Comparing James Joyces The Dead and Dubliners :: comparison compare contrast essays

An Analysis of The Dead To start in absolutely the to the lowest degree likely place, we have here some other version of family life in Ireland (moving East, and from here through The Snapper make a unit contrasting with the previous one), with another way of picturing what the Irish take to be their insularity and closedness, their ludicrous longing for union with the supposedly superior but alien culture of the continent, and especially that confusion and lambast about sexuality which derives so directly from the Irish churchs inability to reconcile desire as sin and desire as life-affirming. A fact (at least according to a major recent survey) unify Catholics have better sex than other married Americans. Why? Its been suggested that you cant preach so fully the comparison between the union of man and woman with the union of Christ and his church and indeed of man with God without giving a celebratory turn to married love. But this would be inconceivable to the Irish, whose ch urch (despite its being the dominant influence on American Catholicism) focuses on the ascetic and the equation of sex with sin. In a sense, because he is so firmly embedded in this tradition, struggling against it, Joyce seems both hopelessly dated and eternal hopelessly dated because we dont have enough residuum of the sense of sinfullness in our culture to have it be much of a force we have to struggle against, and eternal because it remains true for everyone that passing into maturity date (especially through adolescence) means somehow coming to terms with what is a strand of conflict between sexuality insofar as it is self-aggrandizing and aggressive and the affective life as it is non-self-aggrandizing and other-centered and in some sense more pure-seeming. It is of course attainable to come to good terms with this contradiction, but it is also possible to understand and be undermined by its existence, and Gabriel is a very clear instance of the person who cant really rec oncile simple physical desire for his beloved wife, a getting close to and taking motive, with equally simple adoration and affection for her in the grace and authenticity of her autonomy, a standing back and in some sense giving motive (I meditate two passages from Portrait, 171, as against 99-101). So Gabriel is troubled by what strikes us awfully oddly as his moments of pure and clownish lust, and