Post-Colonial Power Structures: Colonization as Depicted Within James Joyce's Dubliners

The actions and beliefs of Farrington in James Joyce's Counterparts can be examined and understood through the theories of Stuart Hall, wherein a subject of colonial rule will appropriate the imposed power structure inherent in a colonizer/colonized dynamic (such as Dublin under British rule). It is important to note, however, Farrington lives in a post-colonial environment. In this way, after a colonizing body leaves, the learned desire for power remains, resulting in an even more indelible and destructive internal colonization. Farrington demonstrates how this internalized self-hatred and desire for power (understood as residual fallout from the discourse of his particular socio-political context) perpetuates and manifests in other physical space-specifically the office, the public house, and the home. This perpetuation proves so dangerous, because Farrington's manipulation of the inherited power hierarchy only serves to reinforce that very system, creating a potentially unbreakable cycle.

The first physical space we are introduced to Farrington is his place of business. The initial adjectives to describe him are "tall and of great bulk" (Joyce 86). Joyce describes him further as a man with "a hanging face...Counterparts can stand as an example, the natural reaction is not to revolt against the power hierarchy. It is to absorb its nuances and reflect it in other situations. Hall echoes this sentiment when he says a colonizing force "had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as 'Other'" (192). In other words, the negative representations of a culture do not indoctrinate and infiltrate only the colonizing body. The colonized learn these imposed traits as well, planting the seeds for later struggle between what they have heard (inferiority to the colonizer) and what they intrinsically feel to be true (equality with the colonizer).