Woman and Nation in Joyce’s Ulysses: The

Consequences of Gendered Language in Irish Nationalist

Literature

Melissa Rouse Mount Holyoke College Department of English Advisor: Amy Martin (CST)

1 Acknowledgements

I would like to preface this work with a “thank you” to all of the people who have helped me transform this blank sheet of paper into the colossal piece of writing that it has become. Everyone involved in this process has been central to it, in one way or another, so I will offer my grateful recognition on the basis of temporality, rather than influential ‘value.’ Of course, the first person I need to recognize is my mother, Barrie, for supporting me through the whole process (whether that meant talking me through the hard parts, or dealing with the fact that I haven’t called home in about a month – I don’t get phone service in the library stacks!). Next, I want to thank my father, Gus, for teaching me by example how to work this hard for this long, and somehow, to find a way to love the process. Mr. Naj, my deepest gratitude goes out to you for helping me discover my love of literature, in all shapes and forms. PJ, although you may never see this, thank you for introducing me to Ulysses – my Joycean journey started in Dublin with a pint of Guinness and an impromptu reading of Sweny’s favorite work of art. Quillian, I cannot express to you the depths of my appreciation. Your passion for Joyce was the stepping-stone for my own explorations, and I could not have done it without your inspiration. Amy: you are the one who held my hand through this process (through thick and thin; through sleepless nights; through moments of desperation). Your guidance provided me with the constant reminder that, whether or not I believed it, this process would end, the panic would subdue, and I would look back on it fondly. And last, but certainly not least, my deepest love and appreciation goes out to my family of girls – thank you all for playing with me, working with me, and putting up with me! None of this would have been possible without your love and support.

2 INTRODUCTION:

IRISH NATIONALISM - A HISTORY LINKED TO LITERATURE

In Ulysses, James Joyce engages with an Irish literary tradition in order to expose the misrepresentations embedded within the history of the Irish nation. As he saw it, these inaccuracies have allowed for the perpetuation of Irish colonial occupation in a series of ways, many of which take root in the fact that Irish history, as I will illustrate, has been built upon the conflation of two disparate narratives: that of political history and that of literary representation. However, as theorist Gayatri Spivak asserts, “these two senses of representation,” although related, are “irreducibly discontinuous.”1 Originally, Irish authors used this relationship to their advantage, transforming nationalist literature into a political tool; literature provided a space in which Irish authors could give voice to the struggles of the nation, whether or not they had the political power to incite change. However, by the time Joyce started writing, the history of Irish literature and the history of the Irish nation had become so intertwined that the two seemed inseparable. This relationship proves problematic in the search for colonial liberation, for it embeds political and social inequality within the language of nationalist literature. Thus, the recognition of this discontinuity between literary and historical representation is central to Joyce’s text, and through his

1 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak? McGill University. Web. . P. 70. 3 manipulations of nationalist symbols, he forces a reconsideration of the Irish nationalist tradition.

Linguistic Power and Hegemonic Control

The role of language in the perpetuation of colonial power structures is fundamental to the solidification of hegemonic power relations, for language and literature both “provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in and by words.’”2

To fully understand this, we must look back briefly at the structures of language that work to create this internalization of cultural inequality. In Of

Grammatology, Jacques Derrida expands on the idea that language is not an infallible construction of truth, as we tend to think it is, but rather an interaction between the various linguistic constructs that create the concept of meaning.3

Language, as such, is composed of a series of arbitrary binary relationships between a signifier and a signified that work reciprocally to define one another, based on their conceptual opposition.4 In this scenario, the word “cat,” for example, although disparate from the actual animal, is used to refer to it, and used so often that it is adopted as the norm for identification. This relationship implies, however, that objects are also defined by what they are not; the object “cat” is equally defined by identifying everything else as “not cat.” Each of these

2 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 68.

3 Derrida, Jacques, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

4 IBID.

4 relationships is based on a differentiation between the (defining) subject and the

(passive) object of observation, a relationship that inevitably creates and reinforces certain power dynamics within language itself. Theorist George

Steiner extends this analysis into the social realm by stating that "history,” as an act of language, “is an implement of the ruling caste,"5 for it gives the dominant role of the “self” or “subject” to one culture, while limiting the suppressed culture to the role of the object or ‘Other’ of history.6 By eliminating the objectified culture’s power of self-definition, the historical process creates a new system in which colonized subjects are instead defined by their oppositional relationship to the dominant colonizing power.

When examining the role that language plays in the formation of cultural identity in literature, this relationship becomes further complicated, for “an opposition of metaphysical concepts (e.g. speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the confrontation of two terms, but a hierarchy and the order of a subordination.”7 Thus, the ways in which the nation is represented in literature, and further, the ways in which these fictional images of the nation become incorporated into the history of the country, are implicated in the discourse of colonial control. To fully understand this process, we must examine the differences between political and literary history – a discrepancy that stems from

5 Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. P. 31.

6 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

7 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. P. 21. 5 the relationship between the sign and the referent of the historical speech-act. In this case, the sign can be defined as the composite structure made up of both signifier and signified of language; the referent, on the other hand, is the real- world object to which this sign is referring. In the context of history (as separate from literature), the referent can be seen as a necessary origin of the communicative act – there would be no Charles Parnell in the history of the Irish nation if there were not a real man who this name referenced. The displacement of the referent (marked by a realization that there really was not such a man, and thus, no real referent) within the historical narrative would be marked by a reconsideration of the entire historical trajectory of Irish nationalism. In the realm of literature, however, "a written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning."8 Thus, the actual presence of this referent is inconsequential to the structural stability of the narrative. To discover that there was not, in fact, a

Molly Bloom living in Dublin at the time when Ulysses was written, does not require a reconsideration of her symbolic significance in Irish literature. Thus, literary representation is a system of communication unlimited by a responsibility to reality, and as such, must be separated from the political history of the nation.

Irish Nationalism: A History linked to literature

8 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. P. 9.

6 For the sake of clarity, I will provide an overview of the ways in which

Irish literature has been incorporated into the political history of the nation, beginning with the literary representations of “backward and inferior”9 Irish characters in early colonial literature. This tradition emerged as a reflection of the social and political degradation of the Irish nation brought on by the British occupation; these representations of the "garrulous, boastful, unreliable, hard- drinking, belligerent (though cowardly) and chronically impecunious"10 Irishman came, over time, to be incorporated into the representations of the nation itself.

Through this, Ireland was cast as a political entity whose “buffoonery”11 and incompetence was ‘proof’ of the superiority of British culture, and as such, worked to justify colonial occupation. These degrading literary depictions helped to form an Irish poetic tradition in which, according to Joyce, “injustice and tribulation… is the theme” 12 and the perpetuation of these representations through the Irish literary canon effectively cast the nation as “a country destined by God to be the everlasting caricature of the serious world.”13 However, “nations have their ego, just like individuals,”14 and thus, in retaliation, Irish authors of subsequent

9 Joyce, James. "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 167.

10 Welch, Robert. The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. P.534.

11 Yeats, W.B. “Manifesto for Irish Literary Theatre.” 1897. Cited in: Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P. 5.

12 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [2]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 184.

13 IBID. "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages." P. 168.

14 IBID. P. 154. 7 nationalist movements created an inversion of the stage-Irishman. This

“reactionary nationalism”15 fueled the Irish Literary Revival of the late 1800s – a social, political and artistic movement characterized by its romantic depictions of

Irish folklore and folk characters. This literary tradition aimed at instilling pride in the Irish nation by harking back to a pre-colonial cultural ‘purity’ that had, allegedly, been perverted by the influences of the British Empire. However, as

Joyce points out in his essay on James Clarence Mangan, “the poet who hurls his lightning against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and crueler tyranny,”16 and thus, he argues, these literary retaliations provide a reinforcement, rather than a subversion, of the colonial hierarchy.

The figure of Lady Ireland that emerged from these nationalist literatures offers a representation of the nation that is both reflective of Ireland’s colonial history, as well as indicative of the future of the colonial struggle. This feminization of the nation was by no means a new literary tradition, as its roots can be found in early Irish literatures such as Gaelic folklore and the aisling poetic form. However, with the romantic reconstitutions of old Irish characters in the Literary Revival, this character was given new life. In this tradition, Lady

Ireland takes on many forms, the most prominent of which are the Old Hag,

Mother Ireland and the Young Irish Queen. The reoccurrence of these women throughout Irish literary history created a symbolic association between Woman

15 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. P. 347.

16 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [2]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 185.

8 and Nation that was so embedded within the discourse of national identity that the two entities became nearly synonymous. As Irish poet Eavan Boland states: “so many… Irish poets… have feminized the national and nationalized the feminine that from time to time it has seemed there is no other option.”17 Due to the conflation of literary and political history in the Irish nationalist tradition, this figure of the feminized Irish nation allowed Irish authors to engage with their colonial status; by casting the woman-wronged by personal strife as the nation- wronged by political domination, they were able to call attention to the injustices wrought upon the Irish nation by British colonization. As Maria Tymoczko points out in her book The Irish Ulysses, “these female types [have] become part of the cultural consciousness of the [Irish] nation,”18 and thus, when any image of

“Young Queen or the Old Mother” appears in Irish literature, the character must be examined in light of this relationship.19 The role of Lady Ireland in Irish nationalist literature is important for, as Gayatri Spivak asserts in Deconstructing

Historiography, the feminine works as the perpetual signifier, the consistently

“neglected syntagm of the semiosis of subalternity or insurgency.”20 The feminine was created by patriarchal society as a means of defining that which it was not,

17 Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. P. 144.

18 Maria Tymoczko, The Irish Ulysses. University of California Pres: Berkely, LA, London. 1994. Pp. 106.

19 Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995, pp. 141.

20 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography."The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ed. Donna Landry and Gerald M. MacLean. New York: Routledge, 1996. P. 228. 9 and as such, the feminine is always the Other that is used to reinforce the structures of masculine power. Thus, Lady Ireland can no longer be seen as a simple figure of her country, but also an indication of “the womanhood of her country” (P 194), thus, reinforcing the subjugation of the nation by its masculine oppressors, rather than freeing it from the chains of colonial domination.

At this point in the political and literary history of the nation, James Joyce enters into the conversation of Irish nationalism for, as he points out, “even today, despite her heavy obstacles, Ireland is making her contribution to English art and thought. That the Irish are really the unbalanced, helpless idiots about whom we read in the lead articles of the Standard and the Morning Post is denied”21 by their influence on the literary, and thus political, world. However, Joyce’s literary endeavors are shaped as much in reaction against the romanticized literatures of

Irish nationalism as these works were written against the degrading British depictions of the Irish nation of the previous centuries. As he states in his essay

“Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” “I do not see the purpose of the bitter invectives against the English despoiler, the disdain for the vast Anglo-Saxon civilization, even though it is almost entirely a materialistic civilization, nor the empty boasts that the art of miniature in the ancient Irish books, such as the

“Book of Kells”, the “Yellow Book of Lecan”, the “Book of the Dun Cox”, which date back to a time when England was an uncivilized country.”22 By rejecting the

21 Joyce, James. "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 171.

22 IBID. p. 173.

10 “empty boasts” of previous literary endeavors, Joyce is recognizing that “when the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”23Joyce recognizes the role of “nationality” and “language” as limitations on representation, and thus, he writes Ulysses as a critique on the nationalist traditions that had romanticized them.

Joyce’s Deconstruction of Nationalist Imagery

Joyce engages with the nationalist literary tradition by exposing the limitations imposed on it by the use of Lady Ireland as a symbol of the Irish nation. As he saw it, this feminized symbol had perpetuated the power of the

British colonial system by reinforcing “imperialism’s image as the establisher of the good society [which] is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind.”24 In this tradition, the British Empire was cast as the knight-in-shining-armor, come to protect the fragile Lady Ireland from the unruly and irresponsible people of the Irish nation.25 The Mar. 1870 edition of

Punch magazine offers an image of this relationship in “The Irish Tempest”

[Figure 1]. In this cartoon, the Irish people are represented as an angry Caliban,

23 Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Ed. John Paul. Riquelme. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. P. 179. Henceforth, this text will be cited parenthetically as P.

24 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 94.

25 Nie, Michael De. The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2004. P. 171. 11 denouncing the rights of the stoic Prospero (whose staff identifies him as the Irish

Land Bill that the British government was passing in Ireland at the time), while

Prospero protects the frightened Miranda (Ireland) from the aggressive tirade.

This description of a feminine nation, saved by the gallant British powers, represented a nation indebted to colonialism for its safety. The figure of Lady

Ireland as an Irish nationalist symbol is further complicated by the recognition that these images of Irishness stem from an original mistranslation by British critics and are based on “a very slender knowledge of Welsh and no knowledge of

Irish literature in the original.”26 This image was created and reinforced by “the loud voice that… bids her be silent,”27 and as such, is an indication of the solidification of colonial language into the consciousness of Irish culture. Herein lies the inherent irony of nationalism, for by utilizing colonial imagery in the representation of the Irish nation, it has reappropriated the structures of colonial control into the very language of Irish liberation. Thus, what this image of national womanhood produced, was not the basis of political freedom that nationalist writers had hoped for, but rather a representation of colonial relations that implicates political freedom in the structures of gender inequality. The expansion of this symbolic relationship through time has reinforced a national fiction and, by incorporating it into political history, reinterpreted it as truth.

26 Maria Tymoczko, The Irish Ulysses. University of California Pres: Berkely, LA, London. 1994. P. 89.

27 Joyce, James. Ulysses Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random House, 1986. P. 12. Henceforth, this text will be cited parenthetically as U.

12 Perhaps the most problematic aspect of depicting Lady Ireland as the symbol of the Irish nation is that it implies the existence of a singular, unified nation as its referent – a problematic understanding of the nation, for pre-colonial

Ireland was, in reality, torn with internal conflict, and it was only through the

13 Figure 1 – “The Irish Tempest,” Punch, 19 Mar. 1870.

14 imposition of colonial control that “the ancient enemies [of pre-colonial Irish political factions] made common cause against the English aggression.”28

According to Joyce, the imposition of a strong foreign power against which the populace and political powers had to fight, allowed Ireland to formulate a sense of national identity determined by the geographical limitations of the island as a whole, rather than by the series of competing regions, political forces and social factions that had previously divided it. Thus, the representation of the nation as a single figure is a fictionalization that has been perpetuated through the nationalist literary tradition. As such, these nationalist authors have removed the necessity for a real referent, and in so doing, built a nation upon the idea of something that is not, in fact, present. This cultural misconception finds strength in its ability to validate untruths on the basis of other untruths.

In Ulysses, Joyce confronts the limitations of this nationalist symbol by breaking down the association between Woman and Nation. This is an important step, for Lady Ireland had become “a corrupt image obscuring the real suffering… endured in the history of the nation.”29 By recognizing her as a literary construct, rather than a representation of national reality, Joyce exposes the fact that, like any historical construct, the Lady Ireland tradition is simply a “continuous sign- chain”30 of symbolic association, not an unalterable truth, and as such, “the

28 Joyce, James. "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 161.

29 Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle. Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1996. P. 80.

