Religious Symbolism of "The Boarding House".
"The Boarding House" by James Joyce leaves an impression of being written to emphasize plot, but it is more in-depth than the surface reveals. There have been very few critics who have taken the time to criticize "The Boarding House". One in particular, Bruce A. Rosenberg, found that Joyce composed this story with much religious symbolism. Each character defines a religious figure in such a way that the reader must thoroughly study it to make the discovery.
By reading the story one will see the surface plot: "The Boarding House" is a story about a young man, Bob Doran, who boards at Mrs. Mooney's Boarding House. He is trapped in a scheme by Mrs. Mooney and her daughter, Polly, and is forced to marry Polly, and, although .
"his instinct urged him to remain free," and "he had a notion he was being had" (Joyce, "The Boarding House", Dubliners, 1914), he agreed to marry her "out of concern for conventional morality and fear of losing a lucrative position" (Pattern 2: 225). .
Joyce, himself, once told a person that "he thought of his work as similar to that of the priest in the Mass" and that "he was contributing to the spiritual nourishment of everyday compatriots by changing the bread of everyday circumstance into the Eucharist of art" (Brandabur 31). Joyce made his characters out to be "living and believable" (Rosenberg 45). Joyce uses symbolism in such a way that each detail leads yet to another detail of religious symbolism. It is very difficult, at first, to see that Joyce made his characters out to be symbolic because he is so subtle in doing so. Joyce uses the word reparation five times in a subtle manner. Its connotation is emphasized in such a way as to mean financial or economical matters, but Mrs. Mooney wants Doran to marry her daughter for reparation. Reparation can also be "considered in the context of religious symbolism" (Rosenberg 46).