1. The Sisters {Childhood} Flashcards
Genre
“The Sisters” is a modernist short story. Joyce was a leader of the Modernist literary movement, which arose out of writers’ frustrations with traditional literary conventions.
- tired of adventurous stories with clear resolutions
- focused on the alienation in a fast paced, increasingly confusing world in the post industrialised world.
- feature experimental structures, unsettling moods, and ambiguous endings.
Herring comments “the author need not fear censorship because libelous thoughts are in the reader’s mind, not in the text”
Dramatic Method
Ambiguity
- Joyce never directly addresses the medical condition that led to Father Flynn’s death. Some scholars believe that the story insinuates that he died from syphilis (thus explaining his paralysis and other symptoms)
- Joyce hints throughout the story that Father Flynn may have been a pedophile, but the characters never say this aloud—instead, the idea is only hinted at through evasive statements full of ellipses.
- Creates an ambiguous conclusion: Readers are left wondering how they are supposed to feel about Father Flynn and about the Catholic Church as a whole. The women in the story don’t seem to be moral guides, but the men don’t seem to point the way either, as they believe an appropriate replacement for Catholic education is physical exercise. Thus, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about how the narrator should move forward from here.
Dramatic Methods
Mood
The mood of “The Sisters” is depressing and bleak.
- first half of the story is concerned with the young narrator’s inner experience as he processes the death of his teacher and mentor, Father Flynn who is implied to be a pedophile
- In the second half of the story the bleak mood emerges from readers’ awareness over the course of the conversation that these three adults all knew about Father Flynn’s declining mental and physical health yet never did anything to intervene.
Dramatic Methods
Tone
The tone of “The Sisters” is both childlike and formal. The unnamed narrator telling the story is simultaneously a naïve child and also a perceptive young person with a large vocabulary, leading to the somewhat contradictory tone.
In the second half, the tone becomes contradictory in a new way, as the women speak of the priest in simultaneously reverential and concerned ways. This is Joyce’s way of highlighting the hypocrisy of practicing Catholics in Dublin.
Dramatic Methods
Style
The writing style of “The Sisters” is, when it comes to narration, quite simple and direct. The narrator is a child who occasionally uses imagery and figurative language but primarily describes his thoughts and movements in an accessible and unadorned way.
The style becomes more complex when the adults are talking, full of ellipsis and half sentences, encouraging the reader to read between the lines.
Setting
“The Sisters” takes place in Dublin, Ireland in 1895. The story specifically focuses on the relationship between a lower-middle class family and a Catholic priest.
Context
the time in which the story is set, the Irish Nationalist movement was struggling in its efforts to push for independence from English colonial rule.
In this story, Joyce is critiquing the Nationalist movement alongside the Catholic Church by highlighting how the two organizations were both corrupt and inappropriately enmeshed. He does this in subtle ways, like by mentioning how notice of Father Flynn’s memorial service was published in a Nationalist newspaper.
It is important to note that Joyce wrote this story after the Catholic Church sabotaged the charismatic and effective leader of the Nationalist movement (Charles Stewart Parnell) because he had an extramarital affair, leading to several decades of waning political power.
Characters
Like in many of Joyce’s stories, the characters represent different elements of Irish (specifically Dublin) society.
- Father Flynn, for example, as a corrupt priest, represents the corruption of the Catholic Church as a whole.
- The men in the narrator’s life (his uncle and Old Cotter) represent secular Irish people who take issue with the Church, but not in any organized or politically powerful way.
- The women in the story (the narrator’s aunt and both of Father Flynn’s sisters) represent Irish people who venerate the Church even in the face of its obvious corruption.
Trevor L. Williams states ‘there is not a single priest who is not somehow morally and intellectually compromised’
Theme: Utility of Education
In the story, then, Joyce presents two conflicting views about the ways that young people should be raised and educated—while one school of thought prioritizes religious education through the Catholic Church, the other espouses a form of education rooted in real-world practicality.
