The Church’s Grasp: Captivity in Joyce’s Dubliners
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published 07/08/2007
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SummaryIt is easy to recognize when one is held captive by the unfamiliar, but the crippling effect of familiar forces is not so easily realized. Throughout American captivity narratives, typically female Anglo-Americans are ensnared by Native Americans, the “other” of early Anglo-American culture. The early Anglo-Americans imagined the Native Americans as the “demonic barbarians” against which they defined their own opposing “pious civilization.” The Anglo-American women’s Indian captivity narratives supported and helped construct this dichotomy with horror stories in which they came to prove themselves exemplary Christians in the face of satanic peoples. The “colonial” characters of James Joyce’s Dubliners strongly identity themselves as Anglo-Irish just as the protagonists of women’s Indian captivity narratives view themselves as Anglo-Americans. The Dubliners also fear and dream of the “other,” the exotic inhabitants of the Orient as well as the Protestants that potentially lurk around the corner. However, in Joyce’s tales it is everyday forces that hold the Dubliners captive instead of the other. As Anglo-American women find God while trapped among the other, Joyce’s characters discover the lack of God and hope while held in the grip of the seemingly familiar, the Catholic Church.
Table of Contents
- It is easy to recognize when one is held captive by the unfamiliar, but the crippling effect of familiar forces is not so easily realized
- Joyce's characters express their sense of Anglo-Irish identity through varying opinions of the other
- The Catholic Church controls much more than the boys' curriculum
- The story of Father Flynn and his young companion is not the only example of the cycle of captivity that the Church instills on Dublin
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