The Necessity of Emotional Authenticity: Gabriel’s Deteriorating Sequence in The Dead

The Necessity of Emotional Authenticity: Gabriel’s Deteriorating Sequence in The Dead

 

James Joyce, 1882-1941

John Kuczmarski (John Thomas aka John Kooz)

December 1, 2004

Professor Soderholm

The Necessity of Emotional Authenticity: Gabriel’s Deteriorating Sequence in The Dead

If you were born blind, were unable to see your entire life, and then suddenly could see for five seconds, what would happen?  Imagine if, during this brief blip of visual illumination, you saw all the colors, hues, and the entire visual spectrum while walking in a forest, but then went blind after that five-second revelation? Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of “The Dead” experiences a revelation similar to this.  Gabriel Conroy is a humble man – perhaps too humble. He is an emotionally sensitive bookworm who welcomes books more than money and “loves to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books” (1594).  His sensitized, introverted personality is ill suited for the brusque and boisterous (especially with the presence of Freddy Malins) environment at the Morkan’s dance party. Throughout “The Dead” James Joyce plants triggers that build in stages, showing Gabriel’s sensitivity, that eventually culminate with an epiphany, where the emotionally battered Gabriel chooses to recognize himself with members of the dead.  He is like the blind man, who, after spending his entire life blind, can see for five seconds but then chooses to go back to sleep.  The fact that Gabriel had this choice of choosing blindness (death) or illumination (life) was the result of emotional distance and disparity.  The reason why he chose to reside and reunite with the dead was because of a shattered confidence, distance from the festivities, the presence of a gathering shadow of doubt around him.  Throughout the short story, Gabriel Conroy has an over-reliance on external sources of confidence and doesn’t produce enough self-reassurance originating from an internal source.  

At the opening of the story, as Gabriel is removing his goloshes, a  congenial conversation with Lily goes horribly awry.  In their brief dialogue Gabriel inquires about her school, learns that she has finished and responds, “I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?” (1588).  This causes Lily to respond with “great bitterness: ‘The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.’” (1588).   It is obvious Gabriel has unintentionally offended Lily with a comment that she interprets to be patronizing.  Instead of tactfully explaining what he means, he emphasizes the communicational faux pas, exacerbates the squabble and furthers the distance between their socio-economic statuses by giving her a tip.  What is the psychological consequence of fouling up this conversation and being somewhat scolded by Lily?  Emotional disparity from the party and loss of confidence is the consequence.  Gabriel’s confidence in communicating is smashed.  Immediately after he darts up the stairs to evade Lily and join the party, he distances himself from the festive activity: “he waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish…he was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort.  It had cast a gloom over him” (1589).  Not only is he emotionally removed, but also he is psychologically discomposed by Lily’s bitter response.  Also, the negative ramifications of Lily’s compliment initiate a building gloom that leaves him disparately disconnected from the party.  Because he unsuccessfully communicates with Lily, a gloom is cast over him, shattering his confidence. 

There is a lyric from a song by the Goo-goo Dolls that goes “I don’t want the world to see me because I don’t think that they’ll understand”.  This fear of other people not understanding you has infected Gabriel and he suffers from it.  He pictures that he “would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand...They would think he would be airing his superior education”(1589). It is clear that Gabriel fears a replay of what happened earlier, where he untactfully said the marital expectation comment to Lily, and now assumes the other party-goers will not understand him either. Furthermore, the narrator recognizes Gabriel’s smashed confidence: “he would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry…his whole speech…an utter failure” (1589). Standing outside the drawing-room shows the physical disparity and expecting his speech to be incomprehensible shows Gabriel’s emotional dissociation and lack of confidence. It is clear the genesis of Gabriel’s brooding gloom and crumbling confidence, which distances him form the party, has commenced.

Instead of recognizing his false assumptions (that all of his conversations at the party would now be incomprehensible or misconstrued) Gabriel continues to make them, which doesn’t prevent, but perpetuates, the deterioration of his confidence.  The next stage that Joyce tactfully plants to show how Gabriel’s shattered confidence, which leads to his emotional separation, occurs with Miss Ivors on the dance floor.  While dancing, Miss Ivors and Gabriel engage in a discussion about Irish tradition and, once again, the introverted Gabriel is unable to emotionally express himself.  Miss Ivors questions his patriotism and ties with Ireland: “Haven’t you your own land to visit,’ continued Miss Ivors, ‘that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country?’” (1595).  It is clear that this comment is somewhat confrontational, but, being overly-sensitized to it, Gabriel blurts out “to tell you the truth…I’m sick of my own country, sick of it” (1596).  When Miss Ivors asks the poor conversationalist, Gabriel, to expound, and he can’t, she mocks him by saying, “of course, you’ve no answer” (1596).  He then hides his agitation “by taking part in the dance with great energy” (1596).  During this bicker Gabriel doesn’t express his opinions nor his irritation, and, instead, buries them.  Because he emotionally buries his feelings, he ends up relating with the physically buried dead, instead of the living, during his epiphanic moment at the end of the play.  

