"The Sisters" by James Joyce

Dubliners--on my first stackiversary.

Today is the anniversary of my first joining Substack, and in honor of the date, I’m returning to my first subject here: an analysis of The Sisters by James Joyce.

Also, check the points of business after the introduction: I’m giving away paperback books. (Point 2.c.)

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

The Sisters, by James Joyce

As I try to uncover the meaning of The Sisters, the opening story in Dubliners by James Joyce, I want to start with what I see the story itself saying, before we get into all the possible nuances. The story starts with old Cotter speaking ill of the dead Father Flynn, even if he can’t quite articulate what it is he means to say. There’s something queer, he says. He has a theory which he doesn’t give. The story ends with a discussion of Father Flynn’s last days. He’d suffered a couple of strokes, and before the third one which paralyzed and ultimately killed him, it had created in him a decline and a moroseness. The most worrying sign was when they found him in the dark chapel, in the confessional, laughing to himself.

Instead of assuming Joyce was hinting at something more sinister about Father Flynn, who was a friend of the boy who provides the story’s POV, I think it’s important to note that the queerness the boy shouldn’t have been around (in the story’s vernacular) is Father Flynn’s illness, or specifically, the behavior associated with it. The word “queer” isn’t used again until the women discuss the troubling behavior at the end of the book. This would indicate the judgment against the priest is less a critique on religion than on people’s attitude toward the sick.

James Joyce

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Now, let’s discuss: The Sisters.

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Old Cotter has a strange feeling about Father Flynn because Flynn is ill, and there seems to be a connection between that illness and moral failure in the eyes of old Cotter. We see similar language in the boy’s thoughts where he says of the word paralysis, “But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.” Later, the dead father’s grey face follows him in a dream:

It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.

This last quote directly connects to two other parts of the story. First, the father is confessing in the dream, and in reality, he was found alone in a confessional, laughing to himself. Second, the boy says he felt as if he were absolving “the simoniac of his sin.” That concept was introduced earlier, as the word paralysis sounded strange to him, “like simony in the catechism.” Simony is the church selling that which is holy: pardons, offices, sacred items, etc. It was named after Simon Magus who tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from Peter. The other word offered was gnomon in the Euclid. It has the definition of the protruding part of a sundial, but here it is specifically referenced with the Euclid, the famous text on geometry. In this case, the gnomon is what is left when you remove from the corner of a parallelogram an identical but smaller parallelogram. I think the symbolism of the gnomon references the Father’s dementia. He has become what is left when that smaller part of himself is removed. This mental illness is equated to sin in the eyes of the characters and particularly, in the boy’s dream, the sin of simony. Why? Do they fear, in their ignorance, that the Father has sold some holy part of himself?

“It's bad for children,” said old Cotter, “because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect…”

If there is merit to this understanding of the story, then the next question I have is what does the text have to say about this equating illness, and mental illness in particular, with sin. It would be easy to suppose a critique from a modern, progressive standpoint, especially personally, with my work in psychology-relevant fields.

After the old-Cotter segment, the boy goes to bed, puzzling over what Cotter suggested but could not bring himself outright to say. Supporting Cotter’s fear that an impressionable boy would be affected, he sees the old man’s grey face and cannot rid himself of the vision by hiding under the covers and thinking of Christmas.

Then he goes to the shop, behind which the old priest could usually be found. It was located on Great Britain street, which has to be important in an Irish story. The detail I know for certain was housing for the poor was located there. The store’s name was Drapery, which makes me think of the beginning of the book and the boy looking for signs in the window that the priest was dead. The store sold children’s bootees and umbrellas. A sign usually hung in the window but was hidden that day; it said umbrellas re-covered. (Recovered?) A mourning bouquet of silk or cloth flowers hangs on the knocker and a sign posted there makes real the man’s death for the boy.

He was annoyed with himself because he felt the priest’s death had freed him from something. This seemed unfair, for the priest had taught him so much.

His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts.

One of these institutions he reflects upon is the secrecy of the confessional. Now, I’ve made an argument for the “queerness” about the priest to be related to his illness and not some greater trouble, but this consideration on lessons taught ends with a pointedly creepy touch: “When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip—a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.”

