Conflict, sex and snow in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’

“In the midst of life, we are in death.”

The Book of Common Prayer

In 1959, Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann revealed the origins of “The Dead”, the last tale in Dubliners (1914): “The story was suggested by an incident that took place in Galway in 1903.  There Michael (‘Sonny’) Bodkin courted Nora Barnacle [Joyce’s future wife]; but he contracted tuberculosis and had to be confined to bed.  Shortly afterwards Nora resolved to go to Dublin, and Bodkin stole out of his sickroom, in spite of the rainy weather, to sing to her under an apple tree and bid her good-bye.  In Dublin Nora soon learned that Bodkin was dead.”  He adds that “The Dead” “begins with a party and ends with a corpse”.

A disturbing undercurrent of social, political and religious hostility, fuelled by abundant alcohol, runs through the festivities, and the holiday atmosphere is compromised by a mournful mood.  Aunt Kate, the co-hostess at the party, laments that “we’re all very quarrelsome”.  The young maidservant Lily (who pronounces Gabriel’s surname Con-e-roy) bitterly condemns her predatory suitors: “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”  They want sex, not marriage.  Though Lily is obedient and hardworking, Aunt Kate criticises her behaviour: “I don’t know what has come over her lately.  She’s not the girl she was at all.”

Kate worries that Freddy Malins will arrive drunk and spoil the party.  Comic and grotesque, Freddy talks rubbish, behaves foolishly and spins out of control.  Gabriel’s teaching colleague Molly Ivors accuses him of being a West Briton, an Irishman subservient to the culture of the United Kingdom, “instead of depending on ourselves alone” (a reference to the literal meaning of Sinn Fein).  She leaves early to hear a speech by James Connolly, the Irish political leader destined to be executed by the British after the Easter Rising of 1916.

Aunt Kate is furious that the Pope has barred women like the devoted Aunt Julia from singing in church choirs, and replaced them with little boys.  The guests even quarrel about whether the outstanding singers were better in the past or in the present, and who are today’s best singers.  The only Protestant at the party—the handsome and silver-haired Mr. Browne, who becomes increasingly drunk and dishevelled as the evening progresses—questions the Catholic monks sleeping in their coffins, the vicarious expiation of sin and reduced time in Purgatory.

The principal characters also have minor disputes that lead to their final rupture.  Gabriel’s mother had been opposed to his marriage to the “country cute” wife, Gretta.  She took a very long time to get dressed, ignored Gabriel’s advice to wear galoshes in wet weather and made them late for the party.  While Gabriel refuses to go to the West Country with Molly Ivors and her friends, Gretta is keen to return to her native town and tells him, “I’d love to see Galway.”  She’s deeply moved by hearing Bartell D’Arcy sing.  All these contretemps set up the climactic confrontation, and Gretta’s sexual and emotional withdrawal from Gabriel.

The interludes of the songs mollify the conflicts and express the themes of the story.

“Arrayed for the Bridal” and “The Lass of Aughrim” both describe a woman’s tragic loss when she is jilted by her lover.  The unmarried Aunt Julia, who sings the aria from Verdi’s I Puritani, was never joyfully “arrayed for the bridal”.  Ellmann explained that “Aughrim is a little village in the west not far from Galway.  In it a woman who has been seduced and abandoned by Lord Gregory comes with her baby in the rain to beg for admission to his house.”  The same tragic scene occurs in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), when the pregnant and destitute Fanny Robin vainly appeals to her lover Sergeant Troy.

The guests’ repetition of “goodnight” twelve times not only suggests polite farewells to everyone, but also their reluctance to leave the musical party and feast.  Joyce’s repetition influenced T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published six years after Dubliners: “good night, ladies, good night good ladies, good night, good night.”

In the confined cab ride and again in the more intimate room at Gresham’s Hotel, Gabriel experiences a new “fever of rage and desire,” and longs to sleep with Gretta.  In The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor notes that “when they return to their hotel bedroom the electric light has failed, and his passion is also extinguished.”  Like a shy suitor, Gabriel waits for the right moment to touch her.  He wonders about Gretta’s secret thoughts, and doesn’t understand why she’s so remote and unresponsive.