Obviously, the combination of Gabriel’s inability to express his ideas and Miss Ivors caustic response tarnish his self-assurance once again.  As a result of his deteriorated esteem he retreats to isolation, emotionally distancing himself form the party by sitting “in a remote corner of the room where Freddy Malins’ mother was sitting” (1596).  Gabriel is crossing all boundaries now; he generalizes and assumes that he has been a communicational failure with the youthful Lily and the middle-aged Miss Ivors, so now he tries his tongue with the elderly: old Mrs. Malins!  Because the conversation with Mrs. Malins is simply another evasion (like when he avoided the conflict with Lily’s interpretation of his comment by running up the stairs) it is unsuccessful.  During this conversation “Gabriel hardly heard what she said” (1596), when Mrs. Malins was describing a fishing excursion,.  The shattered confidence causes Gabriel to emotionally run away, which distances him from the party to such an extreme that he can’t even listen to Mrs. Malins.  

These three stages have placed Gabriel in such a denigrated state that he cannot even bear to stay at the party.  “How pleasant it would be to walk out alone,” (1597) he says, “how much more pleasant it would be [at Wellington Monument] that at the supper-table” (1597).  So far we have seen Gabriel’s incapacity to have a successful conversation destroy his confidence and distance himself from the party with Lily.  He becomes even more agitated with Miss Ivors, and his irritation builds to an unbearable amount with Mrs. Malins.  By the time he reaches his fourth conversational confrontation and can’t express himself, his irritation boils over to anger.  

When he finds out his wife, Gretta, has been reminiscing about an old love, “A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind…and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins” (1612).  He is really charged up here; even his veins pump angry blood.  Instead of expressing his agitation in the fact that his wife loved Michael Fury (a very witty name considering the infuriating reaction it evokes from Gabriel) more than he, Gabriel buries his rage.  By now, the infuriation has built up to such a huge level that it converts to overwhelming doubt: 

“Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony…he saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing about his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.” (1613) 

This is the epiphanic climax where he sees himself as the battered, emotionally sensitive person who doubts his belief to such a degree that he labels them, clownish.  Even his voice is different after this realization: “his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent” (1613).  That moment was the time when he needed to turn it around; he needed to express his well-justified irritation about his wife appearing to have loved another.  Instead, of choosing to emotional resurrect himself through authentic expression, Gabriel continues to use his ineffectively drab mode of communicating and, as a result of not seizing this crucial opportunity for change, is completed terrorized when he hears his wife say that Michael Furey died for her: “a vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer…some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world” (1613).  So instead of choosing to express himself, he negates the opportunity for emotional salvation, and he feels vague ambiguity.  This impalpable and vindictive force is his own shattered self-confidence and his world is so vague because of his emotional distance from it.  When he understands this, the shadow of doubtful gloom completely begins to subdue him.

 Towards the end of the story, after being glazed over by the realization, the epiphanic moment reaches the apex where the decision to emotionally return to life, or remain with the dead, greets him when “generous tears feels Gabriel’s eyes” (1615). His interpretation of himself has already deteriorated from being a sensitive person who idealizes about his ludicrous ideas amongst “vulgarians”, to being meekly held captive by a vindictive force in a vague world.  By the end of the story, Gabriel feels “his soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead” (1615) and “his own identity was fading into a grey impalpable world” (1615).  The shadow of gloom that was sparked by maladaptive conversational skills, leading to lack of emotional integrity and confidence, has completely buried Gabriel and he has emotionally and spiritually joined the dead.  Gabriel’s despondent situation could have been stopped at any time – from initially having a confrontation with Lily to the other extreme of feeling lost in a vindictively vague world -- if he had chosen to seize his emotional reactions, authenticate them, and tactfully respond with sincerity.  The crucial point here is that Gabriel had a choice, but denied himself the opportunity because of lack of emotional authenticity.  From Gabriel’s downward-spiraling sequence of events in “The Dead” Joyce shows us the crucial necessity of empowering ourselves and authenticating our emotions in every context and that communicative Carpe diem can occur, and must occur, in the “now”.

Works Cited

Joyce, James.  The Dead. The Norton Anthology of World 

Masterpieces; Ed 7,. Vol. 1. Ed. Sarah Lawall. New York: Norton & Company, 1999.

James Joyce: the Brazen Head. 

http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/joyce_biography.htm l 

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