“Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls”: Race-ing and Erasing the Body Feminine in Ulysses’ “Nausicaa”
* 정혜연 37)
The prognathous Paddy with ape-like features was a conventional representation of the Irish in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Paddy moseyed along the imagination of the British imperialists as the “missing link” between apes and black Africans. One popular cartoon titled “The King of A-Shantee” shows Paddy and his wife Bridget in their native habitat, a shanty. As Vincent Cheng observes, the British, articulating the logic of white male dominance and social stratification, punned on the word “A-Shantee” and paralleled this “essentialized Irish pair” with the African Ashanti as a way to reinforce the idea of Irish racial inferiority.1) Cissy Caffrey, with her “golliwog
Figure 1. “The King of A-Shantee”
* 성신여자대학교 영어영문학과 조교수 1) Vincent. J. Cheng, 1995, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge UP, New York & Cambridge) p. 33 128 인문과학연구 제31집 curls”2) is an unruly Joycean lass from Paddy and Bridget’s brood.3) In “Nausicaa,” she is the cross-dressing, tomboyish, impudent “dark one with the mop head and the nigger mouth [sic],” whose full lips are made to whistle impudent tunes.4) “Raced” as black, Cissy also appears as a “shilling whore” in “Circe”:5) as we can see, Cissy’s body is inscribed with overt markers which render her the racial/sexual Other and places her beyond the polite society of the Dublin gentry. Considering that racializing and feminizing the Irish were disenfranchising strategies oft employed by the patriarchal British empire, one may question why James Joyce, who severely criticized British political oppression over the Irish, would recycle such offensive and incendiary stereotypes in his modernist tour de force, Ulysses (1922). One simple answer is that Cissy, placed under double jeopardy by the blackening and the gendering of her body, can be seen as an embodiment of Ireland, and Joyce was trying to explore through Cissy the precarious positionality of Ireland. Admittedly, a study of Joyce’s Cissy
2) James Joyce, 1990, Ulysses (Vintage International, New York) p. 353 In this essay, I will henceforth abbreviate Ulysses as U. 3) Based on a 19th century children’s book character, the golliwog was a type of rag doll with “black skin, eyes rimmed in white, clown lips, and frizzy hair” (“Golliwogg”). In its outward appearance, the golliwog shares close proximity to “Topsy,” and “Sambo,” two popular racist caricatures of blacks. This similarity is made all the more evident when set against the description of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): “[Topsy] was one of the blackest of her race; and her round, shining eyes, glittering as glass beads, moved with quick and restless glances over everything in the room. Her mouth half open with astonishment at the wonders of the new Mas’r’s parlor, displayed a white and brilliant set of teeth. Her woolly hair was braided in sundry little tails, which stuck out in every direction. [...] Altogether, there was something odd and goblin-like about her appearance-something [...] ‘so heathenish’”(258). Despite the great popularity of the golliwog, the doll (not surprisingly) sparked public outrage as it was seen as racist; in the UK, golliwog is thought to have been abbreviated to ‘wog’ [sic], a “racial slur applied to [all] dark-skinned people” (“Golliwogg”). 4) James Joyce, 1990, op.cit., p. 371 5) Ibid., p. 587 “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 129 enables us to scrutinize his political commentary on the intersecting ideologies of race, gender, and colonialism. Nonetheless, we would be remiss to facilely accept the blackening of Cissy as Joyce’s critique on the plights of the Irish in British-occupied Ireland; this essay thus inspects the problematic characterization of Cissy, which places her as the polar opposite of Gerty MacDowell who, according to Suzette Henke, is the “second most prominent female character in Ulysses” and appears as the very epitome of conventional femininity.6) While one is embraced as protagonist Bloom’s sexual fantasy and the other repudiated, both Gerty and Cissy, in a sense, are products of a masculinist discourse which strips them of their agency; along these lines, I will also look into the narrative structure of “Nausicaa,” which awards only to immediately divest the authority of female narrative voice. In lieu of extending the racism/misogyny debate in Joyce’s magnum opus, I aim to re-read the chapter with Cissy