Exiles (1918) is an autobiographical drama, the only play that James Joyce wrote. It was written while he was penning Ulysses, which was published in 1922.
Exiles is set in the summer of 1912 in Merrion and Ranelagh, suburbs of Dublin, the capital of Ireland.
The protagonist Richard Rowan is a tormented writer. He has a wife Bertha (whom he is not fond of), and an eight-year-old son Archie.
The play begins with the maid Brigid, ‘an elderly woman, lowsized, with irongrey hair’ in conversation with the 27-year-old music teacher Beatrice Justice just before Beatrice enters the writer’s room. Richard has written about Beatrice – does she want to see what he wrote?
Richard is not just at odds with Bertha, but also with his mother – who drove him to exile; his son – ‘a child of sin and shame;’ and the parochial Irish society. He despises the rigid, judgemental conventions and lack of freedom – and left his country to find independence. But, he had to leave his nomadic life to return to Ireland due to his mother’s illness and death. His mother had never forgiven him and he has never forgiven his mother. And his cousin Robert is making amorous advances towards his wife Bertha.
Now Richard feels a great sense of guilt – for leaving his mother, for rejecting Irish society, for wanting freedom, for his love of writing, for the distance from his wife, for his infidelities, for everything really. And yet, he still wants total, absolute personal freedom.
Interestingly Robert, as he is smoking a European cigarette, says, ‘If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European … Some day we shall have to choose between England and Europe.’ This is a novel of the current times.
Joyce’s writing is not dense like his stream-of-conscious literary work, Ulysses. Quite the opposite - the setting of Exiles is mainly indoors, mainly in one room, with few characters, and with such sparse writing. Few words, yet much meaning with so much torment, and so, so much honesty. But at what cost?
The drama is fascinating, in style, content, and character – and a wonderful read.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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