The trial of the neighborhood-watch champion of Florida has begun, the New England Patriots' tight end has been charged with an execution-style homicide, President Obama has ended his silence about climate change, and the Supreme Court has ruled on voting rights, the Defense of Marriage Act, and California's Prop 8. Where to begin? How about with "The Boarding House," the seventh story in Joyce's Dubliners and one of my favorites.
Roaming hither and thither in the critical literature, one forms the idea that "The Boarding House" has been read as another installment in the sequence of "paralysis" stories. Doran, a tenant in Mrs Mooney's boarding house, takes up with his landlady's 19-year-old daughter. Mrs Mooney is alert to every new development in her house, but she does not squash the affair until it has reached a point where she calculates that Doran can be confronted and forced to marry the girl. And she calculates correctly. Doran feels trapped and wants to fly away, but he fears exposure, publicity,, and the loss of his job in the office of a Catholic wine merchant--a position, we are told, he has held for thirteen years. So, just as Eveline could not bring herself to leave Ireland for a new and freer life, Doran makes a marriage that is not his but Mrs Mooney's idea, and faces a narrowing, Dublin future.
The main problem with this is that it makes Doran the star of the show. It also makes Mrs Mooney, who executed the trap that Doran won't escape, a candidate for villainhood. But here is how the story starts:
Mrs Mooney was a butcher's daughter. She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman. She had married her father's foreman and opened a butcher's shop near Spring Gardens. But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr Mooney began to go to the devil. He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt. It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after. By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business. One night he went for his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour's house.
After that they lived apart. She went to the priest and got a separation from him with care of the children. . . . Mrs Mooney, who had taken what remained of her money out of the butcher business and set up a boarding-house in Hardwicke Street, was a big imposing woman.
She's not a villain. She's a woman who's been kocked about some and learned how to take care of herself. There's a detail that, on first reading, is easy to glide past:
Mrs Mooney sat in the straw arm-chair and watched the servant Mary remove the breakfast things. She made Mary collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to help make Tuesday's bread pudding.
She's a close calculator and she may not have miscalculated since she married her father's foreman. I feel about her the way I feel about those weeds that grow up in the cracks of your sidewalk. You don't like them but your dislike is mitigated by something like admiration.