at its core and reconsider the vestiges of racist and sexist discourse which may unwittingly have become elided by the urgency to figure Cissy as Ireland incarnate. At this juncture, it may be useful to contextualize “Nausicaa” with a discussion of the sexual and racial stereotyping of Ireland. In the nineteenth century, issues of race and racial categorization preoccupied the minds of the British. Such remarks made by Benjamin Disraeli who argued that “[r]ace implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance”7) instigated the Britons’ zeal to validate their dominance over, colonization of, and racist policies towards the Irish, the Africans, and other colonized people who, as a rule, were considered to be of a distinct race
6) Suzette Henke, 1982, “Gerty MacDowell: Joyce’s Sentimental Heroine” Women in Joyce (U of Illinois P, Urbana & Chicago) p. 132 7) Herbert H. Odom, 1967, “Generalizations of Race in Nineteenth-Century Physical Anthropology” Isis 58 p. 9 130 인문과학연구 제31집 from the Anglo-Saxons and thus lacking “sympathy with the English character.”8) Implementing a strict racial binary, the British endowed these contemptible Others with traits feared and despised by the respectable Englishmen; subsequently, Paddy and Bridget were lambasted as “childish, emotionally unstable, ignorant, indolent, superstitious, primitive or semi-civilized, dirty, vengeful, and violent” savages, who have been “savages since the world began, and will be forever savages.”9) In this way, Victorian discourse solidified the image of the Irish as barbarians, dependent upon the governance and the benevolence of the British Empire. And acting upon a persistent attempt to bind the Irish with other “barbarians,” the British went so far as to manufacture arbitrary criteria to prove the Irish as “white niggers” [sic] or “Europe’s blacks.” For instance, John Beddoe, an influential Victorian ethnologist, developed the “index of nigriscence” to specify one’s racial and ethnic identity by calculating the amount of melanin in skin, eyes, and hair. Inevitably, Beddoe’s criterion provided “scientific” evidence to confirm the African genesis of the “Africanoid” Celts.10) The nigrification of the Irish led to their infantilization, and not unlike their American “Negro” counterparts Topsy and Sambo, Paddy and Bridget were demoted to “neglected and badly brought up children” lacking autonomy.11) Yet another step in the disenfranchisement of the Irish led to their feminization, which is not surprising since many literary critics and social scientists have expounded upon the knot of complicity between societal hierarchies of race and gender. L. P Curtis notes that the feminization of
8) Vincent J. Cheng, 1995, op, cit., p. 21 9) Ibid., p. 20, 28 10) Ibid., p. 31 11) Ibid., p. 27 “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 131 the Irish alludes to an implicit collusion between patriarchal and imperial notions of autonomy. Underscoring the relevance of an “assumed connection between femininity and unfitness for self-government,” Curtis submits that:
The habit of assigning sexual genders to various races and nation [...] in a period when demands for female suffrage were being resisted by the overwhelming majority of Parliament, when the very idea of female emancipation aroused deep fears among the male members of the population, the assignment of feminine traits of mind to a people like the Irish certainly did not enhance their claim for political emancipation [and] the self-consciously mature and virile Anglo-Saxon had no intention of conferring his sophisticated institutions upon the childlike and feminine Irish Celts, as also on women and children.12)
In a word, the feminization of the Irish, in tandem with their infantilization and nigrification, were strategies undertaken to confiscate the Irish of their political agency and self-sufficiency. Without a doubt, Joyce lived in “an era of gendered racialism; it colored the world narratives of philosophy, history, government, and science [and he] imbibed it as much as others did.”13) Joyce was very much a product of the racist (as well as sexist) discourse of his time. Still, many critics have made attempts (perhaps rightfully so) to safeguard Joyce against allegations of racism and other forms of prejudice; maintaining that Ulysses is a novel that “publicly [...] parodies racialism,” Laura Doyle italicizes that Joyce had “the originality to reject this kind of masculinist racialism.”14) Vincent
