Women in Dubliners

Dubliners most often portrays women as victimized members of society, but in other than four stories in the collection women only appear in small roles as counterparts to their male protagonists. Unfortunately, many of his female characters are bent on the accumulation of money whether its needed for survival or not. These women are portrayed as being both taken advantage of and the ones taking advantage. For example, “Two Gallants” is about a playboy who turns on the charm in order to take advantage of a servant girl and get her to steal a coin from her employer; she is the victim, the weak female. Then you have “The Boarding House,” which features a mother and her daughter who basically setup a man by having the daughter sleep with the man to take advantage of him economically by forcing him to marry. These two stories that appear chronologically in the collection, and both of them deal with one gender setting up the other gender for some sort of financial gain, and sex is the tool in both.