Between Sickness and Sin: The Pathologization of Illicit Love in James Joyce’s Dubliners

Abstract

Illicit or non-normative sentimental relationships appear repeatedly in many of the short stories that comprise James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). This type of emotional link did not have any room in end-of-century Catholic Ireland, and any unorthodox relationship was regarded or punished as sinful and socially unacceptable, following the strict morality of the times. In this article, I intend to analyse some of the most significant stories in Dubliners, in order to dissect the ways in which late nineteenth-century Dublin’s double standards punished any subject steering away from established social norms concerning marriage and acceptable relationships, either by forcing the reclusion of the subjects to the domestic/private sphere or by imposing a normative marriage on them, or even by pushing them to the brink of madness, alcoholism, or suicide.