A complementary friendship -: A psychological interpretation of James!Joyce's 'Exiles'

The psychological interpretation of James Joyce's play Exiles has so far focused mainly on the possible homosexual relationship between Richard Rowan and Robert Hand. Reference was thereby made to Freudian models and to autobiographical information of the author. It is remarkable that Freud's theory of the 'Geschadigte Dritte' and the 'Dirnenliebe' were not used in these interpretations. This is about the desire of certain men to be cuckolded by their wives. This model may well be applied to the relationship between the two men concerned, who, after all, need each other in a complementary way. Richard wants to lose his wife Bertha to his friend, the womanizer Robert. Within the male world, the above-mentioned Bertha functions as a sort of object of exchange, a situation that has been strikingly mapped by the psychologist Luce Irigaray.