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 all to one side.” Poor Nanny is on her feet non-stop.

Her sister Eliza, by contrast – well:

“We found Eliza seated in his arm-chair in state.” Like a dignitary. She doesn’t extend her visitors the minimal courtesy of rising to greet them when they arrive, and she never once moves from her chair.

And so it is throughout the story. Nannie is in motion, Eliza perfectly still. Nanny is mute, and Eliza never shuts up, clearly reveling in the status of the pious bereaved and directing the efforts of an overworked sister.

“Nannie went to the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wine.” Nanny initially invites the guests to serve themselves, but then, “at her sister’s bidding, she filled out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us.”

Nannie, finally exhausted, “leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall asleep.”

When we reach the place where Eliza speaks piously and self-pityingly about “all the work we had, she and me, getting the woman to wash him…”, the thoughtful reader will have long since guessed the score.

Now let’s go a level deeper --- from the literal to the allegorical. If you’ve read the gospels, you may recognize in this story a winking inversion of an episode that occurs in Luke’s gospel Chapter 10, verses 38-42, and that also features two sisters: Mary and Martha. Mary and Martha are, like Nanny and Eliza, a study in contracts, and for some of the same reasons, but with far different implications:

³⁸ Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house.

³⁹ And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word.

⁴⁰ But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.

⁴¹ And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things:

⁴² But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

Of course, Eliza, contra Mary, isn’t sitting at anyone’s feet drinking in pious instruction; she’s sitting on her ass mouthing pious banalities. And Nanny isn’t complaining to anyone; she’s going quietly the business of serving her guests.

Let's pivot to the boy and the priest. Some impute pedophilia to the priest. That’s not altogether implausible, but as you’ll learn later in Dubliners, when Joyce wants to tell you someone is a pervert, he knows how to do it. Since simony is mentioned twice in the story, there is certainly textual support for the speculation that the priest did something improper that involved the sale of his official duties.

But again, even if that happened, we really don’t have the specifics. What we can know for certain is that Father Flynn, no longer a practicing priest, has undertaken to instruct the narrator.

“They say,” notes the narrator’s uncle, “that he [Father Flynn] had a great wish for him [the boy].” The most reasonable “great wish” that would have been divulged to an uncle is that the priest would like to train the young man for the priesthood.

The narrator regards the vocation with terrified awe.

“The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them.”

We later learn that Father Flynn struggled with a similarly debilitating terror – so much so that when he broke an empty chalice, the gravity of this harmless act broke his mind.

These very ordinary, very pedestrian matters bring us to the much larger theme of Joyce and Catholicism. The story puts flesh of a few of the many reasons that Joyce regarded the pervasive Catholicism of his homeland with a fierce and scornful antipathy. In the religious world of “The Sisters”, people presumably divulge their darkest secrets in the sacred precincts of the confessional, but they can't speak directly to each other -- as we note from the recurrence of insinuation, ellipses, and trailings-off. In the religious world of “The Sisters”, priests are held in the loftiest veneration, but people don’t want their kids spending too much time in their company. In the religious world of "The Sisters", the Christian gospel's message of forgiveness and grace is so warped and perverted that the accidental breaking of a chalice drives a man to nervous collapse and must be blamed on a child.

Finally, the Dublin of "The Sisters" one that prizes ignorance and regards learning with distrust. The story is book-ended by two telling malapropisms. Early in the story, the narrator’s uncle refers to him flippantly as “this Rosicrucian”, likely intending to suggest that the narrator aspires to enter an exclusive priestly order like the Franciscans or the Jesuits. But Rosicrucianism was not a priestly order; in fact, it wasn’t specifically Christian at all. It was a mystical fraternity with some connection to Gnosticism, one of the greatest, most reviled heresies in the history of Christianity. The uncle then goes on to note that “Education is all very fine and large”, the tiresome, age-old formulation in which the committed ignorant have always disparaged learning. (Education may have cautioned him that Rosicrucian was not the word he was looking for.)

At the other end of the story, Eliza reminisces on her brother’s desire to take the sisters for a ride in “one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise … with the rheumatic wheels….”