Joyce’s writing style in “Clay” is repetitive and circuitous. Joyce uses repetition as a way of highlighting the stagnancy of Maria’s life, as seen in the following passage near the beginning of the story:
In a few minutes the women began to come in by twos and threes, wiping their steaming hands in their petticoats and pulling down the sleeves of their blouses over their red steaming arms. They settled down before their huge mugs which the cook and the dummy filled up with hot tea, already mixed with milk and sugar in huge tin cans.
In this scene, Joyce describes the women at the laundry where Maria works ending their workday and drinking some tea. In the first sentence he uses the repetitive language of “steaming hands” and “steaming arms” and, in the second sentence, repeats the adjective “huge” when describing both the women’s mugs and the tin cans containing their tea. These subtle repetitions are intentional and give the impression of a narrator who is too exhausted or too jaded to think of a variety of words to use. Seeing as the narrator remains close to Maria’s perspective throughout the story, it is easy for readers to understand the narrator’s weary energy as an extension of Maria’s.
In addition to being intentionally repetitive, Joyce’s writing in “Clay” is circuitous, meaning that the narrator doesn’t always say what they mean directly. For example, though the climax of the story is when Maria selects a piece of clay in the blindfold game—and the title of the story is “Clay”—the word “clay” never appears in the story itself. Because Maria cannot accept the fact that she chose clay—given its connotation with death—the narrator also skirts around the issue. In fact, the narrator never even states directly in this moment that Maria didn’t want to accept what she had chosen; they just move onto Maria celebrating her next selection of a prayer book. In this way, the circuitous writing style captures something important about Maria’s own denial about the challenges in her life.
