STYLING HOSPITALITY: GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE MOORE IN JAMES JOYCE’S “THE DEAD”

Chapter Summary

It is well-established that the style of Dubliners is influenced by the nineteenth-century French novel, but some of the specific engagements of Joyce’s stories with French fiction remain to be charted. This essay focuses on the theme of hospitality in The Dead, and discusses two cryptic moments of intertextuality in the final scene of the story, in which Joyce draws on Flaubert’s short-story, La Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier, and George Moore’s novel, Vain Fortune. Both of these texts feature self-reflexive narratives in which their authors reflect on their writings as kinds of hospitality. This essay argues that Joyce constructs an artistic hospitality of his own, evident in his style, through a consideration of Flaubert and Moore’s different forms of hospitable engagement with foreign materials in their writing.