Short story by James Joyce
| "The Sisters" |
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| Country | Ireland |
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| Language | English |
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| Genre(s) | short story |
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| Published in | Dubliners |
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| Publication type | Collection |
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| Media type | Print |
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| Publication date | 1914 |
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"The Sisters" is a short story by James Joyce, the first of a series of short stories called Dubliners. Originally published in the Irish Homestead on 13 August 1904, "The Sisters" was Joyce's first published work of fiction. Joyce later revised the story and had it, along with the rest of the series, published in book form in 1914. The story details a boy's connection with a local priest, in the context of the priest's death and reputation.
Summary
Narrated in the first person, "The Sisters" deals with the death of a priest, Father James Flynn, who had a close association with a young boy. The story opens with the boy, who knows that the priest’s death is imminent, outside the priest’s home, repeating the word “paralysis” while looking up at the bedroom window for the sign that will tell him Flynn has died. When he returns home, a family friend is disparaging the priest, then informs the boy of the priest’s death and proceeds to disparage their relationship. That night the boy dreams of the “paralytic” and as the dream continues he remembers the priest has died of “paralysis.” The next day he finds himself unable to mourn, feeling instead that he has been freed. He is surprised and remembers that the priest instructed him in numerous subjects, especially the traditions of the Catholic Church. That evening he and his aunt visit the priest's home, where they are met by his sisters, Eliza and Nannie. After viewing the priest’s corpse in the bedroom upstairs, they sit downstairs with the sisters while Eliza recounts the priest’s decline. She says the duties of the priesthood had overwhelmed him, that he dropped a chalice, which broke, and afterwards was found in his confession-box laughing to himself.
Evolution of the story
In summer of 1904, George Russell of the editorial department of the weekly paper The Irish Homestead wrote Joyce a letter in regards to a section of the journal called "Our Weekly Story":
Dear Joyce,
Look at the story in this paper The Irish Homestead. Could you write anything simple, rural?, livemaking?, pathos?, which could be inserted so as not to shock the readers. If you could furnish a short story about 1800 words suitable for insertion the editor will pay £1. It is easily earned money if you can write fluently and don't mind playing to the common understanding and liking for once in a way. You can sign it any name you like as a pseudonym. Yours sincerely
Geo. W. Russell (
Letters 43)
[1]
Joyce took the offer, and "The Sisters" was published on 13 August 1904 using the pseudonym Stephen Dædalus, a name given to one of Joyce's semi-autobiographical literary characters in his later novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. "The Sisters" was the start of a series called Dubliners that he hoped the Homestead would continue to publish. In fact, Joyce would write two more stories for the Homestead, "Eveline" and "After the Race", before complaints stopped the paper from publishing any more of his stories.[2] Joyce, nevertheless, continued to add more stories to the collection. But he had great difficulty getting Dubliners published, and it wasn't until 1914 that the first edition of the book came out. During that decade, "The Sisters" went through a number of revisions.[3]
The two published versions have essentially the same plot. The romantic style of the original, however, has been transformed to produce a
modernist text.[4] The 1914 version, like the other Dubliners stories, is written in a style Joyce called "scrupulous meanness", the direct presentation of what is "seen and heard".[5][6] The style demands greater engagement by the reader, who is left to provide interpretation.
Other changes were made to characterisation and relationships. In particular, Joyce severely strengthened the relationship between the priest and the boy, making it stand out as a memorable feature of the story.[7]
The theme of Dubliners, “what holds [the stories] together and makes them a book [is] hinted on the first page,” the “paralysis” or “living death” of which Joyce spoke in a letter of 1904.[8][9]
In Joyce's Stephen Hero, "an epiphany" is defined "as a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself".[10] Both forms are found in "The Sisters", in Eliza's conversation and in the boy's dream of Father Flynn.[11]
Father James Flynn may be "what [James] Joyce might have become as parish priest" had he not left Dublin.[12]
One critic has argued that the original version of "The Sisters" parodies the Catholic mass and that Joyce developed and sharpened the parody in his revision.[13] It has been noted that between Father Flynn in "The Sisters" and Father Purdon in "Grace" "there is not a single priest [in Dubliners] who is not somehow morally and intellectually compromised".[14]
Reception
"The Sisters" has been a subject of scholarly debate, mostly in regard to the priest's illness. One analysis of Father Flynn's illness throughout the second version of the story shows that Joyce deliberately implied that Father Flynn had central nervous system syphilis. Joyce was interested and qualified enough in medicine to be able to describe a syphilitic and had definite reasons for doing so. The syphilitic nature of Father Flynn's illness is apparent in the author's use of paralysis, which was often used synonymously with paresis (general paralysis of the insane) when Joyce began his revisions in 1905.[15]
The priest having suffered from a sexually transmitted infection would help account for the adult society's negative opinion and disdain for him.
But, on the other hand, the opening sentence of the story states unambiguously, "There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke." The paralysis is also perfectly explainable as a result of the series of strokes.
