SOURCE: Dombrowski, Theo Q., and Lester B. Pearson “Joyce's Exiles: The Problem of Love.” James Joyce Quarterly 15, no. 2 (winter 1978): 118–27.

[In the following essay, Dombrowski and Pearson examine the problematic characters in Exiles.]

Long considered an inferior work of largely curiosity value, Exiles has increasingly been recognized as a significant, if problematic, part of Joyce's works. Indeed, as some have begun to realize, part of the play's very significance depends upon the problems it raises and fails to solve. John MacNicholas, for one, has effectively argued that the uncertainty surrounding Bertha's relationship with Robert Hand is not to be seen as a weakness of the play: it is, rather, to be seen as the result of Joyce's deliberate attempt “to create in the audience the same basis of doubt which Richard himself perceives.”¹ The problems of the play can be seen to be further significant in terms of the dramatic theory Joyce discusses in relation to Ibsen, maintaining as he does that “naked drama” resides in “the opening up of a great question, or a great conflict which is almost independent of the conflicting actors. …”²

Perhaps most perplexing of the play's problems is Joyce's presentation of Richard. While it may be argued that Joyce has created in Richard a character at once hopelessly enigmatic and entirely objectionable, it has not been fully appreciated that Richard's attitudes towards his sexual and familial roles merit detailed examination on more than one ground. First, in terms of Joyce's development, the presentation of Richard's complex feelings towards these roles is markedly unlike his previous presentations of any character's feelings towards those roles and a significant presage of his presentation of Bloom. Moreover, in terms of Exiles itself, Richard's position involves both more consistency and more réal problems than is generally recognized.

Indeed, part of the point of the play seems to be that love, especially when sought as an ideal, creates an insoluble problem: love purports to be selfless but by its very nature involves affection that is self-directed and possessive. Thus the central conflict of the play is less between characters than between Richard's conception of what love should be and his own emotional nature. This conflict is partly conscious—Richard suffers acutely from his own emotional contrarieties—and partly unconscious—he often contradicts himself even as he attempts to define ideal behavior. In one sense, the play seems to depict Richard as the idealist who (somewhat like Stephen Dedalus) attempts to surpass his own humanity, but who, like Stephen in Ulysses, is forced to realize that he is as irrevocably human as those above whom he attempts to raise himself. As an artist, he seeks his ideal by enlisting “pride or scorn” (E 20) to achieve a stance he himself identifies with that of the statue Robert describes, head down, arm extended, saying, “In my time the dunghill was so high” (E 43). As a man, he seeks the ideal of purely selfless, free love by avoiding the mechanical fidelity of legal marriage and traditional duty. Thus he implicitly claims to be more than an ordinary man, as, for example, when he says to Robert, “Like all men you have a foolish wandering heart” (E 61). It is with such a view of his ability to achieve ideal love that he refuses to accept traditional family roles and attempts to reform his own family relationships.

But Richard's concept of this ideal love is far from simple, though described extensively in his confrontation with Robert in the second act. With qualifications, Richard, unlike Robert, sees love primarily to involve selflessness and responsibility. While it may seem that he is trying to intimidate Robert or exalt himself when he says nothing of his own emotional gratification in his relationship with Bertha, he is in fact expressing what he genuinely believes to be ideal. To love ideally is not to fulfil oneself but rather is “To wish her well” (E 63).³ His own love for Bertha is, he implies, selfless. Perhaps because, unlike Stephen in Ulysses, he has “saved himself,” he is able to desire a selflessness antithetical to Stephen's egoistic ideal of self help (U 240).

