Clay

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1914

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Themes

The Diminishing Power of Low Social Status

In “Clay,” Joyce makes use of Maria’s size and her social status to demonstrate how closely these two ideas are connected. Etymologically, stature and status are connected by their identical Latin root word, “stare,” meaning “to stand.” On the one hand, “stature” means one’s physical height when standing. “Status,” on the other hand, means one’s social standing. Throughout the story, Joyce emphasizes Maria’s size while also focusing on her lack of status. Joyce even uses “little” to describe Maria’s room, and the stool she must sit on in the crowded tram. That Maria’s “toes barely [touch] the floor” also contributes to the reader’s understanding of Maria’s stature. She is made to appear childlike and powerless with this image. He suggests that having a low social status diminishes a person to the point that they become overlooked and obsolete, reinforcing the story’s representation of Maria as an analogy for (Joyce’s view of) Ireland.

At the same time, Maria’s social status is determined by her menial job and her lack of a husband. Women in early 20th-century Dublin automatically took on the status of their husbands. Being an unmarried woman carried with it virtually no status at all, and her Catholicism and relative poverty also contribute to her being seen as insignificant. Maria is nearly invisible in Joyce’s Dublin, representing the inequality and disparaging situations many were forced to endure in 20th-century Ireland. The Protestant minority in power and the lack of social change in Dublin, compared with the rest of the world’s quick progression and change, left the majority of citizens in a state of stagnancy. Upward mobility in society was not just difficult but was often unachievable for many who were stuck in poverty.

The Disparity Between Desire and Reality

Joyce develops the story’s poignancy through Maria’s disappointment at her reality. Although Maria desires many specific items or occurrences, she is inevitably disappointed when her desires go unfulfilled. Joyce weaves Maria’s desires through the text subtly to emphasize her weak and stagnant characterization; she rarely attempts to make her desires a reality.

First, although Maria professes to not want to be married, the story implies that she does hold this desire. Marriage is very important for a woman in this time and place; being unmarried results in lower social status and severely impacts a woman’s financial situation. Maria is not considered marriageable by the other characters in the story; she is portrayed as small, “unattractive,” and old. Lizzy Fleming says that Maria will receive the ring in the traditional Halloween game, signifying that the person picking the ring while blindfolded would be married within the year. This is not the first time Lizzie has made this joke, and the laughter that ensues is cruel. That it bothers Maria despite her joining in with the laughter is clear: “[W]hen she laughed her grey-green eyes sparkled with disappointed shyness, and the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin” (97). The descriptions of Maria’s reactions are vaguely negative and feeble, suggesting a placid dissent. Maria’s unmarried state is also made the point of a mean jab when she attempts to buy a cake. The “stylish young lady” working in the shop asks Maria if “it was a wedding cake she wanted to buy” (98). Even Mrs. Donnelly’s prediction that “Maria would enter a convent before the year was out” underscores Maria’s lack of husband and family.

Maria also experiences desire and disappointment in her hopes for the Halloween party with Joe and his family. On the way to the party, Maria plans on buying treats for the children and cake for the adults. It takes her considerable time to find the right items. However, she ends up leaving the cake on the tram when she gets off. As a result, she is “coloured with shame and vexation and disappointment” (100). So sharp is her sorrow that “she nearly cried outright” (100). This is one of the few times Maria so directly addresses her desire and disappointment, breaking down the wall she has created with herself concerning her contentment. At this point, it’s clear Maria is certainly feigning this contentment and understands her powerlessness.

A third desire and disappointment that thematically weaves through the story is Maria’s hope that “Joe wouldn’t come in drunk” to the party (96). As soon as she has this thought, however, Maria covers it up with the assertion of how much Joe loves her. Nevertheless, Joe has been drinking when Maria arrives at the Donnelly house, and he continues to drink throughout the evening. He also forces Maria to have wine and stout and becomes belligerent when she suggests he make up with his brother. Maria’s desire for a sober but happy evening ends in disappointment.

