Objet petits pois: peas, domestics, and modernity in “Two Gallants”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Corley and Lenehan con a gold coin off a servant girl in James Joyce’s “Two Gallants” – but how they do so is left unclear. Lenehan’s consumption of a plate of peas midway through the story meanwhile appears relatively unmysterious. This article argues however that Lenehan’s peas are a key narrative motif: firstly, crystallising the antagonisms that consciously underlie Joyce’s emergent modernist style, but also (by way of the evolving connotation of peas through Irish history) actively historicising the social conditions that underlie this aesthetic. Ultimately, it is via the peas’ relationship with near-absent figure of the “slavey” herself that we see how Joyce’s dialectical aesthetic serves to interrogate the socio-historical position of Corley and Lenehan’s Ireland.