They no longer belonged wholly to their native culture neither could they be a true individual of the newly adopted society. The corollary was that they began to bear a double consciousness which created a fragmented sense of one’s identity. In order to share the colonizers’ ostensible supremacy, these indoctrinated subjects were ready to mimic their colonizers in every aspect of life, regardless of basic differences in their cultural configurations.
James Joyce, modernism, Dubliners, hospitality, Gresham's LawĮuropean colonizers were greatly successful in instilling their viewpoints into the minds of a multitude of native people. The ‘secondary’ quality of the famous Dublin hotel (built by the second, unknown Thomas Gresham) underscores – and ultimately redeems – the theme of secondariness that runs through ‘The Dead’. Questions of value and valuing suggested by Gresham's Law are shown to be more complicated than they initially appear, as they intersect with the various forms of hospitality traced in the story.
Both Gresham's Law and the hotel setting and history enter into and help to shape ‘The Dead’. This sixteenth-century Thomas Gresham was even better known, however, for his eponymous ‘Gresham's Law’. It was founded in 1817 by Thomas Gresham, who began life as a foundling rescued from the steps of London's Royal Exchange and was thereby given the name of the Renaissance statesman who built that exchange. Dublin's Gresham Hotel, where Gabriel and Gretta Conroy end their evening in Joyce's most famous short story, has a fascinating history.
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