ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the problematic nature of nationalist projects. It discusses the story's suggestions in an exploration of the forms in which Irish masculinity was deliberately and prograrnmatically reconstituted by Irish nationalist movements at the moment and of the recalcitrance that the performance of masculinity in popular culture presented to such projects. The chapter explores the "Counterparts" in relation to the gradual and complex emergence of modernity in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland and to the sites of "countermodernity" that seem simultaneously to be engendered. The spare and desolate story, together with many others in Dubliners, is bitterly diagnostic of the paralysis of Irish men in colonial Ireland, which, so often, are counterpointed by drinking. By the 1880s and the 1890s, a new convergence had become possible between the Irish Catholic church, the resurgent nationalist movement, and the cause of temperance.