Although there are few problems in such a commonplace notion, there are problems implicit in Richard's belief that love is something through which the entire personality (of the woman at least) is not only fundamentally altered but also fulfilled. Thus he demands of Robert, “Have you the luminous certitude that yours is the brain in contact with which she must think and understand and that yours is the body in contact with which her body must feel?” (E 63) Because Richard's love for Bertha must be selfless, he does not speak of the positive effects of his relationship on himself. However, that he fails to do so has implications of which neither Robert nor he seems aware, implications which are further evident when he says that if he loved Bertha he would give her up if she preferred Robert. When he says to Robert, “[I would] go away. You, and not I, would be necessary to her” (E 64), he both suggests that a woman cannot simultaneously love two men, and implies that, though he would be acutely distressed at relinquishing Bertha, he would not cease to “think,” “understand,” or “feel” (E 64), as she would without the appropriate mate—nor does he consider whether Robert is able to “think,” “understand,” or “feel” without Bertha. Indeed, it seems both Robert and Richard accept the view that a woman is more dependent upon a man to fulfil herself than the reverse. It is entirely consistent with Richard's idea of a generous love for him to say of Bertha, “I tried to give her a new life” (E 67), for he does not consider it part of love to question whether or not he himself has been granted a “new life.” However, the fact that he does not consider the reflexive effects of love, along with the fact that Robert says of Bertha, “She is yours, your work” (E 62), suggests that it is within the man's sole power to uplift his wife.⁴ The suggestion is amplified because, in Bertha's case, she is below Richard “in birth and education” (E 103). Even given that it seems irrelevant to the question of love for Richard to consider his own benefit, there is some irony in the fact that Bertha considers less that she has been uplifted by the relationship than that she has had to undergo great personal sacrifice (E 100) resulting in feelings of inadequacy for her (E 74, 100), and that she has, in fact, uplifted Richard: “I made him a man” (E 100).

While Richard does not seem aware of such implications of his viewpoint, he does recognize the problems entailed by another of its aspects. Because he believes love must be selfless, Richard criticizes Beatrice for her inability to “give [herself] freely and wholly” (E 22). Bertha echoes the charge, saying of Beatrice, “she is not generous. …” (E 55). Nowhere is the notion of giving explicitly defined. In Stephen Hero Stephen clearly means sexual generosity when he speaks of women giving, but insofar as Richard differentiates between Beatrice's reticence of self and mind (E 22) he seems to mean something more comprehensive, perhaps the readiness to give without asking for anything in return or weighing the consequences. In any case, Richard does not question Bertha's ability to give. Clearly, in following him into exile, in sacrificing everything for his sake, Bertha is more than able to give “wholly.”

However, his own ability to give troubles Richard more deeply, for he simultaneously desires to retain Bertha and recognizes that he must not limit her freedom:

I will reproach myself … for having taken all for myself because I would not suffer her to give to another what was hers and not mine to give, because I accepted from her her loyalty and made her life poorer in love.

(E 69)

It is not just the fulfilling kind of love described above that Richard evidently feels he would thereby keep from Bertha. Like Stephen Daedalus (and Joyce himself) Richard highly prizes a vital “life.” Thus it is a great part of his fear that “I stand between her and any moments of life that should be hers …” (E 69)

Richard's emotions—his desire to keep Bertha—further restrict his concept of love. Although his use of “moments,” as in the above, would suggest that he theoretically allows that “life” can be achieved in brief affairs, he has rejected the ideas of his “youth” that it is the “blinding instant of passion alone” that permits one to “escape from the misery of what slaves call life” (E 71). He rejects this idea (expressed here by Robert) partly because it stresses the “passion” rather than the ability to “understand” and “feel” (E 63) which he seems to feel love entails, but partly also because he seems emotionally to value a more permanent relationship. It is true that Richard feels that “to take care of the future is to destroy hope and love in the world” (E 34)—an idea which clearly echoes Stephen Daedalus' claim that it is insane to promise one will always love another.⁵ He feels that to promise fidelity is to deny the possibility of achieving “moments of life,” that fidelity is not something which should result from promise or plan. However, the fact that he brings up “that other law of nature … change,” hypothesizing to Robert, “How will it be … when her beauty … wearies you … ?” (E 68) implies that he feels the limitations of a relationship which is nothing more than “moments.” An ideal relationship, it seems, is a free-willed fidelity, one where both partners are free from suspicions, jealousy, social pressures, shame, or the obligation to stay—but feel the desire to stay, nevertheless.

