A Mother Study Guide

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children. Although his Catholic family lived comfortably for the beginning of Joyce’s life, when he was around ten, his father lost his job and began drinking heavily. The Joyce family sank into poverty, moving often. But with his father’s connections, Joyce still managed to eventually attend Belvedere College, one of the best Jesuit schools in Dublin. His Catholic education left him torn between his feeling that the Church repressed him and his love for its thinkers, symbols, and tradition of intellectual rigor. Joyce attended University College Dublin, where he studied multiple languages, wrote plays and poetry, and published in Irish literary magazines. After graduation, he moved to Paris to study medicine but soon gave up, occasionally appealing to his family for money to support him despite their poverty. In 1903, he returned home to see his dying mother, but refused her dying wish that he make confession and take communion, a defining event for his novel Ulysses. From 1904 on, Joyce reworked details from his own life into Dubliners, a collection of short stories, and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. But his controversial writing about religion and sex meant that he had a difficult time getting his writing published, and since he was an accomplished tenor and played the guitar and the piano, he nearly became a musician instead of an author. Despite his publishing woes and the obscenity charges that his work faced, Joyce had a major impact on the Modernist movement of the early 20th century. Just two years after the publication of Finnegans Wake, Joyce died in Germany following a surgery on a perforated ulcer.

“A Mother” takes place at the turn of the 20th century in Dublin. During this time, Irish Nationalism, the push for Ireland to fight back against English colonial rule to attain self-governance and economic independence, was growing in influence. The Irish Nationalist movement included political efforts to rebel against English rule—some of them violent. But it also encompassed the Irish Revival: a renewed interest in the Celtic and Gaelic precolonial cultures of Ireland and their languages, literatures, and music. The Kearneys participate in the Nationalist movement by taking advantage of the Irish Revival’s popularity to promote Kathleen’s musical career. The fictional Eire Abu Society also benefits from the Irish Revival: although it ends up a failure, they promote their concert series as a celebration of Irish culture.

“A Mother” is one of the short stories in James Joyce’s collection Dubliners. Mr Holohan, the event planner in “A Mother,” also briefly appears in another story in Dubliners, “Two Gallants.” “Two Gallants” explores similar themes: the characters, Lenehan and Corley, each appear to be products of their circumstances and mostly focused on getting money like Mrs Kearney. But while Mrs Kearney is wealthy and tries to take advantage of Mr Holohan at the same time he tries to take advantage of her, Lenehan and Corley end up swindling a woman out of a gold coin. Overall, both stories examine how the classism in Dublin society keeps the city and its people stagnant and focused on being self-serving. James Joyce’s best known works include novels A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Playwright Samuel Beckett drew on his personal familiarity with Joyce and his Modernist style in his existentialist dramas like Endgame and Waiting for Godot. Later, Irish author Frank McCourt cited Joyce as an influence on his memoir Angela’s Ashes, which deals with social tensions in mid-20th-century Ireland.