Money, Transaction, and Relationships Theme Analysis

 “Two Gallants” is full of characters talking and thinking about money. Lenehan and Corley, for instance, talk about the foolishness of spending money on women. The narrator of the story also mentions what the two men do to scrape by, their methods for getting other people to pay for things they want, and even how other characters make money. Further, the primary action of the story centers around what Corley is trying to “pull off” with the unnamed maid he is meeting, which it is revealed at the end of “Two Gallants” is to get her to either give him money or steal some for him. Meanwhile, the story makes clear that Lenehan and Corley are both poor though they came from formerly well-to-do families, and that their friends seem to be similarly hard off. This general impoverishment provides more context for the story’s and characters’ constant focus on money—if a person doesn’t have money, they will always be thinking about it. And this constant need for money explains why the characters treat seemingly every social interaction in the story not as an opportunity for connection, but rather as merely transactional, as opportunities to get more than they give. In this way, “Two Gallants” suggests that the financial poverty in Ireland has also resulted in a poverty of social life, in which stability, friendship, and love are both financially and emotionally impossible to achieve.

Both Lenehan and Corley are poor and always talking about, thinking about, and defined by money. Lenehan makes the little money he has through some connection to gambling on horse racing, and his social interactions are largely defined by being ingratiating enough to worm his way into social groups such that he is included in the next ordered round of drinks. The narrator notes that it is only Lenehan’s quick social wit that stops others from thinking of him as a “leech.” But the fact is that he does leech off of other people, and his life is defined by attempts to get money or to get things for free. Similarly, Corley brags about how dumb he used to be when he would spend money on women. Now he prides himself on his ability to get women to buy things for him: cigarettes, cigars, tram tickets. Procuring such gifts—rather than human connection, or love, or even lust—is the main goal of his romantic encounters. The story makes a joke out of this behavior by implying that Corley pronounces his last name in a manner that more closely resembles “Whorely”—and hammers home that Corley’s interactions are entirely transactional.

The lack of money makes a stable life and relationship impossible. While eating a meager meal of peas that he had to think hard about before buying, Lenehan thinks about how he is tired of his “poverty of purse and spirit.” In this line, the story links lack of money to lack of joy. It does not matter if poverty of purse causes poverty of spirit, or vice versa—the point is that Lenehan’s lack of money has made his life unfulfilling and difficult. Moreover, Lenehan longs for a good job––where he could make money––which would allow him to buy a home of his own. Without money, Lenehan can only wander the streets. It’s not just that he has nowhere to go; he can’t even afford to go anywhere, much less to build a stable life or support a family. His poverty makes his dreams impossible to achieve.

The story highlights the destructiveness of purely transactional relationships by keeping hidden whatever it is that Corley is trying to “pull off” with the maid whom he is seeing. The story revolves around Lenehan’s often repeated question: can Corley pull “it” off—without explaining for most of the narrative what “it” is. At first, readers might be inclined to believe that Corley is trying to get the woman to marry him. But Corley’s disreputable nature quickly makes that seem unlikely, and instead suggests that Corley is trying to convince the woman to have sex with him. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Corley has likely already had sex with the maid—he comments on his unfounded worry that she might get pregnant, while Lenehan’s urgent interest in whether Corley can pull “it” off implies a personal interest beyond a vicarious desire to hear about Corley’s sex life. At the story’s end, the mystery is revealed: Corley’s goal was nothing sexual at all—it was to convince the maid to steal from her employer for him. Through the shifting expectations set up by the story, “Two Gallants” implies that Corley’s transactional goal—to use his relationship with the maid to make money—is even worse than a basic lust for sex.

In “Two Gallants,” romance, sex, human relations, happiness, and pleasure are all exchanged for one, small gold coin. The procurement of the coin seems like a triumph to Corley and Lenehan, but that same small coin after so much mysterious buildup may strike the reader as an anticlimax. Through this juxtaposition, Joyce shows the futility of Lenehan and Corley’s actions. All their planning, joking, and worrying about whether or not it would “come off” has culminated in this rather pathetic financial gain. The maid’s petty theft is the only thing they have to show for all their plans––and it is a hollow victory. In the same way that a stable life is impossible to achieve without money, it’s immediately evident that this small amount of money will not be able to fulfill the men. That they themselves have sacrificed their personal relationships to get it—using the maid and, at times, suspecting each other of betrayal—makes clear the cost of reducing interpersonal connections to transactional, monetary terms.