Religion, Guilt, and Sin Theme Analysis

James Joyce was raised a Roman Catholic but left the church as a young man, objecting to Catholicism’s oppression of individuality and the overall effect this had on Irish society. “The Boarding House” offers a scathing critique of religion in Dublin, presenting it as, by turns, a prison (its machinery of guilt and sin trapping Mr. Doran in marriage) and a charade (as demonstrated by the worshippers in the “little circus” in front of the church outside the boarding house). In depicting Christianity as both performative and imprisoning, Joyce suggests that such a debased but socially powerful form of religion is incompatible with human happiness.

Religion is ever-present in “The Boarding House” as a controlling force, though empty of any healing, redemptive, or holy qualities. The sacred bond of marriage—one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church—becomes a highly unsacred battleground. It’s degraded to a legal and economic bargaining tool by Mrs. Mooney’s mercenary machinations to force Mr. Doran to propose as a “reparation” for his sexual sins with Polly. Meanwhile, outside the Protestant church opposite the boarding house, “worshippers, singly or in groups, traversed the little circus before the church, revealing their purpose by their self-contained demeanor no less than by the little volumes in their gloved hands.” Their self-containment, their grip on material and worldly items like bound volumes, and the way they traverse a “circus” all highlight how debased and lacking in transcendence religion has become in this city.

In the case of Mr. Doran, religion is actively harmful, promoting a profound guilt about sin that causes him emotional and physical suffering and forces him into a life he doesn’t want. After telling the priest about his affair with Polly, Mr. Doran’s “recollection of his confession of the night before was a cause of acute pain to him.” He’s left so anxious he can’t shave for shaking, so guilty he’s “almost thankful at being afforded a loophole of reparation”—though that “loophole” is nothing less than being committed for life to a marriage he doesn’t want. Moreover, there’s a suggestion that Mr. Doran (like so many characters in Dubliners) had a more rebellious spirit in his youth, and that this has since been stamped out of him by religious duty—and a suggestion, too, that those days of youthful freedom from religious constraint might turn out to the happiest in his life: “As a young man he had sown his wild oats, of course; he had boasted of his free-thinking and denied the existence of God to his companions in public-houses. But that was all passed and done with … nearly. […] he attended to his religious duties and for nine-tenths of the year lived a regular life.” And now precisely because of his attempts to live a regular, Church-sanctioned life, he feels like a man condemned.

Beyond oppressive and harmful, religion is presented as itself immoral or at least amoral, thus setting the tone for all the manipulation, posturing, and hypocrisy in the boarding house and the city as a whole. During Mr. Doran’s confession, the priest drew out “every ridiculous detail of the affair.” The ridiculousness of the details highlights that knowing them wasn’t necessary to the priest’s task; he might have been acting out some improper interest in sexual matters. Mrs. Mooney, meanwhile, hopes that after “hav[ing] the matter out with Mr. Doran,” she’ll be able to “catch short twelve at Marlborough Street”—that is, go to the shortest Mass available, favored by people recovering from Saturday night. So debased is this religion, Joyce suggests, that it can be squeezed in between life’s manipulations and excesses without a second thought. In Joyce’s Dublin, then, religion is a dangerous of thing: an oppressively powerful governing force with no true morality.