Section of the 1883 ‘Geological Map of the Environs of Dublin’ by Lett’s, Sons, & Co. showing Lucan in the far west, Chapelizod near the center, and Dublin city in the east. From the online David Rumsey Map Collection. The Liffey runs west to east in the center, and below it can be seen the Lucan Road, running almost parallel to the river’s course. Click image for full map.
The Lucan Road, mentioned in “A Painful Case,” connects the western Dublin suburbs of Chapelizod and Lucan, incidentally the location of the 1883 Dublin-Lucan Steam Tramway terminus. Running along the south side of the Liffey, the road spans from Lucan in the west to Chapelizod in the east. (Joyce even hybridized the towns in Finnegans Wake as “Lucalizod.”) The road actually has many names along various stretches of its length, but Joyce preferred to use its utilitarian label in Dubliners. Like the Shelbourne Road, the Lucan Road identifies a route to a town. And because that town is west of Dublin, it implies an opposite directional movement to the Liffey running nearly parallel just above it. Its westward direction also implies an exit from the city and thus connotes escape, departure, or moving beyond a boundary. All of these are appropriate in the context of “A Painful Case,” especially at the reference’s particular placement in the story.
Mr. Duffy has just re-read the newspaper story describing the death of his once close but lately estranged friend Mrs. Sinico. His first reading had been over dinner in George’s Street, a location within the city proper. But it isn’t until he arrives at home after a vaguely difficult end to his interrupted meal that the reader learns the story that so bothered him was one about the death of his friend. It is only once he is safely out of the city that the news is conveyed to the reader, word-for-word no less, and even then the story is followed directly by connotations of even further outward movement:
“Mr Duffy raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the cheerless evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from time to time a light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end!” (115)
Because the name implies a movement toward the town of Lucan, which is even further west of the city center than Chapelizod, the reference to the road imbues the news of the death with further implications of departure or escape. The embedded news story implies that the death was an accident, but the narrative suggests the possibility that Mrs. Sinico’s death is a suicide. In either case, the centrifugal movement from center to something outside is reflected between death and departure.
The movement implied by a road labeled for its westward destination also anticipates the more expansive “journey westward” in “The Dead,” and, like that journey, is initiated by the main character’s reflection on a disturbingly influential dead figure (223). But whereas Gabriel has only just learned of Micahel Furey’s existence, Mr. Duffy had been uncomfortably familiar with Mrs Sinico while she was alive. His emotions are more confused and visceral (the rest of the paragraph contains words like “revolted,” “vulgar,” “degraded,” “squalid,” “miserable,” “malodorous,” etc.), requiring perhaps a more limited geo-emotional escape so that he may instead work to anchor himself. In fact, he seems to do just this when he ventures back out for a walk, and it isn’t until he gazes back toward the city that he is able to to feel sympathy for Mrs Sinico, albeit a sympathy born out of guilt and shame for his own hand in her demise. While the lights of the Lucan Road, toponymically pointing westward, only offer Duffy a kind of malformed epiphanic journey westward, the lights of Dublin, pulling him eastward, present him with feelings of loneliness and guilt. In the end, “[h]e turned back the way he had come,” but listens still to the train in the east, which seems to be iterating the syllables of his friend’s name as it moves away.
The location of Dan Burke’s Stephen’s Green location is seen at the bottom left of the photograph. Image from the National Library of Ireland’s digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection. Photo by Robert French, published 1865-1914.
Dan Burke’s is named in “A Painful Case” as Duffy’s go-to lunch spot in the city. Although he lives in Chapelizod, he works in the city center, at a bank in Baggot Street, and must therefore find sustenance near his office:
“He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke’s and took his lunch—a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At four o’clock he was set free. He dined in an eating-house in George’s Street where he felt himself safe from the society of Dublin’s gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare” (108-109).
Section of page from Thom’s 1892 Directory containing listings for “Burke, Daniel.”
