10. (14) Grace Flashcards
Genre
“Grace” is a modernist short story belonging to Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners.
Kernan—the protagonist of the story starts in personal and professional crisis and ends in a similar state. (Though Kernan has taken the step of attending a Catholic retreat with the hopes of becoming sober, Joyce intentionally ends the narrative before the retreat is even fully underway.)
Joyce also refuses to give readers a clear moral takeaway—another component of modernist literature. There is not a single character who readers are necessarily “rooting” for—Kernan is an alcoholic who burdens his wife, his friends feign a deep knowledge of religion while getting many facts wrong, and Father Purdon waters Catholicism down to a business transaction between practitioners and priests.
With “Grace,” Joyce is also telling his own version of the biblical “fall of man” story. While Adam and Eve metaphorically “fell” from grace after eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, Kernan starts the story literally falling down the stairs after getting drunk. While Kernan appears to have a chance at redemption at the end of the story in order to become sober, Joyce implies that it will not be so simple.
Mood
The mood of “Grace” is a primarily humorous and lighthearted one despite the emotionally heavy content.
While many of Joyce’s stories in his collection Dubliners feature bleak and depressing moods, this story is a moment of reprieve. This is likely because Joyce is focused on highlighting the comical absurdity of Irish men avoiding heavy topics as well as, later in the story, the absurd ways that the Catholic Church lets needful people down.
Tone
Joyce’s tone in “Grace” is satirical and gently mocking. In addition to actively satirizing the Catholic Church (via the transaction-oriented Father Purdon), he is also gently mocking Kernan and his group of friends for their lack of spiritual integrity.
As a group, they are more interested in arguing over papal mottos and criticizing Protestantism than actually engaging with important religious questions like morality and redemption.
Though Joyce does not have his third-person narrator offer direct commentary on the men’s behavior, his teasing tone comes across in his decision to have the characters speak and behave in such unenlightened ways.
Style
Joyce’s writing style in “Grace” features simple, unadorned language as well as heavy dialogue between characters.
Joyce’s stylistic choices in “Grace” indicate that he wants readers to decide for themselves how they feel about the characters. This group of men clearly cares for each other and yet, at the same time, they do not necessarily know how to offer the kind of support their wounded alcoholic friend needs in this moment.
Their banter is fun—and their factual errors about religion are funny—but are they helping Kernan find the kind of redemption and healing that he needs? Joyce intentionally keeps it ambiguous.
Setting
“Grace” is set in Dublin, Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. During this time, Irish nationalists were fighting for freedom from England’s colonial rule, in large part due to the widespread poverty and exploitation that they saw as a result of England’s ongoing colonist influence. This nationalist movement was primarily made up of Catholics, while “loyalists” (or Irish people who wanted to remain a part of Britain) were primarily Protestant.
This conflict shows up in “Grace” in a few different ways. First, when discussing the Catholic retreat that Kernan’s friends (Power, Cunningham, and M’Coy) hope he will attend with them, they extol the virtues of the Catholic Church and denounce Protestantism.
This is somewhat ironic, as Kernan himself was raised Protestant and only converted to Catholicism because his wife was Catholic (and likely wanted to be married in a Catholic Church). In having Kernan move between both socio-religious worlds with no real effects on his life or spirituality, Joyce is making the point that Catholicism and Protestantism are not as different as many Irish people made them out to be.
Joyce also includes allusions to The Irish Times and The Freeman’s Journal in the story. These two periodicals both published news related to the fight for independence. It is notable that The Irish Times was as a Protestant nationalist publication and The Freeman’s Journal was more closely aligned with the Catholic Church—again, Joyce is highlighting how it is possible for Protestant and Catholics to work together for an independent state.
Theme: Morality, Redemption and the Catholic Church
three of Mr. Kernan’s friends come together to stage an intervention for him, arranging for the four of them to attend a Catholic retreat where Kernan can make a fresh start.
It’s understandable that they would assume the Catholic Church is the answer to Kernan’s problems: in early 20th-century Dublin, where the story is set, Catholicism was the dominant belief system and was widely regarded as the moral framework of Irish society.
