A Mother

by

James Joyce

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Themes and Colors
Class, Ambition, and Corruption Theme Icon
Irish Nationalism, Colonization, and Failure Theme Icon
Paralysis and Decay Theme Icon
Gender and Power Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Mother, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Class, Ambition, and Corruption

In “A Mother,” Joyce describes Mrs Kearney as an upper-class, educated woman. She attended school at a “high-class” convent, learned skills that made her an attractive prospective wife, and married her husband for financial security rather than romance. But despite her comfortable lifestyle, including regular vacations and good educations and dowries for her daughters, she still feels compelled to climb the social and economic ladder and will take advantage of the people around her to…

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Irish Nationalism, Colonization, and Failure

“A Mother” takes place during the time of the late-19th- and early-20th-century Irish Revival, a movement to uplift Ireland’s precolonial Gaelic and Celtic language and culture. While the Irish Nationalist movement was intended to help the Irish people to resist their English oppressors and celebrate their own culture, the Kearneys only take part in the Irish Nationalist movement to benefit themselves, since the movement is both fashionable and lucrative for them. In addition to the…

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Paralysis and Decay

When he wrote Dubliners, James Joyce believed that the decades of conflict in Ireland, whether between the Irish and their English colonizers, or between Catholics and Protestants, had left the Irish people in a state of “paralysis”: cultural, economic, and political stagnation that led to the decline of Irish society. Many of the characters in “A Mother” seem to be afflicted with some sort of paralysis: Mr Holohan, the inexperienced concert promoter for…

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Gender and Power

In “A Mother,” Mrs Kearney is an ambitious, upper-class, educated woman who mistreats the people of the Eire Abu Society whom she deems beneath her. While she ends up ruining her family’s reputation and her daughter’s music career with her efforts to climb the social ladder, Joyce also includes details about Mrs Kearney that invite the reader to pity her: as a woman, her piano-playing was only seen as useful for its ability to charm…

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