According to Thom’s 1892 Directory (pictured above), Daniel Burke and Co., “grocers, tea, wine and spirit merchants,” had establishments at 50 Lower Baggot Street, as well as St. James Street East, 3 King’s Street South, Ballsbridge, 11 Sandycove Road, and 107 and 108 Stephen’s Green West. A previous directory published in 1883 (embedded below; see left column near top) also lists Daniel Burke as “grocer, tea, wine and spirit merchant” in several of the same locations. An established and expanding business with stores located around the city, Dan Burke’s would have been to Duffy a reliable establishment that appealed to his regard for consistency and order.
Duffy’s appreciation of Dan Burke’s consistency is echoed in his always ordering the same arrowroot biscuits (or cookies, for American readers) and bottle of lager. Arrowroot biscuits differ from the traditional kind in that they are made with the naturally gluten-free arrowroot instead of wheat flour. In fact, the 1920 entry in the Encyclopedia Americana describes arrowroot as “a fine-grained starch esteemed for making desserts and invalid foods.” The entry also explains that arrowroot was particularly popular in Victorian Great Britain as it was produced in British colonies. True to his sensitive character, Duffy seems drawn to a consistent and gentle diet, opting away from gluten and stout in favor of the gentler and lighter fare Dan Burke’s offers. That it’s located in the same street as his office makes it a convenient as well as efficient choice for a midday meal.
Phoenix Park is a 1752-acre urban park just north of the River Liffey in the west part of Dublin near the village of Chapelizod. One of the largest capital-city parks in Europe, it houses in its walls not only a zoo, grass fields, woods, sports grounds, a raceway, walking and biking trails, and wild deer descended from those introduced in 1660 when the park was established by the Duke of Ormonde as a hunting ground, but also the residences of both the President of Ireland and the U.S. Ambassador, the headquarters of the Garda Síochána (Irish police), and the National Ambulance Service College (previously the Hibernian Military School “incorporated in 1769,” Joh D’Alton explains, “for maintaining, educating, and apprenticing the orphans and children of soldiers in Ireland” [529]).
Phoenix Park, Dublin City, Co. Dublin, photographed by Robert French between 1865 and 1914. The photo shows the Wellington Monument, one of several statues and monuments in the park, in the snowy background. From the National Library of Ireland’s digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection.
Though Phoenix Park is never mentioned by name in Dubliners, “the Park,” the Parkgate, and locations within the park, like the Wellington Monument and Magazine Hill, are. The Wellington Monument, which stands just inside the park’s main entrance, appears in “The Dead” covered with snow and frost in Gabriel’s imagination, serving in part as an outdoor solitary and quiet contrast to the bustling of the party going on inside the Morkan home:
“Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!” (D 202)
But perhaps the most Phoenix-Park-centric story in Dubliners is “A Painful Case.” The main character, James Duffy, lives in Chapelizod, a village whose name (translated “Iseult’s Chapel”) emanates romantic connotations through its invocation of the Tristan and Iseult story. One of the village’s main roadways, which Duffy traverses, runs along the outside of Phoenix Park’s south wall. The park is referenced at two points in the story. It is the last place James Duffy meets Emily Sinico, a married woman with whom he has “become intimate” (D 110), after what he perceives to have been an awkward and dangerously romantic exchange; and it is where he returns, alone, to walk and think after reading the news of her sudden and disturbing death.
The first reference to the park is used as a kind of response to a near-moment of passion:
“The dark discreet room, their isolation, the music that still vibrated in their ears united them. This union exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek.
Mr Duffy was very much surprised. Her interpretation of his words disillusioned him. He did not visit her for a week, then he wrote to her asking her to meet him. As he did not wish their last interview to be troubled by the influence of their ruined confessional they met in a little cakeshop near the Parkgate. It was cold autumn weather but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse: every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow. When they came out of the Park they walked in silence towards the tram; but here she began to tremble so violently that, fearing another collapse on her part, he bade her good-bye quickly and left her. A few days later he received a parcel containing his books and music” (D 111-12).
