James Joyce identifies the British Empire and the Irish Catholic Church as the Irish men`s authoritarianism and the spiritual authority in his fiction, particularly in Dubliners. The unnamed boys, sharing the same characteristics of personality, in "The Sisters", "An Encounter", and "Araby" in the novel suffer from the same psychological anxieties caused by the regulation of sexuality, the province of the Irish Catholic Church. They are all forced to suppress their adolescent sexual curiosities and natural sexual desire. Young women like Eveline, Maria, and Mangan`s sister, virginal yet eager for romance, courtship, and marriage, provoked an epidemic of social purity anxieties. Father Flynn`s homosexual desire in "The Sisters" and the old josser`s masturbation in "An Encounter" are the kind of paralysis because it is sex that does not result in procreation. Likewise, Old women like Nannie and Eliza in "The Sisters" are the victims by Irish Catholicism because they have no hope to compensate themselves for their faithful Catholic sacrifice. Irish Catholicism in Joyce`s fiction demands that men and women psychologically castrate themselves by consenting to the Catholic mores and Catholic image of Virgin Mary. As a result, almost all the Irish have no choice but to obey Catholicism`s inescapable dominance and finally become psychologically paralyzed victims. |