Joyce’s “The Dead” and the Midlife Crisis

Abstract

Joyce’s “The Dead” and the Midlife Crisis Thomas Rendall (bio) The idea of a midlife transition was first developed in detail as a concept of modern psychological practice by Elliot Jacques in his 1965 article “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.”1 As is clear from his title, for Jacques the most important cause of the crisis is a person’s realization that, following an upward course of life, the course after middle-age is one downward to death. Persons experiencing a midlife crisis are typically dissatisfied with what they have so far accomplished in life, experience boredom with their current careers and partners, and have a strong desire to make radical changes in these areas. The midlife crisis is a controversial concept in current research: some researchers believe it is mainly due to mental, emotional, and social causes, while others stress the importance of biological, hormonal changes. Still others reject the concept altogether, calling it a “public myth,”2 or “an unreal creature of the imagination.”3 Notwithstanding this controversy, the phenomenon of midlife crisis has become part of our common wisdom, and it has frequently appeared in Western literature: Dante’s being lost at midlife in a Dark Wood; Don Quixote’s middle-aged dissatisfaction—so great that he changes his identity completely;4 Faust’s discontentment with his former career as scholar and professor;5 Mann’s exhausted Aschenbach; Eliot’s Prufrock, who has “seen the moment of my greatness flicker.”6 Writing in 1907, Joyce could not have been aware of the midlife crisis syndrome as detailed in modern psychology. But research has shown that major personality adjustments are common in middle age, and Joyce, as an acute observer of human nature (his own nature included) incorporated in his fiction features of the midlife crisis, or to use a less dramatic phrase preferred by clinicians, the “mid-life transition” (Kruger).We find many of the key characteristics of this experience, as defined by late twentieth century psychology, embodied by Gabriel and Gretta in “The Dead.”7 [End Page 262] Research has established that the midlife crisis occurs between 40 and 60, with one large-scale study specifying an average age of 46.8 Gabriel’s exact age is left undefined in “The Dead,” although he is described as a “young man” (D 178). We would, of course, not normally consider a middle-aged person young; however, “young man” is later defined in the context of the story’s mainly geriatric dramatis personae when Gabriel’s foil, the drunk Freddy Malins, enters and is described as “a young man of about forty” (184). That Gabriel, like Freddy, has reached middle age is confirmed by Joyce’s emphasis on the decrepitude of his aunts, both younger than Gabriel’s mother (179); late in the story, we learn that Julia is so frail that Gabriel expects her imminent death (222).9 The midlife crisis is especially common in men who are well-educated; in one study, “more than 20 percent of the college-educated group reported feeling at some point that they were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Only 12.8 per cent of all other men reported this experience” (Stevens-Long and Common 309–10). Gabriel has taken a university degree (187) and become a university teacher (188). He worries that his Browning quotation will be above the heads of the hearers of his after-dinner speech because “they would think that he was airing his superior education” (179). A common symptom of the midlife crisis is seemingly unaccountable depression: one study of Harvard graduates found that the participants experienced “much more depression in their forties than they had in young adulthood.”12 Although in the opening scenes of the story Gabriel appears to conform to his assigned social role as the confident favorite nephew, we discover a puzzling negativity when we enter his thoughts. Gabriel’s conversation with the chambermaid Lily results in a cynical remark about men that “cast a gloom over him” (179). His thoughts about the audience reaction to his dinner speech produce an overreaction that goes beyond simple stage-fright: “He would fail with them just as he had failed...