The stories of Dubliners show great sympathy for the
constrained circumstances of Irish women, and "The Boarding
House" contributes to this portrait gallery by beginning with
the backstory of Mrs. Mooney, a butcher's daughter who
married her father's foreman, and, soon after the old man's
death, found her husband to be an abusive alcoholic. She
separated from him, cut him off without a penny, sold the
shop, and set up a boarding house. These circumstances help to
explain, but hardly counterbalance in pathos, what she does to
one of her boarders.
Mrs. Mooney is an intimidating woman known to her lodgers as
"The Madam"—a label that conveys her
unquestioned authority but also suggests that her house
somehow resembles a brothel. In this scenario the role of
whore is played by her flirtatious nineteen-year-old daughter,
who has the eyes of "a little perverse madonna." Mrs. Mooney
gives Polly "the run of the young men" in the house, but she
can see that "none of them meant business"—until, one day, one
bites the hook. Once the daughter's honor has been securely
compromised the mother intervenes. Ominously, the reader
learns that "She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals
with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind."
Mrs. Mooney first interrogates Polly, who has maintained a
cunning but unspoken awareness of her mother's cunning
awareness of what is going on. Her suspicions confirmed, the
mother then reviews her moral options and decides that outrage
is justified: "She had allowed him to live beneath her roof,
assuming he was a man of honour, and he had simply abused her
hospitality." He is 34 or 35 years old, "so that youth could
not be pleaded as his excuse; nor could ignorance be his
excuse since he was a man who had seen something of the world.
He had simply taken advantage of Polly's youth and
inexperience: that was evident."
The outrage is feigned: Doran has paid good the money
for "hospitality," Mrs. Mooney could easily have
prevented the liaison, and Polly has acted with as much savvy
as her supposed seducer. (Indeed, she has reeled him in like a
fish.) But Mrs. Mooney does not intend to allow her lodger the
leisure to ponder such contradictions. Only one thing matters:
"What reparation would he make? / There must be reparation
made in such cases. It is all very well for the man: he can go
his ways as if nothing had happened, having had his moment of
pleasure, but the girl has to bear the brunt. Some mothers
would be content to patch up such an affair for a sum of
money; she had known cases of it. But she would not do so. For
her only one reparation could make up for the loss of her
daughter's honour: marriage." Mrs. Mooney wants someone to
take her daughter off her hands, and Mr. Doran, who has some
money set aside, seems like a good catch. The narrative notes,
twice, that she "felt sure she would win."
Doran seems more sensitive to social opinion than some of the
other lodgers, and he has been "employed for thirteen years in
a great Catholic wine-merchant's office"; the shame of a
scandal could cost him that job. Other forces are arrayed
against him. "Reparation" is a Catholic term for the expiation
of sin, one invoked by the censorious priest to whom the young
man has confessed his transgression. There is also the fear of
physical violence: Polly's brother Jack is a foul-mouthed thug
known to be good with his fists. Doran remembers that once,
when one of the lodgers made "a rather free allusion to
Polly," he had exploded in rage, "shouting at him that if any
fellow tried that sort of a game on with his sister
he'd bloody well put his teeth down his throat, so he would."
Doran senses that "he was being had." The Mooneys are beneath
him socially, Polly seems "a little vulgar," and "His instinct
urged him to remain free, not to marry. Once you are married you
are done for, it said." But the conclusion of his drama, untold
in Joyce's story, seems foreordained.
Ulysses supplies
the aftermath. In
Lotus Eaters M'Coy tells Bloom that
Doran is on "
one of his periodical bends," and in
Lestrygonians
Bloom thinks that these are "
annual." The narrator of
Cyclops
spots him "
sitting up there in the corner that I hadn’t seen
snoring drunk blind to the world." Awakened by the loud
conversation in the pub, he joins in with a memorable mixture of
befuddlement, belligerence, and blubbering sentimentality.
One memorable paragraph of the
narrator's infectiously
mean-spirited monologue supplies plenty of scuttlebutt to round
out the picture: "And off with him and out trying to walk
straight. Boosed at five o’clock. Night he was near being lagged
only Paddy Leonard knew the bobby, 14A. Blind to the world up in
a shebeen in
Bride street
after closing time, fornicating with two shawls and a bully on
guard, drinking porter out of teacups. And calling himself a
Frenchy for the shawls, Joseph Manuo, and talking against the
Catholic religion, and he serving mass in
Adam and Eve’s when he
was young with his eyes shut, who wrote the new testament, and
the old testament, and hugging and smugging. And the two shawls
killed with the laughing, picking his pockets, the bloody fool
and he spilling the porter all over the bed and the two shawls
screeching laughing at one another. How is your testament?
Have you got an old testament? Only Paddy was passing
there, I tell you what. Then see him of a Sunday with his little
concubine of a wife, and she wagging her tail up the aisle of
the chapel with her patent boots on her, no less, and her
violets, nice as pie, doing the little lady. Jack Mooney’s
sister. And the old prostitute of a mother
procuring rooms to street couples.
Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Told him if he didn’t patch up
the pot, Jesus, he’d kick the shite out of him."
Many details are worth noting here: Polly's ascent into prim
bourgeois respectability (the narrator has earlier recalled a
report of her "stravaging about the landings Bantam Lyons told
me that was stopping there at two in the morning without a
stitch on her, exposing her person, open to all comers, fair
field and no favour"), her husband's periodic employment of
prostitutes to obtain some facsimile of erotic satisfaction (a
report that is seconded in
Lestrygonians when Bloom
thinks of him "Up in the Coombe with chummies and
streetwalkers"), the alleged descent of the mother-in-law's
house into a similarly disreputable condition ("procuring rooms
to street couples"), and Doran's renewed antipathy to "the
Catholic religion."
In the short story Joyce says of Doran that "As a young man
he had sown his wild oats, of course; he had boasted of his
free-thinking and denied the existence of God to his
companions in public-houses. But that was all passed and done
with...nearly." The crisis in the boarding house sends him
back to the bosom of mother church. Having allowed it to sink
the talons of guilt into him, and having paid dearly in
"reparation," Doran now loudly profanes the faith: "Who
said Christ is good?... Is that a good Christ, says
Bob Doran, to take away poor little Willy Dignam?... He's
a bloody ruffian, I say, to take away poor little Willy
Dignam." The narrator, showing the purely nominal
embrace of piety typical of male Dubliners, pronounces Doran
the "lowest blackguard in Dublin when he’s under the
influence."
