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The Fall of Mr. Duffy:
Paradise Lost and “A Painful Case”
Aimee Wilson
Mr. Duffy faces a choice in James Joyce’s “A Painful Case”: maintain an isolated, mechanized life, or follow his passionate, physical desires in a life that is more connected, spontaneous and sensuous. The path he ultimately chooses – isolation – makes him a character that bears comparison with John Milton’s biblical Adam from Paradise Lost. In effect, James Duffy experiences a reverse fall from grace. In Milton’s version, Adam and Eve’s fall brings them into lustful, carnal desire, whereas the fall of Duffy brings him away from it. The religious connections continue; the train Duffy watches at the end of the story is easily read as phallic, yet this symbol can also be read as the snake in the garden of Eden. Furthermore, both Adam and Duffy are brought to a crossroads by a woman, and it is the woman’s sexuality that forces a decision. In both cases, the decision is between passionate, physical union and religion.
Predictably, critics are quick to draw on the religious symbolism present in the short story. Gerald Doherty maintains that Duffy’s idea of his relationship with Mrs. Sinico “conforms to a medieval Roman Catholic theology” (103), while Mary Lowe-Evans argues that the name of Mrs. Sinico’s daughter, Mary, suggests “conservatism and conformity…Mary cooperated with God’s preordained plan for humankind” (399). Sara Bershtel’s analysis draws a relationship between “A Painful Case” and the story of Genesis. Her argument, however, maintains that Duffy lives in something of an Edenic state. “In Duffy, Joyce presents us with a parodic version of unfallen man,” states Bershtel. “Possessed of an acute sense of moral punctiliousness, Duffy is always correct in his observance of all obligations” (239).
The parallels between “A Painful Case” and Milton’s version of the biblical fall are numerous. The most important of these for the purposes of this argument is the sharp division Milton establishes between love and lustful passion, the former described as pure and the latter sinful (4.736-75). He portrays Adam and Eve’s relationship, to a large extent, as the pure and unsinful kind. We are told that, in Eden,
Love his golden shafts employs; here lights
His constant lamp and waves his purple wings,
Reigns here and revels, not in the bought smile
Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared (4.763-66)
And whenever Adam is tempted to fall into lascivious thinking (8.561-94), God’s messengers are there to “correct” his errors; indeed, the angel Raphael cautions Adam, “[i]n loving thou dost well, in passion not” (8.588).
But Adam’s lust gets the better of him. Once he’s bitten the apple, Adam is overcome with passionate desires, shortly thereafter saying to Eve, “But come; so well refreshed now let us play / As meet is after such delicious fare” (9.1027-8) and leading her into the woods to copulate in sin. So Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve’s fall produces a situation where lust is inherent.
The symbolic apple appears in “A Painful Case” as well, and is once again associated with lust. Yet the apple is anything but a focal point of the short story. Joyce writes, “[o]n lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped – the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or of an overripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten” (90). Bershtel points out that critics seem to have forgotten the apple just as Duffy has done (237). She argues that the apple is symbolic of Duffy’s passion and desire, and its past-prime state “suggests that Duffy’s autumnal encounter with Mrs. Sinico is, if not necessarily doomed, then certainly the very last occasion before vitality unenjoyed turns to rottenness and corruption (238). But whereas Bershtel argues that this forgotten apple is never eaten, signifying that Duffy never “falls,” we could just as easily assume that that apple’s eating is long-overdue, and is only waiting for a reminder.
Mrs. Sinico serves as that reminder. What Duffy feels for Mrs. Sinico is decidedly lustful. She brings Duffy out of his routine and arouses him both mentally and physically. Upon meeting her Duffy notes her “bosom of certain fulness” (92) and that her eyes are marked by a “deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris” (91). The later comparison of her companionship to “the warm soil about an exotic” is similarly sexually suggestive. When Duffy thinks of Mrs. Sinico after her death, he is haunted by her touch and her voice in his ear (98), thoughts which culminate in a symbolic orgasm (99).
