5. (7) The Boarding House {Adolescence} Flashcards
Genre
“The Boarding House” is a Modernist short story and a prime example of naturalist fiction. Beginning in the 19th century, naturalism was a literary movement that expounded the need for objective and scientific means of examining human behavior.
Despite the use of naturalist writing techniques throughout Dubliners, Joyce himself was not a pure naturalist, employing what would be later described as the Joycean epiphany technique to chart a character’s realizations and revelations in service of larger social commentary.
These epiphanies, however shrewd in their broader implications, are by their very nature subjective. The true line between subjectivity and objectivity is blurred in Joyce’s work, despite his penchant for a more removed style of narration in stories like “The Boarding House.”
In addition to embodying certain characteristics of naturalism, “The Boarding House” is also an example of modernist literature. Themes often found in modernist literature include the increased independence of women and their presence in the workplace; war and globalization; and science and genetic technology (including eugenics), among others.
Mood
The mood throughout “The Boarding House” remains fairly removed and impartial with regards to its characters and their banally tumultuous lives. Joyce chooses not to linger on moments that might otherwise evoke a complex slew of emotions, moving quickly from one event to the next, recounting story beats through quick and pointed summary.
The effect is rather one of an impersonal outsider looking in, as though viewing the events of someone else’s life unfold briefly and succinctly, through the window of their home.
“The Boarding House” itself is very short; the reader does not have much time to become endeared to the characters, leading to a feeling of emotional remove with regards to the overall mood of the narrative. This desensitization and lack of emotional turbulence inflicted through mood appear to be the author’s intended effect.
Tone
The narrator uses an incisive, diagnostic tone throughout “The Boarding House,” connecting characters’ feelings, impulses, and actions to broader social patterns.
Though these observations about social roles may appear as an extension of a character’s own thought process, Joyce takes care to distinguish between characters’ observations and the narrator’s subsequent interpretations.
Joyce extends this character’s thought process beyond and outside of her limited perspective, utilizing an analytical narrative tone to do so.
Style
Joyce’s style of writing in “The Boarding House,” and in Dubliners generally, is much more accessible to the casual reading audience than the stream of consciousness techniques he utilizes in his novels.
Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man both explore the perspective of a single character, conveying his thoughts and meditations as they occur from moment to moment, mimicking the unstructured nature of human consciousness.
Joyce’s goal for “The Boarding House” and the other short stories in Dubliners diverges from that of Ulysses and Portrait. These stories are not written as reflections on the inner turmoil and thought processes of individual characters; rather, they serve as “slice of life” vignettes exploring the perspectives of multiple characters and their relationships with one another.
“The Boarding House” engages its characters with a greater level of remove, positioning readers as external observers instead of placing them within the stream of a single character’s consciousness. To account for this, Joyce uses relatively straightforward language, as opposed to sensationalized, figurative, or repetitive prose.
The structure of the story adheres to that of a traditional narrative, chronicling the relatively simple lives of a Dublin family. Joyce fits the direct, uncomplicated style of his language to the direct, relatively predictable lives that his subjects lead.
Setting
The events of this particular story are in large part set in its titular location—the boarding house which, though begun as a reputable business, has garnered somewhat of a reputation for impropriety.
The unsavory reputation of this primary setting elicits a wide range of character motivations and reactions.
Polly’s feminine “purity” has been tainted by this setting, ironically in the eyes of the very man who took advantage of her in an extramarital affair. Joyce uses this corrupting setting to demonstrate just how dependent social perceptions of morality are on environmental context.
While individual actions do contribute to the perception of moral or immoral action, many people are written off as immoral simply for being impoverished, or living in a “rough” area. The family and the location that Polly finds herself within have trapped her in this negative perception.
Theme: Social manipulation vs Social paralysis
It’s a suffocating environment that serves as a microcosm of Dublin, a city in which “everyone knows everyone else’s business”—and judges that business according to strict social mores and religious morality.
Like so many other characters in Dubliners, Mr. Doran is paralyzed by this scrutiny. Facing the judgment of his employer, the priest, his family, and others, he feels he has only two options: to marry Polly or to run away.
Mrs. Mooney, meanwhile, takes advantage of this socially induced “paralysis” (to use Joyce’s word from the first paragraph of Dubliners), by turning a blind eye on the flirtation until she’s satisfied that it’s gone too far for Mr. Doran to respectably back out.
The strictures of Dublin society, then, create both paralysis and opportunities for manipulation. But though it seems Mrs. Mooney will get what she wants, and Polly is pleased with her mother’s intervention, the story’s biting tone clearly indicates that in Joyce’s view, there is no real winner when people are ruled by the rigid, arbitrary forces of social and religious morality.
Though Mrs. Mooney is in some ways the story’s victor, her victory is hollow. She is a great social manipulator (necessarily, after escaping her alcoholic husband who once tried to attack her with a cleaver), but the manipulation impoverishes her life.
She clearly cares for her daughter, but she can express this care only through manipulation and fixation on material gain, thus suggesting that she, too, is trapped in her own way.
