Clay

In “Clay,” Joyce makes use of Maria’s size and her social status to demonstrate how closely these two ideas are connected. Etymologically, stature and status are connected by their identical Latin root word, “stare,” meaning “to stand.” On the one hand, “stature” means one’s physical height when standing. “Status,” on the other hand, means one’s social standing. Throughout the story, Joyce emphasizes Maria’s size while also focusing on her lack of status. Joyce even uses “little” to describe Maria’s room, and the stool she must sit on in the crowded tram. That Maria’s “toes barely [touch] the floor” also contributes to the reader’s understanding of Maria’s stature. She is made to appear childlike and powerless with this image. He suggests that having a low social status diminishes a person to the point that they become overlooked and obsolete, reinforcing the story’s representation of Maria as an analogy for (Joyce’s view of) Ireland.

At the same time, Maria’s social status is determined by her menial job and her lack of a husband. Women in early 20th-century Dublin automatically took on the status of their husbands. Being an unmarried woman carried with it virtually no status at all, and her Catholicism and relative poverty also contribute to her being seen as insignificant.