30 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. P. 5. 15 possibility of action lies in the dynamics of the disruption of this object, the breaking and re-linking of the chain.”31 In order to achieve this, Joyce juxtaposes various images of Lady Ireland in Ulysses to expose the discrepancies between them. This technique, which would be coined later by Jacques Derrida as

“deconstruction,” is marked by its use of “a double gesture, a double science, a double writing – [to] put into practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system… [as a] means of intervening in the field of oppositions.”32 By deconstructing this tradition of representation, he exposes the ways in which the literary figure of Lady Ireland does not correspond to historical realities of the nation; by recognizing that “no metaphor fully replaces what it refers to; the analogy is always partial,”33 Joyce illustrates that, in this symbolic alignment between Woman and Nation, there are certain discontinuities that illuminate the fallibility of this nationalist image. Through his strategic rewritings of Lady Ireland, Joyce is able to create a symbol that provides the basis for its own unraveling - one in which “the queen herself becomes the sign of subversion,”34 rather than a reinforcement of cultural objectification. In so doing, he was able to reestablish the literary history of the nation as separate from the

31 IBID.

32 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. P 21

33 MacGrath, Francis C. Brian Friel's (post)colonial Drama: Language, Illusion, and Politics. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999, p. 189.

34 Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P. 124.

16 lived history of the Irish colonial experience.

Structure of Analysis

The discussion of Lady Ireland that follows is divided into three sections in which I will focus on Joyce’s representation of the Old Hag, Mother Ireland, and the Young Irish Queen, respectively. My thesis is framed this way because there is a temporal component to any tradition, and Joyce’s engagement with this temporality is closely related to the representation of these three figures, as they represent the past, present and future of the Irish nationalist tradition. In this, the

Old Hag represents the history of the Lady Ireland tradition, and the ways in which this history continues to haunt modern nationalist authors such as Joyce; the Mother Ireland chapter focuses on Joyce’s perceptions of this tradition at the time in which he is writing; and the Young Queen will provide both a criticism and a proposal for the ways in which this tradition should be translated into later

Irish literatures.

17 CHAPTER 1: THE OLD HAG AND THE HAUNTING OF HISTORIAL IMAGERY

Old Woman: Some call me the Poor Old Woman, and there are some that call me Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan. Peter: I think I knew someone of that name once. Who was it, I wonder? It must have been someone I knew when I was a boy. No, no, I remember, I heard it in a song. Old Woman: [who is standing in the doorway] They are wondering that there were songs made for me; there have been many songs made for me. I heard one on the wind this morning. [She sings] …

Old Woman: It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are red- cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and bogs and the rushes will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries; many a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born, and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that had red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake; and for all that, they will think they are well paid.

…

Peter: [to Patrick, laying a hand on his arm] did you see an old woman going down the path? Patrick: I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.35

……….

In Ulysses, Joyce engages with the history of Irish nationalist literature through his depictions of the Old Hag. Traditionally, this figure had been used as

35 Yeats, W. B. "Cathleen Ni Houlihan." Modern Irish Drama. Ed. John P. Harrington. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

18 a symbol of patriotic responsibility - arriving at the homes of able-bodied Irish men and calling on them to abandon their families in order to fight for national independence against the British colonial forces. Old Lady Ireland has been a common trope in Irish writing throughout the ages, but the increase of nationalist literature during the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19th century gave her image a new breath of life. This surge in national fervor led to an outpouring of romanticized images, within which the depiction of a feminized nation became so pervasive that many Irish citizens grew up, like the poet Patrick Pearse, believing that “there was actually a woman called Erin, and had Mr. Yeats’ Kathleen Ni

Houlihan been then written and had I seen it I should have taken it not as an allegory but as a representation of a thing that might happen any day in my house.” 36 The internalization of nationalist imagery in the psyche of Ireland solidified the association between Woman and Nation in a new way, creating a tradition of gendered representation in Irish literature for years to come. As

Joyce saw it, however, these romanticized images of the nation “rarely [got] beyond the laying of the foundation stone,”37 and thus, later generations of Irish authors would be forced to contend with the influences of this limited nationalist imagery. In response to this tradition, “the poet’s central effort is to free himself from the unfortunate influence of these idols that corrupt him from without and

36 Pearse, Padraic. "The Spiritual Nation." The Best of Pearse. Ed. Proinsias Mac Aonghusa and Liam O'Reagain. Cork: Mercier, 1967. Pp.152-53.

37 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [2]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 176. 19 within,”38 and the Old Hag of Revival texts, as a manifestation of such an “idol” in Irish literature, proved one of the strongest influences against which Joyce had to write.

W.B. Yeats’ “Cathleen Ni Houlihan” emerged as one of the most influential representations of the “poor old woman”39 in the Irish Literary Revival.

Set in the Irish countryside, Yeats’s play gracefully fused traditional folkloric representations of Old Lady Ireland with the romanticized fanaticism of nationalist fervor, and in so doing, he managed to create a text that epitomized the sentiment of Irish Revival literature. By incorporating and transforming the folkloric character of Cathleen into the stories of modern nationalism, he was working, like many authors of the time, to depict an Ireland that was “the home of an ancient idealism,” rather than a breeding ground for “buffoonery,” 40 as it had been cast in the past. The Home Rule Acts, which were being debated at the time, provided the Irish nation with a beacon of hope in their quest for cultural and political autonomy, and thus, like much of the literature of the time, Yeats’ play was working to avoid the “danger inherent in offending the Irish self image at the moment of their attempt to confront the English rule in Ireland.”41 In response to

38 IBID. P. 185.

39 Yeats, W. B. "Cathleen Ni Houlihan." Modern Irish Drama. Ed. John P. Harrington. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

40 Yeats, W.B. “Manifesto for Irish Literary Theatre.” 1897. From: Grene, Nicholas.The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P. 5.

41 Nolan, Emer. "The Battle of Two Civilizations: Joyce and Decolonization." James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. P. 51.

20 this political atmosphere, the image of Old Lady Ireland was transformed from her previous incarnations as the unfaithful and immoral “wild Irish girl”42 into a valiant old woman, wronged by the strong but illegitimate powers of British imperialism; this was a woman whose “lands [had] been stolen”43 and whose honor had been forgotten, and as such, the literary representations of this Woman- as-Nation became incorporated into the fight for national political autonomy.

These new literary representations of Old Lady Ireland reflected a nation in the same victimized position, a nation which needed to be, and deserved to be fought for, in order to reclaim both the land and culture that had been usurped by British colonial forces.

Yeats creates a world in which the “ancient idealism” of Irish culture

(represented by Cathleen) comes into contact with everyday Irish life (represented by the family), as a means of indicating the ways in which the two are related. By merging the mythical with the common, he tapped into a repository of collective cultural knowledge that had been lost, translated or transformed during colonization, and through this, he reconnects the Irish people with the stories of their past. By writing Cathleen into a new narrative of the Irish nation, Yeats reclaims the folkloric representation of Woman as Nation as an Irish one, and through this, claims space for the Irish nation in the representation of their culture.

42 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan). The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale. Ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

43 Yeats, W. B. "Cathleen Ni Houlihan." Modern Irish Drama. Ed. John P. Harrington. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. 21 This merging of historical collective memory and current political anxiety, however, glorifies individual self-sacrifice and emphasizes the precedence of the nation over the individual. In Yeats’ play, the well-being of the nation is deemed more important than the well-being of the family, and the life of the young man is viewed as a necessary sacrifice for the collective goal of anti-colonial action. As the Irish author George Bernard Shaw states, this sentiment can “lead a man to do something dangerous”44 – an important transformation of patriotic impulse for a nation previously viewed by Joyce as “dependent, and free from dangerous enthusiasms.”45 Through his fusion of the national with the heroic, Yeats was able to create a literature of national optimism – one focused on moving forward, past

British colonial oppression, but which found its strength in the collective identity of a shared Irish past.

The tradition of depicting the nation as a romanticized Lady Ireland works, not only as an impetus for the Irish anti-colonial movement, but also as a limitation to the fulfillment of these goals. This stems from the fact that this character is based on an image of “an original, unreflective wholeness of the people”46 which cannot fully represent the complexity of the Irish nation as a diverse social entity. To fully understand the implications of this tradition for

44 Shaw, George Bernard. From: Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. "Thinking of Her...as...Ireland: : Yeats, Pearse and Heaney." Gender and History in Yeat's Love Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.P. 12.

45 Joyce, James. "The Home Rule Comet." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 212.

46 Nolan, Emer. "The Battle of Two Civilizations: Joyce and Decolonization." James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. P.52.

22 modernist writers such as Joyce, we must first understand that the Ireland of the early twentieth century faced the consequences of recent political failure, particularly in the form of the Home Rule Acts. In response to this political climate, writers of the modernist tradition, such as Joyce, became increasingly unsatisfied with the “political and dramatic claptrap”47 of Revival nationalism, and, as such, turned their attention to the question that would determine the transformation of nationalist literature for the next generation: if political action, such as Home Rule, was unable to achieve the goal of Irish autonomy, what right did these nationalist images have in promising such freedoms? Although the

Literary Revival had done much to build a sense of nationalism within Ireland,

Joyce saw that the images of nationalist pride must be recognized “not as unflattering, but as artificial, or historically and culturally unfounded.”48 They expressed an idea of national cohesion that was insufficient for representing the social and political complexities to which the nation was responding, and out of which it had grown. In these representations of Lady Ireland as a purely Irish character, nationalist authors such as Yeats ignored the diversity of the nation. As

Joyce saw it, the Irish “civilization is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled… In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a

47 Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years. New York: Viking, 1958. P.187.

48 Nolan, Emer. "The Battle of Two Civilizations: Joyce and Decolonization." James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. P. 50. 23 neighboring thread.”49 These simplified representations of the nation were, rather, an attempt to “propel themselves forward… by a certain goal of regression,”50 which, in looking inwards and backwards, failed to express the fluidity and complexity of the nation that had emerged from the intersection of British and

Irish cultures in colonialism. By harking back to pre-colonial traditions, Revival nationalism excluded the more recent history of the nation from its literary representations.

In Ulysses, Joyce revises these gendered representations of the nation by reconstructing the figure of the Old Hag through his representations the old women in the text. The Milkwoman from “Telemachus” provides the most prominent example of this nationalist image, as Joyce uses metonymy, echo and character parallel to reinforce the association between the two. For example,

Joyce’s association of the Milkwoman with the nourishment of the daily milk delivery and the image of “a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs” (U 12), works through transitive interpretation to connect this woman with the Cathleen of earlier literatures, who is traditionally associated with natural emblems of sustenance, such as livestock and agriculture.51 To further solidify this connection, Joyce includes the assertion that this character is part of a literary tradition in which “silk of the kine and poor old woman” were “names

49 Joyce, James. "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 165.

50 Nairn, Tom. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: NLB, 1977. P. 348.

51 Tymoczko, Maria. "Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses: A Survey of the Irish Goddesses." The Irish Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1994. 97-107.

24 given her in old times,” (U 12). These references connect the character of the

Milkwoman to a series of traditional Irish texts, as the phrase “poor old woman” can be found in multiple examples of Old Hag literature, including Yeats’

“Cathleen Ni Houlihan.” “Silk of the kine,” as Gifford points out in Ulysses

Annotated, is a translation of the Irish phrase shioda na mbo, which means, in summation, “Ireland.”52 Through this series of parallels, the milkmaid in

“Telemachus,” although not immediately recognizable as this heroic figure of

Irish folklore, represents a manifestation of a feminized Ireland.

One of the most detrimental aspects of depicting the Nation as Woman in

Irish literature is that it had, through repetition and reiteration, been so deeply embedded in the discourse of national identity, that it had become nearly impossible to escape. The perpetuation of this literary tradition across generations imposed a limitation on the future representations of the nation, for “so many male Irish poets… have feminized the national and nationalized the feminine that from time to time it has seemed there is no other option.”53 In Ulysses, we see this aspect of the nationalist tradition most clearly in yet another manifestation of the

Old Hag: the ghost of Stephen’s mother. The relationship between Stephen and this ghost mirrors that of Hamlet and his father in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as both youths are haunted by the ghosts of their past, to whom they are held prisoner

52 Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1988. P.21.

53 Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. P.144. 25 (emotionally and psychologically) in light of unfulfilled demands and feelings of guilt for their inaction. In the context of Stephen’s haunting, however, this phantom of an old woman exposes Mother Ireland as a relic of a limited literary tradition with which later authors, like Joyce and Stephen, are forced to contend.

Unlike the character of the Milkwoman in “Telemachus,” this old woman is not the honest representation of a contemporary Irish woman, but rather the shadow of a historically imposed tradition of nationalist literature, which has been brought about by English and Irish depictions of a cohesive and feminized Ireland. Joyce transforms this image of Lady Ireland into a skeleton of her previous glory in order to indicate the ways in which, by rallying behind the powerful yet simplified images of Mother Ireland, Irish literature had perpetuated the limiting discourse of

Woman-as-Nation; Lady Ireland, once a beacon of hope, had become a spirit that

“refuses to be exorcised.”54 As Joyce states in his essay on James Clarence

Mangan, the Old Lady Ireland of romantic traditions is “an abject queen to whom, because of the bloody crimes that she has committed and the no less bloody crimes committed against her by the hands of others, madness has come and death is about to come, but who does not wish to believe that she is about to die.”55 The tradition of representing Nation as Woman in the literature of the Irish nation is the “longindying call” (U 210) of a cultural simplification to which the nation was clinging.

54 Schutte, William M. Joyce and Shakespeare; a Study in the Meaning of Ulysses. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. P.109.

55 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [2]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 185.

26 The power of Joyce’s version of this image, however, lies in his manipulation of traditional representations, rather than his reiteration of them, as he uses this figure as the foundation upon which to build his critique of the tradition of a feminized Irish nation. One of the limitations of the Revival tradition is the emphasis it places on the Irish language as an indication of

‘Irishness,’ and Joyce exposes this limitation through his manipulation of the

Milkwoman in Ulysses. The understanding of language as it relates to power is important in the analysis of British colonization in Ireland, for one of the primary ways in which imperial power exerted its control was by effectively eliminating

Irish as a national language and replacing it with English. Due to this historical silencing, the Irish subject of the early twentieth century could no longer be identified by linguistic tradition, for Irish was, at this point, considered a dead or dying language. The romanticization of the language during the Irish Revival, however, had the effect of creating an image of the Irish subject who was, once again, tied to an Irish language. Joyce explores this expectation in “Telemachus” when Haines addresses the Milkwoman in Irish, with the assumption that she will be able to respond. He then undermines this expectation by representing an Old

Hag who doesn’t even recognize the language of her ancestors. Haines’ use of

Gaelic does not help him in his attempts to communicate with this woman, but, on the contrary, works to “[bid] her be silent” (U 12). This moment exposes “the power of nationhood to edit the reality of womanhood” for “once the idea of a nation influences the perception of a woman, then that woman is suddenly and

27 inevitably simplified… She becomes the passive projection of a national idea.” 56

Haines’ belief that this woman will speak Irish is informed by his understanding of Revival representations of Old Lady Ireland, and thus, his inability to take this discrepancy between nationalist figure and Irish woman into consideration indicates the limitations of the representations upon which his assumptions are based. What Haines is searching for is not an updated version of a real Irish woman, but rather, a reinforcement of an obsolete specimen of Irishness that will validate the relationship between Gaelic tradition and modern Irish citizen, and thus, strengthen the image of the Lady Ireland that he has been trained to expect.

