Joyce and the Heterosexual Norm

“Joyce must assert his heterosexual identity through ignorance of its opposite” (331).

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

This quote, which is from Roberta Jackson’s “The Open Closet in Dubliners: James Duffy’s Painful Case” stuck out at me. When I first read Joyce’s “A Painful Case” (which the article critiques) the homosexual undertone somehow slipped past me. After reading Roberta Jackson’s article, however, my eyes became opened and I could not believe that I had missed this in Joyce’s story. In her article, I notice that she discusses the ideas of the heterosexual norm and homosexual panic and ties it into both Joyce and his story. At the end of her article she writes that Joyce had a case of homophobia. She shows this by writing that to Joyce his brother is, “…the person socially adjacent to him who could most easily be disowned” (329). By using his brother as the inspiration for the character Duffy, Joyce attempts to draw the readers from assuming that he is a closeted homosexual (a good example of his homophobia). Earlier in the last paragraph of Jackson’s article, she states that, “Joyce’s use of material drawn from his brother’s diaries and his own dreams allow him to embody his own experience of homosexual panic and subject it to analysis” (341). From the data that she provides in her article I do in fact see this.

In her article, Jackson talks about how homosexuality was not looked on in a positive manner at the time. Because of this, and the fact that she said Joyce liked controversy, I think that he wrote this short story in an attempt to address an important topic in Dublin (among other locations) at the time, homosexuality.

After reading over “A Painful Case” again, this time knowing that it had homosexual undertones, I would assume that Joyce is simply portraying what life is like for a closeted gay man (Duffy) in Dublin at the time. When Jackson writes in her article that, “Duffy’s daily habits have the numbed, wary regularity of someone always under surveillance…,” I get the feeling that he is forced to repress his sexual feelings because he fears what others may think (337). The fact that he feels like he is always under “surveillance” seems to me to be an accurate assessment of how a closeted homosexual would feel (which would probably be scared or nervous and wondering if anybody can tell). In Duffy’s case, he is shown to be different from other men, as he is represented through his daily routines (on page 91). Through his routines he comes off as being a loner and trying to remain isolated from the world around him. It can definitely be argued that this isolation represents his being in the closet. By portraying Duffy in this manner, it appears that Joyce is definitely trying to say something about this topic and this type of person.

Homosexuality vs. Religion

Dear Dark-Haired Love

My dark dear, dear dark-haired love,

our kisses open Christ’s wounds up;

don’t open your mouth, don’t tell a soul –

our love’s on the wrong side of the gospel.

-Cathal O’Searcaigh

This “dark” poem by Searcaigh shows the conflict that has always existed between homosexuality and religion. It shows how homosexuals have always been opposed to and persecuted by religious people. This opposition has caused homosexuals to stay in the closet throughout history. “Dark” is used to show the negative view on homosexuality in religion. It shows how being gay has been looked on as evil or immoral, causing the gay community and religious groups to constantly be opposed. The relationship between two people of the same sex seems to metaphorically “open Christ’s wounds up” because of the implication that homosexual people cannot be saved by God. Not only can they not be saved by God, these people will also then get shunned by most religious people who do not agree with their lifestyle. The character in this story, in an attempt to keep from getting persecuted by religious people, tells his lover “don’t tell a soul” because their kind of love is “on the wrong side of the gospel”. No matter how real their love is it cannot be accepted in a typical Christian society so they must keep it a secret. This has always been a problem in the gay community because they do not want their lifestyle to be discriminated against. Dear Dark Haired Love shows how homosexuals are discriminated against in a way which makes them stay in the closet in order to not get persecuted by religious groups. It shows how they are unfairly treated and it is a plea for more religious people to become more accepting of their lifestyle.

Duffy's Necessary Isolation

“Duffy is trapped. If he represses his desires, he becomes hopelessly isolated and neurotic, since he will not compromise his ideal of honesty and live with Mrs. Sinico openly, as if he were a heterosexual man... Duffy’s social isolation is not fundamentally due to his neuroticism (the standard critical reading), but rather his neuroticism arises from his necessary isolation and his need to distance himself from the homophobia of the patriarchy” (Jackson, 336).