Finally, the most painful of Maria’s desires is to be loved and valued. This becomes clear through the lyrics of the song she sings, “I Dreamt that I Dwelt.” The speaker in the song asserts that all the wealth in the world does not matter so much as being loved. Maria’s continued reminiscences of her time with Joe and Alphy (and her assertion that they thought of her as their mother) points to her longing to be loved like a valued family member. However, at the party, Joe becomes loud and abusive at Maria’s suggestion that he contact Alphy, and the neighbor girls play a terrible practical joke on her. After insisting that Maria sing a song for them before she leaves, Joe’s eyes fill with tears, not over his love for Maria, but for his love of an old composer. In the end, he reaches for the corkscrew and more alcohol and never says an affectionate word to Maria. Readers are left with Maria standing by the piano, silent, her desires unfulfilled.

Self-Deception

Joyce famously called his short stories “epiphanies,” and most of the stories of Dubliners end with the main character experiencing an epiphany: a sudden reassessment of facts and details that results in a moment of clarity and self-understanding. Significantly, “Clay” is a story in which the main character exhibits both ample self-deception and a lack of self-understanding; there is no epiphany, because there is no room for growth or improvement in Maria’s life. Joyce accomplishes Maria’s self-deception and lack of self-understanding through two intertwined literary devices: narrative point of view and irony.

The narrative point of view in “Clay” is limited third person and uses free indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse uses the character’s own language to frame thoughts, as opposed to an impersonal narrator. Thus, in “Clay,” sometimes Joyce’s realistic language is replaced with Maria’s self-deceiving generalizations. For example, Maria uses the word “nice” to cover all her descriptions of those characters she sees as somehow higher than herself in status. The matron is nice, Protestants are nice, the gentleman on the tram is nice, Joe is nice, Joe’s wife is nice, even Maria deems her “tidy little body” as nice (97). This reveals very little about the actual interaction between Maria and the other characters or about Maria’s evaluation of herself. Likewise, Maria creates an image of herself through her own thoughts in which she is essential to the peaceful running of the laundry and plays an important part of Joe’s life.

However, the disparity between Maria’s thoughts about herself and the reality of the situation become increasingly apparent and increasingly ironic. Irony is often used to underscore that readers know more about a situation or characters than do the characters themselves. In this case, the examples Maria cites about herself and her life are very different from the reality. For example, although Maria reports that the matron says Maria is a “veritable peace-maker” (95), Maria cannot make peace between Joe and his brother Alphy. Maria also reports that “[e]veryone was so fond” of her. Yet no one in the story demonstrates either kindness or fondness toward Maria: the laundry workers tease her, the young people on the tram will not give her a seat, Joe speaks only of himself to her, the children and next-door girls play a trick on her, and Joe is more interested in finding the corkscrew than in her singing. In addition, despite thinking that her living conditions at the laundry are fine and “how much better it was to be independent and to have your own money” (98), Maria has no financial resources other than a few coins in her pocket, and she does extremely hard and menial labor. Her future is uncertain. Indeed, the only time that honest self-understanding seeps through her self-deception is at those moments when she is most embarrassed and uncomfortable. Losing the cake on the tram is the best evidence of this: “At the thought of the failure of her little surprise and of the two and fourpence she had thrown away for nothing she threw away for nothing she nearly cried outright” (100).

This moment also indicates why Maria repeatedly chooses to engage in self-deception instead of embracing her reality. Just as she cannot change the fact that she left the cake on the tram, she has no power to change her life because of her predetermined role in society. Her situation is fraught with despair and uncertainty. Throughout the story, moments of confusion, fear, and embarrassment threaten to unravel her fragile sense of self as well as her survival. Thus, the irony inherent in “Clay” made possible by the point of view renders Maria’s very existence, and the story, as tragic. Maria copes with this chronic inequality and the circumstances out of her control by refusing to address her own needs and desires that will never be met.