By breaking the linguistic connection between the Milkwoman and the Woman- as-Nation, Joyce exposes the limitations of Revival nationalist representation.

The silencing of an Irish character by an English one reflects the broader history of linguistic oppression, in which the colonized subject is unable to speak out against colonial power because she has been estranged from her own traditional language, and is not, subsequently, fully incorporated into the English linguistic tradition. This interaction reflects the damage dome to the Irish language in colonial history, particularly with the replacement of Irish Gaelic by the British colonizers in the nineteenth century. Due to this linguistic displacement, the literary representations have Lady Ireland have been reduced to the “other” of the colonial relationship, in which the Woman-as-Nation is defined, not by what she is, or what she has to say, but rather, by her ability to confirm or

56 Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. P.136.

28 deny the expectations imposed on her by an English-language literary tradition.

This relationship can be transitively applied to an analysis of the relationship between the British powers and the Irish nation, in which Haines’ linguistic dominance, and the power of previous literary representation to inform his expectations for the Milkwoman, mirrors the dominance of the English language over the Irish, and the ways in which this language has limited and informed the expectations of the Irish nation. The silencing of the Milkwoman by Haines reflects the silencing of the Irish Nation through the Anglicization of the Irish language; his expectations for her linguistic aptitude reinforces the dominance of

English-language literatures in the representation of the Irish nation, as well as the dominance of the British Nation over the Irish Nation. Joyce, however, exposes the limitations of a linguistically-determined cultural hierarchy by turning it back onto Haines: the old woman, upon hearing him speak Gaelic, misidentifies Haines as being from the West of Ireland where the language is still spoken. This misappropriation of cultural information illustrates the arbitrary nature of such cultural determinants, and thus, undermines the system of colonial inequality that had been founded upon the original presupposition of British superiority.

Representations of Lady Ireland within the nationalist tradition provide a dangerous impediment in the representation of the Irish nation, for they create a solid, “impalpable imperishable being” (P 196) with which Irish writers must contend. Like Stephen’s fight with the elusive ghost of his mother, the modern

Irish author must fight against the “necessary evils” (U 485) of a literary past that

29 is not fully rooted in the reality of the Irish nation. In his book, Joyce and

Shakespeare: a Study in the Meaning of Ulysses, William Schutte outlines the power of this type of relationship in his discussion of the church in Ireland, in which he states: “the church is strong, paradoxically enough, precisely because it has no concrete foundations. It rests ‘upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood’ (U

205) – foundations which cannot be shaken because they cannot be defined.”57

The same holds true for the representation of Ireland in nationalist literature, for the image of Lady Ireland, as a central theme of Irish literature, has “forced

Stephen” and other modern Irish writers, “to an act of denial”58 of the intricacies and details of Irish life, subjecting them instead to generalizations of Irishness.

The connection between Lady Ireland and the Irish nation is as unsubstantiated as the arbitrary power of religion, yet it gains influence by becoming a “monument” in the discourse of Irish nationalism. As Joyce states in his essay on Mangan, “ the most popular act of grace… is a monument, because it honours the dead while it flatters the living. It has also the supreme advantage of finality, since, to tell the truth, it is the most polite and effective way to assure a lasting oblivion of the deceased.”59 This “finality” is a key component of the power of literary representation, for it indicates the stagnation of an unchangeable image in a literary tradition. The most the modern writer can do is reinterpret and

57 Schutte, William M. Joyce and Shakespeare; a Study in the Meaning of Ulysses. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. P. 91.

58 IBID

59 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [2]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 176.

30 manipulate the image that has been offered them by previous generations, for the dead speak “by metempsychosis” (U 386), and the use of this tradition, “this position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of habit” (U 444). Thus, “like all deeds in the nightmare of history, [this] must stand irrevocable forever… Mrs.

Dedalus in death has obtained power over [Stephen] which she never had in life.”60 As the representation of a literary tradition, rather than a reflection of the living complexities of the nation, the figure of Lady Ireland has taken on a role that can no longer be easily attacked; in these nationalist fictions, “death is the highest form of life” (U 411). The battle of the Irish writer against nationalist imagery is transformed into a battle between the individual writers of the modernist tradition and the monumental figures of nationalist representation. This literary tradition has solidified the arbitrary connection between Woman and

Nation into a form of nationalist ‘truth,’ thus reinforcing the “false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration” (P

287). Although this is not an easily eradicated tradition, Joyce, like Stephen, sees that “the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (he taps his brow) but in here it is I must kill the priest and king” (U 481) – through his writing, he attempts to destabilize the symbolic power of Lady Ireland in order to destabilize the power of nationalist traditions.

Joyce combats these stagnant figures of a feminized Ireland in Ulysses by shattering (both literally and figuratively) the image of the Old Hag. Joyce

60 Schutte, William M. Joyce and Shakespeare; a Study in the Meaning of Ulysses. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. P.108. 31 represents this project, symbolically, in Stephen’s engagement with the ghost of his mother - particularly in the scene at Bella Cohen’s brothel where he shatters the light fixture in an attempt to dissolve the terrifying and reprimanding ghost of his mother that has been following him throughout the day; however, this destructive action is mirrored, in a less literal way, in Joyce’s engagement with the

Milkmaid from “Telemachus.” He deconstructs this literary tradition, in the figure of the Milkmaid, by disassociating the woman from the symbol through manipulation of metaphor; he transforms the image of the Milkwoman into a disenfranchised parody of the romanticized Cathleen of Revival literature. As we have already seen, the Milkwoman has many of the characteristics of the traditional Lady Ireland; however, she still seems to be just an echo of this romantic figure, an incomplete analogy. The version of Cathleen represented by the Milkwoman is not the vibrant mother of the past, but rather a “mother who has starved her children,”61 who carries “the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast” (U 12). Her representation does not conceal a history of Irish hardship through romanticized depiction, but rather, it exposes the suffering brought on by tragedies like the Great Famine. As such, the “rich white milk,” (U 12) with which she is meant to nourish the Irish youth, is “not hers” (U 12) and the breasts from which this nourishment should flow are instead nothing more than “old shrunken paps” (U 12). By connecting the Milkwoman to the Old Hag of Irish

61 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. “Women and the Nation.” Routledge 1995. New York, NY. P. 175

32 folklore, Joyce works to “establish a discourse with the idea of the nation.” 62 This dialogue with national imagery, however, can only come about by “subverting the previous terms of that discourse.”63 Thus, by associating the Milkwoman of

Ulysses with the previous representations of the Old Hag in Irish nationalist literature, and then indicating the inaccuracies of this connection, Joyce critiques this literary tradition.

The disassociation of the Milkwoman in Ulysses from the nationalist image of Lady Ireland, however, is only the first step in Joyce’s attempt to “kill the priest and king” (U 481) for, due to the nature of literary representation, even

Joyce’s depictions of the Milkmaid have the potential to be solidified into a new national symbol. As Emer Nolan states in his book James Joyce and Nationalism,

“[Joyce’s] only crime, so far as his successors were concerned, was to complicate their Oedipal struggle with native traditions, by articulating his own so memorably: now every rebellious son of Mother Ireland had to struggle with the ghost of Stephen Dedalus, along with all the other phantoms of the Irish past.”64

The simple inversion of a metaphor does not, inherently, undermine the power of the symbol, for any new interpretation has the capacity to be reincorporated into later Irish nationalist literatures. As Spivak reminds us, what is needed, rather, is to "suspend (as far as possible) the clamor of his or her own consciousness... so

62 Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995, pp. 148.

63 IBID.

64 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. “Introduction: Modernism and Nationalism” Routledge 1995. New York, NY. P. 15. 33 that the elaboration of the insurgency... does not freeze into an 'object of investigation,' or, worse yet, a model for imitation."65 In order to sustain this dissociation of romantic historical Woman from the lived history of the Irish nation, Joyce undermines the central aspect of femininity: fertility. The metonymical references, in which Cathleen, and Ireland with her, is identified by her “shrunken paps” (U 12) and, later, in “Calypso” as “the grey sunken cunt of the world” (U 50) indicate Joyce’s disinheritance of this nationalist figure. He represents these women in a way that exposes the negative connotations of this national symbol – the haggard hands of the Milkwoman are the weary tools of an exhausted colonial subject, not a valiant image of Irish independence to be reappropriated into the lexicon of colonial domination. Similarly, Joyce refers to the “woman’s unclean loins,” (U 11) which, as Gifford points out, stems from the belief that the vagina is unclean after childbirth; this association makes it clear that the inheritance of this image is itself tainted, undesirable or dirty. By refusing fertility (the primary feature of Irish goddesses) in her depiction, Joyce is robbing the image of Mother Ireland of her potency, and with it, her ability to “confer identity on another person;”66 without her symbolic potency, the image of

Cathleen as an essentialized Irish stereotype can no longer be passed onto future generations.

65 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P.82.

66 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. “Introduction: Modernism and Nationalism” Routledge 1995. New York, NY. P. 173.

34 Joyce also refuses to allow his representations of the Old Hag to achieve the final transformation from hag to queen, which is central to much Revivalist literature, including Yeats’ “Cathleen Ni Houlihan.” This change in the traditional literary representation of Lady Ireland illustrates that the Old Hag in Ulysses is just another old woman, who is not destined for the mythical transformation of her symbolic counterpart. Thus, unlike the Cathleen of Yeats’ play, she should not be garnered with the “buckles and banners”67 of nationalist pride. By incorporating this image into his text, and then undermining her narrative of regeneration, Joyce illustrates the importance of nationalist traditions in the formation of modern nationalist literature (Ulysses included), while simultaneously refusing to perpetuate her romanticization in his own text. In so doing, he relegates history to its proper place in the past, without ignoring the value it has had in the formation of the present. Joyce’s transformation of this nationalist narrative of rejuvenation works as a reminder that, like the ghost of

Stephen’s mother, these images of the past are given power by those who represent them in the present; although modern Irish literature is haunted by the ghost of this feminized nation, the power to change this tradition belongs to the authors of the modern Irish nation.

Joyce’s deconstruction of the Old Hag in Ulysses is completed by his refusal to make her a central figure in his narrative: these images of Old Mother

Ireland are most noticeable by their insignificance. The points at which these

67 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [2]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 185. 35 women appear are brief – the Milkwoman is a minor player in the text with little to no influence in the development of the plot, and the ghost of Stephen’s mother is only given voice through Stephen’s anxieties about her, not by her actual presence. In fact, when looking at a character list of the text, none of these old women (major or minor) are mentioned. This is because they simply are not characters in the traditional sense, but rather effigies of a past that wander in and out, nameless, and without any independent formative power, other than that which is attributed to them by others. This relates closely to what the Irish poet

Eavan Boland calls “the influence of absences,”68 for “a society, a nation, a literary heritage are always in danger of making up their communicable heritage from their visible elements.”69 By removing these images of the heroic Old Hag from the substantive body of the narrative, Joyce is undermining their agency in influencing his text, and thus, their ability to be reincorporated into the nationalist tradition by future generations. His refusal to grant them this power is an important step in the formation of a postcolonial nation for, as Spivak states: "a nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism."70 The romanticized representations of Irish literary history have provided little more than an unrealistic idea of a homogenous

Irish nation, yet Joyce writes the insufficiency of these representations into the

68 Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. P.134.

69 IBID. pp. 146-7.

70 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Postcolonial Criticism. Ed. B. J. Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley. London: Longman, 1997. P.87.

36 very body of his text by focusing on their limitations. In so doing, he is indicating that the literary representation of Woman-as-Nation is an arbitrary and self- sustaining tradition in which “the songs enhanced the images; the images reinforced the songs.”71 His representations of the Old Hag provide a critique of

Irish nationalist literature that exposes it as tradition that relies only on its own past (rather than the grounding of this past in a historical reality or referent) for growth. By moving the image of the Old Hag from the center of his narrative, and creating a text that is still able to support itself through the development of the other characters, Joyce illustrates the erroneous dependence the Irish literary tradition has had on its patterns of representation. These images are instead exposed for what they are: points at which the literary tradition has abandoned its attempts to represent national realities. As such, nationalist literature has become little more than an echo of its own history, passed down from generation to generation. Thus, by reading the absence of this image, we can see that Joyce is shattering the tradition of Lady Ireland and indicating a space in which national representation might be unhindered by the ghosts of its literary past.

The influence of Joyce’s representation lies in the rubble of broken metaphor, for in order to retain their power as a national symbol, these literary representations of the feminized Irish nation must be reinforced by the cultural referent of the Irish nation. However, as Joyce explains in “Ireland, Isle of Saints and Sages,” the “curious character of the modern Irishman” is “compounded of

71 Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. P. 129. 37 the old Celtic stock and the Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman races,” it is not the reflection of a unified Irish race, or even, a predictable “national temperament.”72 The Irish nation is a complicated social entity, in which “the various elements” cannot be accurately represented by a single image. Thus,

Joyce focuses his narrative on the ways in which these nationalist figures of Lady

Ireland oversimplify the Irish nation, in order to express the limitations inherent in the tradition of literary representation within which he is writing.

The adoption of this symbol into the political discourse of Irish nation has built up a nationalist tradition in which "two senses of representation are being run together: representation as 'speaking for', as in politics, and representation as

're-presentation', as in art or philosophy."73 As a literary symbol, however, Lady

Ireland indicates the detriment of this conflation, for in literature, “re- presentation” not only involves the reiteration of a referent, but also, its replacement. Thus, politicized literary images, such as that of Lady Ireland, are an indication of a referential absence74 wherein what is missing is the nation itself.

By juxtaposing the nationalist figures of the Old Hag with the Old Hag characters in Ulysses, Joyce illustrates the ways in which they fail to align, and in so doing, to illustrate that “here and there an individual may, like Leopold Bloom [or the

Milkwoman] retrace a hero’s steps without ever achieving any of the hero’s

72 Joyce, James. "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 162.

73 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 70.

74 IBID.

38 stature.”75 The Irish citizen need not sacrifice his own life for the greater good of the nation in order to be part of the national collective and Irish literature does not need to speak for the entirety of the nation’s history in order to be considered

Irish literature. However, the literary representation of Lady Ireland must be seen for what it is – a metaphor for the national experience, which is incapable of fully representing the complexities of its referent. By exposing the lack of historical referent in the Lady Ireland tradition, Joyce is compromising the integrity of this symbol as a tool of national representation.