Richard's intense desire to retain links with Bertha leads him to many inconsistencies in his attempt to give Bertha the kind of “freedom” he feels to be essential to love. In the past he gave Bertha freedom by not imposing bonds of legal marriage upon her and by refusing even to ask her to accompany him into exile (E 75). Now he wishes to go further and ensure that she is not bound by a fidelity merely dutiful. One apparent restriction on the freedom he attempts to give her is his implicit belief that he need not be passive to allow her such freedom: to attract her by her love for him or by arguments against the restraints of social norms is evidently not, in his eyes, to subvert her freedom. Thus when Robert asks him whether Bertha accompanied him into exile “of her own free choice” (E 40), Richard answers, “I played for her against all that you say or can say; and I won” (E 40). It seems somewhat inconsistent that he here confesses to having engaged in a contest for Bertha's love, and, at another point, refuses to engage in another such contest: he will not “free” Robert so that they can fight “Together” over Bertha” (E 71). Yet this apparent inconsistency is explained by the fact that the earlier contest was not one of love against love, but of Richard's love against Robert's attempts to undermine his affection for her (E 85). That it was not a contest of love is confirmed by Bertha's assertion that she did not know Robert loved her (E 84). Richard refuses to “free” Robert to fight over Bertha now, partly it seems because to fight for love is to regard it as something possessed rather than something given, and partly it seems because Richard views friendship as something quite different from love. While he attempts to free his beloved from any sense of obligation towards him, he need not free his friend from a sense of obligation: “Free yourself” (E 71).

Because of the inherent difficulties arising both from love's selfless and selfish qualities and from Richard's own emotional nature, other inconsistencies in Richard's idealistic position are not so easily explained. When he tells Bertha, “I have allowed you complete liberty—and allow you it still” (E 52), Bertha answers “scornfully” for she does not feel herself to be free. He does say to her, “You have complete liberty to do as you wish—you and he,” but the fact that he adds, “But not in this way” (E 53) clearly undercuts the generosity he is trying to feel. Indeed, Bertha explicitly says that if he is to speak of his own knowledge of the affair to Robert she will be severely hampered. Richard's desire to say to Robert what he does say, “I know everything. I have known for some time” (E 59) is, admittedly, understandable, for to have one's wife unfaithful is traditionally demeaning.⁶

Admittedly, too, his reasons for speaking to Robert may be idealistic: perhaps he feels a clandestine relationship is not truly free, restricted as it is by guilt and secrecy. Nevertheless, it is meaningless for him to claim (to Bertha anyway) that he is not imposing any restriction (E 75), for Robert and she are severely hampered by their knowledge that Richard is observing them.

Although he denies it, Richard further limits the freedom he allows Bertha by demonstrating that he is jealous of Robert. When in the third act Bertha declares her impatience with Richard he answers “Bitterly,” “I am in the way, is it?” (E 103) and suspects that Bertha wants to be rid of him “so that you can meet your lover—freely?” (E 104). Partly Richard's bitterness seems a reaction to Bertha's failure to understand that she is free, a failure which is reflected in her belief that he is “in the way.” However, it seems his own jealousy that leads him to draw out the implications of her supposed desire for freedom, speaking of her and her “lover” meeting “Night after night” (E 104). In any case, the fact that Richard goes on to say that he will free her (“You have only to say the word”—E 103) suggests that he, too, does not feel her to have been hitherto free, despite his earlier claims to the contrary.

The insolubility of Richard's problem, his dual inclination to give freedom and to express his love as possessiveness is reflected further in what he says to Archie:

While you have a thing it can be taken from you. … 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.

(E 46-47)

It may be that Richard is talking of giving his love to Bertha in abstract terms, but the fact that he speaks of a “robber” and later calls Robert a “thief” (E 51) suggests that he is thinking also that if he is to “give” Bertha the freedom to love whom she pleases, then, in a sense he cannot lose her to a “thief.” It is not inconsistent with Richard's view that Robert can be a “thief” even while Bertha cannot be stolen, for Robert can act like a thief in trying to steal Bertha's affection. Evidently Richard equates thievery with furtive behavior—hence his disturbance that she and Robert should behave “in such a way—like thieves—at night” (E 61). Even so, Richard's claim, “Steal you could not in my house because the doors were open. …” (E 62) reveals not only a desire to remove all restrictions from his love, but profound uneasiness that Robert as “thief” should steal what Richard is (emotionally) reluctant to lose.

