This paper explores Joyce`s critique of colonial domination and seeks for the ways to get out of this miserable condition, focusing on the interrelationship of political reality and women`s lives in colonial Ireland in Two Gallants. Patriarchy, the t...
This paper explores Joyce`s critique of colonial domination and seeks for the ways to get out of this miserable condition, focusing on the interrelationship of political reality and women`s lives in colonial Ireland in Two Gallants. Patriarchy, the typical binary thought infiltrated on human mind in almost every society, is closely connected with imperialism. Imperialists have thus used this sexist social custom in order to ease their colonial domination. It is in this context that the British defined the Irish as a feminine race and applied the norms commonly used in the relationship between man and woman in a patriarchal society. For the British empire, this binarism helped to conceal the injustice caused from cruel domination and exploitation of Ireland. But this `fictive` binarism by the empire was internalized by the colonized Irish. The Irish equated the feminine as something negative, impure and inferior. They did the same cruel behavior toward the Irish women as the empire did to the colony. And they tried to exonerate themselves from colonial oppression, imputing historical wrongdoing to `impure women.` Women were thus doubly colonized in Ireland by the Irish males as well as by the British empire. Joyce tried to refute this simple reductionism by exposing the fictiveness of the colonial and patriarchal discourse. As he said while writing Dubliners, he wanted his works to be a nicely polished looking glass for his countrymen, who would look at their degraded condition in the glass. Stephen resolves to forge the uncreated conscience of [his] race at the end of Portrait, but it may be possible only after the Irish realize their own spiritual paralysis. In this context, the reality of the slavey in Two Gallants mirrors back the miserable condition of the colonized Ireland itself, and Lenehan mimicking the imperial Corley as a disciple shows the real cause of lasting colonial situation.