Little vestiges of the Dubliners story "A Mother"
live on in Ulysses. In addition to Hoppy Holohan, whom two men
mention briefly, Molly Bloom preserves the memory of Kathleen
Kearney, the daughter whose budding career as a piano
accompanist was endangered by her mother's intemperate anger.
Kathleen is now performing as a singer—a negligible one, in
Molly's opinion.
In "A Mother," the tightly wound Mrs. Kearney explodes in
rage at Mr. Holohan because he has reneged on an agreement to
pay Kathleen eight guineas for accompanying the singers in
four upcoming concerts. Her complaint is just, and plenty of
sexism is involved in the way she is treated, but on the other
hand the concert organizers are facing a real financial
disaster, and the Kearney family does not need the money. Mrs.
Keaney has gone to considerable expense to promote the concert
simply because as a prosperous middle-class mother she has
been eager to see her daughter get ahead in life.
Mr. Kearney "ensured for both his daughters a dowry of one
hundred pounds each when they came to the age of twenty-four.
He sent the elder daughter, Kathleen, to a good convent, where
she learned French and music, and afterwards paid her fees at
the Academy"—the Royal Irish Academy of Music. The family
enjoys vacations at the seaside for several weeks every
summer. Mrs. Kearney, "determined to take advantage of her
daughter's name" (Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan took
Dublin by storm in 1902), brings a teacher of Irish to the
house, and introduces her daughter to family friends—"musical
friends or Nationalist friends"—who get together periodically
to gossip and exchange snippets of Irish. "Soon the name of
Miss Kathleen Kearney began to be heard often on people's
lips. People said that she was very clever at music and a very
nice girl and, moreover, that she was a believer in the
language movement. Mrs Kearney was well content at this."
When Mr. Holohan and Mrs. Kearney fall out and she pulls her
daughter out of a concert already in progress, it seems that
the domineering mother may have doomed the prospects of her
"meekly" obedient daughter. But Kathleen's social prominence
and her musical career evidently live on. In "The Dead" Molly
Ivors mentions that Kathleen will be part of a group of Irish
language enthusiasts traveling to the Aran Islands for a month
that summer. Penelope shows that she has advanced from
merely accompanying singers to performing as a vocalist
herself, but it implies that this is the kind of success that
comes to pampered socialites. Molly thinks of "little chits
of missies they have now singing Kathleen Kearney and her
like." Later she thinks with scathing contempt of "Kathleen
Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss
Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking
about politics they know as much about as my backside anything
in the world to make themselves someway interesting Irish
homemade beauties."
In the short story Kathleen exists merely as an adjunct to
her deeply frustrated mother, but Ulysses endows
Kathleen with mediocrity in her own right. The charming little
chit of a Miss chatters on about all things nobly Irish while
singing painfully—one more in the growing catalogue of
dead-end Dubliners.
