"Faithful Departed": Tracing the Themes of Exile and Betrayal through James Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles
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Date
2008-04-03
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Abstract
James Joyce left Ireland in 1904 because he felt betrayed by the publishing industry, several close friends, and the Irish Catholic Church. Although he returned to visit four times, he remained an artist in exile until his death in 1941. Manifest in his writing are feelings of exile and betrayal which reflect his own love⁄hate relationship with Ireland. In Dubliners, Joyce develops several different degrees of exile. In "Eveline," he presents a young girl who longs for physical exile, but in order to do so she must betray her duty to her father, her dead mother, and the Catholic Church. She ultimately cannot achieve physical exile, thereby betraying her future husband. In "A Painful Case," Joyce creates an "inner exile," one who, although he lives in Dublin, is estranged from it culturally and socially. Through his relationship with Mrs. Sinico, he experiences an interpersonal relationship, which, after it ends, leaves him unable to return to his life alienated from the city in which he lives. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man depicts the journey of Stephen Dedalus from idealistic school boy to exile. In what most critics see as his most autobiographical work, young Stephen inherits many situations Joyce faced as a young man in Dublin. Stephen, who initially trusts the cultural and religious institutions of Ireland, learns through a series of betrayals that physical exile is necessary for him to become an artist. Exiles, Joyce's only existing play, depicts the struggle of a writer who, after living in Rome, has returned to Dublin. Richard Rowan longs to be betrayed by his wife to atone for his years of infidelity. Joyce uses the element of betrayal to demonstrate the ways in which it precipitates exile.
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James Joyce, Dubliners, Eveline, A Painful Case, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles
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Degree
MA
Discipline
English
