The final story of James Joyce's Dubliners, published in 1914, introduces us to a character that is greatly egotistical and insecure in himself. Gabriel Conroy is the awaited guest and main character of the story, "The Dead." In Joyce's collection of stories intended to show what life was like in his native town of Dublin, Ireland, Gabriel stands out as a character that has an incomplete view of himself and his life. Joyce uses Gabriel and his interaction with the female characters Gretta, Miss Ivors, and Lily to portray a vision of conflict between feminism and masculinity and a search for identity and end fulfillment.

In her assessment of "The Dead," Kelly Anspaugh argues the story can be read from a feminist perspective. The story offers a less-then politically correct representation of women challenging traditional male dominance in the confrontations between Gabriel and three different female characters of Lily, Miss Ivors, and Gretta (4). These confrontations continually deflate Gabriel's ego throughout the evening and cause him to become very insecure about his identity. In the opening paragraphs of Joyce's story, there is much anticipation surrounding Gabriel's arrival. Once he does appear at his aunts' house for their party, they immediately come to greet him. A reader can only picture him as someone of importance. Such attention to him and his arrival at the festivities are more than likely meant to establish an egotistical individual of high self-esteem. As his wife, Gretta, goes off with his Aunts Kate and Julia, Gabriel proceeds to the coat closet followed by Lily, the caretaker's daughter, in order to give him a hand with his overcoat. This is where the first incidence of an assertion of feminism (by Lily) confronts and wins over a masculine declaration. Lily is confronted by Gabriel, the bourgeois male, in a flirtatious and "patronizing" manner. He smiles and glances at her, admiring how she has grown since he knew her as a child. He asks her about marriage and she responds with "great bitterness" about men and how they only want to take advantage of women. Gabriel is startled when Lily lashes back at him. He tries to redeem himself by giving her some money with the excuse that it is holiday season and she must except. She attempts to refuse his gift, but he runs out of the room before she can return the money he shoved into her hand. Anspaugh says that Joyce has created the traditional scene of the rich, more powerful man preying on the susceptible young girl, only this time the girl fights back. He is sexually attracted to her and gets shot down. She says, "Rather than pleading with her seducer to show compassion, Lily lashes back violently at the offending male, and Gabriel feels the sting" (5). After Gabriel leaves Lily in the coat closet, the damage to Gabriel's self-assurance can be sensed when Joyce writes, "He was still discomposed by the girl's sudden and bitter retort. It had cast a gloom over him, which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie (2242).

His next encounter is with Miss Ivors, who he finds himself partnered with during the square dance. Miss Ivors challenges and teases him about writing for an English paper and calls him a "West Briton." Gabriel is disturbed and upset over what his partner has said to him. He begins to reflect and convince himself he has done nothing wrong and not "betrayed" Ireland. To the reader, though, he seems somewhat unsure in his internal defense. Miss Ivors then reverts back to her "feminine charms to mollify him: '[she] took his hand in a warm grasp and said in a soft friendly tone: Of course, I was only joking'" (5). Gabriel proceeds to dance with "great energy" to cover up the agitation brought upon by the interrogation of Miss Ivors (Joyce, 2249). When they meet again in the dance, Joyce says Miss Ivors looks at Gabriel "from under her brows for a moment quizzically until he smiled." She then stood on her tiptoe and whispered to him, "West Briton" (2249). Gabriel has become even more agitated then after his encounter with Lily. He has been sexually aroused again only to be denied again. She tried to embarrass him in front of the other guests and make him feel uncomfortable (Anspaugh, 6). By treating him so, Miss Ivors "robs Gabriel of his masculinity - at one point even calling him an 'innocent Amy' (6).

