"Three mortal hour/i~s": female Gothic in Joyce's "The Dead." - James Joyce

symbolic setting of its last scene, locating Gabriel, by his vision of the snow immuring the living and the dead'. . . in the ninth circle of the Inferno, the lake of ice called Cocytus" (35). (13)My argument that Joyce had Dante's Virtues in mind while writing "The Dead" finds support in a reading of Samuel Beckett's parody of Joyce in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). There the Virtues come back in Beckett's Dantean anti-hero Belacqua's vision of an illuminated advertisement for meat extract:

There were signs on all hands. There was the big Bovril sign to

begin with, flaring beyond the Green. But it was useless. Faith,

Hope and - what was it? - Love, Eden missed, every ebb derided,

all the tides ebbing from the shingle of Ego Maximus. Itself it went

nowhere, only round and round, like the spheres, but mutely.

("Ding-Dong" 39)

The colorful Bovril sign reappears at the opening of the next story, "A Wet Night," which concludes with a much-noted parody of the terminal "snow epiphany" of The Dead." Also critic Anthony Farrow has argued that Belacqua's three female companions-Alba (white), Smeraldina (green) and Ruby (red) - are ironic correspondents to Dante's Virtues (109). (14)That Joyce was particularly interested the triadic structure of The Divine Comedy, especially in regard to the way it shaped character, is indicated by Stephen Dedalus's less-than-reverent allusion to Beatrice in Ulysses as "the isosceles triangle . . . [Dante]. fell in love with" (637).

The most extensive study to date of the Joyce/Dante relationship is Mary Reynolds's Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (1981). Reynolds claims that "every story in Dubliners can be matched with an episode in the Inferno, either by subject matter or incident, in a catalogue of moral death" (159). Reynolds does not detect the providential spirit of Beatrice hovering over "The Dead" and so reads Joyce's ending (as does Thomas Rice - see note 12 above) as devoid of hope: Gabriel's misfortune in the final incident, which forms the climax of the story, is a punishment - a reprisal for having sinned against his kinfolk and country" (161). (l5)For an analysis of Gabriel Conroy's correspondence to the angel Gabriel - as well as Michael Furey's correspondence to the archangel Michael - see Florence Walzl's "Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of "The Dead." (16)Numerous critics have noted the similarities between Gabriel Conroy and Leopold Bloom. According to Ellmann, Joyce first conceived of Bloom as the hero of a story for Dubliners. He wrote "The Dead" instead (230).

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