Tag: the sisters

In the opening story of Dubliners, Eliza, the sister of the just-deceased Father James Flynn, regrets that the family never fulfilled James’s wish to go visit the old house in Irishtown before his death. She explains to the young narrator and his aunt that

“…he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him” (17).

The trip from the northern side of Dublin to what Don Gifford calls “a poor, working class slum just south of the mouth of the Liffey” (34) would not have taken long at all, especially considering the narrator of “Araby” travels an even greater distance, from North Richmond Street to nearly Sandymount, alone at night by foot and train, and that the boys in “An Encounter” also walk a much greater distance, from the Royal Canal to Ringsend, in an afternoon. But while the young narrators of the childhood stories are active and mobile, the priest and his elderly sisters would require more structure and accommodation for their trip. In fact, Father Flynn had planned to rent

“one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told him about–them with the rheumatic wheels–for the day cheap…at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening” (17).

Don Gifford identifies Johnny Rush’s as a “cab and car proprietor” operated by Francis “Johnny” Rush. And indeed, Thom’s 1892 directory lists a Francis Rush at 10 Findlater’s place under the category “Carriage, Cab, and Car Proprietors.”

Findlater’s Place is half a block south of Great Britain (now Parnell) Street just off of Marlborough Street. The three aging siblings would have been able to walk to Johnny Rush’s to get their carriage and from there drive down to Irishtown, about 4.5 km (2.8 miles) fairly easily. According to the Google map, it would take 45 minutes to walk and 16 minutes to bike the route. The pneumatic wheels, or “rheumatic wheels” as Eliza calls them, would make the trip more pleasant as they were “tyre[s] filled with compressed air,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites the Freeman’s Journal, or “Freeman’s General” as Eliza calls it, as explaining “[t]here is every reason to expect that a large business can be done in fixing the Pneumatic Tyre to the wheels of carriages, invalid chairs, etc.”

Another implication of the word “pneumatic,” and Eliza’s express non-saying of it, involves spiritual matters, an idea explored more thoroughly by Bernard Benstock in Narrative Con/Text in Dubliners. In his study, he posits the potential correlation between the names of Johnny Rush and Father O’Rourke and the Old and New Testaments. And while internal spiritual and psychological readings of Dubliners spaces abound, it is also worth exploring the external geographical and technological implications of the reference to Johnny to Rush’s.

When viewed on the map, it is clear that Johnny Rush’s in Findlater’s Place is right in between Great Britain Street, the first explicitly defined setting in Dubliners where the priest and his sisters live, and the Gresham Hotel, the final setting of the last story in Dubliners. At the intersection of the first and last setting markers sits the carriage and cab proprietor, reifying the importance of transportation and its manifestations to the whole of Dubliners. Whereas the first story describes a hypothetical cab ride that was never taken because of a character’s death, the final story ends with an actual, though problematized, cab ride to the Gresham where Gabriel learns about his wife’s past lover, long dead and buried yet still powerfully present. While many of the stories in the collection include transportation ranging from cab to tram to train, after Mrs. Sinico is killed by a train in “A Painful Case,” all transportation stops, until, in the opening scene of “Grace,” Mr. Kernan climbs into a cab, bloody and unable to speak due to his injuries. Then, the two cabs in “The Dead” are hard to come by and imbued with possibly violent connotations. Ultimately, Gabriel and Gretta’s cab ride to the Gresham, as opposed to their home in Monkstown which would have taken them past Irishtown, is a kind of reminder of the opening story’s imagined cab ride. And the proximity of the first and final settings, further foregrounded by Johnny Rush’s cab, car, and carriage proprietor right in between them, calls attention to the critical importance of geographical space and the methods of traversing it that James Joyce so carefully delineates in Dubliners.

Persia appears momentarily in “the Sisters” as the possible setting for a dream the narrator has the night he hears about Father Flynn’s death. Now modern-day Iran, Persia has had many iterations since the First Persian Empire in 550 BCE. Between that time, also known as the Achaemenid Empire, and 651 AD, it transitioned to the Parthian Empire and then the Sasanian Empire. Much of that time was marked by the ongoing Roman-Persian wars, which lasted from roughly 92 AD to 629 AD. Beginning in 1501, Persia was ruled by a series of dynasties. By Joyce’s time, Persia was under the Qajar Dynasty, which spanned from 1785 to 1925. Unsurprisingly, this period saw increased Brittanic influence, especially in the area to the southeast bordering India and what is now Pakistan. Thus the reference to Persia in the story evokes a long imperial history, not just that of the Persian Empire itself, but also the British Empire, which is also alluded to in the name of Great Britain Street, where the boy walks as he recalls his dream. As he walks, he also recalls that Father Flynn was educated at the Irish College in Rome, a more direct association to the Roman Empire than the one embedded in the Persia reference through the Roman-Persian wars.

