Joyce's depiction of women is characterized by a high degree of literary self-awareness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work . Self-awareness emerges as an awareness of expectations of both gender and language. pitting isolated, highly self-aware literary men (or men with literary aspirations) against women who follow more romantic models, even stereotypes. In Dubliners, Joyce uses a clichéd story of doomed love ending in death, physical or spiritual, in "A Painful Case" and "The Dead." The first sticks much more closely to these conventions and can be read as a precursor to the more sophisticated techniques of the second, which draws the reader's attention to the cliché with the sole aim of reorienting it. Nevertheless, it is Joyce's work here, his subversion of gender, which takes center stage, and the women in the stories take a back seat. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he again literalizes a stereotype, the Madonna/whore binary, showing women as nuns, long-suffering wives, or prostitutes. But this division also serves to highlight one of Stephen Dedalus's main struggles, between Ireland and exile, family and freedom, which results in a call to move away from domestic responsibility. Ulysses, and in particular "Penelope", seems to escape it because it is precisely against the genre - there was no pre-existing genre of the "monologue in bed" - but it is the most conscious and the most critical of the construction feminine linguistics. The "feminine" words (through letters to Bloom) constitute the constant background sound in Bloom's mind, but he focuses on them precisely because of their "bad handwriting" (4.414), as Milly writes to him. Molly has the last word in Ulysses, but it's unclear who authorizes that word, as we'll see.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essay “A Painful Case” is built on a cliché³® The story of a misanthropic bachelor who meets an emotionally frustrated woman, develops a bond, then pushback from intimacy couldn't be more formal; she even dies from a “sudden failure of the action of the heart” (114). The irony is obvious: the suddenness actually happened four years earlier. Joyce wrote Dubliners to appeal to both general audiences and academics, and "A Painful Case" seems particularly interesting to the popular reader and, with its story of unrequited love, to female readers. James Duffy is skeptical and irritated by this kind of bland and superficial writing: “She asked him why he hadn't written down his thoughts. For what, he asked, with cautious contempt. sixty seconds? To submit to the criticism of an obtuse bourgeoisie which entrusted its morality to the police and its fine arts to impresarios? (111) Joyce both launches into self-criticism and evades it; by criticizing the method he uses, he demonstrates a self-awareness that elevates his work beyond this “bourgeois” production. Duffy also practices this self-awareness in collaboration with Joyce. At the end of a symbolic biographical paragraph, all spoken in the third person of the past tense, we learn this information: "He had a strange autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about itself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to beggars and walked with a firm step, carrying a large hazel tree" (108). Just in case the reader doesn'twould not understand that the first sentence is itself an example of this habit, Joyce repeats the information with a sentence that characterizes this kind of "autobiographical habit", giving the reader information about a character's relationship to the money and its relationship with money. approach, two clichés of fiction. Who, exactly, is writing this paragraph, Joyce or the muffled Duffy who so clearly wants to write? The story continues this self-awareness-the newspaper article telling Duffy of the woman's death takes up a substantial portion of the text and stands out from the rest of the text in its entirety. This direct information takes us again into another popular medium that deliberately avoids subjective treatment, just as sentimental fiction struggles to immerse itself deeply in its characters despite its objective: "The threadbare sentences, the stupid expressions of sympathy, the careful words of a reporter won over to hide the details of a banal, vulgar death that attacked his stomach” (115). The story ends with a flood of drowning clichés. Duffy twice considers himself “excluded from the feast of life” (117). He then sees a train, the vehicle which marked their last meeting and his death, a cliché symbol since Anna Karenina of the inexorable destiny of life and romantic destiny: “It slowly disappeared out of sight; but he still heard in his ears the laborious hum of the engine repeating the syllables of his name” (117). This is what Mary Sinico is reduced to (we only learn her first name from the newspaper), mechanical repetition (even “reiterate” is repetitive; “repeat” means “to repeat” without the prefix “re-”) which mimes the mechanical cliché³ that Joyce deployed. She is only sound, not physical – “she had become a memory” (116) – and this memory is only preserved through the text of the story and its sentimental legacy. In “The Dead,” however, Joyce takes a similar storyline and explores more meaningful connections between music and memory, space and time, exile and patriotism. Greta's generic love story gets lost amidst these ideas that preoccupy Gabriel. Gabriel's position as an outsider looking out is amplified by his linguistic disconnect from his people (later capitalized by Miss Ivors as she shouts a goodbye in Gaelic, "Beannacht libh", in her last verbal blow to Gabriel); indeed, music and singing, two highly mnemonic cultural elements, are foreign elements to his ears throughout the short story: “Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane played her Academy piece...the piece she was playing had no melody to it” (2014). His domain is speech, a far less memorable and emotional medium than music, but even his poetic allusions, he fears, will fall flat and exaggerate his intellectual separation from the other guests: "He was undecided about Robert Browning's lines for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. A quote they might recognize from Shakespeare or The Songs would be better... He had taken a bad tone" (2010). The bad tone comes not only from the ostentatious reference, but also from the actual topicality of the speech, transitive adjectives and verbs over octaves and tonal variations Even in an old love letter, he acknowledges the relative pallor of language: “Why do words like these seem so boring and cold to me? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?" (2030) The muffled but persistent music is the untapped reservoir of the memory of the characters of "The Dead", even if for Gabriel its words must suffice for harmony: “Like distant music, these words that he had writtenyears before were brought to him from the past” (2030). The absence of music in today's Dublin suggests the emotional coldness that reigns over the city and its inhabitants. It is an old Irish ballad, The Lass of Aughrim, which triggers the reminiscence of a childhood love for Gretta. The association of music with vitality is explained in his recollections, but worded ironically to emphasize Furey's death: "He was going to study singing purely for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey” (2034). Gabriel's inability to connect at this level of sound is illustrated by one of his literary critiques, recalled just before Aunt Julia restores his youth through song: "One has the impression of listening to tormented music through thought” (2018). Gabriel takes refuge in cramped quarters which oppose the notion of a vast past: "Listening this evening to the names of all these great singers of the past, it seemed to me, I must admit, that we were living in a less spacious era. These days could, without exaggeration, be called spacious days” (2024). On the other hand, Gabriel's previous positions were confined, as in the small pantry, where even his coat conceals a certain frigidity from the outside: "...a cold and fragrant air from outside escaped from the crevices and folds” (2009). It is in these situations that Gabriel is unable to reconcile past and present, and he leaves the pantry at the end of the party in the same way he entered it: “Gabriel advanced from the small pantry eating, struggling to put on his overcoat” (2026). -Cold and warm, soft light and hard lights-divide the past and the present. By the time Gabriel experiences his epiphany, it is clear that it is a "thought-tormented" epiphany, a predictable usurpation of the story's own narrative "past" that illustrates his new ambitions to unite the past and the present. His violent lust preceding the epiphany – “He wanted to cry out to her with his soul, to crush his body against hers, to master her” (2032) – is counterbalanced by his subsequent tears which signify his epiphany for him: “ He had never felt this way towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love" (2033). This calibration of feelings is another conscious gesture that reminds the reader of the generic implications that mask Greta's story She is only the conduit for Gabriel's epiphany, and her clichéd story produces his cliché change; the only part of the story that is not stereotyped is Joyce's temporal imagery; . It is he who, in the end, produces the only substantial and original ideas The epiphany is the product of self-awareness - Gabriel ultimately sees himself through the eyes of others - and is linked to himself, and. no to women catalysts The author-reader relationship works in the same way; Joyce wants his reader to become aware of the author's self-awareness and, through this, broaden his appreciation of the stories, and Joyce seems to make this easier for his male readership, who are not as likely to be attracted by the manifest feeling of his stories. This rupture appears more clearly in Portrait, which contrasts family domesticity with writing. Joyce made a similar choice in her life, swimming away from her drowning Dublin clan to make her way in the world. In the "story", the older Joyce has an ironic attitude towards the redemptive power of women, his younger counterpart esteems them throughout the beginning of the novel: "He wanted to encounter in the real world the insubstantial image that his soul saw so constantly. didn't know where to see it or how but a premonition which carried him away told him that this imagewould encounter, without any action on his part... They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in this moment of supreme tenderness, he would be transfigured. It would melt into something impalpable before his eyes and then in an instant he would be transfigured” (54). The intentionally unclear pronouns—he meets a picture, both are now a “they,” but “they” is also contradictorily “alone”—emphasize that Stephen is not so much looking for a woman as he is for himself. His desire to “disappear” under the woman’s gaze is ridiculed by Joyce; Although silence will become one of Stephen's survival traits, it is a voluntary silence, not a passive one. The emphasis is quickly met by Joyce's ironic subversion; Stephen is literally transfigured in the next scene as his family is once again evicted. Later, we are given the description of another passive abandonment to a woman, this time during an actual physical encounter: "He closed his eyes, abandoning himself to her, his body and his mind, conscious of nothing to the world only from the dark pressure of his gently parted lips, pressing on his brain as if they were the vehicle of a vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than his own; vanishing of sin, sweeter than sound or smell” (86). In this supposedly unconscious state, Stephen's verbal facilities are very attuned - the constant alliteration ("vehicle... vague", "fading of sin, sweeter than sound") alludes to the sound that displaces the physical; even the “unfamiliar, shy pressure” is an oblique reference to erection and orgasm through similar “vague speech” that masks vulgar physicality with elevated language. Perhaps it's not about Stephen and the woman (who barely has a name among the interchangeable objects of desire Stephen encounters, much like the almost anonymous Mary Sinico in "A Painful Case"), but about two "parting lips" of the woman (yet another example of verbal ambiguity), which transfer their power to Stephen's lips and allow him to make the final alliterative impulse: the orgasm is replaced by the epiphany, the physical explosion through Stephen's verbal departure sets the course for this sensation far from the earthly. , the physical chains of Ireland, and his final journal entry in “O Father, Old Artificer” (219) concerns his own father, his country as a father figure, and artifice, writing. But women are given a voice of their own. in Ulysses, or at least in the one who comes to speak in the name of all women, folded “in the attitude of Gea-Tellus” (17.2313). In the two instances of women's writing, Milly and Martha's letters to Bloom, Joyce condescendingly highlights their poor command of language, spelling, and grammar. Nonetheless, their words (especially Martha's) echo in his head for the rest of the day, and later, Bloom thinks about the ingenuity of Molly's pun on Ben Dollard's voice - "a barrel tone basic” (8.116) – as a clever reworking of Ben’s voice. , the body and the propensity to drink. "See? It all works" (8.123), Bloom says to himself, and to us, in defense of his raw intelligence. This raw intelligence appears unmediated in Molly's dialogue, but its commitment on paper alone signifies Joyce's hand. Bound to her room, deprived of the external stimuli that pass through the minds of Stephen and Bloom, Molly's life on June 16 is limited to a mnemonic and private narrative. She attempts to bridge the gap between memory and writing by reveling in the fact that Lieutenant Mulvey's current wife, if she exists, has no idea of ​​their affair twenty years ago "in the eyes of the world, you could say they could have."