The emotional difficulty Richard encounters in his attempts to give Bertha freedom is intensified by the fact that, though the absence of legal ties frees them both from the fear of legal adultery, he cannot escape the feeling that infidelity is inherently wrong, a betrayal of love freely given. If Bertha sleeps with Robert, though he will try to see her action generously as a sign of her freedom, he must simultaneously feel it to be a sign that she does not love him. Thus he both desires that she be unfaithful and fears that she will be. The horror with which he regards infidelity is reflected in the fact that even though he dismisses the significance of carnal intercourse (“longing to possess a woman is not love”—E 63) he implicitly opposes Robert's arguments for promiscuity, as shown earlier, and is shocked by his own infidelity: “I look at her body which I betrayed—grossly and many times” (E 68). It is not just in retrospect that Richard feels this remorse, for directly after one instance of infidelity he “wakened [Bertha] from her sleep and told her” and “cried beside her bed” (E 66).

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with Richard's attempts to achieve freedom in ideal love is created by the fact that Bertha does not want freedom. It may be partly the reflection of Bertha's limitations, her conditioning by society, that she desires love as a kind of bondage, but, for her, the desire is nonetheless real. She feels abandoned without assurances of affection: “Dick, my God, tell me what you wish me to do? [sic]” (E 75). Somewhat like Molly Bloom, she uses the freedom she has been allowed merely to provoke jealousy, affirmations of love, and the retraction of her freedom. When, after her visit to Robert, her attempts to goad Richard into overt jealousy result only in his renewed protestations of her freedom, she breaks into tears, and echoing Nora in A Doll's House, exclaims, “You do not understand anything in me—not one thing in my heart or soul. A Stranger! I am living with a stranger!” (E 104).

Bertha is only partly right, for Richard does understand that she wants to be held by love. The “voices” of “despair” (E 109) that plague him at the end seem to arise partly from the fact that he has failed in himself and others to engender his ideals of love. Thus, recalling a line from Robert's newspaper article, he “Bitterly” says to Bertha that he left her “In [her] hour of need” (E 102). His tortured attempts to achieve an ideal life are interpreted by Bertha, as by Ireland, to be neglect. The pain is intensified for him, because at one point at least he seems to have doubted his own action: he says to Robert, “Have you thought that it is perhaps now—at this moment—that I am neglecting her?” (E 68).

However, Richard has established earlier that he does not believe an individual's wish—“happiness”—to be most important: “do you feel that happiness is the best, the highest we can know?” (E 22) he says to Beatrice. He feels for him to give perfect love is more important than that his beloved be happy. It seems that to love is to be selfless, not to fulfil the emotional needs of the beloved. Even if Bertha's immediate wish is to be held by bonds (E 111), the resulting relationship would be meaningless for her as well as him. Though Richard has momentary doubts about having killed the “virginity of her soul” (E 67), he implicitly agrees with Robert's largely sincere statement that his relationship with Bertha, whatever its unhappiness, has changed Bertha from a simple, innocent girl to “A strange and wonderful personality” (E 67). Moreover, he is willing to take the drastic step of leaving her with Robert so that by his own doubt he will feel her to be released.