There is no mappable route in “The Sisters” like there is in the other two childhood stories, but the narrator’s dream of Persia is a kind of imagined journey to the exotic. This imagined journey represents perhaps an expedition in embryonic form when contrasted with the one in “Araby,” which, though a real route, is only an artificial journey to the exotic locale evoked by the name of the bazaar.

The inherent mythos of places like Persia and Araby in Dubliners may perhaps also be viewed as a vestige of Romaticism, an early nineteenth-century literary and artistic movement that romanticized the exotic East as mystical and erotic. Such references are restricted to the childhood stories, as if Joyce is drawing a parallel between the evolution of literature in the nineteenth century and the phases of maturation depicted in the collection as a whole. That the journey to these two places are only imagined or simulated reaffirms the Romantic unattainability they represent.

In “The Sisters,” the narrator describes Persia as part of a dream or vision:

“As I walked along in the sun I remembered old Cotter’s words and tried to remember what had happened afterwards in the dream. I remembered that I had noticed long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashion. I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange — in Persia, I thought…. But I could not remember the end of the dream.” (13-14)

The smoky memory of the dream echoes the exotic strangeness of the place as a Romantic concept. But the images sharply contrast with the narrator’s realistic surroundings at that moment. He is recalling the dream as he walks down the sunny side of Great Britain Street in the heart of working-class Dublin. Persia and all its mysteriousness represent the secrets and mysteries that also surround Father Flynn whose death he has just confirmed from the notice in the draper’s shop window. The priest had formerly “amused himself by putting difficult questions to [the boy]” which “showed [him] how complex and mysterious were certain institutions in the Church” (13). Persia seems almost a dream representation of the mysticism the boy perceives in the church, and the correlation between the two in his perception shows the church to be an institution as exotic and Romantic as Persia itself.

Frederick Lange points out the downstairs room where the boy and his aunt talk to the sisters is a kind of materialized version of the boy’s dream: “The images of the ’empty fireplace’ and ’empty grate’ are linked to the dream image of ‘lamp.’ The boy recalls the ‘curtains’ in his dream after seeing the Drapery sign and the ‘lamp’ after remembering how the priest used to sit by the fire” (35). Lange’s association serves his purpose of tracing church history in Joyce’s work, but we can also use the comparison to note the evolution of imagery and setting from Romantic to Realist fiction. According to this comparison, the priest and his sisters’ quarters become a modern urban Dublin incarnation of the Romantic East, where “long velvet curtains” are replaced with the commercial Drapery, and the “swinging lamp of antique fashion” becomes the empty grate. And I would argue that we could also compare the “dead-room” itself to the Persia room in the dream, a pairing not so starkly contradictory, and one that reveals the still unevolved Romantic perspectives of childhood. In this case, the “long velvet curtains” become “the lace end of the blind [which] was suffused with dusky golden light” and the “swinging lamp of antique fashion” becomes the “candles [which] looked like pale thin flames” (14). Thus, while the downstairs room, where the grown-ups make small talk, is an uncomfortable and uninviting place (the narrator “grope[s] [his] way to [his] usual chair in the corner” and refuses a biscuit because he fears making too much noise), the upstairs room, where the priest lies dead, is to this child suffused with mystery.

Father James Flynn, the priest who dies in “The Sisters” had been an important person in the narrator’s life. The priest had taught the young boy “a great deal,” including proper pronunciation of Latin, all about Napoleon, and the intricacies of the liturgical year and the mass. The narrator’s description of his informal education by the priest seems to also have been a Socratic one, for according to the boy,

“He had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking what one should do in certain circumstance or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts” (13).

Flynn himself had also been educated in all these areas, though his education was, of course, a formal one. In fact,

“He had studied in the Irish College in Rome…” (13)

According to the history page on its website, The Irish College in Rome reopened in 1826 after having been closed for 28 years due to the French Invasion and the Napoleonic Wars.