12) L. P. Curtis, Jr., 1968, Anglo-Saxon and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (U of Bridgeport P, Bridgeport) pp. 61-2 13) Laura Doyle, 1993, “Races and Chains: The Sexuo-Racial Matrix in Ulysses” Joyce: The Return of the Repressed (Cornell UP, Ithaca & London) p. 154 14) Ibid., p. 154 132 인문과학연구 제31집
Cheng too contends that Joyce wrote insistently from the perspective of a colonial subject of an oppressive empire and that he was cognizant of the devastating corollaries of and expressed distinct distaste for such racist discourse. Noting that the figure of the Other is “a constant preoccupation” in Joyce’s work, Derek Attridge, like Cheng and Doyle, explains that Joyce’s representation of otherness evidences Joyce’s concerns about the othering of the Irish who also “suffered as objects of just this kind of stereotyping prejudice.”15) As noted above, I do not necessarily disagree with the views of these three critics and other staunch supporters of Joyce’s artistic propriety; still, I submit that it is necessary to turn our critical gaze onto the destructive race-ing of Cissy in Ulysses which erases her from the core of the narrative and from Dublin society.16) In 1839, Gustave d’Eichthal intimated that “the white race represented the male and the black race the female,” bolstering the notion of a symbiotic correlation between “gendered polarities” and “racial polarities.”17) In “Nausicaa,” the imperial and patriarchal inscriptions on Cissy’s body becomes quite literal and distinctly traceable in her blackened features; her exclusion from the pivotal Gerty-Bloom nucleus of this chapter extends to
15) Vincent J. Cheng, 1995, op. cit., p. xiii 16) We can locate Joyce’s earlier consideration of how the imperial discourse double-binds the Irish through gender and race in “Araby,” one of the fifteen collected short stories in Dubliners (1914). Similar to what takes place in “Nausicaa,” Mangan’s nameless sister (who is simply described as a “brown figure”) is characterized by two specific details (Dubliners 23): one is her color, and the other is her surname, which stakes her out as patriarchal property. Nameless, voiceless, and reduced to an object of the boy narrator’s romantic desires, Mangan’s sister is exiled to the periphery by her association with Araby, an Orientalist term encompassing the exoticism and eroticism of the racial Other; as Hélène Cixous asserts, “the reduction of a ‘person’ to a ‘nobody’ to the position of the ‘other’ [is the] inexorable plot of racism” (70-1). Granted, the boy narrator’s name is also left unidentified but he, owing to his capacity of epiphany, is able to occupy the subject position. 17) Laura Doyle, 1993, op. cit., pp. 151-2 “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 133 her social marginalization.18) The depiction of Cissy as a “lovable [girl] in the extreme” with “gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe red lips” is quickly turned on its head as she mutates into “[m]adcap Ciss with her golliwog curls.”19) At once, Joyce draws precarious attention to Cissy’s dark eyes, full lips and her kinky hair. Such overt racist markers promptly reduces Cissy to a golliwog, a black doll with grotesque features and nappy hair, reducing Cissy to a child’s plaything, easy to manipulate, disregard, and to discard. Interestingly enough, it is Joyce’s protagonist Bloom who instigates Cissy’s transition from a “romantic gypsy to a buffoonish blackface”;20) under his male gaze, Cissy’s “mop head” is transformed into “golliwog curls” and her “cherryripe red lips” into “fat lips” and “nigger [sic] mouth.”21) Though initially appearing as a mother-figure of sorts for the Caffrey twins and Baby Boardman, Cissy’s maternal authority is expunged by Bloom who remarks, “of course [she] understands birds, animals, babies. In their line.”22) Classified alongside “birds, animals, [and] babies,” Cissy’s authorial voice is undermined and her role as a surrogate mother is rescinded. Coincidentally, Cissy’s puerile characteristics come to be greatly exaggerated and constant
