Exhuming the Monks of Mount Melleray from “The Dead”

Abstract

Exhuming the Monks of Mount Melleray from “The Dead” Kieran Quinlan (bio) “The Dead” is the Dubliners’ story in which Joyce celebrates Irish hospitality following his scrupulously mean treatment of his country, his city, and its paralyzed inhabitants in the earlier narratives of the collection. Indeed, the two themes intersect here and play off one another when Gabriel Conroy, the stiff and overly complacent protagonist, is prompted to shed “[g]enerous tears” as he gradually comprehends the powerful impact of the dead (surely the ultimate paralysis) on the living in his wife Gretta’s remembered friendship with Michael Furey (D 223). The centrally placed dinner-table conversation about the “hospitable,” silent monks at Mount Melleray who “slept in their coffins” in order “to remind them of their last end” and “to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world,” a conversation occasioned by Mrs. Malins’s mention of her son Freddy’s upcoming visit there, quietly foreshadows the resolution of these themes (D 200, 201). It can be argued that the cameo presentation on the monks encapsulates the pattern of the entire story. Thus, the monks are first warmly commended for their hospitality; then they are depicted as sleeping in their coffins, but, by realistic implication at least, they rise from those coffins each night at 2:00 A.M. to praise their Creator and to begin the new day, feeling joyful in their chosen state though, no doubt, it seems “lugubrious” to the outside world (D 201). Their habits are similar to the narrative of “The Dead” as a whole since it moves from a celebration of Irish hospitality to celery-eating, monk-like Gabriel (who lives in Monkstown) “stretch[ing] himself cautiously along under the sheets” and listening to “the snow falling faintly through the universe … like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (D 223, 224). Gabriel’s initial irritation at the apparent recasting of his entire married life is followed shortly by his empathy with Gretta; his ongoing disorientation seems to indicate that he will awaken to embrace more gratefully the chastened affections of a mature connubial life that will “make up for the sins” of his past complacencies with a wife who has “locked in her heart” the memory of the beloved Michael Furey (D 223).1 But while pertinent to the story’s themes of hospitality, paralysis, and the ongoing impact of the dead on the living, the Mount Melleray [End Page 157] reference is far from being wholly contrived on Joyce’s part. Such a passing allusion would have been relatively commonplace in the Ireland of the early twentieth century extending almost to the present. The Protestant Mr. Browne is the only one at the table who is “astonished” to hear about both the monks’ generosity and their ascetic practices (D 201). Moreover, the proposed visit there of the inebriated Freddy Malins is accepted as a matter that requires no explanation. In other words, though the exchange will quickly become “lugubrious” even for its participants and end up “buried in a silence of the table,” it is in no way unusual, and, though it is the censorious Mrs. Malins who manages to get in a final remark “in an indistinct undertone”—“They are very good men, the monks, very pious men”—that too is a sentiment that would have been shared by everyone present (D 201).2 This is the case because the Mount Melleray Abbey in County Waterford was then and continues to be the most iconic of modern Irish monasteries (as iconic, for what it is worth, as San Quentin in American popular culture). Mount Melleray Abbey was founded in 1832, shortly after Catholic Emancipation, by Irish (and English) Trappist monks exiled from France because of their order’s loyalty to the deposed King Charles X, the last of the Bourbon monarchs, and also, it seems, because the improved agricultural methods they had introduced into their French fields in Brittany had threatened a number of the local merchants and landowners.3 After much wandering, the monks eventually settled on a barren tract of the Knockmealdown Mountains in County Waterford...