James Joyce's "The Sisters"
Here's a stab at a close reading of “The Sisters”. Before speculating about whether Father Flynn was a practitioner of simony or pedophilia, we can start with something obvious and incontrovertible: the story is entitled “The Sisters”, and we can assume that title has significance. So, who are these sisters, and what does the story tell us about them? Nanny, who greets the narrator and his aunt when they visit to view the dead priest’s body, is hearing- impaired and dwarfish. We know she can't hear because, when Nanny greets her visitors, we’re told “it would have been unseemly to shout at her”. Also, Nanny never speaks; she only gestures. We learn she’s unusually short when she mounts the stairs, “her bowed head being scarcely above the level of the banister rail.” Nanny is also careless of her personal appearance, likely because she’s very overworked. The narrator notices “how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down...