18) “Nausicaa” is the thirteenth chapter of Ulysses. The chapter begins on the beach with Gerty MacDowell and her two girl friends, Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, who are playing with their younger siblings. Bloom sits on the rocks nearby on the Sandymount Strand, ogling at the young girls, Gerty in particular, and Gerty and Bloom’s reaction to each other is, according to William Tindall, “the principal substance of this chapter; she becomes an exhibitionist, he a voyeur” (192). The chapter is divided into two parts, the first centers on Gerty, the second on Bloom. The bifurcated narrative structure is discussed elsewhere in this essay. 19) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 347, 353 20) Margot Norris, 1998, “Modernism, Myth, and Desire in ‘Nausicaa’” James Joyce Quarterly 26.1 p. 45 21) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 353 22) Ibid., p. 371 134 인문과학연구 제31집 references are made of Cissy’s childlike and tomboyish appearance: for one, Cissy is wearing French heels to make her look taller (and older) but the unsuitability heightens the impression of a young girl playing dress-up in adult clothing. Bloom comments on this discrepancy when he observes that Cissy looks as if she is “dress[ed] in [her] mother’s clothes.”23) Expecting to get a rise out of Bloom, Cissy runs in her high heels to show off “all the end of her petticoat ... and her skinny shanks up as far as possible.”24) Unfortunately, Cissy does not get the response she expects from Bloom because even more than her tomboyish behavior of wildly running to and fro, throwing the ball for her twin brothers to catch, it is Cissy’s skinny shanks that marks “her body as childish, at least in form, for she lacks the ‘womanly fullness’ [...] that Bloom appreciates in Gerty.”25) Moreover, one is able to observe a certain “burlesque-like minstrel show” quality in Cissy’s performative attempts to win Bloom’s attention.26) Cissy’s demotion to a minstrel show character who, more often than not, was dehumanized for comic relief hamstrings her even further to a distinct racialized identity. According to Margot Norris, Cissy is the namesake of a gender bender pantomime character-a giant baby girl usually played by a
23) Ibid., p. 371 24) Ibid., p. 359 25) Jen Shelton, 1996, “Bad Girls: Gerty, Cissy, and the Erotics of Unruly Speech” James Joyce Quarterly 34.1 p. 91 26) Likewise, in “The Wandering Rocks,” Father Conmee’s thoughts immediately turn to the “souls of black and brown and yellow men ... and the African mission” as he encounters an advertisement of a popular minstrel show and its star Eugene Stratton “grinning with thick nigger [sic] lips” (U 10.222-3). Father Conmee is unable to separate the “negro” impersonator Stratton and his would-be converts from Africa. Sheldon Brivic asserts that Father Conmee’s biased view of Africa may have reflected that of Joyce’s; Brivic argues that because of Joyce’s limited access to views of Africans that were not stereotypes, his point of view inevitably conformed to the Eurocentric bias of non-whites. Nevertheless Brivic does not go the full force in his attack on Joyce’s alleged racism by stating that Joyce “marshalled his opaque images of people of color so as to evade a real opposition” (55). “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 135 man in baby clothes-from the production of Babes in the Woods.27) The infantile was a major trope of the Pantomime “whose intertexts are drawn from fairy tales and nursery rhymes [and] baby talk, games, and play” and Cissy’s discourse in “Nausicaa,” says Norris, consists “entirely of this language.”28) Accordingly, Cissy’s limitation to infantile discourse verbally signals her marginalization. In Ulysses, Cissy’s male contemporary, Stephen Dedalus, eloquently delivers to Dublin’s intellectual elites his theories about philosophy, religion, and literature; Cissy, on the other hand, is more or less limited to mimicking an infantilized rhetoric that emphasizes her subordinate position. Jen Shelton makes an opposing case for Cissy’s articulation of the infantile and suggests that it empowers rather than delimits her. Shelton argues that in conversing with Baby Boardman in baby talk, Cissy’s speech includes a “powerful component, manipulative, and controlling” because she is able to make the baby comply to her will. Particularly addressing the moment in which Cissy is trying to teach Baby Boardman to say “papa,” Shelton suggests that Cissy “conjure[s] a moment of laughter at patriarchy”:29) Cissy requests that baby say “papa, baby, Say pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa,” to which Baby Boardman responds “Haja ja ja haja.”30) According to Shelton, here “papa,” the signifier of the patriarch, is relegated to an infant’s babblings, closely resembling sounds of laughter and Cissy thus is able to subvert and poke fun at the tyrannies of patriarchal power.31) Shelton’s
