“A Mother” is a relatively straightforward and easy-to-read Dubliners selection that provides comic relief before the last two stories in the collection. The concert is literally paralyzed by Mrs. Kearney’s greed until the Committee of the Eire Abu Society finds a replacement for Kathleen. In other words, although this story is light in tone, it nevertheless reiterates Joyce’s main theme of paralysis.
“A Mother” also returns to the theme of corruption. The concerts staged by Holohan (who will reappear as Hoppy Holohan in Ulysses) are patriotic in nature, a celebration of Irish culture. And yet, Mrs. Kearney’s only concern is the money promised to her daughter.
Although the goal of the Society is a renaissance of Irish culture and language, the concert series seems stillborn: “The poor lady sang Killarney in a bodiless gasping voice, with all the old-fashioned mannerisms of intonation and pronunciation which she believed lent elegance to her singing. She looked as if she had been resurrected from an old stage-wardrobe.” Death, introduced in “The Sisters” and reiterated periodically ever since, reappears in “A Mother.”
Lastly, Joyce’s color symbolism (with yellow and brown representing decay and paralysis) returns as well, linking this story with the others preceding it in a fashion that seems genuinely cinematic. Mr. Kearny has a “great brown beard,” for example, and that brownness yields a consistency of appearance with the stories that have come before, as if the same cameraman shot all of them.