The boy remembers old Cotter’s words at this point, connecting this uncanny smile with the man’s unspoken fears, and he tries to remember more of his dream from the night before. He remembers curtains (Drapery?) and an antique, swinging lamp. He’s somewhere where customs are different, perhaps Persia.

Questions arise in the boy’s mind. In the context of the priest’s decline and death, his idiosyncrasies take on new meaning. He’s haunted by Cotter’s half-spoken accusations. He was old and different, but so far, without accusation. Where the story comes uncomfortably close is in the boy’s thoughts on the duties of the priest, in particular, the handling of the body of Christ and the secrecy of the confessional:

The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them

The boy and his aunt visit the house of mourning. There may be hard feelings between the aunt and Nannie, because it is only the soberness of the situation that has his aunt shaking her hand and not yelling. As nothing else is mentioned on this matter, this is more likely a case of deafness. The boy focuses on being silent. He walks on tiptoe and refuses the crackers because of the noise they’d make. He can’t focus to pray and makes note of how poorly Nannie is dressed. He has the false sense that the priest is smiling; his face is grey and he holds a chalice, a cup, like the one he broke in the episode that supposedly started his decline.

Downstairs, they join Eliza who is sitting in her brother’s chair. Eliza and Nannie are the sisters of the story’s title. Nannie serves and then sits behind Eliza on the sofa, nearly asleep while Eliza does the talking. Much of that talk is surface niceties, but then:

Mind you, I noticed there was something queer coming over him latterly. Whenever I'd bring in his soup to him there I'd find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open.

We are brought back again to old Cotter with that word, queer.

“He was too scrupulous always,” she said. “The duties of the priesthood was too much for him. And then his life was, you might say, crossed.”

“Yes,” said my aunt. “He was a disappointed man. You could see that.”

The story closes with the revelation of facts I’ve already given. The priest went into a mental decline and was found locked in the dark chapel, sitting in his confessional, laughing softly to himself.

What was Father Flynn’s disappointment? We know he attended the Irish College in Rome, which is impressive and especially so when we learn the family comes from Irishtown, which I’m told is a lower-class district in Dublin.

As part of the questioning, the aunt asks obliquely about last rights, which were given, we are told. It’s an interesting question, if the aunt had reason to doubt he could receive them for some great sin. (I say last rights under the assumption that’s the same as Extreme Unction, which may be the more proper term.)

Everyone talks about how peaceful and resigned the priest is in death, but when the boy looks, the word Joyce uses to describe the priest’s face is truculent: aggressively hostile or belligerent.

Part of the boy’s lessons were in understanding the different kinds of sin, and mortal sin requires absolution from a priest to receive salvation. Other lessons included Napoleon, who closed the Irish College in 1798, and the catacombs which were both a burial place for the dead and a hiding place from religious persecution.

Hemingway’s iceberg theory for fiction had him writing about a melodramatic topic but never directly mentioning it, whether it was suicide or abortion. I don’t think that’s what this is. There’s no definitive answer we can come to if we just collect enough clues. The priest’s face is belligerent but people talk about him being at peace because that’s what people do with death. He may have died angry with God but he may not have. The question to his last rights came from no particular insight, otherwise the family would have kept the boy away. His uncle mocked his interest in the church as it was.

We don’t know because they don’t know. Their suspicion is the key, and that suspicion seems rooted to me in the fear of mental illness.

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Prose Style, Literary Theory, and Analysis

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Two Versions of One Story

A reference:

Joyce's "The Sisters": A Development
Florence L. Walzl
James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1/2, JJQ 50 YEARS: JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY UNIVERSITY OF TULSA 1963–2013 (Fall 2012-Winter 2013), pp. 73-117 (45 pages)

Read it at JSTOR

Joyce's correspondence verifies that he kept changing "The Sisters"
as his concept of Dubliners enlarged from an original plan of ten stories
for The Irish Homestead magazine, through a twelve-story version
sent to the publisher Grant Richards, on December 3, 1905,
a fourteen-story version sent to him as final on July 9,1906,
and to the eventual fifteen-story version published in 1914.