The flirtation and lust between Mr. Doran and Polly Mooney are glossed over in just two paragraphs, while many pages are devoted to the inevitable outcome of this momentary outburst of libido. Thus the story’s structure reflects a world in which libido—or life force more generally—is suffocated by social strictures.
readers can deduce that women were under some pressure to marry, whether they wanted to or not. Polly seems to think little about Mr. Doran’s characters or feelings, instead working in silent complicity with her mother to secure a proposal—but Joyce hints at the likely emptiness of such a match.
As such, Polly will also lose out, no matter how happy she is with the way this story ends. Thus, while all three main characters dance with and around the rules of their society, Joyce demonstrates that each one is, in fact, paralyzed or impoverished by those very rules.
Theme: Female Innocence vs. Female Cunning
Though the story’s male characters-Jack Mooney and Mr. Doran—see Polly as innocent and in need of protection, both Mrs. Mooney and her daughter in fact turn out to be the story’s most skilled social navigators. Together, they wordlessly and intuitively collaborate on a successful bid to secure a proposal from Mr. Doran. Their cunning lies precisely in impersonating female innocence to achieve their own ends.
And yet, though they’re presented as manipulative, and though Joyce’s portrayal of female characters has often been considered misogynistic, these female characters are in fact simply wily products of Dublin society—a society that scorns single women, leaves them few opportunities to support themselves, and is riddled with religious guilt and repression around sex, which women bear the brunt of in the form of harsh treatment for any sexual indiscretion.
Thus, it’s not the women Joyce condemns, or even their manipulations, but rather the need for women to manipulate in order to make their way in early 20th-century Dublin.
tldr: women r forced to act in certain ways just to survive.
Even the relationship between mother and daughter is damaged by the need to feign innocence. When they discuss Polly’s relations with Mr. Doran, “Both had been somewhat awkward, of course”—and both are awkward because they don’t wish to reveal that they were anything but innocent in the affair’s development.
Thus women control all the story’s events, yet are still condescended to by the story’s men. As such, Mrs. Mooney, like Polly—and by extension like all the women in this city of which the boarding house is a microcosm—cunningly twists society’s expectations of women to her own advantage, though doing so provides no escape from those expectations.
Theme: Religion, Guilt and Sin
“The Boarding House” offers a scathing critique of religion in Dublin, presenting it as, by turns, a prison (its machinery of guilt and sin trapping Mr. Doran in marriage) and a charade (as demonstrated by the worshippers in the “little circus” in front of the church outside the boarding house).
In depicting Christianity as both performative and imprisoning, Joyce suggests that such a debased but socially powerful form of religion is incompatible with human happiness.
Religion is ever-present in “The Boarding House” as a controlling force, though empty of any healing, redemptive, or holy qualities. The sacred bond of marriage—one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church—becomes a highly unsacred battleground. It’s degraded to a legal and economic bargaining tool by Mrs. Mooney’s mercenary machinations to force.
In the case of Mr. Doran, religion is actively harmful, promoting a profound guilt about sin that causes him emotional and physical suffering and forces him into a life he doesn’t want.
Moreover, there’s a suggestion that Mr. Doran (like so many characters in Dubliners) had a more rebellious spirit in his youth, and that this has since been stamped out of him by religious duty—and a suggestion, too, that those days of youthful freedom from religious constraint might turn out to the happiest in his life
Symbols: Cleaver
In “The Boarding House,” the cleaver—a large knife butchers use to cut bone—symbolizes the forceful and decisive power of social oppression.
the cleaver symbolizes the ways in which Dublin’s patriarchal society oppressed and even terrorized women in early 20th-century Dublin. Later, as a single mother and businesswoman, Mrs. Mooney learns to manipulate society’s oppressive rules for her own gain, and deals with moral problems—like Polly and Mr. Doran’s relationship—“as a cleaver deals with meat.”
Perverse Madonna
Madonna Whore complex
“Madonna” is another name used to refer to the Virgin Mary, who gave birth to Jesus Christ. In the Bible, Mary becomes pregnant with God’s Son without ever having sexual intercourse. The oxymoron of a “perverse madonna,” to which Polly is likened, draws on a core contradiction present in Irish Catholic society: the need for women to simultaneously be virginal, sexless beings, but become pregnant and have sexual allure when men demand it of them.
This paradoxical theme emerges across Joyce’s literary portfolio, within which he explores the ongoing clash between religious moral values and modern youthful scrutiny of sexual mores.
Motif: the color white
The color white, frequently associated with purity and chastity, appears throughout the text in association with Polly’s character. This motif exists to comment on external perceptions of her virginity and the weight they hold in determining her life trajectory.
It is clear from Mr. Doran’s memory of that night that his initial attraction to Polly hinged heavily on her innocent girlhood. He recalls that she tapped on his door “timidly,” showcasing the shy, reticent character men are taught to find alluring within gendered societal roles.
“Whiteness” in this passage only makes more evident the nature of Mr. Doran’s attraction, connecting it directly to Polly’s appropriate presentation of feminine chastity.
This motif is further developed after Mr. Doran leaves to speak with Polly’s mother about the affair. As Polly waits upstairs for him to return, she disassociates from reality, zoning out as her gaze remains locked on the white pillows on the bed in front of her.
This disassociation holds important symbolic meaning for Polly. She loses focus on the white pillows just as she daydreams about a future where her sexual scruples do not come under suspicion. The pillows’ whiteness is emphasized to demonstrate her momentary forgetfulness of the societal importance of young girls’ sexual purity.
