Community, Isolation, and Gender Theme Analysis

“Grace” begins with Tom Kernan lying bloodied and alone at the bottom of a flight of stairs, having fallen down them during a bout of heavy drinking. Eventually, a kind stranger in a cycling-suit comes to his rescue and helps bring him home, along with Kernan’s friend Jack Power. Beginning from this initial rescue, the story emphasizes the importance of community to support individuals and their particular struggles. However, Mrs. Kernan’s character also draws attention to how communal support often falls along gender lines and does not actually encompass everyone in a community.

Mr. Kernan’s binge-drinking sets up how struggling in isolation isn’t just lonely—it can be downright dangerous. It is heavily implied that Kernan’s drunken fall at the beginning of the story happens because he is alone. When the bar manager asks who he is and if he was alone, a bartender answers that he was with “two gentlemen” who seem to have disappeared and abandoned Kernan. Later in the story, once Kernan is with his friends, they, too, ask him what happened to the men who accompanied him to the bar—to which Kernan can only respond, “I wonder where he did go to.” After Kernan’s accident, a constable enters to investigate the property damage incurred by Kernan’s fall. The only reason why Kernan escapes arrest is because a stranger (the young man in the cycling-suit) offers to help him home—and Power, whom they happen to run into on the way, helps as well. This implies that it is only through the care of his community that Kernan is able to make it home safely and evade jail.

As the story progresses, it becomes even clearer that struggling individuals like Kernan need a community to support them. Most of “Grace” is written in dialogue form—as Kernan, Power, Martin Cunningham, and Mr. M’Coy speak, the men’s voices overlap and respond to one another. The free-flowing dialogue in the story brings the reader into this community of men, making the reader feel included and understand the value of that inclusion and support for Kernan. Following Kernan’s drunken fall, his friends eventually conspire to bring him to a Catholic retreat (with the goal of helping him become a better Catholic and reform his behavior)—and the fact that the men are going as a group rather than sending Kernan alone makes it clear that they want to support him in his self-improvement journey. The retreat itself is also communal in nature: in the church, Kernan only begins to feel comfortable and supported once he realizes how many individuals he recognizes in the pews. It is the community-oriented aspect of worship that carries value for him, not the spiritual side.

However, Kernan’s social circle is highly gendered—only men are included in it, and Kernan’s wife, Mrs. Kernan, is the antithesis of this community. The communal scenes in the story consist entirely of men, who seem to intentionally separate themselves from women and converse only amongst themselves. Moreover, the men never mention a single woman in their long conversation that takes up most of the story, further emphasizing the lack of female representation in their spaces and conversations. Mrs. Kernan functions as the antithesis of Kernan’s all-male community: she finds her life as a wife and mother “unbearable” and is “bounded by her kitchen” for much of life. Furthermore, her own attempts to pull Kernan out of his drinking problem are presented as comically annoying, harsh, and unsuccessful. For instance, when Mrs. Kernan comes into the living room to offer drinks to Kernan’s friends, he asks her, “And have you nothing for me, duckie?,” to which she shoot back “O, you! The back of my hand to you!” To this, Kernan sarcastically replies “Nothing for poor little hubby!” Kernan’s sharp response indicates that he doesn’t take his wife’s refusal to contribute to his alcohol consumption seriously—in fact, given Mrs. Kernan’s dissatisfaction with her marriage, it doesn’t seem like Kernan takes her seriously in any context. Mrs. Kernan’s alienation from Kernan and the other men speaks to the role of gender in community spaces: the community of men supporting Kernan saves him from the dangers of isolation, but is also itself exclusionary, given the story’s lack of women in the story and its negative portrayal of Mrs. Kernan and her unhappiness.

Kernan is relatively successful at improving his outlook on life, despite his fall from grace professionally and his descent into alcohol abuse, but Mrs. Kernan remains seemingly alone by the end of the story. In this way, Kernan and his wife offer contrasting examples of the negative effects of isolation. But while Kernan is able to benefit from community support from his male friends, Mrs. Kernan does not appear to have an equivalent female friend group and so continues to find her “wife’s life irksome” and “unbearable.” Through these parallel examples, the story underscores the importance of close friendships and communities—but also how these support systems can be exclusionary, particularly on the basis of gender.