When it finally reopened, it did so in a new location, since the old one had been lost “to some Sisters.” The reopening was led by Father Michael Blake of Dublin. Then, according to the history,

Within six years the two of the most famous Rectors of the College entered the pages of it’s [sic] history. Paul Cullen served as Rector for seventeen years, before going to Armagh as Archbishop and subsequently to Dublin as Archbishop and eventually as Ireland’s first Cardinal. He was succeeded by Tobias Kirby, a priest of the Diocese of Waterford and Lismore, who served as Rector for forty-one years from 1850 until he retired in 1891. The College archive contains his entire collection of letters, one of the most important private collections for the history of the nineteenth century in the English speaking world.”

(That archive is available online through the college’s website.)

Since he’s noted to have been 65 when he dies on July 1, 1895, Father Flynn would have been born in 1829 or 1830 and so would have attended the college well after its reopening, at the earliest, about 1850. This is the year Tobias Kirby became rector. Kirby died January 20, 1895, just under 6 months before Father Flynn. Like Joyce, Kirby returned to Dublin only twice after he left for the continent. According to the biographical summary accompanying the collection of Kirby’s letters housed at the college, “He maintained contacts with his ex-students some of whom were to become bishops in Australia.” Might one of these correspondents be the priest mentioned in Eveline, a school friend of her father’s who had moved to Melbourne?

All but one (Persia) of the geographical references in “The Sisters,” including the Irish College in Rome, pertain to Father Flynn. And only one of these is shared with the narrator: Great Britain Street. The street is where the Drapery is, where Flynn is lying in “the house of mourning” (14) and where the boy goes to visit. Five of the six total geographical references relate to the priest’s birth (Irishtown), education (Irish College in Rome), vocation (St. Catherine’s in Meath Street), unrealized plans (Johnny Rush’s), or death (Great Britain Street). The way this dead figure dominates the geography seems to anticipate the collection’s final story, wherein the dead continually exert their influence on the living.

Father Flynn’s death notice reveals that he had been parish priest at St. Catherine’s Church in Meath Street:

“Two poor women and a telegram boy were reading the card pinned on the crape. I also approached and read:

July 1st, 1895

The Rev. James Flynn (formerly of S. Catherine’s Church,

in Meath Street), aged sixty-five years.

R.I.P.

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check” (12).

The church is, of course, a Catholic church, and though it is on the site of a previous cathedral, the new church that took its place had only been completed as it would have appeared in the context of the story in 1857. It’s possible, then, given that he had been living with his sisters for several years since “something queer came over him,” that Father Flynn could have been its first priest (16). According to several editions of the Irish Catholic Directory and Almanac between 1858 and 1904, there were only two head parish priests in St. Catherine’s between the time the church was dedicated in 1858 and Father Flynn’s death in 1895.

The reference to the church in “The Sisters” carries implications of religious tension as well. A Catholic church designed by James Joseph McCarthy (though some would dispute this credit), who also designed the Star of the Sea Church around the same time, St. Catherine’s in Meath Street sits just around the corner from St. Catherine’s in Thomas Street, a Church of Ireland establishment where the Nationalist leader Robert Emmet was executed in 1803. Though Emmet was a Protestant, he supported Catholics’ freedom to worship. Thus even though the reference to St. Catherine’s is complicated by the two opposing denominations in near proximity to each other, even the tension is further complicated by the indirect evoking of Emmet whose political ideas were as important, if not more important, than his religious preferences.

In a story so seemingly centered on religious matters (simony [9], catechism [9, 13], the mysteries of the sacraments [13], Father Flynn, a mysterious fall from grace [16-18], etc.), the complex implications embedded in the reference to St. Catherine’s, just steps away from the other St. Catherine’s, coupled with the bookended references to Great Britain Street and Irishtown, the story’s first and last geographical references, respectively, suggest that, as usual with Joyce, there is much more at work in “The Sisters” than just religious mysteries and dichotomies. Religion is only part of a larger network of issues that, appropriately, the opening story of Dubliners invokes. And as Stephen reminds us later, in Ulysses, he is “servant of two masters…an English and an Italian” (U 17.638), meaning “[t]he imperial British state…and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” ((U 17.643-44). Religion is almost always tangled up with politics in Ireland, and seeing St. Catherine’s in Meath Street on a map, so close to Emmet’s execution site at St. Catherine’s in Thomas Street, helps to highlight the political overtones in the story, which, as it turns out, are just as prominent as the more literal religious ones.

