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“The Boarding House”’s Dublin
If you were to ask anybody who the main characters of “The Boarding House” are, they would likely give you the same answer: Mrs. Mooney, Mr. Doran, and Polly Mooney. However, there is a fourth character who looms in the background of every scene and is just as, if not more, important as any of these three individuals: the city of Dublin. Dublin is a major player in the events that unfold throughout “The Boarding House.” It provides a tourist destination for several of Mrs. Mooney’s lodgers, it provides a place of work for Mr. Doran, and it has a rich musical tradition that draws Mrs. Mooney’s artistes to the music halls. Most importantly, Dublin’s claustrophobic insularity generates much of the story’s plot. Both Mrs. Mooney and Mr. Doran are highly aware that Dublin is “such a small city” in which “everyone knows everyone else’s business,” making any attempt to deny the affair between Mr. Doran and Polly impossible. As a result, Dublin itself acts as a guiding agent that forces Mr. Doran to accept Polly’s hand in order to avoid scandal.
This close examination of Dublin life is a constant in most of Joyce’s writings. “The Boarding House” is part of a collection of short stories called Dubliners which Joyce published in 1914. Dubliners contains fifteen portraits of life in the Irish capital. Joyce focuses on children and adults who skirt the middle class, such as housemaids, office clerks, music teachers, students, shop girls, swindlers, and out-of-luck businessmen. He envisioned his collection as a looking glass with which the Irish could observe and study themselves. In most of the stories, Joyce uses a detached but highly perceptive narrative voice that displays these lives to the reader in precise detail. Rather than present intricate dramas with complex plots, these stories sketch daily situations in which not much seems to happen—a mother arranges a match for her daughter, a boy visits a bazaar, a woman buys sweets for holiday festivities, a man reunites with an old friend over a few drinks. Though these events may not appear profound, the characters’ intensely personal and often tragic revelations certainly are. The stories in Dubliners peer into the homes, hearts, and minds of people whose lives connect and intermingle through the shared space and spirit of Dublin.
Joyce likely dedicated the majority of his career to writing a literary autopsy of Dublin because it was a deeply personal issue for him. For most scholars, James Joyce’s very name is synonymous with Dublin because all of his fiction is set in the city where he grew up. He was born into a middle-class, Catholic family in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, on February 2, 1882. The family’s prosperity dwindled soon after Joyce’s birth, forcing them to move from their comfortable home to the unfashionable and impoverished area of North Dublin. Nonetheless, Joyce attended a prestigious Jesuit school and went on to study philosophy and languages at University College, Dublin. He moved to Paris after graduation in 1902 to pursue medical school, but instead he turned his attention to writing. In 1903 he returned to Dublin, where he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, the following year. Joyce and his wife would go on to live in a number of countries across Europe until his death in 1941. However, no matter where they traveled, Joyce continued to set all of his literature in Ireland, especially Dublin.
