The "Other" Women In James Joyce's Dubliners

James Joyce has long been labeled as a misogynist. In Dubliners, he represents many female characters, for which he is accused of representing women as the Other and stereotypes. However, due to the historical limitation of his period, Joyce inevitably represents women as the Other, which is the reality of Irish women at that time. Joyce's purpose is to expose how the women become the Other in patriarchal society. The aim of the paper is to apply de Beauvoir's existentialist feminism to the analysis of Joyce's Dubliners in order to find out Joyce's attitude towards woman. Written in 1905, Dubliners is a realistic work of the "moral history of Ireland." Joyce gives a panoramic and realistic representation of the situation of female characters in society at that time, aiming to tell us it is the social customs as a whole that subordinates women to the Other during their development from childhood to old age. Women are forced to accept their fate as the Other due to their unfavorable condition and inferior status. Men resort to social forces to control women. Surrounded by the hostility from the male world, some women, due to their internalization and immanence submit to the forces and some try to rebel, but with their situation unchanged, they fight but fail. With this observation and understanding of the women's situation at that time, Joyce intends to tell the reader that the so-called "femininity" is the product of patriarchal culture and shows his deep sympathy to the misery of the women. He also denounces the futility and impotence of the patriarchal system which oppresses and suppresses and victimizes women. So Joyce is not a misogynist as many critics labels, for he transcends his sexual identity to see through the surface of women's position as the Other and reveals the truth and reason of women's otherness in patriarchal society. Furthermore, he assumes the female point of view and perceives and represents the inner experience of the women and leads the readers to side with the miserable women and at the same time assume disdainful...