Eroding Structural Borders in Dubliners: The Figure of Woman as Unifying Pattern

My purpose in this essay is to demonstrate that a persistent pattern emerges in Dubliners. It involves woman figures of symbolic importance to the other characters and to the portrayal of Dublin. The pattern manifested by the woman figures appears in women who play either one of two by now familiar roles, the temptress or the virgin. These figures embody the polarity between the harsh realities of physical existence and an ideal spiritual existence. They are central to the confrontation of the ideal with the real in the stories of Dubliners, a confrontation that establishes the discrepancy between romance and reality and the related theme of disillusionment. This pattern makes a major contribution to the unity of Dubliners, not only making the collection of short stories an integrated whole, but also challenging the structural borders of the short story genre. Studying Dubliners by focusing on this pattern and the relationship of the woman figure to the epiphanic structure of the book opens the text up to new questions and rereadings of the stories, individually and collectively, as an unified whole.