7. (10) Clay {Maturity} Flashcards
Genre
“Clay” is a realist short story in Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners. In “Clay,” for example, Joyce depicts the realistic conditions of living and working in an Irish laundry boarding-house as well as the reality that older unmarried women in early 20th century Ireland did not have many prospects when it came to romantic love or financial security.
In addition to being a realist story, “Clay” is also a modernist one. oyce is particularly focused in this story on capturing the estrangement and paralysis that Irish people experienced during the economic downturn in their country caused by English colonialism.
Maria is a classic modernist protagonist in that she is both financially impoverished and also emotionally disconnected from not only the people around her but also herself.
Given the inclusion of this story in a collection called Dubliners, readers can interpret Maria’s emotional repression as a symptom of the oppression and estrangement Joyce believed Dublin residents experienced more broadly in the years before independence from England.
Mood
Despite the seemingly joyful holiday setting of the story, the overall mood is bleak and depressing. This is because, while Maria may be in denial about her suffering, readers are not. They can feel her discomfort as various characters mock her for being an unmarried older woman, as she is harassed by a drunk man on the tram, and as she feels forced to sing a sad song in front of everyone at the Donnellys’ Hallow Eve party.
It is notable that the story again ends with earnest emotion, but this time on the part of Joe, who cries while listening to Maria sing for the group. In this moment, Joe is a stand-in for readers who witness Maria’s pain even when she can’t acknowledge it.
Tone
The tone of “Clay” is somewhat contradictory. While both Maria and the narrator act as if Maria is happy with her life—contributing to a joyful tone—readers can tell that something is deeply amiss as Maria faces a series of challenging situations without acknowledging them as such.
In this way, readers can sense Joyce’s pessimistic tone beneath the falsely positive tone of the narrator.
Style
Joyce’s writing style in “Clay” is repetitive and circuitous. Joyce uses repetition as a way of highlighting the stagnancy of Maria’s life.
Herring: “Questing characters in Dubliners are frequently assaulted by something I call a “tyranny of triteness,”
Style
This story is specifically set on Hallow Eve, a historically Irish pagan holiday (Samhain) that the Catholic Church reappropriated as “All Saints Day” or “All Hallows,” today referred to as “Halloween.”
The game that the children play here was popular in southeast Ireland and featured setting up several saucers with different items in each one—water, a ring, a prayer book, and clay. The children would then take turns wearing the blindfold and intuitively pick a saucer.
Each item in the saucers represents something different—water signified traveling across the sea, a ring meant marriage, the prayer book signaled the chooser possibly joining a convent, and clay foretold the chooser would die within the year.
While all of the people who play this game in “Clay” know that the game is just a game, it is notable that they shuffle the saucers around when Maria picks clay and do not speak of it. This is because, given her age, it is a much more likely outcome for her. That Maria refuses to acknowledge that she picked the clay—and agrees to quickly pick again—demonstrates her reluctance to face the truth of her lonely and stagnant life.
tldr: she can actually die so no one acknowledges the clay and maria remains in denial
Gary Leonard- ‘every person in the room…works to preserve her delusions’
Theme: Loneliness and Estrangement
Maria is surrounded by people at work, and she speaks with strangers when she is out in the city, but these interactions are mostly superficial. Furthermore, Maria feels distance even with her closest friend, Joe Donnelly, a man whom she took care of when he was young, who still treats her like part of his family.
Throughout the story, Maria faces teasing about being single, she struggles to support herself with low wages, and she often seems bewildered in the presence of others, making her an easy target for manipulation and cruelty. By depicting a day in Maria’s life, Joyce shows the difficulty of aging as a single woman, suggesting that no matter how kind Maria is, she (and other women like her) will struggle to fit in.
Maria’s loneliness stems from more than being single; her relationships with friends and acquaintances seem shallow. The others toast to her health and compliment her work ethic, but Joyce never shows her having a deeper interaction at work—in fact, she mostly seems uncomfortable and eager for the time to pass.
Even with Joe Donnelly, though, Maria struggles to connect. His drinking makes her uncomfortable, he will not take her advice to reconcile with his brother, and, Maria reveals early in the story, she once refused his offer to live with him because she felt she would be “in the way.” As much as she wants to feel part of his family, then, it seems that she knows she is not.
Despite Maria’s desire—and efforts—to connect with others, Joyce implies that Maria will be alone forever. One indication that Maria will remain lonely is the failure of her attempts to connect with the Donnelly family.
Joyce cements the impression that Maria’s loneliness will be lasting at the story’s end when she agrees to sing an aria. As she sings, Maria accidentally repeats the first verse—about dreaming of wealth—rather than moving onto the second verse, which is explicitly about dreaming of love. Furthermore, the fact that nobody at the party points out her mistake suggests that they, too, understand that she will never marry and that her loneliness will never get better.
