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James Joyce’s “Clay” tells the story of an unmarried woman named Maria who works as a maid at a Protestant charity that houses troubled women. She is small, soft-spoken, and a “veritable peace-maker.” The story opens with Maria admiring the kitchen that she has just cleaned as she prepares for teatime at the charity. “Clay” then follows a single day in Maria’s uneventful life in which she goes to work, runs a few errands, and then attends the Hallow Eve party of the man that she used to nurse when he was a boy.
Most texts begin with an inciting incident which is an event that sets the rest of the story’s plot in motion. However, “Clay” does not have such a moment. Instead, the story simply plods along as Maria goes about her day. As a result, the reader essentially becomes a passive participant in Maria’s deadening routine. Joyce structures the narrative in such a way in order to emphasize Maria’s dull, monotonous life and provide a backdrop for her unhappiness.
In the rising action, Maria joins the women for tea where they promptly begin to tease Maria for being unmarried. Maria may smile through their teasing, but Joyce notes that Maria’s eyes sparkle with “disappointed shyness” as she does so. Similar rhetoric persists as the rising action continues, as Maria fights through the rain and the crowds to buy cakes for the party. Maria is mocked for the second time that day when the stylish young woman behind the bakery counter coldly asks if Maria is looking to buy a wedding cake. Once again, Maria smiles along with the teasing but her blush indicates that she is embarrassed by the comment. In both of these examples, Maria does not acknowledge her distress—not even in her head. Instead, her body language betrays her suppressed emotions. Maria’s “spark[ling]” eyes and “blush[ing]” cheeks are the physical manifestations of the pain that Maria is unable to express to herself or other people. The closest that Maria comes to acknowledging her own loneliness occurs when she relishes in the conversation that she has with a man on the tram after completing her errands. However, her brief acknowledgement that she desires human connection is short-lived and quickly compartmentalized.
Maria arrives at Joe Donnelly’s Hallow Eve party which, barring a brief upset over a misplaced cake and a poorly timed mention of Joe’s estranged brother, continues smoothly. Unfortunately, that peace does not last because the two older girls from next door decide that they should all play a traditional Hallow Eve divination game. Each guest steps up to draw their fortune and the party remains in good spirits until, in the climax of the short story, Maria unknowingly draws the saucer with a piece of clay on it which predicts an early death. Within the context of the short story, the clay is meant to symbolize Maria’s deadening life and imply that she is already effectively deceased even though she still has a pulse. All of the party guests become uncomfortable, except the blindfolded Maria who does not know what she has inadvertently drawn.
“Clay”’s climax is considered an epiphany moment, a motif in many of the stories in Dubliners. Characters in Dubliners experience both great and small revelations in their everyday lives. These epiphanies do not bring new experiences and the possibility of reform, as one might expect. Rather, these epiphanies allow characters to better understand their particular circumstances, usually rife with sadness and routine, which they then return to with resignation and frustration. Sometimes epiphanies occur only on the narrative level, serving as signposts to the reader that a story’s character has missed a moment of self-reflection. This is the case for Maria because, in her blindfolded state, she never realizes what she drew or what it means. She is the only person who is literally and figuratively left in the dark. As a result, Maria is never given the chance to have an epiphany and the reader gets the sense that she will tragically continue to overlook her own unhappiness and doom herself to a life of deadening routines and isolation.
Like many of the short stories in Dubliners, “Clay” ends on a pessimistic note. The party guests have Maria play the game again and this time she touches a prayer book which predicts a cloistered life in a convent. However, even that omen does not have a positive connotation because, whether Maria becomes a nun or not, some part of her will die. She will lose her vibrancy to the dullness of routine, or she will lose the life she knows for one that is unfamiliar.
