26 pages • 52 minutes read
The Boarding House
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Background
Authorial Context: James Joyce
Joyce was born in a Dublin suburb in February 1882 and grew up in Ireland. His parents, John and May Murray Joyce, were practicing Catholics, and James was the eldest of 10 children. A supporter of nationalism, John Joyce believed in Irish independence from the United Kingdom. While the Joyces were middle class, the family suffered a decline in economic status during the author’s childhood. John’s dependence on alcohol and poor financial decision-making led to his family’s increased poverty. Joyce initially attended a Jesuit boarding school but left when his parents could no longer pay the fees.
After graduating from University College, Dublin, Joyce moved to Paris and, after that, rarely visited Ireland. The rest of his life was mostly spent living on the continent of Europe, though much of his fiction remained rooted in Ireland. His attitude toward his home country and Catholicism was ambivalent throughout his life. Joyce met his life partner, Nora Barnacle, in Ireland in 1904. The couple had two children but did not marry until 1931 due to Joyce’s objections to the institution of marriage.
Joyce sought to portray his childhood home as he saw it in his fiction. His representation of Dublin’s social hierarchy in “The Boarding House” is informed by his own experiences. Mr. Doran’s contemplation of his inevitable decline in social status, whether he marries Polly or not, echoes the descent of Joyce’s own family from the middle to the working classes due to his father’s poor judgment. Mr. Doran’s guilt, induced by confessing to the priest, also expresses Joyce’s perception of the Catholic faith as an oppressive force in Irish society. The character’s reluctance to marry Polly, despite increasing pressure to do so, reflects the author’s perception of marriage as a stifling societal convention. Meanwhile, Mrs. Mooney’s attempts to improve her family’s social status are portrayed as manipulative but also understandable considering the importance of social status and respectable appearances in Dublin society during the early 1900s.
Literary Context: Modernism
Modernism as a literary movement that originated in 19th-century Europe and extended into the 20th century. Writers during this period sought to break away from the traditional ways of writing prose and poetry. Modernist authors experimented with both form and expression, believing that the clarity of traditional linear narratives did not express the chaotic reality of lived experience. This break from tradition was very self-conscious, as new sensibilities emerged in the wake of World War I. Joyce is counted among these Modernist writers, and “The Boarding House” in Dubliners is one of his earlier works. While incorporating elements of Modernism, the story does not feature the famous “stream of consciousness” style of his later novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Ulysses (1922). Another acclaimed Modernist novelist during this period was Virginia Woolf, who utilized her own version of stream of consciousness. Through this technique, both Joyce and Woolf attempted to capture the fragmented rhythms of the thought process. Meanwhile, Modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound experimented with the potential of free verse.
In “The Boarding House” and the other stories in Dubliners, Joyce’s focus on ordinary, working-class lives is Modernist, breaking with the literary tradition of dramatic plots featuring middle- or upper-class characters. The author’s depiction of Mrs. Moody demonstrates the interrogation of tradition in the Modernist movement. By showing Mrs. Mooney forging her own social mobility without a man, Joyce subverts traditional class and gender norms, while simultaneously depicting Irish society and culture as it was. A further characteristic of Modernism in the story is the seamless shift from a third-person narrative perspective to an unfiltered representation of various characters’ thoughts. The narrative’s lack of resolution is also typical of the Modernist style, as it concludes before Polly discovers the outcome of her mother’s meeting with Mr. Doran.
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