These lustful thoughts force a decision out of Duffy. He must choose between the passion his body is asking for and the isolation his personal religion demands. Though Duffy is described as having “neither companions nor friends, church nor creed” (91), he does believe in the existence of a god and adhere to a certain personal religion. First of all, his daily routine bears all the markings of religious ceremony, and it is kept with a devout regularity. The narrator states, “Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke’s and took his lunch, a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits” (91). The emphasis is on the sameness of every day.
We are told “[h]e allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but as these circumstances never arose his life rolled out evenly” (91). It is important that Duffy allows himself to think of deviant behavior; the word implies a certain leniency or unusual permission, as though such thoughts are against his internal moral code but he permits them anyway. He does not, however, allow himself to define what those circumstances might be so that he doesn’t have to act on them should they arise. He allows himself a little deviancy by permitting himself to think he might do it, but prevents himself from actually doing it by never defining the circumstances under which it might be done.
Furthermore, it becomes manifestly apparent that Duffy believes in a god when, after Mrs. Sinico’s death, he thinks, “Just God, what an end! Evidently [Mrs. Sinico] had been unfit to live” (97). The first part of the statement is not just an expression; the second half shows that he believes in the existence an arbiter, someone to decide who is fit to live and who isn’t. Duffy later claims responsibility for Mrs. Sinico’s death: “Why had [Duffy] withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death?” (98). These questions allow the reader to understand that Duffy believes his decision to turn away from a physical connection with Mrs. Sinico is what made her “unfit to live” in the arbiter’s eyes. Finally, we are told that Duffy “felt his moral nature falling to pieces” (98), implying that there previously existed in Duffy a certain morality.
This moral code of his religion keeps him sealed off and impassionate. Duffy is described as being removed from even himself, living “a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful sideglances” (90). This distance emulates and anticipates his emotional distance from other people. If he is distant from himself, how can he possibly be close to others? Further, we learn that he “lived his spiritual life without any communion with others” (91) and that besides reunions with relatives at Christmas and at funerals, “conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life” (91). These descriptions allow us to understand that Duffy’s religion is intensely personal and not to be shared, a doctrine which is made manifest in his increasingly isolated and ascetic lifestyle.
Yet Duffy sees that there is another option. He begins to understand what his life would be like should he choose to forego his isolation. He allows to develop a connection with Mrs. Sinico, saying that the union “wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life” (93). Even still, he continues to struggle against his religious code (we are told “he heard the strange impersonal voice, which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness” (93)), and ends the relationship rather forcefully and unsympathetically as soon as Mrs. Sinico attempts a physical connection. Duffy turns instead to an increasingly isolated life, where volumes of Nietzche have taken their place on his bookshelves and in which he writes “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse” (94), as though he has to remind himself why he is maintaining this isolation and swearing off passion.
Duffy’s fall begins four years after the breakup scene when he reads about Mrs. Sinico’s death. He is jarred out of his usual routine, failing to finish his meal, going to his apartment and leaving again shortly thereafter (a marked departure from his usual routine). He sees a pair of lovers and knows his gaze on them is not wanted, prompting the realization that he is an outcast (cast out) from life’s feast (99), a sentiment that is reiterated three sentences after the first. Bershtel explains: “At the sight of young lovers in the park, he understands the richness he has forfeited, and in this moment of awareness, the revulsion at life he felt in the public-house turns to desire and appreciation” (238). Thus the choice is laid out before him: he must allow for passion in his life and forego the mechanized lifestyle or continue to be an outcast. We understand his decision has been made when he lets the physical sensation caused by the train escape: “He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel [Mrs. Sinico] near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear” (99). Significantly, Duffy, like Milton’s Adam, has choice in this matter. Indeed, the two characters are most analogous at this point. They are both faced with a decision in which physical desire is pitted against religion. Both ultimately choose a path that makes them outcasts, the difference lying in what they are cast out of: Adam is literally thrown out of Eden in order that he might continue to satisfy his lust, whereas Duffy decides to continue suppressing his desires, making him an outcast because he will never experience a passionate, physical union.