Chapelizod itself abounds with mythic and romantic connotations, and Phoenix Park, just by its name, also hints at the deep passion and romanticism repressed within Duffy’s “saturnine” and ordered persona (D 108). For even though “[h]e lived at a little distance from his body,” he lived in a place called Chapelizod and walked in a place called Phoenix Park. Don Gifford explains that “[t]he phoenix, a mythical bird, consumed by fire once a millenium yet reborn of its own ashes, is a traditional symbol variously of Christ and of the regenerative power of passionate love. For the Irish the Phoenix was also a symbol of the rebirth of Ireland as an independent (and ideal) nation” (86). Since Duffy is neither religious (he has no “church nor creed” [D 109] ) nor necessarily political (“No social revolution, he told her, would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries” [D 111]), the strongest notion the phoenix symbol conveys would certainly seem to be that of “the regenerative power of passionate love.” And although Duffy sees the Parkgate cakeshop as a neutral or platonic space to meet, and perhaps it is inasmuch as it is at the gate between inside and outside Phoenix Park, the couple’s post-cakeshop stroll inside the park can be seen as a return to the potential of romantic love, a reigniting of the very passions he is trying to extinguish. In fact, despite the grey “cold autumn weather,” in Phoenix Park they wander like it’s summer, and even their goodbye is a rather dramatic and tragedic affair.
Phoenix Park, Dublin City, Co. Dublin, photographed by Robert French between 1865 and 1914. The photo features the Phoenix Column, which was erected in 1747 and is capped by a phoenix rising from ashes.
After Duffy reads of Mrs. Sinico’s death four years later, he is at first repulsed that he ever associated with someone capable of dying in such a way, and then finally starts to mourn the loss of “[h]is soul’s companion!” (D 115). Once the sadness begins, and he realizes how lonely she must have been and how lonely he too would continue to be, he goes back to the park:
“The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces” (D 116-17).
As he stands on Magazine Hill, feeling guilty and alone, he observes two lovers and then hears Emily’s name in the sound of a passing train:
“He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name” (D 117).
The connotations of passion implicit in the allusions to the Tristan and Iseult story and the Phoenix force the reader to at the very least consider the storm raging in Duffy as he recalls Emily Sinico’s life-force as a potential rebirth for him (if not an initial birth), one that allows him to embrace the full power of his longings, whether those longings be for writing, adventure, or romantic love. The rebirth comes as he stands on a hill in Phoenix Park, watching the “worm with a fiery head” winding away in the darkness “reiterating the syllables of her name.” Her life, which woke him from his solitude, made him face emotional intimacy; and her death, to which he believes he sentenced her, has the potential to be a kind of gambit necessary for him to finally realize his erotic, and even homoerotic, desire.
But like most of the characters in Dubliners, although the epiphany is just there, clawing at the heart, it is muted by guilt and the perception of his life as “an adventureless tale” (D 109).
Screenshot of the Google Maps version showing the Chapelizod Bridge.
Very few of the Dubliners stories contain settings very far from the city center. The most significant deviation from this norm is “A Painful Case,” which features the suburb of Chapelizod as the main character’s place of residence. The opening of the story announces this setting in tones much like those of the central character Duffy himself:
“MR. JAMES DUFFY lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built” (107).
More the most part, James Duffy follows a rigid daily routine:
“He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke’s and took his lunch — a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At four o’clock he was set free. He dined in an eating-house in George’s Street where he felt himself safe from the society of Dublin’s gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare” (108-109).
But on one particular evening, after his routine has been interrupted by the news of his friend Emily Sinico’s death, he visits a different public house, one much nearer his home than his usual haunts. Though Duffy initially reads of his friend’s demise in the paper in his George’s Street eating house, he has to go elsewhere to process the news. First he goes home to Chapelizod where he rereads the story by the dim light of his bedroom window, which overlooks the Lucan road, the distillery, and the Liffey. He becomes unsettled and nervous and leaves his house to get some fresh air:
“The cold air met him on the threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch.
