“Clay” is a realist short story in Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners. Realism as a literary genre began as a reaction to romanticism, specifically to the ways that romantic literature told rosy stories of heroic adventures and never-ending love. According to realist writers, this was not how life actually was, and literature should reflect life as it really is. In “Clay,” for example, Joyce depicts the realistic conditions of living and working in an Irish laundry boarding-house as well as the reality that older unmarried women in early 20th century Ireland did not have many prospects when it came to romantic love or financial security.
In addition to being a realist story, “Clay” is also a modernist one. Modernism emerged in the early 20th century as writers wanted to dive more deeply into depicting the particular form of alienation that they were seeing (and themselves experiencing) during industrialization, global imperialism, and world wars. Joyce is particularly focused in this story on capturing the estrangement and paralysis that Irish people experienced during the economic downturn in their country caused by English colonialism.
Maria is a classic modernist protagonist in that she is both financially impoverished and also emotionally disconnected from not only the people around her but also herself. Over the course of the story, readers witness her navigate near-constant mocking and harassment from the people with whom she interacts (the women she lives with, the cake shop employee, a drunk elderly man on the tram, the children at the Donnellys’ Hallow Eve party, etc.) and yet she is constantly smiling, laughing, and going along with whatever they say or do. The narration even frames these moments as “merry” or enjoyable for Maria, when readers can see that she is clearly perturbed. Given the inclusion of this story in a collection called Dubliners, readers can interpret Maria’s emotional repression as a symptom of the oppression and estrangement Joyce believed Dublin residents experienced more broadly in the years before independence from England.