Near the end of “The Sisters,” we learn from Eliza that she, her brother Father James Flynn, and their other sister Nannie are all originally from Irishtown:

“But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him. If we could only get one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told him about, them with the rheumatic wheels, for the day cheap — he said, at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening. He had his mind set on that…. Poor James!” (16)

There are several places in Ireland that carry the name “Irishtown,” and most likely, because of its proximity to the priest and his sisters’ home in Great Britain Street, Don Gifford identifies the reference as the Irishtown that is the “poor, working-class slum just south of the mouth of the Liffey and therefore east and south of Great Britain Street” (Gifford 34).

The location, however, could be more ambiguous than this obvious assumption. At the very least the reference holds ambiguous connotations. First, the general nature of the name parallels the general political implications of the earlier reference to Great Britain Street. That the priest was born in a house in Irishtown and died in an apartment above a Great Britain Street drapery shop brings up the ever-present theme of Ireland versus Britain in Dubliners as a whole.

Additionally, we might explore the alternative locations implied by the name Irishtown. At least two other Irishtowns existed as medieval periphery villages or sections of larger cities. These villages were home to people who identified as pre-Anglian Irish. One of these areas (pictured below) is what one history identifies as “probably the original town of Kilkenny,” in the shadow of St. Canice’s Cathedral (Murtagh and Patterson 5). A transcript of the Corporation Book of the Irishtown of Kilkenny, 1537-1628 provides a fascinating log of the rules for pricing materials as well as names of town officials, including the watchmen of the three city gates. According to the introduction, “The Corporation Book of the Irishtown, Kilkenny, has been known to historians at least since the time of Graves and Prim, who quote from it more than once in their History of St. Canice’s Cathedral (1857); in 1874 Sir John Gilbert, presumably with publication in view, had the greater part of it transcribed” (Ainsworth 3).

Another Irishtown, in Limerick, is part of the locale for the legend of the Brazen Head. According to legend as published in The Old Limerick Journal, “the women from the Abbey and the lrishtown were joining with the hard pressed garrison in repelling the Williamites” who were all defeated when, under the command of William of Orange (a figure also referenced in “the Dead”), they assaulted the Black Battery (Gleeson ?8).

While neither of these places, nor two others listed in Counties Antrim and Mayo, would have been comfortably accessible for a Sunday evening drive in a “new-fangled carriage…with rheumatic wheels” (such a carriage would have been a horse-drawn cart, making the journey between 7 hours [by bicycle] and 23 hours [by foot], according to the map), it is nonetheless characteristic of Joyce to inject layers of implication into such a seemingly simple geographical reference. It’s worth noting that another priest in Dubliners is connected with an ambiguous location as well. In “Eveline,” the unnamed priest in the photograph is said to have moved to Melbourne. It’s all Eveline’s father will say of him, and the vagueness of her father’s explanation (“[w]henever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word”) is enough of an intrigue to warrant her focus on the matter as something worth noting (37). “Melbourne” would most likely refer to Melbourne, Australia, but Melbournes also exist in England as well as Canada, a place Frank has been known to travel.

Basically, the reference to Irishtown in “The Sisters” is anything but a simple Sunday destination. It swells with political and historical implication and generates avenues of exploration among many other works by Joyce.

This week’s featured place is Great Britain Street, where the priest of the “The Sisters” lives (or is lying dead, rather).

The street is particularly interesting in that shortly after the 1891 death of Charles Stewart Parnell, a leading Irish Nationalist, the name was changed from “Great Britain” to “Parnell” Street. This booklet published by the Dublin Civic Trust gives some more info on the history of this iconic street as well as its current thriving cultural significance. The booklet includes historical photos as well as building plans for store fronts. Although there’s no “Drapery,” in the diagram, one table shows that between 1845 and 1900, the number of “[c]lothiers, tailors, haberdashery, hosiery and drapery” businesses on the street fell from 17 to 6. The authors accredit this to “a decline in the quality of the street, away from the specialist uses of old towards a business community mainly serving the domestic demands of the local tenement population.”

Here’s the text of “The Sisters” where the street is referenced:

“The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street. It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery” (11).