self-possession may in fact give Bertha a false sense of security, for Robert has as his subtle weapon the evidence of Richard's abdication, the acquiescence for a duel that shifts the battle to the center of the court:

ROBERT:
… He has left us alone here at night, at this hour, because he longs to know it—he longs to be delivered.
BERTHA:
From what?
ROBERT:
[Moves closer to her and presses her arm as he speaks.] From every law, Bertha, from every bond. All his life he has sought to deliver himself. Every chain but one he has broken and that one we are to break, Bertha—you and I.

(E 112)

Transformed once again into the cat in command, Robert makes his play, assisted by wind and rain and encroaching darkness, and the second act ends with Bertha hovering on the brink of capitulation.

The suspended moments at the close of act 2 result in the ambiguous resolutions of the final act, an inconclusiveness that is characteristic of almost all of Joyce's narrative closures from “The Dead” through A Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Determining the consequences of the romantic interlude in the cottage dominates the cat-and-mouse situation in act 3, but even that issue must take a back seat because of the early morning arrival of Beatrice Justice. Although she presumably intrudes to bring the good news of the article on Richard Rowan in the morning newspaper, she also inadvertently contributes to the suspense by mentioning Robert's arrival home late last night and his packing for an imminent departure. Bertha takes the opportunity to confront Beatrice, shifting the subject from Robert to Richard, and behind the façade of polite conversation the battle lines are drawn: Bertha implies that Beatrice exerts a hold on Richard, and Beatrice suggests that Bertha has pulled Robert into her sphere. The first round results in a standoff, Beatrice just barely holding her own against Bertha's directness. They are temporarily interrupted by Richard, who sardonically reads the leading article and quickly leaves, abandoning the arena once again to the two women.

The second round takes up where the first left off, but it is immediately apparent that Bertha does not intend to renew her attack. Instead, she confesses her sorrows to Bertha (“I gave up everything for him, religion, family, my own peace”), staunchly maintaining her refusal to be humbled: “I am very proud of myself, if you want to know. … I made him a man. … He can despise me, too, like the rest of them—now. And you can despise me. But you will never humble me, any of you.” Her moment of defiance is capped with an offer of friendship with her presumed rival, an allegiance that transcends their rivalry for Richard:

BERTHA:
[Going to her impulsively.] I am in such suffering. Excuse me if I was rude. I want us to be friends. [She holds out her hands.] Will you?
BEATRICE:
[Taking her hands.] Gladly.

(E 129-30)

The gesture of feminine solidarity consolidates Bertha's position as she returns her focus to the men who have viewed her as their domesticated mouse. Robert has been sent for, preventing his inconspicuous escape, but Bertha first faces Richard alone in the wake of the clouded events of the night before. Although she insists that she will tell him the truth, Richard is equally insistent that he will never know the truth, reiterating that he is as always willing to allow Bertha her complete freedom. The chilling ambiguity of truth (the suspicion that the curtain which shrouded the later events in the Ranelagh cottage will remain impenetrable) presents itself in a self-negating conundrum: “I will tell you the truth, Dick, as I always told you. I never lied to you” (E 133), but we also remember her words to Robert in the previous scene: “But, you see, I could not keep things secret from Dick. Besides, what is the good? They always come out in the end” (E 103). Is the truth for Bertha to disclose or for Richard to uncover? Can she tell it or must he find it for himself?

If she intended to make her statement now, she is once again interrupted, this time by the farewell visit of Robert Hand, and it is he who makes the “official” declaration. Bertha gets to deal with him first, so that whatever “secret” is shared by the two of them as their private domain cannot help but be revealed in their open and unobserved discussion. Yet the “truth” retains its pristine ambiguity even between them:

ROBERT:
Has he asked … what happened?
BERTHA:
[Joining her hands in despair.] No. He refuses to ask me anything. He says he will never know.
ROBERT:
[Nods gravely.] Richard is right there. He is always right.

(E 137)

Bertha determines that it is for Robert to make their statement to Richard, but the confused lover balks when she insists on “The truth! Everything!”—his feelings of guilt ostensibly tantamount to a confession. Yet even Robert seems unaware of the reality of objective truth:

ROBERT:
[Catching her hands.] Bertha! What happened last night? What is the truth that I am to tell? [He gazes earnestly into her eyes.] Were you mine in that sacred night of love? Or have I dreamed it?
BERTHA:
[Smiles faintly.] Remember your dream of me. You dreamed that I was yours last night.
ROBERT:
And that is the truth—a dream? That is what I am to tell?
BERTHA:
Yes.
ROBERT:
[Kisses both her hands.] Bertha! [In a softer voice.] In all my life only that dream is real. I forget the rest. [He kisses her hands again.] And now I can tell him the truth.

