Author:

Keywords:

James Stephens, James Joyce, Here Are Ladies, Dubliners, Short Story, Short Story Cycle

Abstract:

Published ten years after George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903) and one year before James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), James Stephens’ Here are Ladies (1913) consists of short stories, poems and monologues. The work is not often discussed, presumably because it is rather difficult to define. It is usually classified as a collection of short stories, but this neglects the poems and monologues and fails to do justice to the thematic and formal links between the texts. Therefore, I would like to look at Here are Ladies as a short story cycle – a collection of interlinked short texts – the first to focus on Dublin life. Predating Joyce’s better-known short story cycle only in publication, Here are Ladies participates in the same international modernist movement as Dubliners, seeking alternative textual formats to represent the urban experience of estrangement and miscommunication. At the same time, Here are Ladies should be considered as part of a tradition of linked stories, moving away from the cycles of Irish mythology and nineteenth-century framed tales to regional cycles such as Jane Barlow’s 1892 Irish Idylls and Moore’s The Untilled Field. In way similar to Joyce, Stephens radically shifts the focus from the rural emphasis of these earlier cycles to the urban setting of Dublin with its paralysed middle-class inhabitants. In this paper, I will compare Stephens’ Here are Ladies to Joyce’s Dubliners, focussing on their respective representation of Dublin life. As commonly known, Joyce stated that Dubliners was meant to “betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis many consider a city”. I will examine whether Stephens’ depiction of urban reality is equally negative, whether he sees as little possibility of community as Joyce does. Moreover, against the background of the genre of the short story cycle, I will examine how the specific formal structure enhances the thematic meaning of Stephens’ book. Here are Ladies, that is, has a very tight structure that governs and unifies the book: it is made up of seven sections; five of these consist of an introductory poem, a set of three sketches and a concluding story. Stephens originally conceived the work as a collection of triads, but added several stories and poems so as to reach the necessary number of words. The recurrence of the themes of paralysis, modern loneliness and epiphany bring about thematic unity. Similarly, recurring symbols such as triangles increase the sense of unity in the collection. Moreover, Stephens provides his readers with as little detail about the characters as possible, often even leaving out their names, thus creating a ‘collective protagonist’. As it does for Joyce’s Dubliners, then, the form of Here are Ladies reinforces the meaning of the work. The unity brought about by the structure emphasizes the shared urban experience of alienation and miscommunication of Stephens’ Dubliners.