Joyce and Trevor's Dubliners: the legacy of colonialism

Trevor's "Two More Gallants" also reveals a submerged gender conflict. Both Heffernan and Fitzpatrick view women as sexual playthings, too. In fact, sexual conquests function as a game in which the male ego seeks self-affirmation from a successful score on game night. When Heffernan recalls the night he came up with the idea of deceiving Professor Flacks, he jogs Fitzpatrick's poor memory by reminding him that "It was the same night you did well with the nurse from Dundrum" (News 255). Fitzpatrick's attempt to recount the details about that "great girl" is quickly swept aside by Heffernan's self-absorption with his own scheme (255).

If Fitzpatrick's desire for sexual conquest signifies his misdirected aggression toward the ruling status quo, there is also something of the mockheroic about it. While Heffernan helps his friend recall important dates from their personal history by recollecting one of Fitzpatrick's evenings of debauchery, the Dublin landscape honors the names of those who helped shape modern Ireland. In contrast to this civic commemoration of Dublin's historical past, Heffernan and Fitzpatrick mark their shabby little achievements by recalling cheap, prurient encounters with a debauched Irish womanhood.

Apart from the obvious reduction of women to chattel, Trevor's story Illustrates another form of female exploitation. In this case, Heffernan recruits in elderly maid who works in Fitzpatrick's digs in Donnybrook to play her part in the subsequent hoax. Heffernan instructs the old woman to tell Flacks how as a young girl working as a maid in a dentist's office she had met Joyce and told him about her sad affair with Corley and the loss of her job. In the ensuing entrapment, in which the old maid convinces Flacks that she is the source for Joyce's "Two Gallants," Heffernan contributes to the old woman's delinquency in order to gain revenge for an offhand remark Flacks had made concerning Heffernan's longevity as a student (News 253-55). Once again, an Irishman resorts to unchivalric means to enact a mean-spirited reprisal at the so-called establishment. Heffernan restores his fragile ego only through the abnegation of the feminine ego. By bribing the old maid, he attempts to regain his self-worth by imagining that his act is a rejection of the system (Flacks and the College), but he achieves his goal at the cost of degrading an Irish woman.

Unlike Joyce's "slavey," who appears to be an unwitting dupe of Corley and Lenehan's, Trevor's elderly maid actively participates in her own degradation. She delights in playing her role in the ruse, for "she'd do anything for a scrap of the ready" (News 256-57). In this case, selfish gain is not exclusive to gender, and Trevor wisely insinuates that human frailties can not always be attributed to environmental factors: the old woman was simply possessed of a meanness that had become obsessional with her" (257).

Ultimately Joyce and Trevor demonstrate the failure of some Irish men to construct a self-affirming response to colonial tyranny, and their consequent inferiority complex leads many of them to treat Irish women as a depository for their repressed aggression. Another effect of Ascendancy rule in Ireland that Joyce explores is how Irish cultural icons become endowed with political connotations to render them serviceable to nationalist ideology.