—Florence L. Walzl

In the first part of my analysis, I said it’s most likely Nannie is deaf. I’m probably the only person who first thought it was anything else, but the original version says it plainly. She’s deaf.

Great Britain Street. Here’s another thing I didn’t realize. The shop, Drapery, is located at the street level of the house where Father Flynn lives. It only struck me because the original version says the house is on Great Britain Street and both versions refers to the shop (on Great Britain Street) as a house.

Of all the stories in Dubliners, The Sisters is the most changed and, second only to The Dead, is one of the most important pieces of the collection.

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The Sisters: A Comparison

The Homestead version has been called more akin to Romanticism than the final version’s Modernism. My first clue of why that might be is in the first line and repeated thereafter: Providence.

Romanticism: a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.
—Oxford Languages

Modernism: a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors. It evolved from the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason. Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence.
—Poetry Foundation

In Dubliners, gone is the suggestion the boy was guided by Providence and of his being a prophet for correctly guessing the priest’s death. This is the distinction critics make in calling the original (more) Romantic.

We find this change also in a less veiled style of writing. Joyce goes from, did it reveal the ceremonious candles in whose light the Christian must take his last sleep—to—for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. The writing presents the world as it is, clearly.

That doesn’t mean there’s no room for the symbolic, but even the symbolic becomes crisp.

It strikes me as odd to make such a distinction between one version speaking of Providence and the other of “some maleficent and sinful being,” but the latter is clearly a mental process and (I argue) a key for opening the symbolism of the work as a whole. It describes not the work of the supernatural, but the cruelties in the way we think about the sick and mentally ill.

As a writer, this encourages me to be clear in descriptions and the setting of facts. The 1914 version is better written and poetic, and important details aren’t lost within indirect sentences.

Let’s take a step back to compare the relative strength of these openings:

Three nights in succession I had found myself in Great Britain-street at that hour, as if by Providence.

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.

His revision is succinct, powerful, and clear. We know exactly where we are in the narrative, which is ironic, as the first version tells us what street we’re on but little else. The first version is passive. The final version is blunt and sure. His original doesn’t even mention death until the second paragraph; until then he dances around the subject, repeatedly referring to the character’s impending death as “it”. Then we’re given the new material, the rumination over the word paralysis, and we have room for his pondering because the situation is as clear in our minds as it is in the text.

As we move on to Old Cotter, I may contradict everything I just said. The first version is roundabout in setting up the death, and then plain in setting up Cotter. It tells plainly Cotter’s concerns, while the second gives us mystery with his inability to articulate. The opening clarity makes this mystery of speech possible and meaningful.

The first version gives us information but none of the momentum in the revision. Cotter’s speech becomes the question that propels the story forward. What was wrong with the priest? Why shouldn’t a child be around a man such as that? The lack of answers sends us searching for closure and informs us how to view the rest of the story. This, too, is a type of clarity and simplicity. The original is indirect, while the second guides the reader.

Opening (1914) paragraph: Sets the narrative and introduces us to the conflation of illness and sin.

Second (1914) paragraph and following (until the trip to the shop): immediate cut to his coming down to supper in the middle of Old Cotter’s opinion. There’s conflict in that opinion. The dialog in the original is lifeless by comparison, but here our emotions rise to the narrator’s defense while we also worry if there really was something dangerous about the priest. The offending suggestions and unanswered questions make for an engaging and meaningful interchange between the adult characters that propels the story forward.

Writers often talk about the scene and the sequel. In the original, there wasn’t enough conflict to warrant a sequel, a moment in the story that reflects on what happened in the scene. Now a sequel is demanded and given when the narrator tries to sleep but is haunted by Old Cotter’s words and visions of the dead priest’s face. None of that existed before.

