Analysis: The Sisters by James Joyce

The "Sin" of Illness

As I try to uncover the meaning of The Sisters, the opening story in Dubliners by James Joyce, I want to start with what I see the story itself saying, before we get into all the possible nuances. The story starts with old Cotter speaking ill of the dead Father Flynn, even if he can’t quite articulate what it is he means to say. There’s something queer, he says. He has a theory which he doesn’t give. The story ends with a discussion of Father Flynn’s last days. He’d suffered a couple of strokes, and before the third one which paralyzed and ultimately killed him, it had created in him a decline and a moroseness. The most worrying sign was when they found him in the dark chapel, in the confessional, laughing to himself.

Instead of assuming Joyce was hinting at something more sinister about Father Flynn, who was a friend of the boy who provides the story’s POV, I think it’s important to note that the queerness the boy shouldn’t have been around (in the story’s vernacular) is Father Flynn’s illness, or specifically, the behavior associated with it. The word “queer” isn’t used again until the women discuss the troubling behavior at the end of the book. This would indicate the judgment against the priest is less a critique on religion than on people’s attitude toward the sick.

Old Cotter has a strange feeling about Father Flynn because Flynn is ill, and there seems to be a connection between that illness and moral failure in the eyes of old Cotter. We see similar language in the boy’s thoughts where he says of the word paralysis, “But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.” Later, the dead father’s grey face follows him in a dream:

It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.

This last quote directly connects to two other parts of the story. First, the father is confessing in the dream, and in reality, he was found alone in a confessional, laughing to himself. Second, the boy says he felt as if he were absolving “the simoniac of his sin.” That concept was introduced earlier, as the word paralysis sounded strange to him, “like simony in the catechism.” Simony is the church selling that which is holy: pardons, offices, sacred items, etc. It was named after Simon Magus who tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from Peter. The other word offered was gnomon in the Euclid. It has the definition of the protruding part of a sundial, but here it is specifically referenced with the Euclid, the famous text on geometry. In this case, the gnomon is what is left when you remove from the corner of a parallelogram an identical but smaller parallelogram. I think the symbolism of the gnomon references the Father’s dementia. He has become what is left when that smaller part of himself is removed. This mental illness is equated to sin in the eyes of the characters and particularly, in the boy’s dream, the sin of simony. Why? Do they fear, in their ignorance, that the Father has sold some holy part of himself?

“It's bad for children,” said old Cotter, “because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect…”

If there is merit to this understanding of the story, then the next question I have is what does the text have to say about this equating illness, and mental illness in particular, with sin. It would be easy to suppose a critique from a modern, progressive standpoint, especially personally, with my work in psychology-relevant fields.

After the old-Cotter segment, the boy goes to bed, puzzling over what Cotter suggested but could not bring himself outright to say. Supporting Cotter’s fear that an impressionable boy would be affected, he sees the old man’s grey face and cannot rid himself of the vision by hiding under the covers and thinking of Christmas.

Then he goes to the shop, behind which the old priest could usually be found. It was located on Great Britain street, which has to be important in an Irish story. The detail I know for certain was housing for the poor was located there. The store’s name was Drapery, which makes me think of the beginning of the book and the boy looking for signs in the window that the priest was dead. The store sold children’s bootees and umbrellas. A sign usually hung in the window but was hidden that day; it said umbrellas re-covered. (Recovered?) A mourning bouquet of silk or cloth flowers hangs on the knocker and a sign posted there makes real the man’s death for the boy.

He was annoyed with himself because he felt the priest’s death had freed him from something. This seemed unfair, for the priest had taught him so much.

His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts.

One of these institutions he reflects upon is the secrecy of the confessional. Now, I’ve made an argument for the “queerness” about the priest to be related to his illness and not some greater trouble, but this consideration on lessons taught ends with a pointedly creepy touch: “When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip—a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.”

The boy remembers old Cotter’s words at this point, connecting this uncanny smile with the man’s unspoken fears, and he tries to remember more of his dream from the night before. He remembers curtains (Drapery?) and an antique, swinging lamp. He’s somewhere where customs are different, perhaps Persia.

Questions arise in the boy’s mind. In the context of the priest’s decline and death, his idiosyncrasies take on new meaning. He’s haunted by Cotter’s half-spoken accusations. He was old and different, but so far, without accusation. Where the story comes uncomfortably close is in the boy’s thoughts on the duties of the priest, in particular, the handling of the body of Christ and the secrecy of the confessional:

The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them

The boy and his aunt visit the house of mourning. There may be hard feelings between the aunt and Nannie, because it is only the soberness of the situation that has his aunt shaking her hand and not yelling. As nothing else is mentioned on this matter, this is more likely a case of deafness. The boy focuses on being silent. He walks on tiptoe and refuses the crackers because of the noise they’d make. He can’t focus to pray and makes note of how poorly Nannie is dressed. He has the false sense that the priest is smiling; his face is grey and he holds a chalice, a cup, like the one he broke in the episode that supposedly started his decline.

Downstairs, they join Eliza who is sitting in her brother’s chair. Eliza and Nannie are the sisters of the story’s title. Nannie serves and then sits behind Eliza on the sofa, nearly asleep while Eliza does the talking. Much of that talk is surface niceties, but then:

Mind you, I noticed there was something queer coming over him latterly. Whenever I'd bring in his soup to him there I'd find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open.

We are brought back again to old Cotter with that word, queer.

“He was too scrupulous always,” she said. “The duties of the priesthood was too much for him. And then his life was, you might say, crossed.”

“Yes,” said my aunt. “He was a disappointed man. You could see that.”

The story closes with the revelation of facts I’ve already given. The priest went into a mental decline and was found locked in the dark chapel, sitting in his confessional, laughing softly to himself.

What was Father Flynn’s disappointment? We know he attended the Irish College in Rome, which is impressive and especially so when we learn the family comes from Irishtown, which I’m told is a lower-class district in Dublin.

As part of the questioning, the aunt asks obliquely about last rights, which were given, we are told. It’s an interesting question, if the aunt had reason to doubt he could receive them for some great sin. (I say last rights under the assumption that’s the same as Extreme Unction, which may be the more proper term.)

Everyone talks about how peaceful and resigned the priest is in death, but when the boy looks, the word Joyce uses to describe the priest’s face is truculent: aggressively hostile or belligerent.

Part of the boy’s lessons were in understanding the different kinds of sin, and mortal sin requires absolution from a priest to receive salvation. Other lessons included Napoleon, who closed the Irish College in 1798, and the catacombs which were both a burial place for the dead and a hiding place from religious persecution.

Hemingway’s iceberg theory for fiction had him writing about a melodramatic topic but never directly mentioning it, whether it was suicide or abortion. I don’t think that’s what this is. There’s no definitive answer we can come to if we just collect enough clues. The priest’s face is belligerent but people talk about him being at peace because that’s what people do with death. He may have died angry with God but he may not have. The question to his last rights came from no particular insight, otherwise the family would have kept the boy away. His uncle mocked his interest in the church as it was.

We don’t know because they don’t know. Their suspicion is the key, and that suspicion seems rooted to me in the fear of mental illness.

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