Lastly, Gabriel finds his last bastion of male dominance foiled when Gretta confesses her love for the dead Michael Furey. When Bartell D'Arcy sings "The Lass of Aughrim," Gabriel sees his wife standing and listening to the music. Unbeknownst to him, she is remembering her long-dead lover. He thinks her radiant and "(a) sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart" for his wife (Joyce, 2261). Gabriel becomes hot and bothered by his wife's state. Joyce conveys to the reader that as the two enter their hotel room, Gabriel looks to exert his dominance over Gretta. He writes that Gabriel experiences, "a keen pang of lust": "He could have flung his arms around her hips and held her still for his arms were trembling with the desire to seize her and only the stress of his nails against the palms of his hands held the wild impulse of his body, in check" (2264). It is the other way around, though, as Gretta becomes the one in control of the moment as they arrive back at their room and she confesses her past love for Michael to Gabriel. Anspaugh calls this occurrence the "third and final blow to Gabriel's male ego." She points out he has become utterly aware of a "shameful consciousness" about himself and calls himself a "pitiable and fatuous fellow" (6). After Gretta becomes the third female of the evening to garner control over this man and his sexual desires, Gabriel has become thoroughly dispirited in terms of his ego and identity as a fulfilled man. Gabriel becomes an example of a male that "has been thoroughly deflated by females around him - a result exactly opposite what bourgeois metaphorics of tumescence leads us to expect" (6).

After establishing the utter devaluation of Gabriel Conroy's view of himself, a question arises regarding Gabriel's search for his whole identity and the role that the women in his life play in that search. In his criticism on Joyce's concluding story on Dublin life, Sean P. Murphy argues that the ending offered by Joyce in "The Dead" does not offer the reader a sense of finalization as Gabriel looks toward the symbolic, rather than the realistic, for answers to discovering his whole identity. Gabriel's encounters with Lily, Miss Ivors, and Gretta cause him troubles in establishing his masculine dominance and therefore establishing what he feels should be his identity and fulfillment via his manhood (463-4).
Murphy offers that that the end of the story has been interpreted in both positive and negative ways. One criticism says that Gabriel "achieves a vision of possible renewal for him and his country," while another states Gabriel is left in a "rather bleak 'cosmic abyss'" (469). Regardless of the view, the sentence that remains a focus in almost every interpretation on Gabriel's future plans for himself is, "The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward" (Joyce 2268). There has been much attention paid to these concepts of "east" and "west." Although the west is associated with death and the graveyard where his wife's former love is now buried, east and west comes to symbolize the two directions his search can take, the east symbolizing the "old, traditional, and effete; the west, the new, primitive, and vital" (Murphy 469). In his journey west, Gabriel would leave all the self-doubt and challenges to his masculinity attributed to the women in his life behind him. He would leave the "fictional" view of himself and his life behind and search for his true, "whole identity." In his journey westward, Gabriel thinks he will find all he is lacking in Dublin and find the key to his identity and existence (469-70).

Murphy states the problem in Gabriel's search in the west is that there is an assumption of a perfect "whole," or the perfect sense of his identity as a man (470). He can never achieve this because it does not exist. It is symbolic of what he should be like and be seen as, particularly in the eyes of the women in his life. The symbolic whole cannot be looked upon and strived for because for Gabriel it is unattainable. There is too much subjectivity; too much rejection of Gabriel's perfect "whole" is possible by people like Lily, Miss Ivors, and Gretta (270-2). Until Gabriel acknowledges the impossibility of this fictional whole identity, he will continue to see the other world, or the west, as where his validation and fulfillment as a man and human being lies (472).

When Joyce wrote Dubliners, he had to fight for 10 years to have it published. Along the way, stories continued to be added until the total reached 15 before it was finally published. The fifteenth and final story is entitled, "The Dead," and seems to give some sort of closure to the book by confronting the issue of death, the final process all living things on Earth must face. Unfortunately for Gabriel, some see "The Dead" as not having and end for him. The relationships Gabriel has had with women have created a dispirited man, one who is in search for some sort of fulfillment in his life and his identity as a man. In the views of some, his character can not receive any closure until he comes to terms with himself and realizes his perfect identity, as a man, does not exist. He must learn to accept himself and the people around him in order to establish himself as a man and for others to see him in the same light.

WORKS CITED

Anspaugh, Kelly. "Three mortal hours": female Gothic in Joyce's "The Dead." (James Joyce) Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr 1994, v 31, n1, p1(12).

Joyce, James. "The Dead." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Seventh Edition, Volume 2. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. pp2240-68.

Murphy, Sean P. Passing boldly into that other world of (w)holes: narrativity and subjectivity in James Joyce's "The Dead." (Special "Dubliners" Number) Studies in Short Fiction, Summer 1995, v32, n3, p463(12).