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Routine can be constricting.
The prison of routine is a recurring theme throughout most of the short stories in Dubliners. Restrictive routines and the repetitive, mundane details of everyday life mark the lives of these characters and trap them in circles of frustration, restraint, and/or violence. However, Maria from “Clay” offers a slight deviation from this narrative trend because she, unlike most of her fellow protagonists, never acknowledges her entrapment. Instead, she simply lives her life half-awake, never fully processing the source of her unhappiness. Through Maria, Joyce shows the reader that the constricting nature of routine affects characters who have little open conflict in their lives in addition to the characters who face more obvious and more difficult predicaments. For Maria, everything demands routine, organization, and precision. She fastidiously supervises the distribution of food portions at the charity, she prides herself on her neat and tidy body, and she repeatedly divides up the minutes she will schedule for traveling and shopping for the evening at Joe’s. Maria intends for her attention to routine to create order and clarity in her life, but such rigidity actually deadens her life and prevents her from being receptive to new experiences and happiness.
It is important to live for yourself instead of simply living for others.
Maria’s dedication to helping other people is one of her defining characteristics. For example, she works as a maid at a Protestant charity that houses troubled women, she is always the peace-maker when a conflict breaks out among the charity’s inhabitants, and she practically raised Joe and Alphy Donnelly. She even spends her own limited funds on cakes that she can bring to the Donnelly’s Hallow Eve party and is extremely distressed when that does not go according to plan. All of these examples characterize Maria as a selfless person who defines her self-worth by her ability to assist others. However, over the course of the story, readers are able to determine that Maria’s demure and giving ways have a negative impact on her own life. Maria is undoubtedly a soothing and helpful presence to everyone who meets her, but Maria never appears to turn that same level of support inward. Instead, she appears to simply live from one altruistic task to the next without preserving any time or energy for herself. In fact, the conversation that Maria has with the man on the tram is the only self-serving thing that Maria does in the entire text—and that brief moment of joy is immediately transformed into a shameful act when Maria blames herself for being distracted by the attention and forgetting the cake.
Women face unfair double standards.
Maria from “Clay” is unmarried. She is also middle-aged which puts her significantly past the typical age that a woman in early 20th-century Dublin would have been expected to get married. As a result, Maria’s status as a spinster comes up several times throughout the text. One might be tempted to think that this is an insignificant detail. After all, there are many characters in Dubliners who are unmarried, such as Mr. Duffy from “A Painful Case” and Ignatius Gallaher from “A Little Cloud,” and their marital status is never considered to be a pressing social issue. However, there is one key difference between Maria and the previously mentioned characters: Maria is a woman. Women in early 20th-century Dublin (and today) are often held to different social standards when it comes to marriage. Maria’s marital status is the subject of teasing and ridicule throughout the text. For example, a woman teases Maria during teatime and says that maybe she will “get the ring” this year and the woman at the bakery cruelly asks Maria if she is shopping for a wedding cake. One cannot help but assume that Maria would not receive the same treatment if she were a man.