Indeed, Richard's attitudes toward Bertha's relationship with Robert involve Richard's most profound difficulties in his struggle to reconcile his ideals with his conflicting emotions. Attempting to explain to Robert emotions which are almost incomprehensible to himself, he says that he “longed to be betrayed” (E 70) by Bertha and Robert, not just insofar as he condones the betrayal in terms of ideals, but “in the dark, in the night—secretly, meanly, craftily” (E 70). Except that he is so clearly distressed by his own contrary inclinations, it would seem that he assures Bertha that he trusts her and that she is free merely so that she will have the confidence to betray him in such a manner. Partly, Richard explains to Robert, he longs to be betrayed by Bertha because he finds her faithfulness a burden insofar as it makes the demands of his love even more difficult. Partly, too, he says the desire arises from an ignoble longing “to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust” (E 70), a longing which he is himself unable to understand, but which clearly is linked to purely irrational, partly sexual desire to feel himself martyred, “betrayed” by his “best friend” (E 70). Even his use of “betrayed” indicates an emotional reaction to infidelity as something other than the expression of Bertha's freedom.⁷ The same desire to be the sufferer is reflected in his apparent satisfaction in his Christ-like “wound of doubt” (E 112), and his predilection to claim for himself the strange “faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him” (E 44). Rather than dominating Richard's feelings, however, this desire is merely a quirk, one which complicates his desire to achieve the ideal.

Beyond these two motives for being betrayed, Richard enigmatically insists that there is “a motive deeper still” (E 70) Robert claims to understand, but presumably he does not for Richard fails to agree with Robert's inflated conclusion, that such a betrayal will “free us both … from the last bonds of what is called morality” (E 70). Whereas Richard has just said he wants to be “betrayed,” Robert insists that they both “battle” (E 70) with complete freedom—quite the reverse of betrayal.

Although the “motive deeper still” is not identified, by the end of Act III it becomes evident that a crucial part of Richard's desire to be “betrayed” depends on his changing ideas about the importance of mutual knowledge in a relationship. Early in their relationship and until the second act, Richard expects Bertha to tell him everything and in turn tells her everything, waking her from her sleep to confess his sexual misdemeanors because “She must know me as I am” (E 66). Thus he rebukes Bertha for failing to understand the freedom she is (theoretically) allowed by mutual knowledge, “unpleasantly” (E 74) and sarcastically answering her claim that she should have told him nothing of her affair with Robert: “It would have been so nice if you had kept it secret” (E 74).

By the end of the play, however, Richard has rescinded the idea that he must know Bertha completely. Although he abandons her at Robert's cottage with the insistence “I will trust you” (E 75), the next morning he claims, “I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or believe” (E 112). In some ways Richard's claim seems a perverse reversal of his earlier injunction to Bertha to abandon her jealousy: “Believe me, Bertha dear. Believe me as I believe you” (E 53). However, it seems that Richard inflicts upon himself this “wound of doubt” in order to comply with his changed attitude toward an ideal relationship:

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.

(E 112)⁸

Although Richard's ideals no doubt dominate his desire, even this tormenting step towards an ideal involves some of the complex feelings that have distressed him earlier. The fact that he describes his feeling for Bertha as “desire” (even if the desire involves both “body and soul in utter nakedness”) suggests that he derives a kind of sexual excitement from the fact that Bertha may have had sexual intercourse with another man. At the same time, however, Richard's Christ-like wound of “doubt,” far from strengthening him, “tires” him. If Richard does feel such excitement, it is over-shadowed by the pain he suffers from this “wound.” It is possible to see some satisfaction in this Christ-like sense of martyrdom, but it is clear that Richard also is genuinely idealistic. By putting Bertha in a position where he is forced to doubt her fidelity, he feels he has given their relationship greater freedom, releasing Bertha from the claims of love. Evidently Richard equates the inability to trust with the lapse of love as “bond,” that kind of relationship which he has been trying to surpass. It seems that he has been so distressed with his own emotional inability to give Bertha freedom, and her emotional and intellectual inability to desire it or understand when she has it, that he has had to force doubt upon himself and an estrangement upon the relationship. Thus, if both decide to remain with each other, their decisions (specifically Bertha's) will be freer of mechanical loyalty than before. “Doubt” at least is “living.”⁹

