Clay

The world in which James Joyce wrote “Clay” was one of rapid change throughout Western Europe in nearly all facets of life. In the first decade of the 20th century, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, the Wright Brothers flew a heavier than air flying machine, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis delved into the human subconsciousness, and August Strindberg opened his play Dream Time. In Russia, the First Russian Revolution began in 1905, the same year Joyce wrote “Clay.” The very fabric of how people viewed reality underwent radical shifts because of these rapid sociopolitical, technological, and aesthetic developments. Joyce, however, saw little change in Ireland, a nation that he believed was dominated by colonial English overlords and the Catholic Church, and was, consequently, stagnant.

In 1905, about 83% of the population of Dublin was Catholic. However, the Protestant minority made up the ruling class and controlled most of the nation’s wealth entry to lucrative employment. Most Dubliners were unable to realize upward mobility. The Dubliners that Joyce features in “Clay” and the other stories in the collection are largely lower-middle- or working-class people. Issues of class and religion surface in the opening paragraphs of “Clay”: the matron (or manager) of the laundry where Maria works is a middle-class Protestant woman while the women (including Maria) who do the physical labor of the laundry are poor, working-class Catholics. The laundry itself mirrors conditions in Dublin, the capital of a country ruled by England and under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church. Although Joyce himself was raised as a middle-class Catholic, he rejected middle-class values and the Catholic Church as a young man and never altered these views.

Further, if Catholic men in Dublin were restricted in their efforts to achieve greater financial security, the case for Catholic women was far worse. Women who were not married had few choices in life. Teaching and nursing were two traditional professions for women in many countries; but in Ireland, these positions were generally held by nuns. Single women who did not choose to enter convents could generally only find employment as domestic servants. Maria, for example, worked first as a child-care worker in a private home, but when the children were grown, her only recourse was a job as a scullery worker in a laundry. Other single women without financial support could find themselves sliding into sex work as the only means of survival. In “Clay,” the women who do the grueling work of the laundry are most likely former sex workers, as this was common in Dublin during Joyce’s lifetime.