But although the reader may initially expect that Kernan will be redeemed by becoming a more devout Catholic, the story undermines the moral authority of Catholicism, thus forcing the reader to question whether embracing Catholicism would be an improvement to Kernan’s life at all. In doing so, the story casts doubt onto the Irish Catholic Church and suggests that following its tenets may not be a surefire path to redeeming oneself or living a moral life.
Initially, it seems like “Grace” will be an archetypal Christian redemption story, in which Kernan will be saved from his alcohol abuse by embracing Catholicism. The story deliberately invokes the Christian trope of humanity’s “fall” from innocence and eventual redemption through Jesus Christ. In the Bible, Adam and Eve bring original sin upon all of humanity when they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge against God’s prohibition, prompting God to throw them out of the Garden of Eden (paradise). This “fall” is eventually redeemed by Christ dying for humankind’s sins.
the reader later learns that Kernan has developed a drinking problem and has begun to falter in his once-successful career. Here, his moral descent into self-destructive behavior is reflected by his physical descent down in the stairs.
Kernan’s close friends stage an intervention for Kernan, believing that taking him to a Catholic retreat will inspire him to be more devout and consequently save him from his own-self-destructive behavior. They hope that a traditional Christian (and specifically Catholic) redemption journey is what will save Kernan: if he devotes himself to Christ, he can atone for his mistakes and redeem himself in the eyes of God.
However, Kernan’s Catholic friends and family are not particularly good Catholics themselves, which implies that the Church isn’t free of hypocrisy or arrogance—and its practitioners shouldn’t necessarily be seen as the moral authority over non-believers.
they get most of the facts wrong: they incorrectly cite the history of the Jesuits, for instance, and they make up nonsensical papal mottoes. By presenting these foolish men as the model churchgoers for Kernan to follow, the story questions whether they have any moral authority over Kernan, and whether Catholicism can truly save Kernan from himself.
Mr. Kernan’s wife, Mrs. Kernan, is also a lifelong Catholic. But Mrs. Kernan also believes in “the banshee,” a fairy-like creature from Irish folklore whose wails predict the death of a loved one. By believing in the banshee, Mrs. Kernan is committing the cardinal sin of idolatry, or having faith in a pagan creature.
Even as the Catholic authority in the Kernan household, Mrs. Kernan is a sinner, which complicates Kernan’s friends’ conviction that the Catholic Church is a surefire path to a moral life.
At the Catholic retreat that Kernan and his friends attend, the priest (and the sermon he gives) are further indicators that the Church may not be the moral institution in claims to be. The primary target of satire in “Grace” is not churchgoers—it is the Catholic Church itself.
Theme: Catholicism vs. Protestantism
Religion heavily underpins the characters’ motivations in “Grace”.
Christianity in “Grace” is strictly divided into two strains of belief: Catholicism and Protestantism. On a broader scale, the opposition between these two belief systems has brought about centuries of sociopolitical conflict and war in Europe—and this rift in particular created a significant social division in 20th-century Ireland, where the story is set.
In “Grace,” however, the Catholic versus Protestant struggle isn’t one rooted in deeply held tradition and intractable belief—rather, it’s a superficial conflict between two groups that the story suggests have more in common than they tend to acknowledge.
Kernan’s close friends also spend most of the story trying to impress one another with their knowledge of Catholic history and theology, demonstrating their desire to prove that they’re sufficiently devout. Catholicism, then, is central to the characters in “Grace”—and, by implication, to Irish society more broadly.
However, a crucial way that the Catholic characters establish themselves as such is by denouncing Protestantism—in other words, their Catholicism is rooted not so much in Catholic belief, but rather in anti-Protestant belief.
the story suggests that perhaps ceremonial or ritualistic differences between Catholicism and Protestantism are what divide them more so than the underlying scripture and principles of Christian faith.
The idea that Catholicism and Protestantism are more alike than they are different carries profound political and social implications when one takes into account the history of Christianity in Ireland.
