THE GRAMMAR OF DUPLICITY IN JAMES JOYCE’S “THE BOARDING HOUSE”
THE GRAMMAR OF DUPLICITY IN JAMES JOYCE’S “THE BOARDING HOUSE”

Summary/Abstract: Compared with many of the stories in Dubliners, “The Boarding House” has received relatively little attention. This is due perhaps to its apparent “simplicity” when compared with the other stories in the volume. It is, on the surface, an old story, the folktale-like tricking of the naive male by a scheming mother and daughter. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate just how sophisticated the narrative strategy really is, how the “duping” of Bob Doran is best read against/within a series of other duplications, or doublings, or counterparts, and through such a reading to offer an explication of the sexual/textual politics of “The Boarding House.” In order to do this I move from a broad consideration of the story in the context of the volume as a whole to a progressively more particular concern with narrative and language, ending with the grammatical interrogation of one word.

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