In a series of gradual revelations, Gretta tells him that Bartell D’Arcy’s song, “The Lass of Aughrim”, reminded her of a boy she used to know who sang that same song.  He had a romantic name, Michael Furey, but an unromantic job in the gasworks, and died at the age of seventeen.  Gretta, once in love with Furey, confesses that she was “great with him at that time.  We used to go out walking the way they do in the country.”  The night before she left for her convent school in Dublin, he came to see her, stood outside in the garden and said he “did not want to live”.  Furey was already consumptive but Gretta claims, “I think he died for me” by standing in the cold rain.  Furey knew he would never be able to marry Gretta and feared he might never see her again.

Gabriel is humiliated and laments, “While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another.”  Gabriel’s jealousy is aroused and his life embittered when he discovers that Gretta feels more passionately about the dead youth, Michael Furey, than about himself.  He realises that he had never aroused her love as intensely as the dying lad who sang “The Lass of Aughrim” and called to her that last night in Galway.

Snow is the dominant symbol in “The Dead” and subject of the last magnificent paragraph.  All the characters comment on the snow and have contradictory responses to the weather, from appreciative, welcoming and stimulating to uncomfortable, unhealthy and morbid.  When Gabriel enters the house, he has snow on his galoshes and a fringe of snow on his cape.  Lily asks if it’s snowing and he replies, “I think we’re in for a night of it.”  He says that the romantic Gretta would “walk home in the snow if she were let.”  While looking out the window he also thinks, “how pleasant it would be to walk out alone.  The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington monument.”  While making his nervously prepared and slightly pompous speech, Gabriel thinks, “People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music.  In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow.  The Wellington Monument [again] wore a gleaming cap of snow.”

Mary Jane, Kate’s niece, remarks, “we haven’t had snow like it for thirty years, and I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland.”   Aunt Julia sadly says, “I love the look of snow.”  Miss O’Callaghan nostalgically opines, “I think Christmas is never really Christmas unless we have snow on the ground.”  “But poor Mr. D’Arcy doesn’t like the snow,” which gives him a hoarse voice and makes him reluctant to sing.  As the guests leave the house, “only streaks and patches of snow lay on the roofs, on the parapets of the quay and on the area railings.”  As their cab passes the monument to Daniel O’Connell, “Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow.”

Joyce’s most poetic passage repeats Mary Jane’s observation and ends with a snow image: “snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  [Gabriel’s] soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

The snow is swallowed up by the untamed and “mutinous Shannon waves”.  The gravestones are tilted and inscriptions effaced by the snow, the rain and the wind.  The magical symbolic snow obscures when it falls and exposes when it melts.  Snow obliterates the present and recalls the past, hides the truth, covers the living and reveals the dead.  The brilliantly effective repetition and chiasmus of “falling softly” and “softly falling”, of “falling faintly” and “faintly falling”, suggests the connection between sex and death, and the mournful theme that the memories of the dead can be stronger than the emotions of the living.

J. F. Powers echoed the end of “The Dead” in his finest priestly story, “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” (1947): “The snowflakes whirled at the window, for a moment for all their bright blue beauty as though struck still by lightning, and Didymus closed his eyes, only to find them there also, but darkly falling.” When I mentioned the influence of “The Dead”, especially in the last two words, Powers replied, “The falling snow and canary are as you say and, though you don’t say, perhaps too obvious.”

John Huston’s last film, The Dead (1987), was his masterpiece.  As with The Maltese Falcon, he stays very close to the original text and uses most of the excellent dialogue.  There’s a perfect physical match between the actors and their characters.  The film intensifies Freddy Malins’ conflict with his unpleasant and censorious mother.  Gabriel’s headmaster, Mr. Grace, reads “Broken Vows”, the Irish poem translated by Lady Gregory about another abandoned woman.  John Huston and the Dubliners, the superb documentary about making The Dead, shows how he directed the film, in a wheelchair and attached to an oxygen tank, the year before he died.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, had thirty-four books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway came out with LSU Press in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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