character from spiritual death, portrayed as the stopping of all movement and sound.
‘A Painful Case’: Death as the Ceasing of all Noises
In ‘A Painful Case’, the last short story of ‘Maturity’, Mr. Duffy is firstly presented through
a careful description of the interior of his house, in a way that makes us think of a symbolic realism,
7
where the exterior setting, or milieu , reflects the protagonist’s inner life. Thus
the lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free of pictures,
but
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a bookcase had been made into an alcove by means of shelves of white wood.
The colour white stands for a symbol of spiritual death throughout Dubliners and possibly, here, of
forced chastity: an alcove is ‘a small area of a room which is formed by one part of a wall being
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built further back than the rest of the wall’. It is, however, a place generally associated with sensual
pleasures, particularly sought during musical entertainments in the XVII and XVIII centuries, when
the main purposes of going to an opera, especially for upper classes, were gossiping, courting and,
sometimes, engaging in adulterous relationships.
Thus, by using the term ‘alcove’ Joyce establishes a link with the main theme of the short story -an
adultery that is never consumed- and successfully associates literature (the bookshelf) and music
(the alcove) as the few pleasures Mr. Duffy allows himself, namely ‘the only dissipations of his
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life’.
We are told that he
abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder
and that
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writing materials was always on his des