The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were five or six workingmen in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman’s estate in County Kildare They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked, spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with their heavy boots. Mr. Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at them, without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and he called for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.
As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory — if anyone remembered him” (116).
It takes a change of scenery for Duffy to feel sympathy for his friend, whom only shortly before he had perceived as “unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared” (115). He had been appalled, in fact, when he first learned of her death. But once he is in the pub near his house, drinking hot punch on a cold November night, he feels much closer to her and regrets that neither one of them could fill the loneliness they both felt in life. Though she was married, her husband was often abroad and Duffy had been the closest thing to a companion she had had. She also had been comforting to him, an unmarried though not necessarily unromantic man who seems unwilling to confront his sensual potential.
That the name of Chapelizod invokes the love story of Tristan and Iseult only adds to the depth of his despair at realizing Mrs. Sinico is gone. Perhaps it is the unnamed pub only distinguished in the story by its location at the Chapelizod bridge, with its connotations of romance and history, that offers Duffy the ability to feel tenderly.
The pub itself is identified by Don Gifford as the Bridge Inn. Although the current Bridge Inn’s website claims it wasn’t built until 1911, the 1900 Thom’s Directory clearly lists a Mr. T. Walker, grocer, wine and spirit merchant, at Bridge Inn in the south side of Chapelizod (see bottom middle column in the screenshot below). The Bridge Inn, just on the south bank of the Liffey is not the same pub as the famous Mullingar’s featured in Finnegans Wake, and which was a favorite spot of Joyce’s father John who knew the owner there, Robert Glenthorn Broadbent, also listed in the directory below.
Screenshot of a digitized 1900 Thom’s DIrectory. The page shows entries for Chapelizod. Note Mr. T. Walker of Bridge Inn near the bottom of the middle column. Also, note Mr. Robt. Glenthorn Broadbent at the top left. He is purportedly a friend of Joyce’s father, John Joyce. Broadbent ran the Mullingar House, another Chapelizod pub, which features in Finnegan’s Wake. Directory made available online by South Dublin County Libraries, http://source.southdublinlibraries.ie/handle/10599/5101
Chapelizod is a neighborhood in the western part of Dublin, along the banks of the Liffey. In Joycean contexts it’s best known as the home of the Earwicker residence in Finnegans Wake, but it’s also where James Duffy lives in the Dubliners story “A Painful Case.” The story opens with a very Duffyesque voice explaining “Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious” (107).
“Village, Chapelizod, Co. Dublin,” showing a street in Chapelizod, photographed by Robert French between 1865 and 1914. From the Lawrence Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland.
Although Mr. Duffy lives in the suburbs, “[e]very morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram” to his office in Baggot Street (108), near the area where Corley meets his girl in “Two Gallants.” Chapelizod is mentioned two more times in the story, both in rather dreary terms after he has read the news of Mrs. Sinico’s death. The first time, he is aware of the news, but the reader is not:
“He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick striking the ground regularly, the fringe of the buff Mail peeping out of a side-pocket of his tight reefer overcoat. On the lonely road which leads from the Parkgate to Chapelizod he slackened his pace.” (113)
Once he arrives at his house, he rereads the story in the newspaper, and this time the reader also gets access to the news that his problematized lover, “[h]is soul’s companion,” has been struck by a train and killed. Unable to calm his nerves, he goes back out into the cold night: “When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch” (116).
“Chapelizod, Co. Dublin,” showing a view of the village, looking south from the hill above. This view is more romantic than the one above, perhaps even Wordsworthean ala “Tintern Abbey.” Recall that Mr. Duffy keeps his Wordsworth on the bottom shelf of his bookcase.