The final irony in this process of symbolic disinheritance, however, is that, due to the role that this nationalist imagery has played in the writing of Ulysses, any act of violence upon this tradition is inevitably tied up in the echoes of the same violence in the text itself. Much as Stephen is only able to destroy the image of his mother’s ghost by smashing the lamp in the brothel, Joyce is unable to criticize the use of nationalist imagery without breaking down the legacy upon which his own art is built. Thus, “the greatest problem for an Irish writer… is the inheritance of tradition. A traumatic break in the culture is equated with a rupture in the self.”76 Yet, the act of recognizing the role that the Irish author has played in the creation of this image is crucial to the dissolution of the tradition, and

Ulysses is Joyce’s assertion that “you have spoken of the past and its phantoms.

75 Schutte, William M. Joyce and Shakespeare; a Study in the Meaning of Ulysses. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. P.141.

76 Shields, Kathleen. "Thomas Kinsella: Building New Bridges." Gained in Translation: Language, Poetry, and Identity in Twentieth-century Ireland. Oxford: P. Lang, 2000. P. 93. 39 Why think of them?... I Bous Stepahnoumenous, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life” (U 408). This assertion reminds the reader that he who gives life to these images also has the power to take it away, but not without accepting some degree of damage to their own history. Thus, as Spivak states in

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” “the postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss,”77 and one must embrace this act of self-destruction as a necessary step towards creating a future unhindered by the biases of a literary representation.

CHAPTER 2: THE PARADOX OF MOTHER IRELAND

Mise Eire:

I am Ireland: Great my glory: I am older than the old woman of I who bore Cuchulainn, the brave. Beare. Great my shame: My own children who sold their mother.

77 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P .82.

40 Great my pain: Mór mo náir: My irreconcilable enemy who Mo chlann féin a dhíol a máthair. harrasses me continually... Mise Éire: Great my sorrow: Uaigní mé ná an Chailleach Bhéarra. That crowd, in whom I placed my trust, died.

I am Ireland: I am lonelier than the old woman of Beare.

Mise Éire: Sine mé ná an Chailleach Bhéarra

Mór mo ghlóir: Mé a rug Cú Chulainn cróga. - Pádraic Mac Piarais78

…

78 Pearse, H. Patrick. “I Am Ireland”. The Literary Writings of Patrick Pearse. Ed. Séamas Ó Buachalla. Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1979. P. 35. 41 Literary History of Mother Ireland

The representation of Ireland as the Mother Nation is one of the most prominent traditions in the literatures of Irish nationalism. Unlike the Old Hag, who represents the influences of nationalist history, Mother Ireland reflects the present condition of the Irish nationalist tradition. As a representation of the colonized nation, the literature of this image often represents her, as in Pearse’s poem Mise Eire, as the mother wronged by her sons; a woman characterized by

“shame” or “glory,”79 but rarely by anything in between, and, ultimately, as a woman whose power is derived from her ability to birth kings.80 This portrayal of

Mother Ireland is so central to the discourse of Irish nationalism that even the male Irish heroes are characterized by their relationship to this woman, for “the heroes of Ireland,” as Cormac Gallagher stresses, “are not father figures – where do we find an Irish Moses? – but rather sons and brothers who have been willing to lay down their lives to defend the honor of their mother.”81 Similarly, the depictions of Irish betrayal and dejection are relayed by stories of “the faithless sons who have shamed their mother by vowing allegiance to an English king,”82

79 Pearse, H. Patrick. “I Am Ireland”. The Literary Writings of Patrick Pearse. Ed. Séamas Ó Buachalla. Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1979. P. 35.

80 Tymoczko, Maria. "Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses: A Survey of the Irish Goddesses." The Irish Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1994. P.117.

81 Gallagher, Cormac. "'Ireland, Mother Ireland': An Essay in Psychoanalytic Symbolism." Jacques Lacan in Ireland. Web. .P.12.

82 IBID. P.8.

42 or, in the case of Pearse’s poem, “sold their mother”83 to the incarceration of colonial control. By limiting the power of this woman to “her role as the mother of a sovereign or the founder of a lineage,”84 the voice and value of the mother herself is overshadowed by the power of her masculine progeny - the “homology

[of] colonialism… silences wom[a]n as occupied territory, and lets men speak for

[her].”85 The male-dominated lexicon of hegemonic control solidified both

Mother Ireland, and the Irish nation she represents, into the subservient role of woman, wherein, as Joyce explains, “both babe and parent now glorify their

Maker,” (U 319) or rather, their colonizer, “the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire” (U 319). This relationship between Mother Ireland and the nation’s citizens (as her progeny), calls to mind Bloom’s reflection in Ulysses that “only a mother and a deadborn child ever buried in the one coffin. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible even in the earth. The Irishman’s house is his coffin. Embalming in catacombs, mummies the same idea” (U 90). The

“limbo gloom” of the Irish “babe” reflects the political stasis of the colonized nation and, like the reduction of Nation to Woman in the masculine tradition of literary representation, each new generation of Irish nationalists is “deadborn” into a tradition in which their subservience is already assumed. The mother and

83 Pearse, H. Patrick. “I Am Ireland”. The Literary Writings of Patrick Pearse. Ed. Séamas Ó Buachalla. Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1979. P. 35.

84 Tymoczko, Maria. "Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses: A Survey of the Irish Goddesses." The Irish Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1994. P.117.

85 Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P.138. 43 child of the Irish nation exist by and for each other, making Irish nationalism a closed system of representation.

The relationship between the Irish nation and the figure of Mother Ireland is complicated by the fact that the nationalist literary tradition has incorporated the image of a feminized nation into the political discourse of nationalism. As such, in Ireland, “the sexual crisis is… inescapably political.”86 The political rhetoric used to justify the union of England and Ireland in the early 1800s reinforced this relationship between woman and nation by transforming the image of Mother Ireland from the victim of an “irreconcilable enemy”87 into that of happily married spouse. This manifestation of Lady Ireland is reflected in such literary representations as Lady Morgan’s “The Wild Irish Girl,” in which the untamed Irish Woman-as-Nation falls head-over-heels in love with the civilized

British Man-as-Nation, disregarding the disdain and mistrust of older generations.

In keeping with this tradition, Joyce saw the later proposition of Home Rule, not as a reconciliatory gesture by the English government for the original Act of

Union, but rather, as a series of “partial concessions”88 on behalf of the British powers to subdue the discontent wife of the Irish nation. In his psychoanalytic analysis of the Home Rule acts, Cormac Gallagher notes Ernest Jones’ speculation that “the way to make peace with Ireland, the virgin mother, was to woo her with

86 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. P. 175.

87 Pearse, H. Patrick. “I Am Ireland”. The Literary Writings of Patrick Pearse. Ed. Séamas Ó Buachalla. Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1979. P. 35.

88 Joyce, James. "The Home Rule Comet.” The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 212.

44 the offer of an honorable alliance rather than ravishing her as though she were a harlot.”89 By incorporating matrimonial legitimacy into the colonial relationship, this rhetoric of union reinforced the political alignment of the two nations, and with it, the metaphorical association of Ireland as the Mother/Wife.

Pearse, although initially a staunch supporter of the Home Rule Acts, was one of the leading figures in the fight for Irish political independence. His opposition to Home Rule is powerfully rendered in his poem Mise Eire, wherein he uses the figure of Mother Ireland to speak out against the Anglo-Irish union.

By accentuating the loneliness and betrayal of the Irish Nation, he critiques Home

Rule as a counter-productive political development, and reinstates the nation into her previous place of a mother wronged. However, this regression is a prime example of the ways in which discourses may “circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy,”90 and as such, Pearse’s poem was, ultimately, unable to fully liberate this image from the paradox of the maternal virgin. Despite his concerted efforts to give voice to the sorrows of an

Irish colonial history, Pearse neglected the opportunity to break down the connection between Mother and Nation, thus contributing to, rather than reversing, a trajectory in which “woman [had become] as sexually intangible as the ideal of national independence became politically intangible. Both entered the

89 Gallagher, Cormac. "'Ireland, Mother Ireland': An Essay in Psychoanalytic Symbolism." Jacques Lacan in Ireland. Web. .p.9.

90 Foucault, Michael. History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol I. New York: Random House, 1978. Pp.101-102. 45 unreality of myth. They became aspirations rather than actualities.”91 Thus, the task of liberating the Nation from its representation as Mother, and with it, the

Nation from its colonial objectification, would continue to be a challenge for the writers, like Joyce, who would come after him.

Joyce’s Engagement with the Mother Ireland Tradition

In Ulysses, Joyce both confronts and deconstructs the representation of

Nation as Mother by undermining the nationalist tradition of “splitting

‘femininity’… into three distinct figures” – that of mother, virgin or whore – which had previously “[served] equally well to contain, or manage, the sexual and political threats… [associated] with women.”92 In his engagement with the figure of Mother Ireland, Joyce critiques the tradition of dividing womanhood into these three categories as a limitation to the representation of women in Irish fiction.

Due to the centrality of this image in the Irish nationalist tradition, any woman who does not fall easily into one of these prescribed roles (mother/virgin/whore) threatens the stability of nationalist representation as a symbolic system. Thus, by giving voice to a plethora of female characters who defy these limitations, Joyce is initiating “a revised relationship with the mother,” which will, in turn, “[make] possible a revised relationship with the motherland.”93 The Irish mother in

91 Kearney, Richard. Myth and Motherland. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1984. P.35-6.

92 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. P.171.

93 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. “Women and the Nation.” Routledge 1995. New York, NY. Pp. 176-7.

46 Ulysses is not limited by the traditional expectations for motherly behavior, which have led to the propagation of these female stereotypes, and as such, she forces the reader to recognize the inadequacy of these assumptions.

Traditional nationalist literatures tend to conceal the limitations of this feminized national image through an act of aversion. Joyce illustrates this in A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in Davin’s story about the young, promiscuous pregnant woman who invited him to “come in and stay the night” (P

160) - an offer which he quickly rejected “all in a fever” (P 160). In this scene,

“Davin’s wish to not know and remain ‘pure’” is an indication of “everything

Joyce hated in his countrymen;”94 his choice to turn a blind eye to the reality of this woman’s situation – a situation “reflected in other figures of the peasant women… as a type of her race and his own,” (P 160) – is a reflection of a broader literary tendency to write out those aspects of life that conflict with traditional expectations. Ulysses is Joyce’s “recalcitrance”95 against this intentional ignorance, for it exposes the reader to the version of womanhood that would have been discovered behind the door in Davin’s story. The borderline pornographic nature of much of Ulysses is Joyce’s attempt to “commit fornication in my sight”

(U 322), and to undermine the purity that has been previously associated with this figure of Mother Ireland. As Stephen Deadalus states in A Portrait of the Artist

94 Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P.128.

95 IBID. 47 as a Young Man: “he hoped that by sinning whole-heartedly his race might come in him to the knowledge of herself” (P 293). By writing the sins of the Mother into the body of his text, Joyce forces his readers to open their eyes to the limitations these expectations pose for both Woman and Nation.

The nationalist tradition of depicting Mother Ireland as a desexualized woman proposes an impossible task to the figure of Lady Ireland: to be simultaneously pure and maternal. In his psychoanalytic review of Irish nationalism, Cormac Gallagher quotes Ernest Jones as saying: “the complexes with which an island home tends to become attached are those relating to the ideas of woman, virgin, mother, and womb, all of which fuse in the central complex of the womb of a virgin mother,”96 and in Irish nationalist literature, this fusion has come to represent the nation. Joyce constructs Molly Bloom as the lynchpin of his engagement with this figure of Mother Ireland, and through her, he exposes the contradictions inherent in the representation of the virgin-mother.

Molly, as both mother of Milly and sexually promiscuous female, proposes a category of woman that does not fall exclusively into either category (virgin or mother); her ability to embody both whore and mother undermines traditional expectations imposed on the figure of Mother Ireland. Molly’s attitude towards sex is central to her deconstruction, for not only does she engage in sexual acts, she does so for the simple reason that she enjoys it. Sex, for her, is not simply a

96 Jones, Ernest. From: Gallagher, Cormac. "'Ireland, Mother Ireland': An Essay in Psychoanalytic Symbolism." Jacques Lacan in Ireland. Web. . P. 3.

48 means of reproduction, it is not an obligatory attempt to fulfill her role as the mother of Irish heroes, it also has the potential to be “copulation without population” (U 345). This fact, however, does not undermine her status as a mother, and it does not simply invert the association to reconstitute her as a whore

– in Ulysses, she is able to play both roles. By creating a character in which the concept of the virgin-mother is undermined, Joyce indicates a weakness in the traditional system of nationalist representation.

Many of Molly’s more controversial characteristics are echoes of pre- colonial images of the Celtic mother goddesses, particularly of the goddess Medb of Cruachan, for, like Molly, Medb “was never without [one] man in the shadow of another.”97 Further, Molly’s association with urine and menstrual blood, which we see “pouring out of [her] like the sea” (U 633) in “Penelope,” connects her to

Charles Bowen’s “Great Bladdered Medb”98 whose fúal fola (literally, ‘urine of blood’) fills three lakes at the end of Táin Bó Cúailnge.99 This association with urination connects her to the Celtic river goddesses, such as Aided Derbforgaill, whose urine had the “life-bringing powers and creative fertilization of water.”100

The fact that Molly menstruates every three weeks (indicating extreme potency)

97 O'Rahilly, T. F. "Early Irish History and Mythology." Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1946. P. 138.

98 Tymoczko, Maria. "Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses: A Survey of the Irish Goddesses." The Irish Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1994. P. 119.

99 O'Rahilly, T. F. "Early Irish History and Mythology." Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1946.P. 133.

100 Tymoczko, Maria. "Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses: A Survey of the Irish Goddesses." The Irish Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1994. P.111. 49 creates yet another line of folkloric association, for fertility was one of the

“central figures in Celtic mother goddesses.”101 Like the old milk-woman from

“Telemachus,” these fertility goddesses are often associated with the production of grains and milk, and thus, Molly’s action of feeding Bloom “the bit of seedcake out of [her] mouth” (U 643), as well as her prominent breasts further connects her to the Celtic mother goddess figures.102 Through her association with these women from Celtic myth, Molly is endowed with a quality of timelessness, and her assertion that “each and so on to no last term” (U 602) harks back to the enduring tradition of depicting Ireland as woman.

These folkloric associations in Ulysses connect the text to pre-colonial

Irish culture – a literary technique used by nationalist poets for generations. Like

Pearse’s Mise Eire, which connects Mother Ireland to “the old woman of Beare,”

Joyce’s Molly embodies a literary representation of an Irish culture that precedes and transcends the influences of British colonial powers. By placing the roots of the distorted nationalist figure of Mother Ireland in a pre-colonial past, Joyce is likening her to “an exotic tree which, when rooted in its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in balm but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their quondam vigor while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, acid and inoperative” (U 335). In this, Joyce acknowledges that, although this image began as a fruitful manifestation of nationalist pride, it had

101 IBID

102 IBID 115.

50 been perverted by the influences of colonial society through “the suppression and distortion of early Irish literature in English translations.”103 Nationalist authors have worked for generations to reawaken a sense of autonomous tradition in Irish literature by orienting the figure of Mother Ireland in an Irish past, rather than an

English (or even Anglo-Irish) one. This is an attempt to reconnect with an Irish past, for, as Fanon states in The Wretched of the Earth, colonialism empties a native of a sense of past,104 and in many ways, Joyce’s Molly is a part of this tradition. By tapping into the reservoir of pre-colonial Irish imagery, these authors are hoping to “[occupy] the void hollowed by the sense of lack of a mother tongue”105 and to reinstate a sense of tradition onto a history of cultural alienation.

