Joyce opens the story with Maria at work in a “laundry,” an allusion to a specific type of boarding house for women in Ireland from the 18th to 20th centuries. Joyce goes as far as to have Maria work at a specific laundry in the Dublin community, as seen in the following passage:
After the break-up at home the boys had got her that position in the Dublin by Lamplight laundry, and she liked it. She used to have such a bad opinion of Protestants but now she thought they were very nice people, a little quiet and serious, but still very nice people to live with.
The Dublin by Lamplight laundry was a Protestant-run asylum for sex workers as well as other women (mostly poor and single) who were willing to work at the laundry’s laundromat in exchange for housing and meals. The laundries are best-known today for the labor violations and abuse that often took place inside the establishments.
That Maria lives and works at a laundry makes it clear that she has very little money and few other options. Joyce wrote this story in the early 1900s when single women of any age had limited options for earning an income. Maria earned her money as a nanny (as evidenced by how she raised Alphy and Joe as her own sons) and, even in her older age, continues to work in domestic labor by working at a laundromat and serving tea to the other women who live and work there. It becomes clear over the course of the story that Maria longs for a husband and family of her own and yet, as a single woman of a certain age, it is likely she will grow old and pass away while working at this exploitative job.
At the end of the story, Joyce alludes to “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” an aria from Irish composer Michael William Balfe’s 1843 opera The Bohemian Girl. Joyce includes the entire first verse of the aria in the story as Maria sings it to the Donnellys and their Hallow Eve party guests:
I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls
With vassals and serfs at my side,
And of all who assembled within those walls
That I was the hope and the pride.
I had riches too great to count; could boast
Of a high ancestral name,
But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
That you loved me still the same.
This verse is notable as, in it, the main character in The Bohemian Girl reflects wistfully on the luxuries of her childhood. Since the working-class Maria did not grow up with such riches, in this moment she sings with longing for the life that she wished she’d had, full of “marble halls,” “serfs” waiting on her, and “a high ancestral name.” And—most importantly—for someone who “loved [her] just the same.”
As the narrator notes, rather than singing the second verse of the aria, Maria repeats this one. As Joyce’s 20th century Irish readers would have known, the second verse digs even deeper into the speaker’s longing for her true love. It’s likely that Maria skips this verse because it would be too painful for her to sing of her own deep longing for a romantic partner. This moment, then, highlights Maria’s loneliness and desire for a love that, Joyce implies, she will never know.