Maria’s superficial interactions, coupled with her inability to connect with others even when she tries, suggest that her loneliness is irresolvable. In “Clay,” then, Joyce offers a glimpse of the isolation and sadness of growing older as a single woman.
Theme: Sadness and Repression
Throughout the story, Maria’s narration is unreliable: she often says one thing but means another, which reflects her attempts to deny and repress her own sadness.
Maria’s struggle to remain optimistic about her lonely life leaves a tragic implication: that in the absence of real opportunity for happiness, all Maria can do is deny reality and try to convince herself that she is already okay.
Joyce never once uses the word “clay” in the story, naming only in the title what Maria refuses to acknowledge.
Theme: Paralysis and Stagnation
Throughout “Clay,” Maria’s life remains remarkably stagnant. Although the people around her constantly make her uncomfortable, for instance, she never stands up for herself—instead, she simply allows these incidents to recur.
Joyce implies that, even though Maria’s life is repetitive and dismal, she has become so paralyzed that she can do nothing to change her fate.
From her general inability to change her life in ways both small and large, it seems that this will inevitably be true, which is a tragedy, since Maria clearly wants change: she wants love, connection to others, more money, and an easier life. But by the end of the story, it is clear that Maria cannot even admit these desires to herself, let alone do anything to make them happen.
Symbols: Ring
Throughout “Clay,” the characters play Hallow Eve games in which they select objects that are supposed to foretell their future. In these games, selecting a ring symbolizes a coming marriage—but for Maria, rings symbolize a future that she wants, but which is out of reach.
Later on, at the Donnellys’, one of the next-door girls selects a ring as part of the Hallow Eve game, while Maria selects a lump of clay, symbolizing impending death.
The contrast between Maria’s and the girl’s selections demonstrates that, while Maria may be surrounded by young women who are eligible for marriage, she herself will likely remain unmarried. Thus, while the ring represents marriage, it also represents a future of happiness and belonging that Maria will not have.
Symbol: Clay
In the Hallow Eve game depicted in the story, finding a lump of clay symbolizes a player’s impending death. However, for Maria—who finds herself in the unfortunate position of selecting the clay—this may not represent literal death, but instead the death of her dreams for the future and the total stagnation of her life.
Professor Walz- ‘At the end [of The Dead], Joyce suggests, as he had done in all the stories of public life, that people who live meaningless lives of inactivity are the real dead’
Symbol: Blindfold
In the Hallow Eve game at the Donnelly home, players must blindfold themselves and select an object that supposedly foretells their future. As such, blindfolds are associated with knowing the future, and they demonstrate a person’s powerlessness over fate.
Allusions: I Dreamt I Dwelt
At the end of the story, Joyce alludes to “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” an aria from Irish composer Michael William Balfe’s 1843 opera The Bohemian Girl.
Joyce includes the entire first verse of the aria in the story as Maria sings it to the Donnellys and their Hallow Eve party guests. This verse is notable as, in it, the main character in The Bohemian Girl reflects wistfully on the luxuries of her childhood.
Since the working-class Maria did not grow up with such riches, in this moment she sings with longing for the life that she wished she’d had, full of “marble halls,” “serfs” waiting on her, and “a high ancestral name.” And—most importantly—for someone who “loved [her] just the same.
As the narrator notes, rather than singing the second verse of the aria, Maria repeats this one. As Joyce’s 20th century Irish readers would have known, the second verse digs even deeper into the speaker’s longing for her true love. It’s likely that Maria skips this verse because it would be too painful for her to sing of her own deep longing for a romantic partner.
Allusions: Laundries
Joyce opens the story with Maria at work in a “laundry,” an allusion to a specific type of boarding house for women in Ireland from the 18th to 20th centuries. Joyce goes as far as to have Maria work at a specific laundry in the Dublin community.
The Dublin by Lamplight laundry was a Protestant-run asylum for sex workers as well as other women (mostly poor and single) who were willing to work at the laundry’s laundromat in exchange for housing and meals. The laundries are best-known today for the labor violations and abuse that often took place inside the establishments.
That Maria lives and works at a laundry makes it clear that she has very little money and few other options.
Joyce wrote this story in the early 1900s when single women of any age had limited options for earning an income. Maria earned her money as a nanny (as evidenced by how she raised Alphy and Joe as her own sons) and, even in her older age, continues to work in domestic labor by working at a laundromat and serving tea to the other women who live and work there.
Context
Many authors writing around the same time as Joyce used free indirect discourse in ways similar to Joyce: Virginia Woolf used it in her novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, as did Gustave Flaubert in his novel Madame Bovary. Mrs. Dalloway bears particular resemblance to “Clay”; not only do both works take place over a single day (as do many of Joyce’s other works), but they also follow the struggles and revelations of female protagonists as they travel through their respective cities.
Additionally, Joyce found the work of playwright Henrik Ibsen inspiring and wrote a review of Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken. Like “Clay,” the play portrays characters who are unfulfilled and struggling to find meaning in life as they grow older.
