Abstract
In Dubliners, James Joyce delineates female characters that are caught up in the colonial, religious, familial, and sexual nets, along with some exceptional women who seek identity and emancipation in the suffocating environment. The sexual ideology inherited from Victorian age reinforces the phallocentrism and its domination on women. This thesis investigates female Dubliners’ subjugation to authorities, defeat of patriarchy and fulfillment of repressed desires in James Joyce’s Dubliners from a Lacanian perspective. I employ Jacques Lacan’s theories concerning the formation of gender identity, the roles of the phallus, and the Woman to elaborate upon my argument that only by metamorphosing into deviant women could the confinements collapse. This research contains three chapters. Chapter one begins with examining Jacques Lacan’s theory of the imaginary phallus and the vulnerability of sex-role, then specifying the feminized, castrated Irish men. I focus on the British colonial manipulation of the Irish subjectivity, and how male Dubliners appropriate their master’s strategy to further victimize women. In the second chapter, I launch the Victorian women issues in light of the virgin/whore dichotomy. I employ Lacan’s theory of masquerade to elaborate upon the conflict between angels and viragos. I analyze the characters’ repression and argue that subterranean desires of women could serve to defy the phallic ego that demands the other’s recognition of one’s narcissistic mirror image. I conclude the thesis in the third chapter by reexamining the female subjectivity in “The Dead.” Lacan’s inquiry of the Woman reinforces female counterattack against male sovereignty. In addition, his conception of desire articulates women’s plight and indicates the counterattack against the male oppression. By illustrating Joyce’s presentation of women in Dubliners, I explore the unspeakable darkness and tension underneath the life of Dubliners.