(E 137-38)

Exiles as a document of “stage realism” comes into question with this unusual exchange during the moments of “resolution”: the privileging of dream over truth (or the identification of dream as truth) disturbs the complacency of verisimilitude in Joyce's drama and focuses on evanescent qualities stronger than its adherence to literal reality. The dream aura sustains itself and expands in the revelation scene despite the efforts of the prosaic Robert to reassure his friend (“I failed. She is yours, as she was nine years ago, when you met her first” [E 139]—here there is no attempt to correct the singular to the plural). The pervasive atmosphere of functional unreality is established at the opening of their interview by an intrusive “Fishwoman” hawking her wares along the road outside, overheard in the Rowan house: “Fresh Dublin bay herrings!” (E 139). Nothing in Exiles quite prepares us for this blatant interference of external and unrelated reality, making something as mundane as a fish vendor an element of mysterious inclusion.

In the closing moments of the play the circumference narrows down to an intimate exchange between Richard and Bertha (Beatrice neutralized; Archie having had his ride on the milk wagon; Robert's departure for Surrey paralleling Beatrice's initial arrival from Youghal). The universe is theirs alone, and it is Bertha who has gathered all of the controlling strings in her hands, not only insisting on her fidelity toward him, but on a continuous and unbroken fidelity. She couples her present devotion to the years of his unfaithfulness: “Heavens, what I suffered then—when we lived in Rome! … I was alone, Dick, forgotten by you and by all” (E 145). The question that she asks is a compound without separate entities, so that it is the total construct of her allegiance that is under examination: “do you believe now that I have been true to you? Last night and always?” (E 144). The doubt that Richard Rowan insists upon seems as permanent as Bertha's devotion, but is enclosed within and subsumed by that devotion as she contains both past and present in her mastery of the situation:

BERTHA:
I am yours. [In a whisper.] If I died this moment, I am yours.
RICHARD:
[Still gazing at her and speaking as if to an absent person.] 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. I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness—for this I longed. And now I am tired for a while, Bertha. My wound tires me. [He stretches himself out wearily along the lounge. BERTHA holds his hand, still speaking very softly.]
BERTHA:
Forget me, Dick. Forget me and love me again as you did the first time. I want my lover. To meet him, to go to him, to give myself to him. You, Dick. O, my strange wild lover, come back to me again! [She closes her eyes.]

(E 147)

In the final conflict of cat-and-mouse, the wounded cat luxuriously stretches himself out in weariness and is ministered to by his prey.

The culmination of their tensions brings the Rowans to a stasis in a drama marked by its nontragedy, a drama of “convalescence,” of wounds that neither heal nor destroy. Richard Rowan had initiated a collision course for himself and those he assumes he controls, and the duration of the drama is a period in which the collision is both inevitable and prevented. The real action of the play had taken place in the past: the consequences of the exile from Ireland and Richard's exiling of himself from Bertha are what Exiles depicts. Beatrice carries her exile with her at all times, an incomplete woman, a convalescent with no chance of complete health, a Protestant in a Catholic enclave. Robert had exile thrust upon him as he abandons the field of inconsequence for a retreat to Surrey, designating as his heir Richard's son: “Perhaps, there, Richard, is the freedom we seek—you in one way, I in another. In him and not in us” (E 143). And the freedom that Richard seeks and presumably grants so freely locks him into permanent exile whether in or away from Ireland. Bertha, on the other hand, forced by Richard into exile from her religion, family, and own peace of mind, exiled from him in Rome and from her proper status upon return to Ireland, not only refuses to allow herself to be humbled, but brings everyone around her to heel. As Joyce's complete woman she has the power to wound and to nurse, free to choose and consequently to make demands. An expansion on the Gretta Conroy of “The Dead,” she anticipates the creation of the Molly Bloom of Ulysses and the Anna Livia Plurabelle of Finnegans Wake.

Despite Joyce's economy of style and form in Exiles, the play seems unable to contain itself with-in the walls of the stage set or the time of the three acts, and Joyce's Notes (which since 1951 have been appended to all printed versions of the play) hint at a broader drama that transcends the stage scenario. Even the stage directions, sparse and pointed as they are, suggest an inner drama, a drama of variant possibilities, within the text. A glance at the cast of characters reveals an alliterative pattern of the names of the two men and the two women, as well as charactonymic potentials: the earthiness of Bertha, Robert as robber-thief, the richness of Richard, and Beatrice as the Dante guide (even Brigid as Irish goddess and patron saint). Surnames loom as large: the significance of the rowan tree in Irish mythology, the arch commentary on Justice (as different from Mercy), and the obviousness of Hand—primary implement of taking, touching, robbing (there are over a hundred references to hands in the stage directions, mostly in relation to Robert). In crafting his drama Joyce concerned himself with the language of gesture, but was no less conscious of language itself: a symbolic web of possibilities exists outside the dialogue of Exiles, adding a dimension often lost in stage production.