Joyce's depiction of women is characterized by a high degree of literary self-consciousness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work. Self-awareness emerges as an awareness of both gender and linguistic expectations. contrasting highly self-aware isolated men of letters (or men with literary aspirations) and women who follow more romantic models, even stereotypes. In Dubliners, Joyce uses a clichéd story of doomed love ending in death, physical or spiritual, in "A Painful Case" and "The Dead". The former sticks much more closely to these conventions and can be read as a precursor to the more sophisticated techniques of the latter, which draws the reader's attention to the cliché only to redirect it. However, here it is Joyce's work, his subversion of gender, that takes center stage, and the women in the stories take a back seat. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he once again literalises a stereotype, the Madonna/whore combination, showing women as nuns, suffering wives or prostitutes. But this division also serves to highlight one of Stephen Dedalus's main battles, between Ireland and exile, family and freedom, which results in a call to write away from domestic responsibility. Ulysses, and especially "Penelope", seems to escape him because it is precisely against the genre - there was no pre-existing genre of the "monologue in bed" - but it is the most aware and critical genre towards female linguistic construction. The "feminine" words (through letters to Bloom) are the constant auditory background in Bloom's mind, but he fixates on them precisely because of their "bad writing" (4.414), as Milly writes to him. Molly has the final word in Ulysses, but it is not so clear who authorizes that word, as we will see. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay “A Painful Case” is built on cliché³® The story of a misanthropic bachelor who meets an emotionally frustrated wife, develops a bond, then recoils into intimacy couldn't be more formulaic; he even dies from "sudden failure of the heart's action" (114). The irony is clear: the accident actually happened four years earlier. Joyce wrote Dubliners to appeal to both mass audiences and scholars, and "A Painful Case" seems particularly aimed at the popular reader and, with its story of unrequited love, female readers. James Duffy is skeptical and irritated by this very kind of bland, superficial writing: "She asked him why he didn't write down his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful disdain. Competing with phrase writers, unable to think consecutively for sixty seconds ? To submit to the criticism of a dull bourgeoisie that entrusted its morality to the police and its fine arts to the businessmen?" (111) Joyce engages in self-criticism and at the same time eludes it; by critiquing the method he employs, he demonstrates a self-awareness that elevates his work beyond this “middle class” production. Duffy also practices this self-awareness alongside Joyce. At the end of a symbolic biographical paragraph, all pronounced in the past tense in the third person, we learn this news: "He had a strange autobiographical habit that led him to occasionally compose in his mind a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and preached in the past tense. He never gave alms to the beggars and walked steadily, carrying a sturdy hazelnut" (108). In case the reader does not understand that the first sentence is itself an example of this habit, Joyce repeats the information with a sentence that characterizes this type of "autobiographical habit", providing the readerinformation about a character's relationship with money and his pace, two clichés³ of fiction. Who, exactly, is writing this paragraph, Joyce or the choked-up Duffy who so clearly wants to write? The story continues this self-awareness-newspaper article telling Duffy about the woman's death takes up a substantial portion of the text and is separate from the rest of the text in its entirety. This unmediated information drags us back into another popular medium that purposefully avoids any subjective treatment, just as sentimental fiction has difficulty diving deeply into its characters despite its objective: "The worn-out phrases, the senseless expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a journalist convinced to hide the details of a banal and vulgar death that struck him in the stomach" (115). The story ends with a wave of clichés³ that suffocate each other. Duffy twice considers himself an "outcast from life's banquet" (117). He then sees a train, the vehicle that marked their last meeting and his death, a clichéd symbol since Anna Karenina of life's inexorable and romantic destiny: "It passed slowly out of sight; but he still heard in his ears the plodding hum of the engine that repeats the syllables of its name" (117). This is what Mary Sinico boils down to (we learn her name only from the newspaper), mechanical repetition (even "reiterate" is repetitive; "iterate" means "repeat" without the prefix "re-") which imitates the mechanical cliché that Joyce he used. She is only sound, not physicality – “she had become a memory” (116) – and this memory is preserved only through the text of the story and its sentimental legacy. In “The Dead,” however, Joyce takes a similar plot and explores more meaningful connections between music and memory, space and time, exile and patriotism. Greta's generic love story gets lost amidst these ideas that worry Gabriel. Gabriel's position as an outsider looking in is amplified by his linguistic disconnection from his people (later capitalized by Miss Ivors as she shouts a farewell in Gaelic, "Beannacht libh", in her final verbal jab at Gabriel); indeed, music and singing, two highly mnemonic cultural essentials, are elements foreign to his ears throughout the novella: "Gabriel could not listen as Mary Jane played her Academy piece... the piece she was playing had no melody for him" (2014). His domain is the spoken word, a medium far less memorable and emotional than music, but he fears that even his poetic allusions might fall flat and exaggerate his intellectual separation from the other guests: "He was hesitant about Robert Browning's verses because he feared they would above the heads of his listeners. It would be better to have some quotation that they could recognize from Shakespeare or the Melodies... He had adopted the wrong tone" (2010). The wrong tone lies not only in ostentatious reference, but in the actual currency of speech, in adjectives and transitive verbs across octaves, and in tonal variations. Even in an old love letter, he recognizes the relative pallor of the language: "Why do words like these seem so dull and cold to me? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?" (2030)The attenuated but persistent music is the unexplored reserve of memory for the characters of "The Dead", although for Gabriel his words must suffice for harmony: "Like distant music these words that he had written years before came to him brought from the past" (2030). The absence of music in today's Dublin is an indication of the emotional coldness that is spreading in the city and its inhabitants. It is an old Irish ballad, The Lass of Aughrim, which triggers reminiscences of a childhood love for Gretta. The association of music with vitality isexplained in his memoir, but phrased ironically to highlight Furey's death: "He would have studied singing only for his health. He had a great voice, poor Michael Furey" (2034). Gabriel's inability to connect on this sonic level is exemplified by one of his literary reviews, remembered shortly before Aunt Julia restores her youth through singing: "You feel that you are listening to music tormented by thoughts" (2018) . Gabriel takes refuge in narrow quarters that oppose this notion of an expansive past: "'Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we lived in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration , be called spacious days" (2024). In contrast, Gabriel's previous positions were confined, as in the small pantry, where even his coat hides a certain frigidity from the outside: "...a cold and perfumed air coming from outside escaped from cracks and folds" ( 2009). It is in these situations that Gabriel is unable to reconcile past and present, and at the end of the party he exits the pantry in much the same way he entered: "Gabriel advanced from the small pantry, putting on his overcoat" (2026). Further binaries - cold and hot, soft light and hard lights - divide the past and the present. When Gabriel experiences his epiphany, it is clear that it is a "thought-tormented" epiphany, a predictable usurpation of the story's narrative "past" that exemplifies his new ambitions to unite past and present. His violent lust preceding the epiphany – "He longed to cry out to her with all his soul, to crush his body against hers, to dominate her" (2032) – is balanced by his subsequent tears which signify her epiphany for him: " He had never felt this way towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling had to be love" (2033). This calibration of feelings is another conscious gesture that reminds the reader of the generic implications that mask Greta's story. She is merely the conduit of Gabriel's epiphany, and her cliché story produces its cliché change; the only part of the story that is not formulaic is Joyce's temporal imagery. He, in the end, produces the only substantial and original ideas. The epiphany is the product of self-awareness – Gabriel finally sees himself through the eyes of others – and is tied to himself, not the catalyst women. The author-reader relationship works the same way; Joyce wants his reader to gain awareness of the author's self-awareness and through this expand his appreciation of the stories, and Joyce seems to make this easier for his male readers, who are not as likely to be attracted by the overt feeling of his stories. This rupture is most clearly visible in Portrait, which contrasts the domesticity of the family with writing. Joyce made a similar choice in her life, swimming away from her drowning Dublin clan to make her way in the world. In the "fiction", the older Joyce has an ironic attitude towards the redemptive power of women that his younger counterpart esteems them throughout the first part of the novel: "He wanted to meet in the real world the inconsistent image that his soul contemplated so constantly. He knew where and how to see it but a premonition that led him told him that that image would come towards him, without any action on his part... They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that 'moment of supreme tenderness it would transfigure into something impalpable before his eyes and then, in an instant, it would be transfigured" (54). The pronouns are deliberately unclear - he encounters an image, the two are now a "they", but "they" are also contradictorily "only" -they point out that Stephen is not so much looking for a woman as for himself. His desire to "fade away" under the woman's gaze is ridiculed by Joyce; although silence will become one of Stephen's survival traits, it is a stubborn silence, not a passive one. The pomposity is immediately met by Joyce's ironic subversion; Stephen is literally transfigured in the next scene as his family is evicted once again. Next, we are given a description of another passive surrender to a woman, this time in an actual physical encounter: "He closed his eyes, surrendering to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her lips that opened softly. They pressed on his brain as if they were the vehicle of a vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than that fainting of sin, weaker than sound or smell" (86 ). In this seemingly unconscious state, Stephen's verbal skills are highly attuned: constant alliteration ("vehicle...vague," "faint of sin, fainter than sound") alludes to the sonic displacing the physical; even the "unknown and timid pressure" is an oblique reference to erection and orgasm through equally "vague speech" that masks vulgar physicality with elevated language. The “they” in “between them,” then, may not be Stephen and the woman (who barely bears a name as one of the interchangeable objects of desire Stephen encounters, much like the nearly nameless Mary Sinico in “A Painful Case” ), but the two "opening lips" of the woman (yet another example of verbal ambiguity), which transfer their power onto Stephen's lips and allow him to make the final alliterative leap: the orgasm is replaced by epiphany, Stephen's physical outburst from his verbal one paves the way for this sensation away from the earthly, physical shackles of Ireland, and his final diary entry of "O Father, Old Artificer" (219) is addressed to his father , to his country as a father figure, and to artifice, to writing. But women receive their own voice in Ulysses, or at least in the one who comes to speak on behalf of all women, inflected "in the attitude of Gea-Tellus" (17.2313). In the two examples of women's writing, Milly and Martha's letters to Bloom, Joyce condescendingly displays their weak knowledge of language, spelling, and grammar. However, their words (especially Martha's) echo in his head for the rest of the day, and later Bloom thinks about the ingenuity of Molly's pun on Ben Dollard's voice - "a vile tone" (8.116) - like a clever reworking of Ben's voice. , body and inclinations to drink. "See? It all works" (8.123) Bloom says to himself, and to us, in defense of his raw intelligence. That raw intelligence appears unmediated in Molly's dialogue, but her commitment to paper alone indicates Joyce's hand. Tied to her room, deprived of the external stimuli that parade in the minds of Stephen and Bloom, Molly's life on June 16 is limited to a mnemonic and private story. He attempts to bridge the gulf between memory and writing by enjoying the fact that Lieutenant Mulvey's current wife, if she exists, has no idea of ​​their affair twenty years ago "in the eyes of the world one might say they could have published a article about it". in the Chronicle" (18.829-830). "World" echoes Martha's mistake in her letter to Bloom - "I called you a bad boy because I don't like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word?" - especially because Molly connects the event to a possible newspaper piece; the word creates a world, just as a newspaper informs its readers about current events and therefore helps to form theirs."