Even though Duffy’s fall brings him out of passion in a reverse of the Miltonian fall, it would be a mistake to read his life before the fall as Edenic. In Eden, Adam and Eve are shown to share an intimate union, whereas Duffy jealously guards his world from intrusion. And while Adam and Eve move from love to lust, Duffy does not move from lust to love. His fall is instead from the possibility of passion to nothingness. While Milton might have shown lust as sinful and something to be on guard against, Joyce portrays it in a more positive (if no more pure) light. If for Duffy the choice is between empty routines, or passionate connections, Joyce makes it clear, as I will later show, that passion is the better of the two options.
To understand the significance of Duffy’s decision, we must first come to an understanding of Mrs. Sinico’s role in the situation: she is the Eve to Mr. Duffy’s Adam. Mrs. Sinico, like Eve, faces her temptation and decision chronologically sooner than her male counterpart. Moreover, both women select the option that leads to lust. Mrs. Sinico knowingly attempts to persuade the Adam figure (Duffy) to do something that breaks a pre-established, external, societal moral code (because what she wants is adulterous), just as Eve is aware that persuading Adam to eat the apple breaks God’s code.
The difference between the two women lies in the fact that Eve’s temptation succeeds and Mrs. Sinico doesn’t. Duffy denies Mrs. Sinico’s attempt at passion. His rejection of her (unlike Adam’s reaction to Eve in which he decides that he would rather leave Eden than leave Eve) alters the course of Mrs. Sinico’s life. As Gerald Doherty puts it, “If James Duffy symptomatizes the impairment of identification (basically he disavows it), Emily Sinico symptomatizes the fate of desire, whose prospects of fulfillment are blocked” (100). And that fate is defeat. Once she chose to embrace and express her desire, Mrs. Sinico is at the mercy of Duffy. His refusal leaves her to be overcome by unanswered desires. Significantly, her death is caused by a train, which, in “A Painful Case,” functions most obviously as a symbol of sexuality (“like a worm with a fiery head” (98)). So we are given to understand that Mrs. Sinico’s death is the result of unrequited passion and that Duffy’s acceptance of guilt for that death is justified.
Interestingly, after Mrs. Sinico is “taken” by the train, the train effectually becomes her mouthpiece. We are told:
Beyond the river [Duffy] saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name. (98)
The description is obviously phallic, but its significance within the story is much richer than just that. The train can be read as the snake in Eden’s apple tree (“worm” better allows for phallic symbolism because, unlike snakes, worms tunnel (penetrate) underground, which is dark and moist (vaginal), allowing the train to be both Christian and sexual). Moreover, in Paradise Lost, Satan whispers in Eve’s ear in an attempt to persuade her to eat the apple (4.800), just as the train (as Mrs. Sinico’s representative) reverberates in Duffy’s ears. Finally, both Adam and Duffy are forced to decision by a woman. The train in Joyce’s story works its way through a literal crossroads (Kingsbridge Station is “the terminus of the Great Southern and Western Railroad (98)) as Duffy works his way through a figurative one. Thus the train symbolizes both Satan’s temptation of Eve (as a symbol of the snake) and of Eve’s temptation of Adam (as the mouthpiece of Mrs. Sinico), whereby Duffy is doubly tempted to forego his isolated lifestyle.
After Duffy’s rejection of passion, he allows the presence of Mrs. Sinico to die away. If we finish with the reading of “A Painful Case” as a reverse of the fall in Paradise Lost, Mrs. Sinico’s death then seems like a “what if” scenario – what if Adam didn’t bite? Eve would have been left with permanently unreciprocated passion like Mrs. Sinico, and all would have ended up utterly alone. Thus the repression of passion leads to a fall that is worse than the Biblical one because Duffy and Mrs. Sinico haven’t even got each other in the end.
Works Cited
Bershtel, Sara. “A Note on the Forgotten Apple in James Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case.’” Studies in Short Fiction 16 (1979): 237-40.
Doherty, Gerald. “Upright Man/Fallen Woman: Identification and Desire in James Joyce's ‘A Painful Case.’” Style 35 (2001): 99-110.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Margot Norris. New York: Norton, 2006.
Lowe-Evans, Mary. “Who Killed Mrs. Sinico?” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1995): 395-402.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005.
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