Ireland in Modern Times: Belonging and Rejection in Joyce's “The Dead”

This paper attempts to shed light on the situation in Ireland in the twentieth century. Driven by the enticing idea of rebellion against the control of the British Empire and with the willingness to find—or rebuild from scratch—an Irish cultural identity that had been downtrodden by the process of Anglicization, the country revealed a moment of fragmentation and turmoil. This last was due to the fact that the response to the colonial need for the building of an Irish identity and nation was twofold. On one hand, in fact, the Gaelic Revival aimed exclusively at the retrieval—or better, the exhumation—of a pure Irishness and Irish tradition that lied in the past of a rural Ireland. On the other hand, countering this stance, emerging modernism pushed towards an Irish identity that went further beyond the local cultural heritage and borders, and that was nourished, namely, by modern cross-cultural contamination and fertilization. Thus, conflicting viewpoints as they were, Revivalism and Modernism were just two different reactions to a modern cultural crisis triggered by the legacies of centuries-old British colonialism. Yet these oppositional mindsets were not binaries impossible to converge on, after all. James Joyce, in fact, was the emblem of the union between an Irish local and a cosmopolitan attitude—two oppositional poles he managed to reconcile in his regional fiction, of which “The Dead” is a prominent example. Recalling the supernatural in its style, the last short story of “Dubliners” not only served as a mis-en-abyme portraying the problematic nature of the modern Irish environment, but it was also a reflecting mirror, providing a peek into the life of its creator.