When his mother arrives and she realises her husband may be dead her worries are mainly financial such as “would she be able to manage on the little pension” but she even worries of “how tiresome would he be to nurse” if he was still alive. This highlights her negative fixation of him in her mind. This reaction contrasts to the mother’s who cries and says that he was a “good lad”, “a happy lad at home” and questions why he became “such a trouble”. The mother feels that she knew her son well and she can only bear to look at him in a positive way, however her image of him is just as false as Elizabeth’s.
When it is found that the husband is dead the mother reacts by “folding her arms, crying” yet Elizabeth just comforts her and tells her “don’t waken th’ children”. Despite this the mother believes she is their to assist as shown previously when she describes to Elizabeth that she came down to help due to “what’ll ‘appen” is “that poor blessed child” gets told of her husband’s death all “of a sudden”. Chrysanthemums are then referred to with the smell this time described as “deathly”. When the body is bought in to the parlour one of the men knocks over a vase of chrysanthemums, which is again symbolic of the death.
While the mother is weeping over her son’s body Elizabeth tries to “get some connection” but she cannot, showing why in the wake of her husband’s death she just worries about practical things such as where he will be laid. She feels that she “must wash him” but this sparks jealousy in the mother. Elizabeth is seen many times cleaning and tidying such as when her son is dropping chrysanthemums and when a vase of chrysanthemums is knocked onto the floor. This is symbolic of her inability to look beyond face value at her husband, until the end of the story. The mother however doesn’t feel she needs to look further than face value as to him he is still a child with “the heartiest laugh”. She even compares him with a “twelvemonth baby” and repeatedly calls him a “lamb”.
When Elizabeth does look closely at him she realises her lack of emotion is due to him being “utterly alien to her”. For this she feels guilty as portrayed by the metaphors “In her womb was ice of fear” and “the fact was too deadly”. She questions herself, “Who am I?” and “What wrong have I done?”, as she tries to find an explanation as to why she had chosen to take a path in her life which she is still “unfamiliar” with. She knows that he was the father of her children but feels ashamed for not trying to see him for anything more. She realises this and been “her life” and “his life” yet it was meaningless in that they were so apart. She then feels that her only definite connection to him as there father of her children is false as the “children belonged to life” and he “had nothing to do with them”. She knows that she is a mother but cannot see herself as a wife. Being parents however still failed to “unite them” as they both had built up roles for themselves which were separate.
Her thoughts are then broken up by the mother but as soon as she begins to clothe him she feels guilt for having to act as if she was important in his life when mentally they were so distant from each other.
After clothing him she tidies the kitchen, again symbolising her false images of her husband and also herself.
James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” begins with a very symbolic setting, for example Chapelizod is a pun on Chapel d’Isevlt- a tragic love story. Another indication to how the story will evolve is the reference to Wordsworth who wrote about solitude and Hauptmann’s Michael Krammer, a play about somebody driven to suicide, also showing the dark nature of “A Painful Case”. The items in James Duffy’s house are all simple items and the rooms are undecorated which ties in with his wish to live in Chapelizod rather than the suburbs that he finds “mean, modern and pretentious”.
James Duffy’s life is described as very repetitive for “he had been for many years working as a cashier of a private bank” and his lunch is
always “a bottle of lager and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits”. His resentment of the modern world restricts him from doing more spontaneous things, yet it is implied later on that he himself is fairly young. He has no “companions” or “friends” as he feels that he wants to be alone.
After he has met Mrs Sinico a few times he finds “courage to make an appointment”. The description shows that despite this, James Duffy is making a conscious effort to act within his limits. This is suggested by words such as “appointment” and the fact that they met “always in the evening”. However it is still an “adventure” for him as the two probably have not “shared” their ideas in the past due to Duffy’s obsession on being alone and Mrs Sinico having a husband who is rarely around. They seem so distant that he thinks “his daughter’s hand” is “in question” due to James Duffy’s visits.
The visits to the cottages are useful to James as they provide something different for him and wear away the “rough edges of his character” but they still do not go too far for him. This changes however when Mrs Sinico “passionately” presses his hand to her cheek. Now she had crossed the line in his mind. He sees her only one more time as he is not willing to change his ways, as nothing in his life is without a pattern.
As four years pass he is still in his routine of going into the city “by tram” and returning on foot. After he has first read the article in his paper his breath is described as “issuing irregularly, almost with a sighing sound”. It is the first time that something related to him is described as irregular, which is symbolic of the change of thoughts in his head that the article will give him.
The description of the death of Mrs Sinico is also very symbolic. The driver of the train shares James Duffy’s Christian name, symbolic of the suggestion that Duffy may be partly responsible due to him rejecting her four years ago. Acording to the report Emily Sinico died due to “attempting to cross the lines”. Metaphorically, this is what she did in James Duffy’s mind when she put his hand to her cheek. The Death is believed to have been caused due to “sudden failure of the heart”, again symbolic to the idea that she was heartbroken. Mrs Sinico had been in a “habit” of crossing the lines late at night just as she was in the habit of meeting James Duffy in the evenings, which is another connection between when she crossed the line in Duffy’s head and the crossing the line which lead to her death. Her husband believes that they “were happily” married but he had been abroad a lot of the time, so they may have had a similar relationship to Elizabeth and her husband in “Odour of Chrysanthemums”.
At first James Duffy is “revolted” at her death and felt she had “degraded herself” and degraded him. This reaction may have been similar to after Mrs Sinico tried to become more intimate with Duffy. His thoughts then change as he looks back over their time spent together. He tries to understand “how lonely her life must have been”, as he begins to look deeper at the situation. He then becomes guiltier. He is very self-centred and naturally believes it was his entire fault and that he had “sentenced her to death”. Despite this for all he knows her death could have been caused by any reason. This fills him with shame and leads him to look at himself as an “outcast from life’s feast”. Pathetic fallacy is used as he stands in the “darkness” feeling “alone”. He realises that he barely exists to anybody else making him feel sorry for himself. However the feeling that he is alone is what he has always chosen over companionship.
The two stories are similar in that they both use death to provoke issues of consciousness. Both James Duffy and Elizabeth Bates change the way that they see themselves at the end of the stories. They have both built up false images of who they are which are altered due to there perception of another character changing. The differences are that Elizabeth’s false relationship is built up due to her and husband trying to do what is perceived to be normal in marrying and having children while James Duffy and Mrs Sinico build up their images of each other while they are in a relationship outside of a marriage. The stories are in many ways typical modernist stories as they revolve around a central character, and the story looks within their minds. They are both effective not due to their plots but their symbolism and the way they look into the mind of the main charachter.