Roberta Jackson’s “The Open Closet in Dubliners” focuses on this aspect of isolation present in James Joyce’s work “Painful Case.” I agree with John Dysktra’s claim that Mr. Duffy doesn’t “freely choose” to be isolated from society. It may not be plainly implied in the text that Mr. Duffy has desires of breaking from the secluded social mold that he currently adheres to, but his interactions with Mrs. Sinico indicate that he has an inability to break free from the “necessary isolation” to which he is bound. His homosexuality is what ultimately keeps him from continuing to maintain some form of interaction with Mrs. Sinico, as he feels compelled to repress any possibility of coming out of the closet to her. I first interpreted Mrs. Sinico’s gesture of pressing Mr. Duffy’s hand to her cheek as something out of compassion, but found it surprisingly to be more an act of sensuality. Mrs. Sinico becomes someone he can talk to, and this first puzzled me as to why he abruptly decides to break contact with her. There are many reasons as to why his regression back to social isolation is unnecessary, including his own sexuality and her marriage to Captain Sinico. However, her strengthening relationship with him leads to her intimate act, even if mistaken. He becomes trapped, as he must decide whether or not to stay true to his sexuality in the face of societal interpretation. Duffy gives in to social pressures in a different way, as he chooses to be “hopelessly isolated” from society.

A product of Duffy’s entrapment is Sinico’s death. He decides to uphold his beliefs through isolation, a likely factor in her suicide. This compels Jackson to define Duffy’s social seclusion as a “neurotic symptom” in which he remains in the closet despite behaviors indicating his desire for the contrary. She presents an interesting twist on Mr. Duffy’s alleged neuroticism, as she supports her claim by stating that he cannot give or receive love. Duffy’s “maladaptive response to normal situations” fuels his neurotic behavior.

Duffy's Painful Case

"Joyce appropriated one of Stannie’s bile beans for Duffy’s journal entry that expresses his pain at the prohibition against love between men, according to Jackson: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” Duffy’s straightforward articulation of the double-bind created for gay men by the Labouchere Amendment indicates his awareness that his homoerotic desires separate him from other men who, Sedgwick argues, must be kept in a state of ignorance about the true nature of their own desires; they must never be certain they are not homosexual.” (335-336)

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

This particular passage struck me as interesting because there is a lot of point made in here that say a lot about society. The double bind that Duffy deals with that Jackson speaks of implies that love cannot exist unless sexual intercourse is present, and it also implies that if sexual intercourse is present that a friendship cannot exist. However, this is not the case. Can a father not love his son and vice versa? Cannot a married couple who engages in sexual intercourse be friends? Love between two males can exist because it is quite common for a father to love his son, and a son to love his father. It is also a love that can exist between two brothers. There is more than one type of love, and the love that can exist between two males does not have to be erotic. It is most likely safe to make an assumption that a man and woman that are married engage in sexual intercourse, but are also friends since they have to be life partners, therefore a friendship can exist even if eroticism between the two are there. It was also confusing what Sedgwick meant by his argument. Are men that are not homosexual aware of their desires because they don’t explore erotic desires for other men? Is that not the same thing as saying a homosexual man is ignorant of his true desires because he does not explore erotic desires for a woman?

On Jackson's "The Open Closet in Dubliners"

Roberta Jackson’s “The Open Closet in Dubliners” examines the historical progression of theoretical examination (within a literary and cultural framework) of James Joyce’s short story “A Painful Case.” If queer theory requires research into context—as Donald E. Hall asserts that it does in Literary and Cultural Theory—then Jackson’s analysis provides an excellent analysis. Hall asserts that queer theory analysis is both textual and extratextual because nothing about sexuality or sexual identity is obvious or self-evident. And Jackson asserts that the previous extratextual analysis of Joyce’s short story sorely misses the mark. And I agree. Jackson points out that prior critics asserted that Joyce attempted to assert his own heterosexuality by simultaneously rejecting the homosexual opposite. His treatment of Duffy represented that attempt: “Since Stannie [Joyce’s brother] has been identified as the beast and since he also served as the model for Duffy and is the source for his admission of homoerotic desire, Duffy also becomes a beast that Joyce must drive before him. Joyce must repel the beast” (Jackson 330). Joyce wrote “A Painful Case” around the time of Oscar Wilde’s persecution. Thus, prior critics argued that he felt compelled to separate himself out of homosexual panic: “Joyce must assert his heterosexual identity through ignorance of its opposite” (Jackson 331).