However, Joyce’s engagement with Mother Ireland is also characterized by an impulse to modernization – an aspect of his representation that manifests in the sexual politics of motherhood discussed in Ulysses. The Holles St. Hospital provides the setting for much of this conversation, as the discussion about birth control and abortion brings the controversial topic of sexuality and motherhood to the forefront of a political discussion. By focusing on “Lilith, patron of abortions” (U 319), infanticide, and the politics of birth control, Joyce is working

103 Tymoczko, Maria. "Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses: A Survey of the Irish Goddesses." The Irish Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1994. P.119.

104 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1965.

105 Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P.120. 51 to remove the sacred nature of motherhood from the scene, and transform it, instead, into a contemporary social issue. In so doing, he relocates the discussion of Mother Ireland into the modern political setting, where the consequences of the dialogue directly (rather than metaphorically) affect the state of the modern nation. This politicization, paired with the demystification of birth, allows the reader to engage directly with the idea of motherhood as a common social role, rather than a literary representation of Nation-as-Woman. The topic of reproductive agency in this episode focuses on the ways in which a woman can take control of her reproductive capacity and, in doing so, disconnects the role of motherhood from its nationalist association with “the perpetuation of the species”

(U 335). With this newfound freedom for sexual self-determination, the Irish mother is freed from her historically imposed obligation to reproduce. She is no longer simply the woman “who bore Cuchulainn, the brave;”106 her relationship to her progeny is but one aspect of her life, and an aspect that she chose. The triumphant and independent depiction of the mother in Ulysses undermines the patriarchal tendency to define woman as an embodiment of “kindness, patience and extreme passivity,”107 thus undermining the dichotomy represented in the alignment of masculine/feminine with powerful/submissive. This dissociation transitively reflects Joyce’s sentiment about the Irish nation, which, like Mina

Purefoy, “has been too long and too persistently denied her legitimate

106 Pearse, H. Patrick. “I Am Ireland”. The Literary Writings of Patrick Pearse. Ed. Séamas Ó Buachalla. Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1979. P. 35.

107 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. P.170.

52 prerogative” (U 334). In Ulysses, Joyce attempts to reinstate power into the woman that is mother, and with her, the woman that is nation.

Paradox and Absence: Joyce’s Divergence from Traditional Nationalist

Representations of Mother Ireland

This transformation of Mother Ireland (from virginal to liberated, from colonial to pre-colonial, or from powerless to powerful) is crucial to the development of Irish post-colonial identity for it undermines the traditional representations of womanhood that have allowed for the continuation of a patriarchal colonial power system. However, the very structure of opposition that this inversion works to undermine carries with it the burden of binary logic, and as such runs the risk of solidifying into a new system of constraints. To combat the simple inversion of binary associations, Joyce imbues the mother figures in his novel with a series of paradoxical and contradictory characteristics; he creates an image of woman that “stimulates two mutually exclusive interpretations, neither of which is untrue, but each of which, standing by itself, is false because it elides the truth of the other.”108 One of these contradictions is Molly’s description as “both earth mother and ‘thirty shilling whore,’”109 which I have already touched upon. In this, Joyce’s representation of Molly, although similar to the nationalist

108 Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P. 126.

109 Tymoczko, Maria. "Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses: A Survey of the Irish Goddesses." The Irish Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1994. P. 114. 53 tradition of connecting the Mother figure to early Irish history, diverges from earlier literatures in an important way: rather than simply reverting to pre-colonial representations of the Mother Goddess, Joyce writes Molly as the embodiment of a modern woman influenced by a Celtic origin. By representing Molly as an amalgamation of cultural influences, Ulysses allows her to “take [her] place fully in a [modern] historical context” while still recognizing that “their characters are informed by mythic patterns.”110 The resexualization of Mother Ireland in Ulysses is a two-fold technique that recognizes a shift in modern attitudes towards sexuality, while simultaneously referencing an Irish heritage, uninfluenced by the petit-bourgeoisie morality of British colonial society. This representation of Lady

Ireland does not simply invert the binary of past and present, but rather, glances backwards in order to “see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness” (U 323). In this sense, “for Joyce, myth was not a way of mythologizing a nation; it was a way of demythologizing it”111 and by exposing the degree to which “the ends and ultimates of all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and originals” (U 322), he is recognizing the importance of these images as an originating source, without limiting the representation of the modern Irish woman to the constraints of traditional expectations.

110 IBID. P. 111.

111 IBID. P. 135.

54 The paradoxical nature of Molly’s character in Ulysses provides an important critique of the image of Mother Ireland, for it creates a figure impervious to comfortable definition. In this figure, “the look of the viewer is doubled, and he too is suspended between desire and identification, attraction and anxiety”112 – a reaction which inhibits the easy reappropriation of Molly as an image of the Mother Nation. Joyce refuses to paint a picture of Mother Ireland that can easily be defined as one thing or another, and in so doing, he is able to intercept her transformation into the ghost of Irish Motherhood represented by the decaying Old Hag. Molly’s paradoxical character, however, leaves the reader wondering what this figure is meant to represent, if not the mother, the goddess or the whore; what is it that Joyce is saying about the representation of the nation through the guise of the indefinable? Christine Von Boheememn provides a piece of this puzzle in her essay “Joyce, Modernity and its Mediation” when she states that “in becoming the ground of the struggle, ‘she’ becomes the sign of divided, irresolvable meaning.”113 The “irresolvable” nature of Joyce’s representation of

Mother Ireland is essential, for it implies that “there is nothing behind this succession of veils, there has never been, and the impulse which is always pressing forward in order to discover this is… not the recognition of lack, but the fascinating vertigo of this nihilating substance.”114 Through this text, Joyce is

112 Foster, Hal. Summarized in:Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P. 139.

113 Boheemen, Christine Van. Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989. P. 208.

114 Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 55 indicating that the Irish woman, and through her, the Irish nation, cannot be simplified into an understandable, homogenous or definable representation. The only way to indicate the nature of the living woman (or the fluctuating composition of the nation) is to indicate the void around which these definitions are structured, and Joyce does so by suspending his figure of the mother nation between the competing forces of paradoxical representation.

Structural Manipulation in “Penelope” as a Deconstructive Tool

In a letter that Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver after the writing of

Ulysses, he told her that “Penelope,” although the last chapter in the book, was not, in fact, the end of it. According to Joyce, “Ithaca” was the concluding segment of the Bloomsday narrative, and “Penelope” was “the clou of the book,”115 which stood on its own, after-the-fact, as a supplement to the text itself.

The word “clou” has various meanings – it can indicate the highlight or a finale of an event, the central idea or event in a text, or, from its original French translation of “nail”, something which drives in, holds together or reinforces an action or object.116 Each of these can be applied to Joyce’s “Penelope” in various ways, but all indicate that this episode of Ulysses is a piece that stands apart from the rest of the text to enhance or to supplement the narrative. The significance of the “clou”

1999. P. 153.

115 Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce. New York: Viking, 1975. P. 287.

116 Definition from: Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P. 141.

56 is complicated by the recognition that, as a “nail,” it can only supplement by forcing a break, or indicating a fracture, in the structure it is meant to reinforce.

As Derrida states in Of Grammatology:

“[i]f it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes- (the)-place. As substitute it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces not relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. Somewhere, something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy. The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself”117

By placing this chapter outside of the body of the narrative, Joyce suggests its position as a surplus of meaning, a “plentitude enriching another plentitude.”118

Thus, “Penelope” provides a new perspective on Ulysses; since it is written in addition to a narrative that is already whole or complete, this chapter indicates an absence in the original ‘wholeness.’ By voicing something that was not present in the text as ‘completed’ before, it simultaneously implies that this ‘wholeness’ is, itself, an illusion - that there was something left out. That something, in Ulysses, is the voice of the woman. By existing outside of the text, “Penelope” points to the fact that this female voice is missing within the original body of the

Bloomsday narrative. Similarly, the transposition of this definition onto the analysis of Mother Ireland indicates that this figure of Lady Ireland functions as a

“clou” to the nationalist literary tradition; Mother Ireland is a symbol of the Irish

117 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. P. 145.

118 Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P. 133. 57 nation that implies an original lack in the tradition. In the history of colonial literature, this lack is the voice of the Irish nation.

The gravity of this exclusion can be understood by analyzing the role that

Molly plays in the development of the narrative in Ulysses (of which she is not actually a part), as Bloom’s ruminations and anxieties about what she is doing while he is away are the inspiration for many of his actions throughout the day.

However, when one reads into this powerful figure of Molly through the lens of the narrative (“Penelope” excluded), all of these reactions to her actions

(primarily focused around Bloom’s anxiety about her affair with Boylan) and representations of her person (seen in his eager sharing of her photograph throughout the day) lead to a recognition that the flesh-and-blood woman is nowhere to be found. This fact begs the question: “who is it that is motivating these moments?” Without the supplement of “Penelope,” this question leads to nowhere, to an absence. However, by adding the voice of Molly to the text

(connected to, but separate from it), the supplemental nature of this chapter compromises the integrity of the masculine narrative by indicating the absence around which it is centered.

This analysis can be used in the discussion of the literary representation of the nation as well. Much as Molly is only represented within the patriarchal lexicon of Bloom’s imagination, according to Joyce, Ireland “entered the British domain without forming an integral part of it. She… abandoned her own language almost entirely and accepted the language of the conqueror without being able to

58 assimilate the culture or adapt herself to the mentality of which this language is the vehicle.”119 The representation of the nation, as a product of this language, is an indication of a British “mentality” within Irish culture. Although many nationalist writers tried to escape this mentality by reverting to figures from pre- colonial Irish folklore, Joyce differs from them in an important way: he does not assume the success of this literary retrospection, as it is still implicated in the language of colonial control. For him, the voice of Irish culture can only be found by examining what the Anglicized representations of Ireland have excluded. Like the voice of woman in Ulysses, an understanding of the Irish nation can only be achieved by acknowledging its actual absence from the literary history.

This problem in the tradition of nationalist representation is reflected in

Bloom’s habit of showing off the picture of Molly that he carries with him. This posed shot of Molly is, much like the Revival depictions of Mother Ireland or the

“pompous and hypocritical literature”120 of the British nation, a static representation of that which it illustrates. The relationship between Molly and her photograph mirrors the relationship between the Irish nation and the literary representations of Lady Ireland, and both relationships are complicated by the recognition that "the potential presence of the referent at the moment it is designated does not modify in the slightest the structure of the mark, which

119 Joyce, James. "The Home Rule Comet." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 213.

120 IBID. P. 212. 59 implies that the mark can do without the referent."121 Not only does Molly not need to be present for her picture to be shared, but the fact that it is shown implies that she is not there; the power of the image is not dependent on the presence of what it represents, on the contrary, its significance is greater when the referent is missing. The absence of a referent in Irish nationalist literature, however, points to a larger issue: the Irish ‘nation,’ as signified by Lady Ireland, is not, in fact, the cohesive social unit that nationalist literatures depict. It is, rather, a complicated social and political organism that has been simplified through literary representation. By drawing this parallel, Joyce exposes Lady Ireland as an image of the nation whose symbolic power is enhanced by the absence of representable national ‘truth.’

Through his use of the supplement, Joyce provides a suggestion (although certainly not a solution) for how to recognize the trace122 of the Irish voice in

Ulysses, and, in this process, to defer the solidification of Molly into yet another image of Lady Ireland. Joyce uses the circular syntactical structure of “Penelope”

- which “has no beginning, middle or end,”123 and is, instead, guided by the cyclical usage of “the female word yes”124 – as a means of confronting the stagnation of previous literary depictions of the Mother Nation. The circular

121 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. P. 10.

122 According to Derrida the "trace” of a presence is that which is implied by the absence, or silence of a text, brought on by the “difference” of meaning. Cited from: Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988.

123 Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce. New York: Viking, 1975. P. 314.

124 IBID. P. 285.

60 nature of this chapter is essential for Joyce’s deconstruction of the nationalist tradition, for it mimics the “natural cycles of growth and decay”125 that are the demarcations of a living system. Thus, unlike the stagnant images of the Old Hag discussed in the previous chapter, Mother Ireland, through the guise of Molly, is still a part of a living system of representation and deconstruction, and as such, is unhindered by fossilization and decay. This fluidity of identity brings to mind

Spivak’s assertion that, in the attempt to make space for the subaltern voice in the world of representation to which they are subject, “a persistent critique is needed.”126 This process of deconstruction works to defer the solidification of image into icon, and thus, allows the figures within it the freedom to take on new forms. Through Molly, Mother Ireland is recast as an Irish literary figure with the potential to change, unhindered by the ties of representational responsibility, expectation and limitation that had guided nationalist imagery in the past.

On a structural level, Joyce’s use of circularity in this section provides a vehicle for criticism, for a circle is constructed by a series of opposing points, which, collectively, make up a single unit of reference. Most importantly, however, in this formation, the units of opposition, such as that of beginning and ending, become indistinguishable from one another. Further, in its completed form, the circle is an object constructed around an empty space, bringing us back

125 Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. P. 179.

126 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 66. 61 to the concept of the supplement as that which indicates an absence or a lack. By providing a conclusion that, through its circular syntactical structure, indicates an absence, Ulysses leaves the reader little choice but to return to the beginning in order to attempt, once again, to decipher the code of the text - to insert what was previously absent into the narrative, and/or to recognize the space demarcated by the absence around which the binary of representation is constructed.

Applying Ulysses to the Nationalist Tradition

This circular pattern of conclusion and recommencement, destruction and recreation, echoes Joyce’s assertion that “time’s ruins build eternities mansions… in woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the “postcreation” (U

320). This statement indicates the ways in which each literary tradition has solidified its own version of national ‘truth’ by breaking down or inverting the representations that came before it (much as the Revival tradition cast its image of the noble Mother Ireland as the opposite of earlier depictions of the Irish Virgin-

Mother) – these are “time’s ruins.” Yet, the amalgamation of representational patterns within and across these traditions has worked to solidify an enduring figure of Mother Ireland within the broader tradition of national representation – she is one example of “eternities mansions.” Thus, although, like all life, these metaphors of nationhood originate from an interpretation of the lived experience of the nation, the solidification and simplification of the diversity that comprises

62 the political and geographical Irish nation has, with time, become a system of representation that the Irish literary tradition has to contend with – she is now “the word that shall not pass away.” As such, the “postcreation” of life through its literary iteration is both part of what Joyce is working with and partly what he is working against; by exposing his art as just that (art, not life or ‘truth’), he is forcing a reconsideration of the sense of finality and conclusion within enduring nationalist traditions such as Mother Ireland. For Joyce, the “postcreation” of meaning is found in the transformation of the “word,” or the image, through retrospective alterations, and as such, it also implies the analysis and deconstruction of future literary representations. The continuous reassessment of the sign leads one to repeatedly seek out that which is not there, to divine meaning from silence, and to seek a referent which never existed – a process that, although destined to be fruitless, has the ultimate effect of deferring the solidification of national image into lifeless specter and keeping the figure of Mother Ireland open for reinterpretation.

