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Betrayal and Irish Politics
By the end of Joyce’s “Two Gallants,” readers are able to determine that Lenehan and Corley have been plotting to coerce the maid that Corley is dating to steal money from her wealthy employer. However, both men are anxious about treachery despite the fact that both Lenehan and Corley use betrayal to make money. Corley orchestrates his encounter with the maid defensively, allowing Lenehan only distant glimpses of the maid for fear of competition. Similarly, Lenehan pesters Corley about his choice of victim, worried that the plan will fall flat and leave him penniless yet again. The reader also learns early in the story that Lenehan is a gambler (specifically, he is a horse race gambler) which includes a considerable amount of treachery and betrayal. Finally, when Corley and the maid reappear later than Lenehan was expecting at the end of the text, Lenehan momentarily convinces himself that Corley has cheated him out of the profits, and not until the final sentence of the story can we be certain that the men’s collaboration is intact.
Betrayal is a key theme throughout “Two Gallants” but it is important to note that a constant worry about betrayal reappears throughout Dubliners as a whole. Joyce’s emphasis on this makes sense when one considers Dubliners’ historical context. It has been argued that the underlying sense of betrayal that persists throughout Dubliners recalls Ireland’s political scandal in which the politician Parnell, according to his loyal followers, was abandoned by the Irish government and many voters when news of his affair leaked into the press.
The Irish political scene in the early twentieth century was uncertain and tumultuous but it was also hopeful, as Ireland sought independence from Great Britain. Nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, who first became active in the 1870s, reinvigorated Irish politics with his proposed Home Rule Bill. If successful, the Home Rule Bill would have granted Ireland a greater voice in the British government. Parnell, dubbed the “Uncrowned King of Ireland,” was hugely popular in Ireland, both for his anti-English views and his support of land ownership for farmers. In 1889, however, his political career collapsed when his adulterous affair with the married Kitty O’Shea was made public. Kitty’s husband had known for years about the affair, but instead of making it public, he attempted to use it to his political and financial advantage. He waited until he filed for divorce to expose the affair. Both Ireland and England were scandalized, Parnell refused to resign, and his career never recovered.
The bitter publicity surrounding Parnell’s affair, and later his death in 1891, dashed all hopes of Irish independence and unity at the time. Most Irish people felt as if Parnell had abandoned them, which led to a period of unease and uncertainty. Lenehan and Corley may be fictional characters but they represent the generation of people who were disappointed by Parnell’s downfall and who now felt that they had no one to trust. Through Lenehan and Corley, Joyce argues that this state of mind leads only to further betrayal.
