"Clay" is a short story by

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

published in his 1914 collection ''

Dubliners ''Dubliners'' is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were writ ...

.'' It deals with the reflections of a middle-aged, unmarried woman during the course of her day.

The story

Maria, a tiny, middle-aged, well-loved, and peacemaking woman with a job in Dublin by Lamplight, a rescue mission for wayward women, is looking forward to a holiday evening at the house of Joe, whom she nursed when he was a boy, along with his brother Alphy, and of whom she is still very fond. She departs for Joe's after attending a tea service with her fellow laundresses, stopping to buy cakes for the Halloween party on the way. At the bakery, Maria is somewhat teased by the clerk, who asks whether she wishes to buy a wedding cake, mirroring a similar joke that was made at the earlier tea. On a tram, Maria has a bashful encounter with an elderly and drunken man who chats with her. She is welcomed warmly at the house by Joe’s family, but she is saddened and ashamed to realize that she has left the plumcake she bought for Joe and his wife on the tram, probably due to "flirting" with the elderly man. Maria is soon enticed into playing a traditional Hallow Eve game with the children in which objects are placed in saucers and a blindfolded player has to pick among them. Each object is supposed to have a prophetic significance. One of the objects in the game is a ring, standing for marriage, which Maria failed to get during a similar game (in which objects were baked into pieces of

barmbrack Barmbrack ( ga, bairín breac), also often shortened to brack, is a yeast bread with added sultanas and raisins. The bread is associated with Halloween in Ireland, where an item (often a ring) is placed inside the bread, with the person who rece ...

) back at the laundry. At Joe's, Maria once again misses the ring and instead chooses what is implied to be a lump of clay. Everyone goes quiet. Maria is allowed to choose again, however, and this time fetches the prayer-book, indicating a life of spiritual vocation (service at a

convent A convent is a community of monks, nuns, religious brothers or, sisters or priests. Alternatively, ''convent'' means the building used by the community. The word is particularly used in the Catholic Church, Lutheran churches, and the Anglic ...

, suggests Joe's wife). After drinking some wine, Maria sings the aria "I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls" from the opera ''

The Bohemian Girl ''The Bohemian Girl'' is an Irish Romantic opera composed by Michael William Balfe with a libretto by Alfred Bunn. The plot is loosely based on a Miguel de Cervantes' tale, ''La Gitanilla''. The best-known aria from the piece is " I Dreamt I Dwe ...

'' by

Michael Balfe Michael William Balfe (15 May 1808 – 20 October 1870) was an Irish composer, best remembered for his operas, especially ''The Bohemian Girl''. After a short career as a violinist, Balfe pursued an operatic singing career, while he began to co ...

. She makes what the text refers to as "a mistake" by singing the first verse twice, but nobody corrects her. She omits the second verse of the song; this omission is significant, as the missing verse imagines suitors like the ones that Maria has not had in her life:

I dreamt that suitors sought my hand,
That knights upon bended knee,
And with vows no maiden heart could withstand,
They pledg'd their faith to me.
And I dreamt that one of that noble host
Came forth my hand to claim;
But I also dreamt, which charm'd me most,
That you lov'd me still the same.

The story ends with a description of how Joe, who earlier was angry at Alphy but relented, has been "very much moved" by her song, so moved that he needs to ask his wife to find the corkscrew for him.

Context

This short story was written in a time of religious and political turmoil in Ireland. At the time that "Clay" was written, there was a divide among the Irish between those of the

Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

faith and those of the

Protestant Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...

faith.

References

Citations

Sources

*Joyce, James. ''Dubliners'' (London: Grant Richards, 1914)

External links

"I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls" sung by Edith Chapman
from the

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project The Cylinder Audio Archive is a free digital collection maintained by the University of California, Santa Barbara Library with streaming and downloadable versions of over 10,000 phonograph cylinders manufactured between 1893 and the mid-1920s. The ...

at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...