The Drapery scene: up through the reading of the posted card, there are some minor editorial changes. Only in the second paragraph, do we resume with the meaningful changes. In the original, the boy is shocked to find the old man was really only sixty-five. Joyce replaces that with the more immediate and important emotion. The reality of the death sets in and the boy finds himself “in check.” The first version comments on the priest sitting in the room behind the shop, but this one presents us with the narrator wanting to complete this common ritual only to find himself blocked by the reality of death.

The second version narrows the action. The boy brings him the snuff (a present of his aunt) instead of the aunt bringing it herself. It keeps the relationship between the priest and the boy central. In the original, the sisters are introduced here (and we’re told Nannie is almost deaf), but they’re removed entirely from the scene in the revision. The details all switch to focus on the boy and priest, the subject of the mystery set forth by Old Cotter’s speech.

In the next paragraph, after the omitted line about not believing the priest dead which has now been contradicted, the boy lacks the courage to visit and walks away on the sunny side of the street, feeling like the death has freed him in some way. He chastises himself, remembering all the priest taught him, which brings us to details from the original version. Again, the specificity and the unanswered questions in the beginning give direction and focus to the narrative now. The guilty feeling of freedom is natural, but it takes on a sinister tint here, as does the priest’s strange smile.

These changes at the start guide the writer as well as the reader. He knows his own focus and what details stray from that focus.

Visiting the dead:

It was an oppressive summer evening of faded gold.

It was after sunset; but the window-panes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds.

The change in description calls to mind the opening and looking to the windows for the candles set at the head of the corpse. Drawing the reader’s mind back to a detail would be meaningless unless that detail were clear and meaningful in the first place.

Details are increased here, giving Nannie more action before she fades into the background. This has become necessary as this is the sisters’ first introduction, but it also keeps the information about the sisters where its most important. Added to this, as well, is the action of the boy feeling the need to be silent. He tip-toes and rejects the crackers for fear they’d be too loud. None of these details appear in the original, and they speak to a natural instinct of respect for the dead. It also suggests he fears he may wake the dead, which carries the weight of the mystery that lies between the priest and the boy.

Joyce’s dialog carries the niceties of society. When reading The Dead, for example, every real and true utterance is a shock of rudeness. Polite conversation is shallow. We have that here but the final version chooses its polite conversation more carefully. The details of the story may be the same, but now they reflect the climax of the mystery Joyce has been building. The dialog heightens the mystery as much as it sheds light upon it.

Every change in The Sisters hearkens back to that stronger opening and the mystery set in Old Cotters speech. Joyce found that mystery within the series of events he’d already written, with the only wholly new section being the attempts to sleep and the dream. However, that change early on inspired change throughout the piece, giving new meaning and focus to the moments Joyce had previously imagined.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Additional Notes:

In 1904, Joyce wrote to his friend, Constantine R Curran:

"The Sisters" was the start of a collection of stories. I am writing a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.

The use of the word epicleti has inspired thousands of words of explanation. In brief, it refers to the Eucharist and the transubstantiation of the bread into the body of Christ.

Hemiplegia is a paralysis of one side of the body.

(Quote from Joyce’s note taken from the reference noted at the top.)

Surprisingly, in view of Joyce's stated intention to C. P. Curran, there is no mention of paralysis and no detail that can be specifically pinpointed as hemiplegia (a unilateral paralysis), let alone total paralysis. There are also no suggestions of immoral conduct. And in this description, there are no mysterious gnomons, no inferences of simony, and no hints of sodomy.

—Florence L. Walzl

Walzl goes on to detail changes in the wake. After letters seeking the practice of burying priests, Flynn went from wearing his habit to wearing vestments. In the original, he’s holding a rosary. In an intermediate draft, he holds a cross, as was standard practice. In Dubliners, he holds the chalice which forgoes realism for symbolism.

Of the story’s title, she writes:

Even in the bare context of this original version, meaning emerges. As in the prose epiphanies Joyce was writing at this period, realistic actions and descriptions convey the moral significance. Father Flynn, a representative of the clergy, is unable to sustain the duties of his office. The sisters as representative of the laity, pious and poor, ignorant or deaf, sustain him at great sacrifice to themselves. It was not a meaning readers of The Irish Homestead would welcome.

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