Duffy’s feeling about Chapelizod is somewhat complex. He sounds rather unromantic about his reasons for living there on one hand, listing only his reasons for not living somewhere else as his motivations. Nevertheless, that he does not want to live somewhere “mean, modern, and pretentious” implies that he does want to live somewhere just the opposite. Chapelizod, especially as it is reflected in Finnegans Wake, has rather romantic associations. It’s name means “Iseult’s chapel,” and Iseult refers to the Irish princess that features in the Tristan and Iseult stories. There are many versions of these stories, but perhaps the one most contemporary to Joyce’s work would have been Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. In this version, Isolde initially heals Tristan, her family’s enemy, after he is wounded in battle. She is later betrothed to Tristan’s uncle Marke, but during the voyage to Brittany to meet her fiance, she and Tristan, who is escorting her, drink a love potion and fall madly in love. Isolde still marries Marke, but she and Tristan meet during the night while her husband is hunting. They are caught and Tristan is wounded in an ensuing fight. He flees, but Isolde follows him. Tristan dies of his wounds just as his love arrives, and she dies of sorrow. In another version of the story, Mark stabs Tristan, and Iseult asks him to use his last bit of strength to kill her with his embrace, which he does.
Tristan and Iseult, 1902, painting by Edmund Blair Leighton.
If Chapelizod isn’t, in “A Painful Case,” “mean, modern, and pretentious,” it also isn’t dramatic and romantic in the way that its name’s associations would imply. While Emily Sinico exhibits certain Isolde-like qualities, James Duffy is certainly no Tristan. Mrs. Sinico is a married woman with obvious affection for Mr. Duffy, and even though the two spend time together at concerts, on walks, and eventually even at her cottage in the evenings; without a love potion, Mr. Duffy is not, after all, able to “ascend to an angelic stature,” to “emotionalise his mental life” (111), at least with her. Without a love potion, he can only “insist[…] on the soul’s incurable loneliness,” resolving that “[w]e cannot give ourselves…we are alone.” Although like Tristan and Isolde, Duffy and Sinico inhabit the world of night, existing together only in darkness, and though Duffy even begins to enjoy this, he is ultimately confined by what he accepts as his own sombre reality. The two “agreed to break off their intercourse” and four years later, his would-be Iseult was dead. Even though he’s attracted and moved by what Chapelizod represents and references, his Chapelizod is actually a stark realistic neighborhood in Dublin, the city whose brown tinted streets are reflected in his face (108). He does not follow Mrs. Sinico into death but stands at the end of the story listening to the silence, feeling alone, feeling realistic.
Screenshot of the Dubliners map showing Holland and Rotterdam (and the two Belgium references to the south from “After the Race” and “The Dead.”)
Holland, which, technically, is a name referring only to two provinces of the Netherlands, appears in “A Painful Case” in rather a painful context. Its first mention is innocuous enough:
[Emily Sinico’s] husband was captain of a mercantile boat plying between Dublin and Holland; and they had one child. ()
But the second mention of the place, in the more specific instance of “Rotterdam,” reveals the sense of tragedy or despair that Joyce would come to associate with the country later in his life. According to the story, Mr. Sinico is in Rotterdam when he hears of his wife’s untimely death:
He was not in Dublin at the time of the accident as he had arrived only that morning from Rotterdam. ()
That Joyce has poor Mr. Sinico located in Holland when his wife is hit by a train is presciently appropriate given Joyce’s own string of unfortunate experiences in the country. David Pascoe describes these experiences in the introduction to the program for the XXIV International James Joyce Symposium (where Mapping Dubliners Project is giving a presentation this week) in Utrecht, Netherlands:
Joyce visited the Netherlands, on vacation, in the late spring of 1927…[H]e took in Zaandem (where, oddly, on visiting a small museum, and signing the visitors book, he stated his place of residence still as Dublin); The Hague (where he was attacked by a dog on the ‘wild and endless’ beach, at Scheveningen and broke his glasses); and Amsterdam (where, staying at the Hotel Krasnapolsky, he spent Bloomsday in bed with a cold, and, from his window, overlooking Dam Square, he saw a bolt of lightning strike the glorious Nieuwe Kerk).
The Dutch, like the British, had (and still have) their own colonies around the world, and Joyce would certainly have recognized it as another inescapable colonizing European force.
