Minding the body: an ecofeminist reading of James Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’

Abstract

Through the lens of Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist theory, I read James Joyce’s short story ‘A Painful Case’ as a critique of liberal humanism’s distrust of embodiment via the consciousness of its protagonist, James Duffy. Because the body is the primary site of contact between feminist and ecocritical theory, ecofeminism, as a melding of the two through their mutual concern for animality, irrationality, and the ethics of embodiment, is ideally suited to interpret Joyce’s text. The article develops as a ‘case’ study, as it were, of what Plumwood calls ‘the super hero of the Western psyche,’ and regards Duffy simultaneously as a carefully crafted individual and as an emblematic figure. ‘A Painful Case,’ then, dramatises the inescapable gestures of animality within even the most heroically self-possessed subject, and contributes to ecocritical efforts to articulate the meaning and ethics of embedded being.

Keywords:

• ecofeminism
• Joyce
• body
• materialism
• dualism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Helena Feder for her ongoing provocation and scrupulously kind guidance. He would also like to thank Dr. Ronald Hoag and Dr. Kenneth Parille for their helpful feedback and encouragement.

Notes

1. Recent such publications include James Fairhall’s (2012a) essay quoted here, and his ‘Ecocriticism, Joyce, and the Politics of Trees in the ‘Cyclops’ Episode of Ulysses’ (2012b, 367–387); Alison Lacivita’s (2013) ‘Wild Dublin: Nature Versus Culture in Irish Literature,’ which attributes Ireland’s lamentable conservation record to ‘an enduring country versus city divide,’ tangentially discusses Joyce and playwright Sean O’Casey as reactionary Modernists against the Yeatsian Celtic Revival (27); and the collection Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce.

2. Reviews of James Joyce’s Painful Case were almost purely laudatory. The Irish Literary Supplement’s Patrick McCarthy (2011) declares that the book is ‘one of the most significant studies of Dubliners to appear in many years’ (7); Brian Shaffer (2006), in Philological Quarterly, deems it ‘among the finest studies of Dubliners ever written’ (403); and it is ‘in short, an eminently insightful and informative study,’ in the opinion of James Joyce Quarterly’s Marc Conner (2009, 145). In the book’s Forward, series editor Sebastian Knowles claims, ‘every possible angle … is given thorough and definitive treatment’ by Owens. However, Mary Lowe-Evans (2009) reviewed it with the major caveat that he wants ‘to disallow any readings of the text differently informed from his own,’ and that he ‘closes out competing analyses of scenarios in the story that clearly accommodate a variety of interpretations’ – a conclusion I share (499).

3. In the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus famously says, ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’ (Joyce 1990 [1922], 190)

4. Joyce argues, in an essay about A Doll’s House, that Ibsen had a purpose, and that ‘the purpose was the emancipation of women, which has caused the greatest revolution in our time in the most important relationship there is – that between men and women; the revolt of women against the idea that they are the mere instruments of men’ (quoted in Johnson [2004, 197]).

5. Paul Stasi’s (2009) ‘Joycean Constellations: “Eveline” and the Critique of Naturalist Totality’ makes a similar and equally compelling argument (39–53).

6. ‘This magnetization of style and vocabulary by the context of person, place and time,’ as Richard Ellmann (1982) described it before Kenner coined his term (146).

7. Rather than omniscient impartiality, Joyce further develops Flaubert’s technique of free indirect discourse, and ‘the normally neutral vocabulary [of Joyce’s texts] is pervaded by a little cloud of idioms which a character might use if he were managing the narrative’ (Kenner 1978, 17). As an illustration, Kenner uses the opening line of the final story in Dubliners, ‘The Dead,’ in which ‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally [emphasis added] run off her feet’ (Joyce 2006 [1914], 151). It quickly becomes obvious that Lily has not been knocked down or physically coerced, but that she is only very busy with greeting the guests of Mrs. Morkan’s Christmas party and taking their coats. The word ‘literally’ is Lily’s cliché, not the third-person narrator’s.

8. This is, of course, a phrase from Paradise Lost (Book I, line 63) borrowed for secular purposes, not unlike Joyce’s use of the term ‘epiphany.’ ‘Darkness visible’ is one of the torments imposed on Satan after his revolt against perhaps the most imposingly centered master, though I use it with Stephen Dedalus’s ‘darkness shining in the lightness’ in mind (Joyce 1990 [1922], 28).

9. Returning to Duffy’s reading habits: his selective appropriation of Nietzsche, whose ubiquitously misunderstood ‘superman’ theory was part of a complex philosophy of humans as biological beings, serves to reinforce his social Darwinist judgement that Sinico was merely ‘one of the wrecks on which civilization has been built’ and enacts capitalism’s penchant for assimilating potentially threatening ideas (Joyce 2006 [1914], 96).

10. Colleen Lamos (‘Duffy’s Subjectification: The Psychic Life of “A Painful Case”’ 2001), Margot Norris (‘Shocking the Reader in “A Painful Case”’ 2000), Nouri Gana (‘The Vicissitudes of Melancholia in Freud and Joyce’ 2006), and Benjamin Boysen (‘The Self and the Other: On James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” and “The Dead”’ 2007) all fail to address it.

11. The encounter between Bloom and his cat is very similar to that described by Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am.

12. R.F. Foster (1989) finds that, though the Industrial Revolution was slower to develop in Ireland, the nation was rapidly urbanising at the turn on the twentieth century. Thousands of miles of new railway lines were built during this period as part of what he calls Ireland’s ‘transport revolution’ (385).

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James D. Cardin

James Cardin received his MA from East Carolina University in 2013. This is his first published work.