Will it snow this Christmas? Most of us – especially those with children in the house – look hopefully for the glittering white to come and throw its blanket over the difficulties of the year so we can look with new eyes through the refracted light at the promise of the crib. We hope the snow will wash us clean so we can start again. We ask so much from the season but we often feel that in the end it has asked too much of us.
In James Joyce’s story “The Dead”, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta arrive at the family Christmas party just as the snow begins to drift outside. Snow gathers in the boots of each guest, to be beaten off at the door. Gabriel does his best to be good to everyone he talks to but somehow everything he says is misinterpreted. A series of snubs and petty cruelties gather on him. Never mind – this year, Gabriel and Gretta will stay at a city hotel after the party and rekindle the passion of their early marriage. He can accept all manner of slights at the family party if the night is to end in sweetness. But when they are finally alone, Gretta is distracted by memories of a boy who loved her many years ago, a delicate boy who died on a cold night like this. Gabriel comes to realise that his wife no longer loves him, that perhaps she could never love him as she did this long-dead boy and that he, and Gretta, and all the old relations at the party will soon be dead themselves, and none of them ever fully satisfied in their lives. The snow begins to fall in an earnest, taping at the hotel window pane. All over Ireland the snow falls on the living and the dead until in Gabriel’s mind there is little to distinguish the one from the other.
