Chapter 14 - The Epistemology of the PantryA Queer Inventory of James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Summary

Patrick Mullen returns to familiar textual moments to discover new forms of Joyce’s subversion of dominant discourses. He detects in moments in “The Dead” such as Lily’s exchange with Gabriel, Molly Ivors’ discussion with Gabriel, and Gabriel’s thoughts on Michael Furey a kind of queerness he associates with “heteronormative failure”: the refusal to marry, the rejection of conventional gender roles, and the experience of homoerotic desire. Adapting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the sexual closet, he writes of the pantry as the emblem and at times the literal location in Joyce’s story of these alternative behaviors. He traces the subtle presence of these non-normative behaviors in the story’s free indirect discourse; in contrast to the unfettered access to an individual’s thoughts purportedly offered by the stream of consciousness, “The Dead” contains in its conventional third-person narrative voice marginalized perspectives that form unexpected alliances across the globe.