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Maria’s Nose and Chin
Joyce draws the reader’s attention to Maria’s nose and chin several times throughout “Clay.” The first example occurs in the story’s opening paragraphs, in which the narrator describes Maria as a woman with a “very long nose and a very long chin.” A few paragraphs later, one of the women makes a joke about Maria’s status as a spinster. Joyce writes that Maria’s “nose nearly met the tip of her chin” as she awkwardly laughs along with the other women. Similar rhetoric persists later in the paragraph when after another woman expresses her desire for a drink. The image of Maria’s nose almost touching her chin returns one final time as she is being blindfolded and led to the table to play the Hallow Eve game right after the previous player, a teenage girl, draws the ring.
Joyce repeatedly presents the reader with a deceptively confusing image, but the motif begins to make sense thematically once one examines the context of each instance. In all of these examples, Maria is putting on a show and laughing through her discomfort. In the first example, she is embarrassed by one of the women teasingly suggesting that she will “get the ring” this year. In the second example, she is unsettled by a reference to alcohol which she does not approve of. In the final example, Maria is likely embarrassed that the girl before her drew the ring because it reminded her of the woman’s comment at the start of the text. In all of these examples, Maria’s improbable body contortion suggests that she is concaving into herself. Joyce focuses on this image to show that Maria is ashamed of her lonely, nonexistent life.
Moments of Paralysis
“Clay” includes several moments of paralysis. For example, Maria is silent and allows both the women at the charity and the woman at the bakery to make fun of her lack of a husband. Furthermore, she merely responds to the man on the bus with “demure nods and hems” instead of having a more equal conversation. Finally, Joyce writes that Maria only agrees to play the Hallow Eve game after the Donnellys and their guests “insist” that she participate, implying that she did not want to play in the first place and simply acquiesced under the pressure.
Maria freezes whenever she arrives at a crossroads, something that is consistent with many characters in Dubliners. In most of the stories in Dubliners, a character has a desire, faces obstacles to it, then ultimately relents and suddenly stops all action. These moments of paralysis showcase the characters’ inability to change their lives and reverse the routines that hamper their wishes. Such immobility fixes the Dubliners in cycles of experience. Throughout the collection, this stifling state appears as part of daily life in Dublin, which all Dubliners ultimately acknowledge and accept. In the case of Maria from “Clay,” her moments of paralysis represent the stagnant life that she is unable to break free from.