63 CHAPTER 3: SILENCE, ABSENCE AND CONTRADICTION IN JOYCE’S YOUNG IRISH QUEEN

Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan:

Long they pine in weary woe - the nobles of our land - Long they wander to and fro, proscribed, alas! and banned; Feastless, houseless, altarless, they bear the exile's brand, But their hope is in the coming-to of Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.

Think not her a ghastly hag, too hideous to be seen; Call her not unseemly names, our matchless Kathaleen; Young she is, and fair she is, and would be crowned a qeeen, Were the king's son at home here with Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.

64 Sweet and mild would look her face - Oh! none so sweet and mild - Could she crush the foes by whom her beauty is reviled; Woolen plaids would grace herself and robes of silk her child, If the king's son were living here with Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.

Sore disgrace it is to see the Arbitress of thrones Vassal to a Saxoneen of cold and hapless bones! Bitter anguish wrings our souls - with heavy sighs and groans We wait the Young Deliverer of Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.

Let us pray to Him who holds life's issues in His hands, Him who formed the mighty globe, with all his thousand lands; Girding them with sea and mountains, rivers deep, and strands, To cast a look of pity upon Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.

He, who over sands and waves led Israel along - He who fed, with heavenly bread, that chosen tribe and throng; He who stood by Moses when his foes were fierce and strong, May He show forth His might in saving Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.

- James Clarence Mangan127

…

The last manifestation of Lady Ireland that I will focus on in this analysis is the Young Irish Queen – a figure used in Irish literature to represent the nationalist dream of a post-colonial future. In traditional representations, this

Young Woman is most recognizable by her innocence and her flawless beauty, and she often appears in the wake of the Old Hag, as a beacon of hope and a promise of success for the Irish nation in its fight for political autonomy. Her

127 Mangan, James Clarence. “Kathleen Ny-Houlihan.” Poems of James Clarence Mangan: (Many Hitherto Uncollected). Ed. D. J. O'Donoghue. Dublin: O'Donoghue, 1903. P. 16. 65 youth is one of regeneration – she is, in effect, the phoenix rising from the flames of colonial subjugation, as she promises freedom and purity for the Irish nation after the perverting forces of British imperialism have been overcome. As an embodiment of nationalist desire, she represents the ability to cast off the rags of colonial history and return Ireland to her previous glory.

The Young Queen in Nationalist Literature

James Clarence Mangan is an important literary figure in any discussion of Irish nationalist literature, and Joyce himself wrote a series of critiques on the poet, in which he expressed both appreciation for and disappointment with his work. Joyce’s assessment was two-fold: he saw Mangan as a contributor to an

Irish literary tradition as well as a critic of the limitations found in this system of representation. He wrote, “Mangan, it must be remembered, wrote with no native literary tradition to guide him, and for a public which cared for matters of the day, and for poetry only so far as it might illustrate these.”128 However, for

Joyce, this did not fully compensate for the fact that his poetry embodied “a narrow and hysterical nationalism”129 that was, ultimately, limiting to the progress towards Irish postcolonial freedom. Like many writers of the Irish literary tradition, Mangan “sings hymns of praise to his country’s fallen glory under a veil of mysticism”130 – an aspect of his writing that Joyce saw as detrimental, primarily

128 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [2]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 182.

129 IBID. P. 186.

130 IBID. P. 183. 66 because of its inability to liberate nationalist literature from a tradition of cultural stereotyping. Thus, for Mangan:

The history of his country encloses him so straightly that even in his hours of extreme individual passion he can barely reduce its walls to ruins. He cries out in his life and in his mournful verses against the injustice of despoilers, but almost never laments a loss greater than that of buckles and banners. He inherits the latest and worst part of a tradition upon which no divine hand has ever traced a boundary, a tradition which is loosened and divided against itself as it moves down the cycles… And precisely because this tradition has become an obsession with him, he has accepted it with all its regrets and failures and would pass it on just as it is.131

Joyce saw Mangan’s poetry as a failed attempt to transform the Irish literary tradition, for it simply reconstituted the previous representations of Lady Ireland – an act that proved more harmful than helpful in overcoming the power structures embedded within this gendered tradition. By inverting the binary of grotesque/romantic in his depiction of the feminized Irish nation, he reinforced the dialectic of inequality upon which colonial representation relies. Through his elaborate depictions of the Irish nation as colonial subject, Mangan solidified, rather than subverted, the colonial relationship, yet, despite this, Joyce still considered him “the most significant poet of the modern Celtic world”132 for his ability to represent the nation in a time of famine and hardship.

Mangan’s poem, “Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan” was one of his most powerful contributions to the Irish nationalist movement, and the influence of this poem is obvious in the adaptations that followed, of which Yeats’ play is one. This poem

131 IBID. P. 185.

132 IBID. P. 179. 67 provides a romantic representation of the Young Irish Queen in which, as Joyce saw it, “[Mangan] inherits the latest and worst part of a legend.”133 In this poem, the Young Irish Queen finds no redemption through her suffering, as she is, instead, forced to “wait the Young Deliverer” of her colonial servitude. She gains no independence, is offered no agency in the determination of her own future, but is rather forced into a continued dependence on masculine powers. This poem strengthens, rather than weakens, the gendered binary of British colonial power, as it reinforces the idea that Ireland is unable to defend itself, and thus, must perpetually depend on external forces for strength and stability. Although

Mangan asserts that “could she crush the foes by whom her beauty is reviled,” it would only be possible “if the king’s son were living here with” her. Through his portrayal of this character, Mangan was refusing to lay to rest an outdated colonial image of the helpless and beautiful Irish Queen.

Like the other images of Lady Ireland discussed thus far, this representation of the Young Queen reflects and manipulates nationalist sentiment.

However, unlike the Old Hag (whose power is found in nostalgia) or the Irish

Mother (who reflects present attitudes), this character does so in a prospective, future-oriented manner. She provides an image of the untainted (yet still unfulfilled) successes of the Irish nation, and as such, builds upon an expectation for the regeneration of Irish culture. Within this, “poetic renderings of Irish heroism” can be seen as both “narcotic and amnesiac… seducing female and male

133 IBID. P. 185.

68 readers to embrace a collective fantasy, to pursue an unreal self-image, both personally and nationally.”134 By reinforcing these “unreal” expectations for national purity, the Young Queen becomes not only an emblem of hope, but also one of failure. No revolution (be it political or cultural) will ever be able to bring about the sort of complete transformation that this version of Lady Ireland undergoes in the nationalist myth. She represents an ‘ideal’ Ireland in which the influences of external cultures have been completely removed (or rather, seem to have never existed); this concept, however, assumes that there was an original, purely Irish nation. As Joyce points out in “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” this search for origins ignores the diversity of the nation (both pre and post colonial) for “to exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible, and to deny the name of patriot to all those who are not of Irish stock would be to deny it to almost all the heroes of the modern movement.”135 Thus, these literary representations of an original

“Irishness” are, in fact, founded upon an imaginary national cohesion, not a lived national truth. The hope found in the nationalist image of the Irish Queen is based on an historically reinforced misrepresentation of the Irish nation, and as such, as

Irish poet Eavan Boland points out, “these songs, these images, wonderful and terrible and memorable as they are, propose for a nation an impossible task: to be

134 Hagen, Patricia L., and Thomas W. Zelman. "We Were Never on the Scene of the Crime": Eavan Boland's Repossession of History. Albany: Twentieth Century Literature, 1991. P. 451.

135 Joyce, James. "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 161. 69 at once an archive of defeat and a diagram of victory.”136 In an attempt to live up to the expectations of this nationalist tradition of rejuvenation, Ireland will find itself perpetually disheartened by its inability to fulfill the unreasonable demands that this literary figure presents as a measure of success. The alluring, yet deceptive power of the Young Irish Queen echoes the tantalizing Siren’s song in

Homer’s Odyssey, for, as Gifford points out in Ulysses Annotated, the siren’s song is one which “[promises] pleasure and merriment after the perils of war and false- promising knowledge of the future to those who land on their rock.”137 The beauty of the Irish Young Queen can be seen, in the same way, as a false-promise of glory and rejuvenation for the Irish Nation in its pursuit for postcolonial liberation.

The “sweet and mild” woman of Mangan’s poem has worked for generations to lure the bards of Irish nationalism into the tradition of depicting the

Irish nation as the Young Queen. However, by the time Ulysses was published in

1922, Joyce recognized that “when first I saw that form endearing… sorrow from me seemed to depart… full of hope and all delighted… but alas, ‘twas idle dreaming” (U 225). The representation of the nation as the Young Queen is part of “history or the denial of reality, for they are two names for one thing, [which] may be said to be that which deceives the whole world.”138 The hope for a ‘new’

136 Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. P. 129.

137 Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1988. P. 290.

138 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [1]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 81. 70 Ireland that is promised by this image of young Erin is countered by Joyce’s assertion that, although it is “the new I want,” there is “nothing new under the sun” (U 308); all reincarnations of the myth of the Young Queen are, themselves, little more than reiterations of previous literary representations, which, like the nymph in Circe, emerge from the artistic act, in which “with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame” (U 445). The authors of Irish nationalist literatures have romanticized the suffering and accentuated the grief, glory and sorrow of the nation, as a means of reflecting and projecting nationalist ideals. Yet these images “are stonecold and pure” (U 449), and as such, they do not provide a realistic reflection of the Irish nation, its sentiments or its potential, but rather, lifeless images “to look on… to praise… almost to pray” (U 445).

Joyce’s Young Queen in Relation to the Literary Tradition

It is important to note that the sections of Ulysses in which young women are most prominent are “Nausicaa” and “Circe,” and Joyce’s representation of prostitution in the latter chapter plays an important role in his deconstruction of the Young Queen of earlier traditions. In his essay “In the Brothel of Modernism:

Picasso and Joyce,” Robert Scholes asserts that “modernism was… a gendered movement” fueled by the “anxieties and ambivalences that worked to bring the figure of the prostitute to the center of the modernist stage.”139 For Joyce, this

139 Scholes, Robert. "In the Brothel of Modernism: Picasso and Joyce." Rpt. in Brown University. Web. http://http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/scholes/Pic_Joy/Part_1_340.html. P. 1. 71 literary movement from purity to debauchery was an attempt to counteract the glamorization of the pure Irish woman depicted in Revival texts, for the Young

Queen of nationalist tradition had fallen victim to an unprecedented glorification.

By only representing the beautiful and the pure, Revival literature had removed the vast pool of ‘unrespectable’ women from the representations of Woman-as-

Nation. Joyce unravels this tradition in two ways. First, by exposing the “sluts and ragamuffins” (U 380) in Nighttown, he liberates the Young Queen from her traditional representation of the pure woman; he works from the assumption that

“to make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes” (U 482), and by representing feminine immorality in this episode, he counteracts the limiting depictions of purity so prevalent in the nationalist literary tradition. Second, by representing a diverse collection of young women in Ulysses, Joyce acknowledges that “the networks of power/desire/interest are so heterogeneous, that their reduction to a coherent narrative is counterproductive.”140 The single voice of Lady Ireland cannot stand in for the diversity of the Irish nation. By depicting the multiplicity of female experience, Joyce is breaking down the “imaginary coherence” of womanhood that had previously been imposed “on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation”141 of which both woman and nation are actually comprised.

Through this, he provides a representation of the nation in which the aim is no longer to find a way to embody the perfection of the Irish Queen, but rather, to

140 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 66.

141 Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. P. 394.

72 “feel lost a bit,” (U 229) in the chaos of these representations, in the emptiness of unfulfilled expectations.

Silence and Absence in Joyce’s Young Queen’s

Gerty MacDowel and Cissy Caffery, whom we first meet on the beach in

“Nausicaa,” are two representations of the Young Queen that Joyce writes into the novel in order to deflate the Young Queen of nationalist literatures. He achieves this by juxtaposing traditional descriptions of the nationalist figure, with the contradictory representations of these young Irish women. In the case of Gerty, who is introduced to the reader as “as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see” (U 286), Joyce achieves this by juxtaposing traditional descriptions of Young Lady Ireland with the shallow and unoriginal basis of

Gerty’s knowledge. For example, although this young woman has much to say about the way that life should be lived, all her utterances seem to be little more than the repetition of pop-wisdom and petty gossip. Her beauty, “almost spiritual in its ivory like purity” (U 286), which is meant to be the incarnation of the Irish ideal, is inspired by “Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the Princess Novelette, who had first advised her to try eyebrowline” (U

286), and her “woolen plaids” and “robes of silk”142 are blue, “because it was expected in the Lady’s Pictoral that electric blue would be worn” (U 287). To further this image of petty girlhood, the hopeful promises of the Irish Queen are

142 Mangan, James Clarence. “Kathleen Ny-Houlihan.” Poems of James Clarence Mangan: (Many Hitherto Uncollected). Ed. D. J. O'Donoghue. Dublin: O'Donoghue, 1903. P. 16. 73 transformed, through Gerty, into the kind of “luck” determined by the arbitrary hope “that was for luck and lovers’ meeting if you put those things on inside out or if they got untied that he was thinking about you so long as it wasn’t Friday,”

(U 288) – the sort of dreams determined by the ways in which one wears ones undergarments on certain days of the week. Joyce’s representation of this character conflates romanticized descriptions of the Young Queen with insubstantial gossip and pop-culture inspiration to indicate a relationship between the two.

Cissy is introduced, similarly, as “a girl lovable in the extreme” against whom “a truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life” (U 284); she is noted for her aptitude for care-giving and her fondness for her siblings, on whom she dotes throughout the chapter. All of these descriptions work to align her with the romanticized figure of the Young Irish Queen, but the narrator’s observation that

“none of your spoilt beauties, Flora MacFlimsly sort, was Cissy Caffery” (U 284) is undermined in “Circe,” where we meet her again later that night. Here, in

Nighttown, she takes on a new persona. She becomes the embodiment of “that sort of person, the fallen [woman] off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girl’s honour” (U

299). Not only is she found gallivanting around the town with men of questionable intentions, she also betrays Stephen in his fight with the British soldiers – indicating her alliance to the English crown, rather than the Irish bard.

Unlike her earlier representations, these aspects of her character undermine her

74 alignment with the Young Queen and the juxtaposition of her two competing personalities forces the reader to reconsider the ways in which her character is to be interpreted as a national symbol.

