"The Old Irish Tonality": Folksong as Emotional Catalyst in "The Dead" (original) (raw)

2007, New Hibernia Review

We know that song as an artistic medium was enormously important to James Joyce throughout his life, and it particularly essential to his most famous short story, "The Dead." The story portrays the singing of three songs and alludes to as many as five others, ranging in provenance from opera and "art" song to music hall and folksong. Of all these song-types, however, it is a traditional ballad called "The Lass of Aughrim" that significantly affects the responses of the characters and the action of the narrative. Most critics who have addressed the question of why Joyce selected this particular song have focused on the lyrics, the narrative, and even the title in an attempt to draw connections-sometimes cogently, sometimes misleadingly-between its images or events and those of the story itself. Richard Ellmann, for example, comments that Aughrim is a little village in the west not far from Galway. The song has a special relevance; in it a woman who has been seduced and abandoned by Lord Gregory comes with her baby in the rain to beg for admission to his house. It brings together the peasant mother and the civilized seducer. 1 More accurately, "The Lass of Aughrim" is a rarely collected traditional ballad of Scottish provenance-it appears as "The Lass of Roch Royal" in the Child collection-which relates the story of a young woman who seeks admittance for herself and her baby to the dwelling of her lover, Lord Gregory. Lord Gregory's mother, feigning the voice of her sleeping son, asks the girl to identify herself by naming love tokens that she and Lord Gregory have exchanged, and eventually turns the young woman away. 2 When Lord Gregory awakens and learns of his mother's treachery, he curses her and sets off in pursuit of his lover and child.