Religious education is represented by Joyce as esoteric, superficial and unrelated to the real world’s needs
Rosicrucian
A Rosicrucian is a member of secret society that centered around the study of alchemy and metaphysics and first emerged in the 17th century. They claim to have access to spiritual wisdom handed down from ancient times. At the beginning of the story, Old Cotter jokingly accuses the narrator for being a Rosicrucian because he spends so much time on his religious studies with Father Flynn.
In this context, the use of the word Rosicrucian is meant as an insult; Old Cotter doesn’t value religious studies and esoteric knowledge, and thinks the narrator should spend more time outside, with people his own age, learning things that are more practical.
Theme: Authority and Corruption
The priest was a divisive figure in the community because many characters no longer see value or even integrity in the Catholic Church. While on the one hand the narrator admired Father Flynn, he also felt uncomfortable around him at times, which raises the question of if the priest’s character was immoral.
By illustrating Father Flynn’s incompetence as a religious leader, as well as his implied spiritual corruption, Joyce undermines the authority of the Catholic Church more broadly.
Father Flynn lives on Great Britain Street, which adds a layer of political corruption to the spiritual and moral corruption that is already present in the story. Great Britain only granted Ireland their independence in the early 1900s, around the time the story was written. Father Flynn is then linked, symbolically, to a force that oppresses and abuses the Irish people. This expands upon the implication that he takes advantage of, and maybe even abuses, the people in his local community and parish.
Theme: Death, Grief, and Mourning
All of those who mourn the priest equally struggle with feelings of relief, disgust, and other emotional responses to death that are not traditionally associated with mourning. Through presenting all of the complexities of the characters’ reactions to death, Joyce creates an honest portrayal of human grief and mourning.
Theme: Paralysis, Deterioration, and the Obsolete
Elderly Father Flynn is characterized as a relic from the past, whose influence on young people and religious teachings are no longer relevant. The death of the priest, then in some ways represents the death of the brand of Catholicism that he espoused.
The death of the priest, then in some ways represents the death of the brand of Catholicism that he espoused. James Joyce himself was a lifelong critic of the Catholic Church, particularly the teachings and practices that he considered obsolete.
Through portraying Father Flynn as old fashioned, overly esoteric, and physically deteriorating, Joyce argues that the teachings of the Catholic Church are obsolete and that, like the priest himself, the time has come that they cease to exist.
Herring states the Dubliners explicates how “centuries of political and religious oppression had caused a general paralysis of mind and will”
Allusion: Battle of Boyne
Joyce includes in the story the fact that Father Flynn died on the 1st of July. July 1st was a significant day in Irish history—on that day in 1690, the forces of the Protestant King of England William III and those of the ousted Catholic King James II fought over who would rule England, Scotland, and Ireland. Ultimately, King William’s soldiers prevailed, resulting in the continued Protestant ascendancy in Britain and the Catholic Church’s loss of power.
tldr: battle between protestant kind william iii and catholic king james ii and protestants won.
It is likely that Joyce decided to have Father Flynn die on July 1st to draw a connection between these two events. As a person who was deeply critical of the power that the Catholic Church was able to regain in Ireland in the centuries after the Battle of the Boyne, Joyce was likely signaling his desire for the Catholic Church to lose that power once again. It is important to note that Joyce was not Protestant and was likewise not a proponent of England’s rule over Ireland, so he’s not implying with this allusion that he believed the Protestant Crown should defeat the Church, but simply that the Catholic Church had its own problems.
tldr: joyce trying to say protestants should be overthrown but perhaps not necesarrily by another oppressive force : protestant christianity.
Allusion: Freeman’s General
The Freeman’s General is perhaps a colloquial way of referring to the Freeman’s Journal, the leading Nationalist newspaper in Ireland. Due to the Catholic Church’s ties to the Nationalist movement, it was common for notices about priest’s deaths (and other goings-on of the Church) to appear in its pages.
With this allusion, Joyce is signaling how the corrupt Father Flynn—a stand-in for the Church as a whole in the story—is linked to the Nationalist movement. While Joyce was raised by Catholic and Nationalist parents, as he became older he developed deep critiques of both institutions for their corruption and ineffective leadership.