This analysis becomes more complicated when applied to Irish politics, for these women, as representations of the nation, are not freed from the gendered expectations that nationalist depictions such as Mangan’s “Kathleen Ny-

Houlihan” held them to, and thus, cannot be viewed as a representation of a liberated nation. Gerty, like Kathleen and the other Revival figures in whom she finds her origins, relies on the dreams of marriage for emancipation. Her assertion that “she would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her” (U 299) and her further belief that through her union with this “man among men” (U 288) that she could finally be “wild, untrammeled, free” (U 299), echoes the irony of

Mangan’s poem, in which the woman’s freedom is contingent on her finding the right man. Similarly, Cissy’s lamentation to Private Carr, in which she begs,

“amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? Cissy’s your girl” (U 488), represents a woman who needs the validation and support of the strong male figure in order to establish her position. This dream of freedom through captivity echoes Joyce’s feelings on the Home Rule Act being discussed at the time, in which the Irish nation was to be ‘liberated’ from colonialism by incorporating the British political system into the Irish government. In his essay “Home Rule Comet,” Joyce poses the question: “what long term alliance can exist between this strange people and

75 the new Anglo-Saxon democracy;”143 this marriage of national political entities, as he saw it, was simply an attempt by the colonial powers to “wear down the separatist sentiment slowly and secretly, while creating a new, eager social class, dependent, and free from dangerous enthusiasms, by means of partial concessions.”144

These “partial concessions” of which he writes mirror Bloom’s feelings towards Gerty after he discovers that she is lame. The fact that he was “glad [he] didn’t know when she was on show” (U 301) indicates Joyce’s understanding that the appeal of these Home Rule Acts, was, like Gerty’s beauty, and Cissy’s loyalty, simply superficial. The nationalist rhetoric surrounding the Home Rule Acts masked the fact that they would not provide the long-term political freedom that

Ireland was hoping for, just as Gerty’s strategic positioning on the beach hid her lameness from the eager eyes of Mr.Bloom. By exposing Gerty’s limp at the end of the chapter, Joyce is hinting at the flaws in both Gerty and the Home Rule movement. By exposing the inability of both political and literary symbol (as

Joyce saw the Home Rule Acts as a symbolic gesture by the English nation, rather than a legitimate political movement)145 to live up to the expectations of their supporters, Joyce is, transitively projecting this critique back onto the figure of

Lady Ireland.

143 Joyce, James. "The Home Rule Comet." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 212.

144 (CW Home Rule Comet)

145 IBID.

76 Insofar as the nationalist representations of the Young Irish Queen had assured political freedom to those who fought, they had proven to be an insubstantial promise of national hope. In Ulysses, Joyce illustrates that Lady

Ireland, as a beacon of hope, has been “pinned together”(U 302) by literary representations and unreasonable expectations. In this, he is begging the question

“art thou real, my ideal?” (U 298), an inquiry which he then answers with a simple ‘no.’ Gerty is not the perfect woman of Bloom’s fantasies, the Home Rule

Acts are not the tool of national liberation for which Ireland has been searching, and the figure of Lady Ireland is not the realistic representation of the Irish political future that nationalist literatures had promised. Thus, like Gerty

MacDowell, Lady Ireland is simply a “caricature” (U 295) of Irish ambition, not realistic representation of an inevitable national rejuvenation; as an image of the broken woman, she is also a symbol of a broken nationalist dream. By representing the “jilted beauty” (U 301) of this nationalist figure, Joyce exposes the “mirage” (U 308) of nationalist expectations, and in so doing, allows the image of the Young Irish Queen to darken with the setting of the “Homerule sun”

(U 308).

Joyce’s representation of Lady Ireland as a flawed symbol of nationalist desire, in the form of Gerty and Cissy, can be better understood by deconstructing the relationship that each of these women has to the language of representation.

For Gerty, this relationship is defined by her romantic nationalist roots and her role as the echo of a literary tradition. This relationship is reinforced by her

77 genealogy, for, as she mentions briefly, she is, in fact, the granddaughter of the

Citizen that Bloom had encountered in Barney Keirnan’s earlier that afternoon (U

289) – a character who is accepted in Joycean criticism as an embodiment of the excesses of the Irish National Revival. Thus, Gerty (and with her, the image of the Irish Queen) is, quite literally, part of the legacy of the nationalist tradition.

This association reinforces the idea that the image of the Young Queen, with which Gerty is associated, is nothing more than a “[parrot]. Press the button and the bird will squeak” (U 303) – or rather, as parrots do, repeat what they have heard before. The Young Irish Queen resembles Gerty in that both are inspired by the words of others (for Gerty this is Madame Vera Verity’s advice column and for

Lady Ireland it is the nationalist representations of Woman that came before her).

The main difference between the two is the rhetoric used to describe them – the romantic language of nationalist literature distinguishes itself from the common language used by Gerty - between these two women, the movement “from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step” (U 419). By equating these two feminine figures, Joyce indicates that to ground the hope of the Irish nation in these images of the Young Queen is as unreasonable as basing them on Gerty.

Cissy, on the other hand, undermines the image of the pure Irish Queen through her sexual politics and her personal betrayals. Her relationship with language is brought to the forefront in “Circe,” when Bloom begs Cissy to “speak, you! Are you struck dumb? You are the link between nations and generations.

Speak, woman, sacred lifegiver!” (U 488). Cissy, however, is, clearly, not the

78 divine peacemaker that the nation had hoped for, as her response to this plea is to assert her connection to the British solders rather than the Irishmen asking for her intervention. Bloom’s plea to her to intervene in the conflict illuminates the betrayal of expectations found in these representations of the Young Irish Queen.

This mirrors Joyce’s deconstruction of Gerty as the pure Irish Woman, as both her and Cissy are characterized by two contradictory representations – an opposition in representation that renders them both silent. Although Gerty’s silence is the silence of unoriginality and Cissy’s silence comes from an actual inability to speak at the right moment, they both create an image of the nation that is incapable of effectively giving voice to the reality of the nation.

Another representation of the Young Queen to appear in Ulysses is Milly

Bloom, a character who is, perhaps, most noticeable by her absence. Her physical absence from the Bloomsday narrative begs the question: “where is the third person of the blessed trinity?” (U 486). Although this quote is, on one level, about the religious family of father/son/holy ghost, it also suggests the mother

(Molly)/ the daughter (Milly)/ and the ghost of the old hag (discussed in chapter

1), or even the father (Bloom)/the daughter (Milly)/ the revered mother (Molly).

However, the fact remains that Milly, although acknowledged as a character, never makes an actual appearance in this text. Her absence from the narrative provides a representation of Young Lady Ireland who can be manipulated by the desires, expectations and disappointments of those around her, and who is never given the opportunity to voice to her own wishes or express agency in the terms

79 of her representation.

This aspect of her representation is furthered by Bloom’s identification of her as “Milly, Marionette” (U 366), a name with many implications. On one level, this means “small Molly,” as she is, in a sense, the younger replica of her mother, carrying on the legacy of strong, independent women in the Bloom family, for as Bloom points out, “what do they love? Another themselves?” (U

311). In the context of the Irish literary tradition, however, she becomes an echo of earlier representations of the Young Queen that has been “handed down from father to, mother to daughter, I mean. Bred in the bone” (U 304). On yet another level, “Marionette” can be identified with the puppet bearing the same name – an identification reinforced by Joyce’s description of other young women in the text as “gaudy dollwomen,” (U 369). This analysis of Milly is important in this analysis of nationalist representation, for it brings to the forefront the manipulability of Lady Ireland as a nationalist symbol. Much as Milly’s reputation and power in the narrative is determined by the gossip about the “bold bad girl from the town of Mullingar” (U 347), and her ability to fulfill her parent’s expectations, representations of the Young Queen in Irish nationalist literature is controlled by the masculine literary tradition. By exposing this character as an insubstantial and powerless figure of nationalist traditions, Joyce illuminates the dangers of relying on this literary image as an instrument of political liberation.

Language and Masculine Influence in the Irish Nationalist Tradition

80 In “Sirens,” Joyce works playfully with the interactions of music, repetition, and language to indicate the degree to which any image of Lady

Ireland contains within it the echoes of its literary history. This episode of

Ulysses is structured as a lyrical compilation of repeated ‘motifs,’ which are laid out in the opening section and then echoed throughout the chapter; as Don Gifford points out in Ulysses Annotated, “the episode’s musical ‘form’ may… be developed by regarding this [opening] sequence as the ‘keyboard’ on which the

‘fugue’ is to be performed.”146 In this chapter, the Young Queen of nationalist literature is transformed into the Lady Ireland of a lyrical tradition. However, in this transformation, the symbolic power of this figure is sustained by the relationship that both artistic forms of have with the act of representation. The focus of this chapter is on the connection between masculinity and representation, for, just as literature is dominated by male poets and authors, the lyrical tradition is dominated by male bards. Thus, as Spivak states in “Can the Subaltern Speak,” any attempt to give voice to the experience of the Nation-as-Woman is inevitably marked by an imposition of power, a forced representation of the Subject (both literary and political) within the lexicon of the hegemonic powers over which she has no control. By exposing the masculine fictions upon which this feminine figure of the Irish nation is built, Joyce is recasting the masculine voice, and with it the nationalist tradition, as one that “believes his own lies. Does really.

Wonderful liar. But want a good memory” (U 224). These artistic representations

146 Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1988. P. 290. 81 of Woman as Nation stand in for, rather than give voice to, the “memory” of lived

‘truths,’ thus indicating the space of the referent (be it woman or nation) as a void which had been, historically, filled by the voice of masculine representation.

By acknowledging these figures of the feminine nation as the product of a masculine tradition, Joyce undermines the assumption that they are the manifestations of a national ‘truth,’ and poses them, rather, as a tool of masculine hegemony. Joyce lays the foundations for this analysis in “Sirens” through his manipulation of musical structure, but uses the same tactic of repetition and

‘motif’ throughout the text to draw a connection between the women of this chapter and the other images of the Young Queen in Ulysses. These connections are made, primarily, by the repetition of descriptive phrases, such as “those lovely seaside girls” (U 231), which are used to create parallels between otherwise unrelated characters (in this case, between Gerty, Edy and Cissy, who Bloom sees on the beach, and Mina and Lydia from “Sirens”). In “Circe,” the narrator notes that:

(Bronze by gold they whisper) ZOE (to Florry) Whisper. (she whispers again) (U 460)

This seemingly simple volley of murmurings works, structurally, to tie the characters of Mina Kennedy and Lydia Douce to Zoe and Florry, the Nighttown whores, and in so doing, implicates the characters of Zoe, Florry, Gerty, Cissy and

Edy into the analysis of Lady Ireland as the product of a masculine artistic tradition. This conflation of characters may seem, upon first glace, to be a paradoxical juxtaposition that undermines the status of each woman as an 82 autonomous representation of individual womanhood. However, in creating these parallels, Joyce forces a recognition that, despite their many differences, each of these images of the Young Irish Queen is part of the same tradition of national imagery, and in this, is yet another product of literary representation.

The repercussions of literary representation are exposed by the content, rather than the structure, of the “Sirens” episode, for it illuminates the ways in which the male dominated world of artistic representation is informed by the voice of a masculine tradition. This chapter is comprised of a group of men singing old Irish ballads and love songs about both the nation and the women in it, while the two living women of the chapter are only involved in the conversations as objects of desire. While these songs of National pride are being sung for and about women (but by men), the two young women of the chapter (the barmaids) remain silent and subservient to masculine desire (both literally ‘serving’ them their drinks, and playing into their objectifying and belittling flirtations). The female voices that we ‘hear’ in this chapter are either masculine performances of the woman-as-[artistic]subject (as heard in the songs) or literary representations of woman-as-object of desire (represented by the silent figures of Lydia and Mina).

Even this distinction, however, is blurred by the fact that the musical performance is related to the erotic of “sweet sinful words” (U 212), which could be used to identify both lyrical and literary representation. However, the function of Lydia

Douce and Mina Kennedy as ‘objects’ to be represented, rather than women to be

83 engaged with, is furthered by the ways in which the narrator identifies them as

“bronze” and “gold” – as the disembodied manifestations of their composite parts.

By juxtaposing the male representations of womanhood within music, through the silent figures of Mina and Lydia, Joyce exposes the irony embedded within the production of a feminine figure of the Irish nation, for “God made the country man the tune” (U 234). These songs of Lady Ireland are written and performed by the men of the nation, and they are played, literally, on an instrument tuned by an old, blind Irishman. In this, Lady Ireland becomes the inanimate symbol of a masculine nationalist tradition, which is animated by the ritual act of artistic representation, for, “if not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. Keeps them young. Even admire themselves. See. Play on her. Lip blow. Body of white woman, a flute alive.” (U 234). By singing these songs of

Lady Ireland, these men are immortalizing the figure of the Young Queen through commemorative national ritual. The recognition of this feminine symbol as the product of a masculine tradition, however, allows for the incorporation of the

Young Irish Queen into “the sustained and developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other; [for] we can use it to much greater analytic and interventionist advantage than invocations of the authenticity of the Other."147

Thus, the men in this episode mirror the Greek mythological character of

Orpheus, who is “the celebrated poet-musician whose lyre could charm into dance

147 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 90.

84 not only wild beasts but also trees and rocks.”148 Like Orpheus’ songs, these ballads breathe life into the inanimate feminine objects of nationalist traditions, and perpetuate the collective aspiration for eternal youth. They are the manifestations of a masculine inclination to fill in the silences inherent in literary representation – a lack of connection between sign and referent, and a “gap in their voices too,” which calls the masculine tradition to “fill me. I’m warm, dark, open,” (U 232). By writing these songs, the male bards attempt to fill the void of the unrepresented feminine voice through the insertion of masculine iteration, as a means of deferring the fear of the unrepresentable.

Lack, Absence and Silence in Joyce’s Young Queen

The ways in which Joyce works to destabilize the nationalist figure of the

Young Queen are diverse, and vary from character to character, yet, even within these differences, all of the characters of the Young Irish Queen have one thing in common: a lack. For Milly, it is a lack of physical presence; for Cissy it is a lack of integrity and loyalty; for Gerty, this lack is a physical lameness; and Mina

Kennedy and Lydia Douce are both lacking in voice. The young women in

Joyce’s Ulysses are manifestations of an image that fails to give voice to a reality, and in so doing, indicates an absence. Joyce exposes this “text-inscribed blankness”149 through his manipulation of paradox; due to this, paradox serves as

148 Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California, 1988. P. 290.

149 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 89. 85 one of the primary demarcations of the Young Queen in Ulysses, as all of the young women in this text are represented by a series of conflicting identifications.

It is not a matter of them being immoral, rather than pure (as in the case of Cissy), silent versus vocal (as in the case of Lydia and Mina), absent versus present (as in the case of Milly), or even, when it comes down to it, being English rather than

Irish – for Cissy, the Irish lass, is inclined to support the British soldiers over

Stephen in “Circe.”

The power of these paradoxical representations becomes most apparent in the case of Milly Bloom, whose association with the opposing forces of presence and absence undercuts itself in a curious way. Although not an active participant in the progression of the narrative, Milly’s presence (or rather, her absence) still manages to influence the conversations and hopes of those who speak about her.

Alec Bannon’s ruminations on his encounter with Milly are influenced by his yearning to know more about her, as he voices his desire that “she who seduced me had left but the name” (U 347); his interaction with this figure of the Young

Queen necessitates a recognition of “the forced invariability of her aspect… her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid in delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage… her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible,” (U 576). Her lack of physical presence only increases her “attraction” and her allure, and thus, works to transform the influence of her absence into a presence of its own.

