Rewriting Joyce's Dubliners for the 21st century : Michèle Forbes' "Clay" and Paul Murray's "A Painful Case"

This article compares two of James Joyce's stories from Dubliners (1914), "Clay" and "A Painful Case," with their rewritings by Michèle Forbes and Paul Murray in Dubliners 100: Fifteen New Stories Inspired by the Original (2014). Besides setting the rewritings in contemporary Dublin, Forbes and Murray change the gender of some characters. While in Joyce's "Clay," the protagonist is an unmarried middle-aged woman, Forbes' version features an overweight single young man. In Murray's "A Painful Case," the gender of the protagonist, James Duffy, stays the same as in Joyce; however, instead of Duffy's close relationship with a married woman, the story focuses on his friendship with a monk who is revealed to be a closeted gay. In turn, Forbes' and Murray's rewritings update the portrayal of diverse members of Irish society – solitary women and men of various ages, while including more explicitly than Joyce those of homosexual orientation.