29 pages • 58 minutes read
Ivy Day in the Committee Room
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Background
Authorial Context: James Joyce and Dubliners
James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic, born to a middle-class Protestant family in Dublin, where he was raised and educated. Despite living outside of Ireland for most of his adult life, Joyce’s works focus on the social nuances and complex politics of Ireland in the early part of the 20th century. Joyce was a major contributor to Modernism, in particular the avant-garde literary movement that pushed the boundaries of literary style and form, and asked questions about the nature and purpose of literature in modern life (see below). Joyce is best known for his intimate bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and monolithic novel Ulysses (1922). Joyce’s dense stories and unorthodox techniques exemplify the social themes and intellectual developments of Modernist literature and form part of the unique literary tradition of Irish culture.
The short story collection Dubliners, in which “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” was published, is one of Joyce’s earlier works. As such, it has a more traditional Realist style than Joyce’s later, experimental Modernist works. The stories in Dubliners were conceived as a sequential set: They portray middle-class life in Dublin and pass from depictions of childhood through adulthood and maturity to old age and death. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is the 11th story of 15, and its location helps to contextualize its exploration of middle age and mood of adult complexity, nostalgia, and regret. Although Dubliners was published in 1914, it was completed in 1905. Joyce had difficulty publishing before 1914 because multiple Irish publishing houses were concerned that aspects of the book were too socially or stylistically daring to print. Joyce refused to make significant changes, and the delay in publication demonstrates Joyce’s firm vision and propensity to push the boundaries of literary convention. It is also important to note that the author’s intentions were fixed in 1905 when the work was completed, not in 1914 when the work was published.
Literary Context: Modernism
The events of the early 1900s saw a dramatic shift in both the political makeup and social outlook of the Western world. The age of empires was ending, and political self-determination became of increasing concern in Ireland, whose indigenous population saw themselves as subjugated to the British crown and living in a state of foreign occupation.
Similarly, intellectual movements began to break away from doctrinal systems of thought and embrace the notion of individualism. Individualism explores the relationship between the hierarchical systems of society and one’s individual identity, and how expressions of individuality can both provide personal purpose and influence change in the modern. As such, it was a challenge to the traditional social order that prioritized a person’s place in the hierarchy over their individual abilities or inclinations. In Ireland, this manifested in relation to British imperialism, Anglo-Irish social conservatism, and the strong hold of religious institutions, whether of the Catholic or Protestant Church.
The stories of Dubliners are significant examples of early Modernism and show Joyce developing a style that would become increasingly experimental in subsequent works, such as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Although stylistically it largely adheres to the tradition of Literary Realism, Dubliners contains significantly revolutionary themes and is highly symbolic, a defining characteristic of Modernism. The political themes and strong symbolism of “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” follow this pattern. While the Dubliners stories are apparently Naturalistic in setting and form, they defy simple characterization and meaning, asking Modernist questions about what literature should and can do. This can be seen in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” through Joyce’s typical avoidance of narrative mediation, meaning that the story limits descriptions of the characters’ thoughts and feelings, the story’s context, and the wider significance of events. Joyce wished for the story to be published without speech marks for dialogue, as in his later works, but was obliged by his publisher to include these: This shows that his intended style was more Modernist than the printed story indicates.
Historical-Political Context: British Colonialism and Irish Republicanism
The colonial history of Ireland dates from the 1066 Norman Conquest of the British Isles. The initial Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England extended into the more remote Celtic regions of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland through the course of the 12th century. These Celtic regions were ethnically, culturally, and linguistically distinct from Anglo-Saxon England, and Norman rule did not take hold as completely as in England, where Anglo-Norman synthesis became the basis of medieval culture and power structures. Subsequent English rulers claimed sovereignty over Ireland, but this control was limited in practice, mostly concentrated around Dublin.
Through the centuries, English rulers sought to extend their power in Ireland: Henry VIII made himself king of Ireland in 1541. Through the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, a colonial program of plantation and Protestant settlement took land away from the Irish Catholic majority population, supported by punitive anti-Catholic laws. In practice, Irish society became bipartite, split between a privileged Protestant Anglo-Irish minority and the Gaelic-Irish Catholic majority. By 1778, only 5% of land was in Catholic hands. Irish produce and resources were extracted to enrich the Anglo-Irish ruling class, and Britain as a colonial power. After centuries of British conquests and failed Irish rebellions, Ireland was formally absorbed into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, making it legally a constituent part of the kingdom, rather than a colony. By the 1900s, centuries of British political neglect, settler-colonialism, and militant policing had caused the people of Ireland to endure some of the most destitute conditions in Europe.
The response of the indigenous Irish population to British colonialism had been one of recurrent rebellion and resistance, although these efforts were often limited and factional. By the late 1800s, many Irish Protestants also supported Irish independence, although there was significant disagreement about ideals and methods between Gaelic Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Anglo-Irish Nationalists. This is the context in which “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is set. Charles Stewart Parnell (b. 1846) was an Irish politician of the Protestant Anglo-Irish upper middle class, the same class that Joyce was born into in 1882. As an MP in Westminster (the British Parliament), he was leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) from 1882 to 1891, during Joyce’s childhood. Parnell’s primary political focus was to obtain “Home Rule” for Ireland, granting the Irish people their own parliament and control over their economic affairs. Parnell made great strides towards this goal and shaped the IPP into a formidable political force in British Parliament. However, in 1890, Parnell was revealed to be having an extramarital affair, which outraged his Catholic constituents and was used by his opponents to undermine his leadership. As a result, the IPP split between the Parnellites and the anti-Parnellites, and political progress towards Irish Home Rule was stalled; Parnell died a few years later in 1891.
Joyce’s story takes place in the post-Parnell political landscape of Ireland, a time of great uncertainty for the Irish people. The hopes of a peaceful acquisition of Home Rule through political means was dwindling, and radical, sometimes militant groups on both sides of the issue were beginning to form. Although Home Rule was passed in 1912, before Dubliners was published, it was stalled and then delayed on the outbreak of war in 1914. Ireland would not achieve independence until the 1920s.
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