This recognition of absence is the key to understanding Joyce’s use of

86 paradox, for these opposites, rather than cancel each other out, seem to indicate something else, something supplementary; these women are, in essence, more than the sum of their parts. By crafting these characters of the Young Queen out of a series of oppositions, Joyce illuminates the points at which the masculine representations of these women exposes the inadequacies within the system of representation itself. These women provide an image suspended in motion, caught between contradictory forces, never comfortably resting in one definitive space or the other. In this situation, “categories can be disposed of without important consequences, but what actually remains is probably what operated all along: an existence interstitial to the binaries, that flexes ideology in the everyday vicissitudes of responding to desires.”150 By choosing to represent this figure as an amorphous compilation of conflicting influences, Joyce is initiating what

Spivak calls a “defetishization of the concrete;”151 the absence that is indicated in this process of deconcretization, however, is not an indication of nothingness, but rather, a recognition of the unrepresentable.

This textual engagement with absence must, on some level, engage with the concept of silence, for it is in silence that speech finds its undoing. For this reason, Joyce’s text reveals the problematic nature of ‘giving voice’ to either

Woman or Nation through the act of writing. The romanticized images of Lady

150 Davis, Tracy C. "Shaw's Interstices of Empire: Decolonizing at Home and Abroad." The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. By Christopher D. Innes. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ., 2004. P. 222.

151 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 91. 87 Ireland that dominate Irish literature do not represent national ‘truths,’ but on the contrary, indicate the limitations of the masculine literary tradition. However, due to the fact that “empty vessels make the most noise,” (U 232) these images of

Lady Ireland have been used repeatedly to as a symbol of nationalist pride. In

Ulysses, Joyce compromises the integrity of this symbol by representing a plethora of Young Queen images, and in so doing, he creates a cumulative image of Irish womanhood in which “the voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived” (U 338). Joyce exposes the flaws in this system of representation in “Sirens” by drawing our attention to the silence of the ‘real’ women in the chapter, as opposed to the masculine vocalizations of the Nation as Woman found in the ballad tradition. The irony of this episode is that it is a chapter about voice and song, which is characterized by allusions to an irreconcilable silence. By juxtaposing the “longer in dying call”

(U 217) of the piano with the silence of the barmaids, Joyce indicates a relationship in which the sounds we hear are the echoes of a nationalist image that will not fade away. The voice of Lady Ireland that we hear in nationalist literature is the “lamentation” (U 228) of a feminine national symbol forced into representation by the powers of a masculine tradition.

In this deconstruction of national imagery, we come full circle, and find ourselves, once again, reassessing the images of the Young Irish Queen found in this text. This inquiry into Joycean imagery brings us back to the character of

88 Gerty MacDowell, the “specimen of winsome Irish girlhood” (U 286). In light of the previous deconstruction, however, Gerty’s disability no longer seems to contradict her embodiment of the national image, but rather, to support it; she is, like the other young women of the text, a perfect embodiment of the “cracked lookingglass of the servant” which, as Stephen so astutely asserts, is the true

“symbol of Irish art” (U 6). In this new light, however, the broken woman is an indication of a broken nationalist tradition, and with it, a broken nation.

However, due to its encasement in the male dominated language of colonial power, the breakdown of an Irish nationalist tradition indicates a weakness in the

British structures of power and language through which it is rendered. By disengaging these fictionalized representations of Lady Ireland from the lived history of the Irish nation, Joyce is able to expose the fallibility of this symbolic system.

CONCLUSION:

Although I have identified language as a limitation to national representation, Joyce’s role as an Irish author indicates that language is

89 simultaneously the tool he must use to deconstruct the literary tradition of which he is a part. As such, his engagement with Irish nationalist literature is plagued by paradox, and his investigation into to absence “is obliged to develop within the discourse of presence."152 However, by exposing his text as a work of fiction,

Joyce acknowledges the disparity between literary and political representation, and in so doing, “shifts the object of representation from the image which it creates to the process of writing itself.”153 This new interpretation allows the representations of Lady Ireland found in Ulysses “to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”154 By acknowledging his text for what it is - an artistic representation of historical, political and social referents through the limited language of a nationalist literary tradition - Joyce undermines the status of these literary symbols as national

‘truths.’ Joyce instigates this recognition in a series of ways, and his focus on paradox, multiplicity and absence in the Ulysses is crucial to his critique of literary representation. As he states in his essay about Mangan, “[Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in] a certain sense, against actuality. It speaks of that which seems unreal and fantastic

152 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 89.

153 Van Boheemen, Christine. "The Primitive Scene of Representation: Writing Gender."Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. P.148.

154 Anderson, Benedict. Paraphrased by: Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. P. 16.

90 to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the tests of reality.”155 This is not to say, however, that Ulysses is freed entirely from its relationship to the past traditions (an assertion that is reinforced by Joyce’s engagement with the Old

Hag in Ulysses), yet its relationship to these symbolic representations is transformed through the self-awareness of literary production. As Tom Nairn states in his discussion of nationalist literature:

I do not mean to imply that the internal re-exploration of our thought-world is futile, or uninstructive. This would be to dismiss too much of the… past decade as worthless. It is reasonably obvious that such re-exploration should accompany and complement the external, historical critique… the two tasks ought to be one… The dilemma consists in where one puts the centre of gravity. If it is placed internally, the result is bound to be the perpetuation of sectarian theology in some form, however refined…. If by contrast one’s primary focus is external, and perceives one time-bound (though still unconcluded) chapter in the history of ideas, then the exegisis of ideas is serving a different purpose altogether.156

This strategic placement of historical “origin” outside of the act of fictional representation reinforces the separation of political history from literary representation as a means of creating something new within the discourse of the old. Thus, Joyce’s manipulation of traditional nationalist imagery in Ulysses works, like “Penelope,” as a supplement to the previous nationalist tradition, in which he exposes the absences around which it has formed.

Joyce’s use of multiplicity and repetition in his depictions of Lady Ireland can be linked to Derrida’s concept of “ritual,” which he saw as fundamental in the

155 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [1]." The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 81.

156 Nairn, Tom. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: NLB, 1977. P. 362. 91 formation of any sign, for “in order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form.”157 The use of repetition, in this sense, is essential to the subsequent deconstruction of the sign, for “it is its sameness which, by corrupting its identity and its singularity, divides its seal,”158 and exposes the weakness of symbolic representation. For example, in the case of Lady Ireland, the relationship between any given manifestation of this image and the referent to which it is allegedly linked (i.e. Gerty, as the Young Irish

Queen and her association with the Irish nation), is weakened by the successful representation of this same referent in the form of another character (i.e. Milly).

In order for the symbol of Lady Ireland be a ‘true’ or stable representation of the nation, there would need to be a 1:1 relationship between the sign and the referent. However, for these two characters, so different in their individual manifestations, to both indicate the same signified, weakens the power of this sign, and with it, the relationship this sign has to the referent of the Irish nation.

The more characters added to this list of possible national symbols, the weaker each individual image gets – thus loosening the ties that bind woman to nation, nation to femininity, and the Irish nation to its literary representation. As

Christine Van Boheemen argues, “in becoming the ground of the struggle, ‘she’ becomes the sign of divided, irresolvable meaning.”159 Joyce’s deconstruction of

Lady Ireland imagery in Ulysses provides an indication of the void left by the

157 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. P. 20.

158 IBID.

159 Van Boheemen, Christine. Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989. P. 125.

92 absence of a referent, and as such, these women signify the absence itself. Rather than write his representations of the feminized Ireland as a national ‘truth,’ Joyce depicts them as spaces in which ‘truth’ cannot be imposed; these women are the connotation of a presence, a place-saver of sorts, marked by an absence of a referent.

In Ulysses, this representational discordance perpetuates the différance of meaning through a process of infinite referral, for Lady Ireland’s role as a sign of the Irish nation is repeatedly influenced and transformed by her relationship to the many signifiers that appear in this narrative. The many manifestations of the Old

Hag, Mother Ireland and the Young Irish Queen in Ulysses, complicate the relationship between the signifier and the signified by undermining their transitive association with the referent of the Irish nation - a relationship that works to undermine the cohesion of the whole system of literary representation as national

‘truth.’ In this, it can be seen that “the condition of possibility of those effects [or images] is simultaneously… the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity.”160 By depicting a multitude of Lady Ireland characters in Ulysses, Joyce exposes an inconsistency in the signifier, which calls into question the homogeneity (or “purity”) of the sign itself. This act blurs the lines between the various women of Irish nationalist discourse as a means of asking “Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew?

Am all them and the same now me?” (U 430). Through this conflation of national

160 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. P. 20. 93 symbols, Joyce exposes these images as akin to “the ancient gods, who are visions of the divine names, [and who] die and come to life many times.”161 She is simply the product of reinterpretation within nationalist literature, whose deconstruction exposes the inadequacies of this tradition of representation. By destabilizing the image of Lady Ireland, Joyce is able to deconstruct the very act of literary representation of which he is a part, and in so doing, expose the inherent complications of representing ‘many’ (the Irish nation) in the form of ‘one’

(Woman).

Joyce’s engagement with the silent figures of Lady Ireland expose these images of Woman, which had come to represent the nation, as “all a kind of attempt to talk” motivated by a discomfort with silence, in which, it is “unpleasant when it stops because you never know exac” (U 237). However, this discomfort is an indication that silence is comprised of more than the lack of speech - it is a manifestation of the unrepresentable that threatens the structural integrity of the tradition of literary representation. The silence of Lady Ireland in Ulysses is an indication that the power of these literary images is found in “words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind” (U 226). Ulysses is an exercise in “measuring silences… into the object of investigation,”162 of exposing the absence of speech as a space in which the traces of the feminine can be found in the masculine tradition. If one were to put this technique into practice, and search Ulysses for the word

161 Joyce, James. "James Clarence Mangan [1].” The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Manson and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. P. 82.

162 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can the Subaltern Speak?McGill University. Web. . P. 92.

94 “silent/silence,” one would discover something striking: the word “silent” is primarily used as a descriptive word in Joyce’s representations of female characters. It is used occasionally in the portrayal of Bloom and Stephen (Joyce’s androgynous representations of Irish colonial servitude), but only in relation to the male voice when it is utilized as a command. Tracing this language of silence allows us to recognize that silence is not a simple inversion of the binary of representation, but rather a manipulation of representation, through which the limitations of the speech-act can be exposed. “Absence” in this sense, can be seen

“as the modification of presence,”163 rather than the simple lack thereof. From this perspective, the voices of Lady Ireland within earlier nationalist literatures were simply “the incitations of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism”

(U 567). For this reason, Joyce is able to use the image of Lady Ireland in

Ulysses, not to give voice to her experience, but rather, to leave space for the silences that indicate her presence.

Despite my assertion that the literary and political history of the Irish nation must be separated, there is a degree to which we must recognize Ulysses as a politically charged text. As such, it does interact with the political condition of

Ireland as a colonized nation, although in a nontraditional way. By indicating the

163 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. P. 6. 95 limitations of these representations of the nation, Joyce is exposing the spaces within the national narrative where the silences and absences of the subaltern voice are found, and in so doing, he recognizes the role that they have played in the development of the nation thus far. Joyce, as an incarnation of the Irish bard, engages with the image of woman from within the silence to which both have been subjected, “each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces” (U 577). Within this same void, the Irish nation is able to find its own space in the colonial dialectic, as the discourse of nationalism is transformed from a truthful representation of national cohesion into

“a set of important clues towards whatever these forms are really about.”164 By using the Old Hag as a symbol for the inheritance of a limited literary tradition, and then putting her in conversation with the supplemental figure of Mother

Ireland in “Penelope,” Joyce reveals the ways in which these literatures of national self-definition are, like Molly, “supplements” to the historical and political conversation of colonial domination, not factual reiterations of the colonial experience. This acknowledgement of literary subjectivity is furthered by his depictions of the Young Irish Queen, in which the perpetuation of this national image are exposed as the byproducts of a colonized culture. However, due to the symbolic relationship between Woman and Nation, any attack on the image of Woman “constitutes in itself an attack on the dominant ideology,”165 and

164 Nairn, Tom. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: NLB, 1977. P. 334.

165 Jacobus, M. “The Question of Language: Men of Maxims in The Mill on the Floss. 1981. P. 209.

96 thus, by undermining the image of Lady Ireland, Joyce undermines the structural stability of colonial and nationalist discourse.

In order for Joyce’s deconstruction of this nationalist discourse to influence the future of Irish nationalism, those who come after him must adopt this deconstructive process, for "cultural identity… is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. It belongs to the future as much as to the past."166 Joyce inscribes this cycle of reinterpretation into the very body of his text by illustrating the relationship between the past, present and future, as represented by the Old

Hag, Mother Ireland and the Young Queen. This complex temporality is crucial in the discussion of nationalist literature, for "every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history.”167 Insofar as these nationalist images are linked to the socio-political development of the nation-state, they should be subject to the transformations and reinterpretations that characterize the fluctuations of historical progression. Thus, for Ulysses to remain a valid (albeit fictional) representation of the Irish nation, “the traumatic ordeal of the break (in death of another or loss of the past) must be faced at each generation.”168 The amorphous and transformative properties of this text are an indication of a

166 Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. P. 4.

167 Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. P. 24.

168 Shields, Kathleen. "Thomas Kinsella: Building New Bridges." Gained in Translation: Language, Poetry, and Identity in Twentieth-century Ireland. Oxford: P. Lang, 2000. Pp. 95-6. 97 “motion made possible by the new matter of history itself,”169 for within the discourse of literary analysis “real respect for our forebearers requires we recognize the futility of these rituals”170 of representation.

By not claiming to speak for the entire past, present and future of the national experience in Ulysses, Joyce creates a literary representation of the Irish nation that has the potential for inexhaustive reconstitution; by recognizing his own temporal and literary limitations, he delays the solidification of his characters into national symbol and, further, into historical ‘truth.’ This deconstruction of literary representation is crucial in the analysis of Irish nationalist literature, for it allows for “the familial residence and tomb of the ‘proper’ in which is produced, by différance, the economy of death. This stone - provided that one knows how to decipher its inscription - is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant.”

Through his transgression of the historical and temporal boundaries of literary representation, Joyce provides his readers with the ability to “decipher” the code of counter-insurgency embedded within his text. By breaking down the images of

Lady Ireland that have limited nationalist literature in the past, Joyce undermines the system of symbolic representation that has reinforced the power of the colonial control in Ireland. Further, by exposing the limitations of this colonial imagery, he frees his own writing from the deceptive conflation of literary and political representation. In the process of critiquing the Irish nationalist tradition,

169 Nairn, Tom. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: NLB, 1977. P. 362.

170 IBID. P. 331.

98 Joyce is able to “fly by those nets” (P 179) of language, representation, and nationalism that threaten to limit his powers of representation. Joyce has written

Ulysses as a supplement to the nationalist literary tradition, which indicates his role as both critic and participant in the representation of the modern Irish nation.

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