Djcercon

I edited your user page to fix the links. Don't just paste URLs into a wikipedia page, use the correct format (or clink on the "link" icon above--which likes like a link in a chain) to link to other wikipedia page. See the Cheatsheet for a refresher on link format. Csforster (talk) 21:58, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

The Dead edit 2/16/15

2/16/15:

Characters (in order of appearance) • Lily: the caretaker’s daughter. She has known Gabriel since her youth and is not impressed by his relationship remarks. • Kate and Julia Morkan: Gabriel and Mary Jane’s aunts, sisters who hold an annual party and dance during Christmas time. Julia is a member of a choir, hence the singing at the party. • Freddy Malins: an acquaintance of Gabriel's who is notorious for being late and intoxicated. Mr. Browne calls him ‘Teddy’ when trying to sober him up. • Gabriel Conroy: the main character and Kate and Julia’s favorite nephew, the son of their deceased older sister Ellen. • Gretta Conroy: Gabriel’s wife and the focus of the end of the story. • Mr. Browne: the only Protestant in the story. • Bartell D’Arcy: a famous, retired tenor. • Molly Ivors: Colleague of Gabriel. Her Irish patriotism is reflected in her modest dress and Irish brooch. She likes to make fun of Gabriel for not being so patriotic and writing for The Daily Express, a conservative British tabloid newspaper. • Patrick Morkan: deceased; Gabriel’s grandfather and Julia and Kate’s father. Gabriel tells a story of Patrick’s horse, Johnny. • Michael Furey: a boy from Gretta’s childhood in Galway. He passed away, ill, while trying to express his love for Gretta as she was leaving to visit a convent in Dublin. He is the focus of the story’s conclusion between Gabriel and Gretta.

Minor characters Miss Daly, Miss Power, Miss Furlong (one of Mary Jane’s friends), Mr. Bergin, Mr. Kerrigan, Miss Higgins, Miss O’Callaghan

Michael Bodkin/Michael Furey Readers have noted that the story of Michael Furey recalls that of Michael Bodkin, with whom Joyce's partner Nora Barnacle had a childhood relationship. Bodkin lived in Galway and died in 1900 "for love."

John V. Kelleher argues that despite the story's haunting description of Furey, one must not assume he is a ghost but rather understand Furey as a real figure in Gretta's life. Furthermore, Kelleher creates a mock future of Gabriel and Gretta's lives after the story and how they each think of Michael in their daily lives. He writes that Gretta thinks of him often, "when not preoccupied with the children, Gabriel, the maid, tomorrow's menu, the new curtains for the living room, and so on" but that Gabriel "may remember about once a week, always of course with some mortification, but not necessarily with very much" (p. 417).

Marjorie E. Howes of the Yale Journal of Criticism invokes a more intimate reading of Furey and Gretta's relationship, suggesting that Gretta's references to the two of them going out walking has sexual undertones, "She narrates her desire for Michael Furey through walking: she twice describes their relationship by using a rural idiom for courtship, saying 'we used to go out walking' . . . they also invoke the relationship in folk culture between travel and sexuality; Paul Muldoon has argued that an association of the west with sexuality is 'part and parcel of the folk-song and ballad tradition.' . . . Both Gretta and Michael Furey are rural-urban migrants, and they embody different, and differently-gendered, relations to mainstream cultural nationalism, its conception of tradition, and modernity. As Joseph Valente has argued, Furey is not an alternative to revivalist myth-making: rather, he is a symptom of it. He embodies a nationalist model of tradition as simple and passionate, broken and self-immolating, and profoundly incompatible with modernity. For Furey, modernity and migration—his job in the gasworks, his movement from Oughterard to Galway, his peripatetic romance with Gretta, and his journey from his sickbed to her back garden—are fatal. Joyce's text also associates this fatality with the ideological opposite of migration, a movement towards home and origins. When Furey appeared in her garden on that wet night, Gretta says she 'implored of him to go home.'" (p. 164)