Upright man/fallen woman: identification and desire in James Joyce's "A Painful Case" - racial studies - Critical Essay

(13.) The locus classicus for the literary argument about the competing claims of angelic or sexual love is, of course, John Donne's "Air and Angels." Drawing on the Thomist doctrine of the incorporeality and therefore sexlessness of the angels, the poem concludes (perhaps facetiously) that though woman's love is as pure as air, it is not as pure as a man's, which is as pure as an angel. See Theodore Redpath's explication of this poem (33-34, 140-44). Was Joyce also being "facetious" in attributing "angelical stature" to Duffy?

(14.) Like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Duffy is the servant of two imperious masters--"an English and an Italian" (17): unlike Stephen, however, Duffy shows no awareness of the complex ramifications of his own servitude. Trevor Williams sharply indicts Duffy for those same failures in awareness from which the pathological dimension of my reading exonerates him: of all the characters in Dubliners, Duffy "is the most firmly trapped within ideology since he has the necessary qualifications of intellect to penetrate the world about him" (99).

(15.) Cynthia Wheatley-Lovoy makes use of the myth of Narcissus and Echo to interpret this scene: "Like Narcissus's pool, [Sinico] represents to [Duffy] only a reflector of his own image. He attempts to create in her a likeness to himself' (184).

(16) In Lacanian terms, Sinico's "gaze" is the camera, which takes in and dominates the world it observes: her "look," by contrast, reveals a subjectivity founded on absence or lack, for which the "swoon" is the appropriate figure. See Jacques Lacan (65-119), and Kaja Silverman (168-70).

(17.) example, within the space of ten lines, the railway porter describes how Sinico was caught by the buffer of the engine and fell to the ground; a juror inquires if the porter saw the fall; and the house surgeon explains how the right side of her head had been injured in the fall (104).

(18.) By "living at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances" (99), as Bernard Benstock notes, Duffy has already "established himself as his own ghost, a comfortable ghost he knows and has accommodated himself to" (38). Sinico, by contrast, is a highly uncomfortable and non-accommodatory ghost.

(19.) Lindsey Tucker explores these scenes in depth, mainly from a Jungian standpoint (118-27).

(20.) Duffy in effect gets the worst of both worlds: as a masculine subject, he mimics the colonizer's ideology of assimilation (he incorporates Sinico into himself); at the same time, he suffers the extreme fate of the colonized subject (alienation, isolation, defeat).

Works Cited

Benstock, Bernard. Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.

Bhabha, Homi. "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." October 28 (1984): 125-33.

_____. "Sly Civility." October 34 (1985): 71-80.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Freudian Subject. Trans. Catherine Porter. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.