You Are What You Read by Robert Diyanni

Author:Robert Diyanni [Diyanni, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691206783
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2020-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

COMMENTS

Plot and Structure

What can we say about the plot of “The Boarding House?” What might we emphasize about the story’s action, and about its shape as a structured artifact? In terms of its plot, or developing action, I would highlight how the story moves quickly from a focus on Mrs. Mooney to a close look at her daughter, Polly, who makes her appearance at the end of the third paragraph and dominates the story from there, though sharing the spotlight with Bob Doran, until returning, triumphantly, to Mrs. Mooney at the end. Polly’s sexual allure is emphasized such that readers suspect that something will happen as a result, given a boarding house populated by young men. Mrs. Mooney appears inactive during Polly’s seduction of Bob Doran, with his decent job and middle-class respectability, such that Mrs. Mooney’s hovering in the margins of the story’s action is a deliberate ploy, an invitation, even a form of encouragement to Polly to work her wiles on the unsuspecting, eagerly complicit Doran. Plot, in this story, includes the collusion between mother and daughter to entrap an eligible marriage prospect.

The plot centers on and advances Doran’s decision to marry Polly; and it turns, as well, on Mrs. Mooney’s decision to delay her confrontation with Mr. Doran, thereby intensifying his sense of foreboding and diminishing his chance of escape. Joyce withholds from us the actual scene of sexual seduction, Doran’s and Polly’s intimacy having occurred before the story’s action begins. Joyce provides us with a flashback midway through the story from Doran’s perspective. Even that scene is brief and rendered through Doran’s memory, revealing his anguished confusion.

Structurally, the story begins and ends with Mrs. Mooney in firm control, first of her boarding house, and then of Polly’s and Doran’s predicament. In terms of structure, as well, we should consider why the story ends where and as it does, with Doran and Mrs. Mooney waiting in the parlor for Polly to come downstairs. Why does Joyce withhold from us the conversation that surely ensues? What do we imagine of Polly and Doran’s future? Joyce leaves these later imaginings to us, as he also leaves us to imagine the particulars of Mrs. Mooney’s interrogation of Doran, what they said to one another, how they conducted themselves, what they felt and thought during their private meeting in the parlor, Polly waiting upstairs expectantly.

Character and Characterization

What’s particularly interesting in terms of character in “The Boarding House” is how Joyce depicts each of its major figures. He introduces Mrs. Mooney in the story’s opening words by means of factual information (she was a butcher’s daughter) accompanied by judgment (she keeps things to herself, she is determined, and she can run a business). A butcher’s daughter, she does not stand high on the social ladder, her status worsened by her husband’s alcoholism, which ruins their business. Undeterred by this failure, however, Mrs. Mooney opens a boarding house and runs it “cunningly and firmly,” showing herself to be a “shrewd judge” of character.

For these qualities we may grant Mrs.

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