Such an explanation of Richard's ideas and behavior obviously does not solve all difficulties. But it does demonstrate that many of the problems involved in Richard's behavior arise from Joyce's attempt to present not an arbitrarily inscrutable character, but rather a character engaged in an important perplexing problem. And Joyce is clearly not interested in Richard's complex feelings as qualities peculiar to him. The very contrariness of Richard's emotions reflects Joyce's changing view of family life considerably altered from Dubliners, Stephen Hero, and A Portrait. Not only do both Bertha and Richard suffer complex feelings, but both further distinguish themselves from the husbands and wives of Joyce's earlier works by the extent to which they value each other and attempt to improve their relationship. And unlike the earlier books, Exiles presents a relationship which, for all its problems, is not emotionally barren, stifling to the individual or devoid of temperamental kinship. Rather than something to be avoided, as for Stephen D(a)edalus, a close relationship is to be sought as a vital part of individual needs and, whatever its inevitable problems, of individual fulfilment. Thus the problems surrounding Richard's characterization, though perhaps limiting the dramatic success of the play, nevertheless contribute significantly to Joyce's intentions in this play and foreshadow his subsequent work, Ulysses, where, indeed, complexity of feeling toward familial roles becomes central to the book.

Notes

1. “Joyce's Exiles: The Argument for Doubt,” JJQ, 11 (Fall 1973), 36.

2. The “perception of a great truth” which Joyce also includes in his definition of “naked drama” seems less important in his own play than the other aspects of “naked drama” he outlines (“Ibsen's New Drama,” ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann [New York: Viking Press, 1959], p. 63).

3. In his notes to the play, Joyce similarly defines love as “the desire of good for another” (E 113).

4. That Joyce's own attitude to love is very different is clearly evident in letters to Nora Barnacle where he considers it a compliment to her that she has enriched his “mind” (e.g. Joyce's letter to Nora, 21 August 1909, in Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann [New York: Viking Press, 1975], pp. 160-62).

5. The concept that marriage entails dutiful fulfilment of roles is one that Joyce depicts ironically throughout his work, from the short stories of Dubliners (like “Grace”) to Finnegans Wake where Glugg reveals a marriage as a contract of practical agreements, the husband promising, for example, to “renounce the devlins in all their pumbs” (FW 243). The four old men declare a similar but more overtly repressive attitude, declaring a long list of “Not”s (FW 368). Juan parallels this with a series of “Never”s to the St. Bride's girls, outlining a prudish and repressive morality (FW 433).

6. Joyce points out, however, in one of his notes to the play, that “Since the publication of the lost pages of Madame Bovary the centre of sympathy appears to have been esthetically shifted from the lover or fancyman to the husband or cuckold” (E 115).

7. Darcy O'Brien argues that Richard's desire to be betrayed is motivated by “libertarianism, masochism, and lust” (The Conscience of James Joyce [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], p. 63). O'Brien develops extensively his argument that Richard's attitude towards Bertha's projected infidelity is a reflection of Joyce's own conflicting attractions to sexual depravity and ideal love. Although the point cannot be argued here, on the whole O'Brien presents convincing evidence only that Joyce found appealing both very physical lust and sentimental affection, not, as O'Brien says, that “He saw his own nature as irreparably split by opposing forces, one of beauty and the other of lust” (p. 43).

8. In his notes, Joyce mentions two other factors that can be taken as part of Richard's motivation for his desire to be betrayed. In the first place, Bertha will benefit insofar as “Through these experiences she will suffuse her own reborn temperament with the wonder of her soul at its own solitude and at her beauty …” (E 115). Moreover, “Richard, unfitted for adulterous intercourse with the wives of his friends because it would involve a great deal of pretence on his part rather than because he is convinced of any dishonourableness in it wishes, it seems, to feel the thrill of adultery vicariously and to possess a bound woman Bertha through the organ of his friend” (E 125). For neither of these motives, however, is there internal evidence.

9. The stress that Richard puts upon doubt as it makes a relationship meaningful suggests Stephen's idea in Ulysses that the mystery of paternity, the fact that a father can never know whether his son is his own, is meaningful because it is a mystery (U 204-05).

   Earl John Clark sees no positive element in the conclusion: “[Richard's] state at the end is marked by a total frustration of his ideals” (“James Joyce's Exiles,” JJQ, 6 (Fall 1968), 74. That Richard's position is intended to be an achievement rather than a frustration is supported by the fact that Joyce himself called Exiles a “comedy” (Letter to Grant Richards, 5 April 1915, in Letters I 78).