Tradition, Gender, and Migration in "The Dead," or: How Many People Has Gretta Conroy Killed?

In this essay, I want to address two related sets of issues in "The Dead." The first involves the question of the text's embrace and/or critique of cultural nationalism and the forms of Irish tradition produced and valued by cultural nationalism. Critics who take up this question often focus on Gretta's Galway origins, Michael Furey's passionate self-sacrifice, and Gabriel's final "journey westward." The second involves the issue of gender and the argument that Gretta, Lily, and other female figures in the story are victims of male public authority, sexual predation, and masculinist aesthetics. The readings generated by these critical traditions are persuasive, and I will not dispute them. Rather, I will suggest that their narratives are haunted, disrupted, and countered by an additional, and previously unremarked, narrative in "The Dead." This alternative narrative exposes and exploits the gendered cultural meanings of modernity, migration and domestic service, and casts Lily and Gretta neither as emblems of tradition nor as victims. It is also a narrative that Joyce's text and John Huston's 1987 film of "The Dead" share, though they figure it in different ways.