Theme: Community, Isolation and Gender
Beginning from Mr. Kernan’s initial rescue, the story emphasizes the importance of community to support individuals and their particular struggles.
However, Mrs. Kernan’s character also draws attention to how communal support often falls along gender lines and does not actually encompass everyone in a community.
Mr. Kernan’s binge-drinking sets up how struggling in isolation isn’t just lonely—it can be downright dangerous. It is heavily implied that Kernan’s drunken fall at the beginning of the story happens because he is alone.
As the story progresses, it becomes even clearer that struggling individuals like Kernan need a community to support them. The free-flowing dialogue in the story brings the reader into this community of men, making the reader feel included and understand the value of that inclusion and support for Kernan.
The retreat itself is also communal in nature: in the church, Kernan only begins to feel comfortable and supported once he realizes how many individuals he recognizes in the pews. It is the community-oriented aspect of worship that carries value for him, not the spiritual side.
However, Kernan’s social circle is highly gendered—only men are included in it, and Kernan’s wife, Mrs. Kernan, is the antithesis of this community. The communal scenes in the story consist entirely of men, who seem to intentionally separate themselves from women and converse only amongst themselves.
she finds her life as a wife and mother “unbearable” and is “bounded by her kitchen” for much of life. Furthermore, her own attempts to pull Kernan out of his drinking problem are presented as comically annoying, harsh, and unsuccessful.
Kernan is relatively successful at improving his outlook on life, despite his fall from grace professionally and his descent into alcohol abuse, but Mrs. Kernan remains seemingly alone by the end of the story. In this way, Kernan and his wife offer contrasting examples of the negative effects of isolation.
Symbols: Stairs and Pulpit
The stairs that Mr. Kernan literally falls down at the beginning of the story symbolize a more figurative fall from grace, while the raised pulpit that he watches Father Purdon preach from at the end of the story represents the potential for redemption.
Purdon gives his speech from an elevated pulpit where he looks out over the congregation, and this position is a symbolic contrast to the bottom of the stairs where Kernan begins the story. The pulpit thus represents the promise of redemption and salvation, by which one can eventually reach heaven in the Christian belief system.
The story complicates this symbolic meaning by making the sermon that Father Purdon delivers from the pulpit trite and shallow, rather than spiritual and meaningful, but if Father Purdon himself implies that the Irish Catholic Church might not offer the proper means to attain redemption, that doesn’t diminish the pulpit’s significance as a symbol of the possibility of such redemption.
Allusion: Tom Burke
Tom Burke was an actual 19th-century Irish Catholic priest who was popular amongst both Catholics and Protestants due to his eloquent sermons. That said, as Cunningham notes in the story, “he didn’t preach what was quite orthodox” and came under scrutiny for delivering sermons that did not align with the theology of the Catholic Church.
It’s likely that Joyce included this allusion to Burke to highlight what he saw as the absurdity of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants. To him, the two faiths were more similar than different, as evidenced by the power of a preacher to bring both communities together. That the men start by lauding Burke and then—later in the conversation—condemning him because he consorted with Protestants shows how arbitrary these divisions are.
Allusion: Father Purdon
Father Purdon’s name is an example of a subtle allusion in the story. As Joyce’s contemporary Irish readers would have known, “Purdon” was the name of Dublin’s red-light (or sex worker) district. The allusion becomes even more clear by the fact that a “red light” is aimed toward Father Purdon’s face as he gives his sermon.
Like sex workers, Joyce is arguing, Father Purdon views his job in a transactional manner—people come to him in order to feel better and, after taking their money (through church donations), he helps them to do so. In other words, though he acts like a moral authority, Father Purdon is actually providing something quite transactional.
Context
“Grace” ends abruptly and ambiguously, leaving readers unsure of whether Tom Kernan will stay sober. But Joyce’s later novel Ulysses features Kernan drinking gin in a bar, subtly implying that the mission Kernan’s friends undertook in “Grace” has failed.
