Clay

Through thematic choices, modernist narrative techniques, and realistic/naturalistic detail, Joyce creates in “Clay” a microcosm of small, backward-looking, and stagnant Ireland through his portraits of Maria and Dublin. Joyce’s thematic treatment of The Diminishing Power of Low Social Status underscores Maria as a symbolic representation of Ireland. Maria is described as “a very, very small person” (95), just as Ireland is a small country in both size and population. She is Catholic and under the domination of a Protestant power structure, and she has very little social status as an unmarried, lower-class woman. Likewise, in 1905, Ireland was considered a “poorly-developed” country and of little social or cultural value to Britain specifically and to Europe at large. Ireland was still a colony of Britain and in no way an equal partner. There was no Home Rule at that point, and all decisions concerning Ireland were made in London.

Similarly, Maria’s life is dictated by others. She is held in low regard and forced to behave in ways she does not necessarily choose for herself. Joyce hence explores The Disparity Between Desire and Reality for Maria. As a colonized person, Maria was taught to admire and look up to her colonizers. She aspires to the colonizers’ model of values and to their way of life. In the story, she uses terms like “nice” and “genteel” to describe middle-class characters such as the matron, the elderly gentleman on the tram, and Joe and Mrs. Donnelly. Unlike Joyce’s often unstintingly realistic details in his third-person narrations, the facts filtered through Maria’s narration are often no more than generalizations. She uses “nice” to cover the disparity she feels between herself and those to whose status she aspires. However, just as the narrative shows that Maria has no chance of improving her stature or status, neither can Ireland lift itself out of the iron grip of London and the Catholic Church.

In addressing Maria’s plight, Joyce uses techniques associated with early modernism. Like other modernist writers, Joyce experimented with new ways of telling stories through innovative narrative devices and rejected Victorian prose techniques such as external characterization, direct reporting, and neatly-concluded endings. In “Clay,” Joyce chooses to use a variation of third-person limited point of view known as free indirect discourse. While both third-person limited narration and free indirect discourse filter all details and events through the main character, free indirect discourse uses the character’s consciousness and internal language, as if the character is speaking to themselves. In many ways, this narrative choice is a forerunner of stream-of-consciousness writing, something Joyce develops fully in later work such as Ulysses. In “Clay,” however, the narration shifts between a strictly third-person limited realistic narrative to one more closely associated with Maria’s internal language. For example, Joyce writes that Maria “had a very long nose and a very long chin. She talked a little through her nose, always soothingly: Yes, my dear, and, No, my dear” (95). These words come from an outside narrator who is critical of Maria, and Maria’s speech is directly reported rather than portrayed through free indirect discourse. Later, when Maria begins to think about going to Joe’s house, the narrative shifts slightly toward indirect free discourse: “Often he had wanted her to go and live with them; but she would have felt herself in the way (though Joe’s wife was ever so nice with her)” (96). The narrative in this passage is not objective in the same way as the previous physical description of Maria. Instead, the narrative is subjective. It passes through Maria’s thoughts and uses her own manner of speaking. This not only develops Maria’s character psychologically but also imparts the character’s worldview to the reader. Thus, because Maria is dominated by both the Catholic Church and the middle classes, using indirect free discourse and third-person-limited point of view allows Joyce to portray a Dubliner who is stuck in a colonial mindset.

Joyce also creates a portrait of a stagnant Dublin representing Ireland as a whole through his use of hyper-realistic and naturalistic detail. Literary Realism is a style of writing that grew in the late 19th century in response to Romanticism. Some of the characteristics of Romanticism included a valorization of nature; an emphasis on the spiritual and/or supernatural; and the idealization of aesthetic beauty. Realist writers, on the other hand, reproduced as closely as possible the facts and details of real life, sometimes in all its ugliness and depravity. They tended to create grim cityscapes and complicated, sometimes “unattractive” characters. These characters exist as everyday kinds of people, not idealized versions of heroes or villains as often portrayed in Romantic literature. These characteristics are evident throughout “Clay.” For example, the Dublin by Lamplight laundry workers are common women, realistically and minutely described: “[T]he women began to come in by twos and threes, wiping their steaming hands in their petticoats and pulling down the sleeves of their blouses over their red steaming arms” (96). Likewise, the elderly man on the train “was a stout gentleman and he wore a brown hard hat; he had a square red face and a greyish moustache” (98). In both, Joyce intimately portrays “red” skin and insufficient observations of hygiene (“wiping” hands on petticoats) to convey his sense of the state of Ireland as lacking and tired from physical effort.

Naturalism grew as a natural outcome of Realism, again using realistic and factual details to build the story. In addition, however, Naturalism strives to portray characters trapped in a deterministic world. The character’s gender, social class, and background make it impossible for the character to self-determine; rather, it is the context and situation that mold the character and the story. In “Clay,” Maria’s chances of improving her situation are limited. She is stuck in the laundry until she must eventually go to the convent where she will die, alone and unloved, as was “confirmed” in the Hallow Eve game she and the others play at Joe’s house. Even while playing games, Maria is blindfolded and given a future that is out of her control. Again, Maria’s plight mirrors that of Ireland in Joyce’s view. So long as Ireland is in the thrall of the English government and the Catholic Church, there can be no progress and no looking forward to a modern world.

The short story “Clay” offers no epiphany, no sudden self-realization for Maria, nor provides a way that she might break free from her circumstances. Instead, she remains a trapped character, no more able to improve her status than to add inches to her frame. She is stuck in her position, trapped in a life alone without family or love, struggling to square her patched-up self-understanding with the realities of Dublin, and situated in a stagnant Ireland.