But these prior critics misinterpret the story. Joyce wrote at the time of the Labouchere Amendment—the same Amendment used to convict Oscar Wilde that criminalized homosexuality. It was not repealed until 1967. Thus, Jackson takes critical license to surmise that Joyce’s title squarely confronts the view of homosexuality that prevailed at the time of the story: homosexuality was a medical condition.

Taking Jackson’s analysis one step further, I find it significant that Joyce’s title (if indeed it refers to Duffy’s condition—and I think that it does) also serves as the title of the newspaper story that reports on the woman’s tragic death on the train tracks. In repressing his homosexuality, Duffy too “dies.” His identity dies. Duffy understands that he is different: “[H]e heard the strange impersonal voice, which he recognized as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own” (Joyce 93). Duffy directly addresses the fact that he lies outside the socially acceptable norm. More importantly, he understands that he is a part of an entire group. He knows that there are others like him—hence the collective “we.” And I contend that this recognition of similar people like him is the driving force for Duffy’s melancholy when he encounters the lovers in the park: “Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair” (Joyce 98). And Duffy despairs because he is “alone” in the world, and he always will be because “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse” (Joyce 94). Thus, Jackson asserts that Duffy remains closeted because there was no chance (within the prevailing heterosexual patriarchy) for recognition of homosexuality within the culture. Most interesting to me is Jackson’s argument that Joyce purposely avoids direct speech in his story. Only once is sexuality explicitly mentioned, and that occurs in the passage quoted above (Joyce 98). Joyce wasn’t closeting his own sexuality. Instead, he exposes the pain of those who were closeted—who couldn’t assert their sexual identity. If there is anything closeted in this short story, it is Joyce’s effort to critique the prevailing attitude toward homosexuality. Duffy solicits our sympathies—he calls on us to examine our prevailing social constructs of what is acceptable and what is not. That assertion is where I break from Jackson. She asserts that the phallic worm “conflate[s] her death [Mrs. Sinico’s] with the diminishing possibility of love between men for Duffy, laying both at the feet of the patriarchy” (Jackson 341). I argue that the worm illustrates humanity’s attempt to wind its way through the dark depths of social persecution and constructs of acceptability.

Jackson's Tenuous Projection

In her analysis of Joyce's A Painful Case, Roberta Jackson identifies protagonist Duffy as a closeted homosexual, and gives compelling historical and biographical evidence that this character is based on Joyce's brother Stannie. While the possibility of Duffy's homosexuality is clear from the text of Painful Case, Jackson's assertion that the work represents Joyce himself reflexively asserting his heterosexuality by throwing his brother under the bus of society's judgement, is dubious at best. Duffy's reflective remark on the impossibility of love between men, only made after his rejection of potential lover Mrs. Sinico, is the most obvious, but also the most striking, evidence for Duffy as homosexual. Her claim that Duffy is modeled after Stannie is also well-corroborated by biographical evidence, especially the direct extraction of some of Stannie's actual diary entries for inclusion in "Duffy's" diary in A Painful Case. Jackson claims that Joyce, acting out of the "homosexual panic" defined by fellow critic Eve Sedgwick, used this fictionalization of his brother's dilemma to distance himself from homosexual identification. If Joyce, however, were truly trying to blot out any doubts as to his own sexuality from the public eye, it seems that he would have been more careful than to write a piece which shows such clear support and even compassion for the oppressed homosexuals of his time.

Duffy's Painful Case

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

"Joyce may have veiled Duffy in uncertainty at the end, but the accumulated allusions leave no doubt as to Duffy's sexuality and to the destructiveness of a homophobia that reaches far beyond its intended target."

The above criticism, from Roberta Jackson's article "The Open Closet in Dubliners: James Duffy's Painful Case" is an apt summary of Joyce's short story "A Painful Case." While I agree with what she has said, I think analyses of the story continually leave out another meaning of the title--namely, that the death of Mrs. Sinico is a painful case--not only because suicide is painful for the survivor's relatives, but also because the "case," the death, is particularly painful for Mr. Duffy, who feels responsible. On page 98, the text says "Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces." I think the text shows another subltlety of homophobia--the ensuing affects cause Mr. Duffy not only to feel alienated, but incapable of making other people happy. The fact that he wonders "Why he had withheld life from her?" shows that he has considered trying to force himself to conform--and therefore shows in effect that his inability to make himself conform tortures him just as much as his subhuman role as the "other."