27) Margot Norris, 1998, op. cit., pp. 44-5 28) Ibid., p. 45 29) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., pp. 356-7 30) Ibid., pp. 356-7 31) Not only does Cissy dress up in unfitting clothes that look like her mother’s, she also cross-dresses in “her father’s suit and hat and burned cork moustache and walk[s] down the Tritonville road, smoking a cigarette” (U 13.353). Shelton reads this as another critical moment in which Cissy subverts masculine authority (93). As Butler has theorized, “the 136 인문과학연구 제31집 argument, I cede, is viable to a limited degree in that Cissy may be demonstrating some agency in appropriating baby talk and choosing it over English, the language of the white patriarchal colonizers. However, Shelton seemingly elides that Cissy’s appropriation of baby talk does not fortify her position as an articulating subject nor establish her as a defiant nonconformist of the dominant discourse; rendering Cissy’s speech to meaningless babble of baby talk prompts the severe dismissal of her capacity to communicate and thus disempowers her in a phallogocentric world. The figuration of Cissy’s fragmented body is further convoluted by the inscription on her body as a (failed) seductress; as Doyle explains, the identification of Cissy as a “tomboy” and “the dark one with mop head and nigger mouth” [sic] occurs almost simultaneously and thus Cissy’s “two violations” of transgressing the norms of both girlishness and whiteness “seem to go hand in hand.”32) When the three girl friends notice Bloom on Sandymount Beach, Cissy immediately responds to his presence in a sexually charged manner. In Cissy’s overstated behavior―calling out “unladylike” things about tabooed body parts, hyperactively attending to the twins, excessively fussing over Baby Boardman, letting out a shrill whistle, etc.―the onlookers (including the readers) “see most of the game”33) she plays to catch
parodic repetition of the ‘original’ reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original” (31). Beyond question, Joyce’s Dublin is populated with “impotent” Irish men-infants, drunkards, cuckolded husbands, masturbators, and Catholic priests-all of whom come to symbolize the paralytic and enervated condition of Ireland under British colonial rule. To a certain degree, Cissy’s appropriation of masculine authority is somewhat of an empty victory in that the “original” (i.e. Irish men) has limited access to agency. Notwithstanding the transgressive potential in Cissy’s crossing over the gender binary, it is still my contention that Cissy is not able to accrue agency as a result of her gender-bending actions because she is clearly being lampooned for her attempts to perform masculinity (as well as grown-up femininity) and her performative antics simply exacerbates the fragmentation of her body: maternal/infantile., male/female, white/black. 32) Laura Doyle, 1993, op. cit., p. 158 “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 137
Bloom’s attention. Cissy’s forwardness in approaching Bloom, and her allusion to him as her Uncle Peter, which is a “childish substitution for a ‘penis,’”34) reveal Cissy’s desires to express her sexuality to and seduce Bloom.35) Such portrayal of Cissy is problematic in that it further associates her with other racialized women whose hypersexualized bodies are constantly laden with proclivities toward depravity and licentiousness; for instance, there are Zoe Higgins and Florryzoe, the “black but comely” harlots of Nighttown.36) The monolithic otherness of these “jujuby women”37) is compounded by their race, sexual “deviance” and also by their association to bestiality (via images of them giving their teat to serpents and lizards). Displaced to this extreme periphery of humanity, Cissy fails in her endeavor to seduce Bloom as he rejects the overtly racialized and hypersexualized Cissy who, perhaps, proves to be too much of an Other for him to be reconciled to. Ultimately, although we can locate moments of subversive agency in Cissy, they do not coalesce to grant her subjectivity in any shape or form; this is rather perplexing in considering why Joyce may have specifically chosen Cissy as his medium and deployed such an unavailing strategy to critique British imperial discourse, which submitted Ireland to such demoralizing discrimination under which Cissy is also placed in “Nausicaa.” It seems as though Cissy is permitted only to make a brief appearance just as to highlight her utter lack of subjectivity and she is essentially banished from the remainder of the chapter. In the end, race-ing, sex-ing, and baby-ing
33) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 371 34) Jen Shelton, 1996, op. cit., p. 93 35) “Circe” highlights Cissy’s role as a seductress in that she returns as a prostitute accompanied by two British soldiers, implicating the imperial discourse in Cissy’s reduction to a prostitute. 36) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 477 37) Ibid., p. 578 138 인문과학연구 제31집
Cissy’s body only leads to erasing her body of any substantial significance; in the same vein, Lesley Higgins argues that while Ulysses “attends closely to the cultural and ideological limitations placed on women in Irish society at the turn of the century, chapter after chapter documents the erasure of most women from everyday life in Dublin.”38) The social relegation of Cissy (by impinging upon her body with racial/sexual markers) is troubling when set against the characterization of Gerty; Bloom rejects the extreme unfamiliarity of Cissy in favor of the passive and silent Gerty who embodies the normative conventions of womanhood. From the onset, Gerty is posed as a diametric opposite of Cissy. She is at once “the girlwoman,” “a womanly woman,” and Joyce’s “ownest girlie”;39) presented as Joyce’s everywoman, Gerty is:
as a fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. [...] Her figure slight and graceful [t]he waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity. [...] There was an innate refinement, a languid queenly hauteur about Gerty which was unmistakably evident in her delicate hands [...] which were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers as white as lemon juice and queen of ointments could make them [...] and higharched step.40)
Contrasting with Cissy’s “mop head,” “gipsylike eyes,” and her “nigger [sic] mouth,” Gerty’s “wealth of wonderful hair was dark brown with a natural wave in it,” her eyes were of “the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive brows,” and her “rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect.”41) She is “colorless and anemic,
38) Lesley Higgins, 1997, “‘Lovely Seaside Girls’ or ‘Sweet Murderers of Men’?: Fatal Women in Ulysses” Gender in Joyce (UP of Florida, Gainesville) p. 48 39) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 342 40) Ibid., p. 348 “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 139 exhibit[ing] the waxen pallor of a Greek nymph, a plaster saint, or the Catholic Virgin, ‘Tower of Ivory’.”42) In elevating Gerty to an emblem of iconic white womanhood, Joyce recycles the age-old binary of femininity: the Madonna, or the “good” subject which is partially accepted versus the whore, the “bad” subject which must be disciplined, punished, and exiled. As the “good” subject, Gerty is awarded narrative agency, albeit partial. Gerty’s narrative, which takes up the first half of “Nausicaa,” is the first instance in which the readers are offered a glimpse of female interority in Ulysses. Her subjectivity is ultimately curtailed in that during the latter half of “Nausicaa,” which is presented from Bloom’s perspective, Gerty is reincorporated into the female other as she becomes the object of Bloom’s fantasy and of his discourse; Jeri Johnson shrewdly observes that while Bloom is granted first-person subjectivity of internal monologue, Gerty is only permitted third-person free indirect discourse and thus “has no voice of her own.”43) Furthermore, critics have long acknowledged that Gerty’s narrative is a parody of Victorian sentimental novels and contemporary women’s magazines attacked for their excessive sentimentality, “lexical redundancy, and tortuous syntax”; even Joyce himself described this part of “Nausicaa” as “a namby-pamby jammy marmarlady drawersy (alto la!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painters’ palette, chitchat, circumlocutions, etc. etc.”44) Considering Joyce’s own distaste for the sickeningly sweet rhetoric of Gerty’s narrative, it is not surprising that he quickly replaces it with the narrative voice of Bloom which, as pointed out above, transitions Gerty from a subject position to an
41) Ibid., p. 347, 349 42) Suzette Henke, 1982, op. cit., p. 136 43) Jeri Johnson, 2010, “Explanatory Notes” Ulysses (Oxford UP, Oxford) p. 899 44) William Kupinse, 1999, “Household Trash: Domesticity and National Identity in The Lamplighter and the ‘Nausicaa’ Episode of Ulysees” South Carolina Review 32.1 p. 82 140 인문과학연구 제31집 object of Bloom’s discourse and his voyeuristic pleasure. If Cissy was infantilized by physical markers, it is Gerty’s narrative which discloses her naiveté and childish notions, especially about marriage. Illustrated in diminutive terms, Gerty envisions her married life as:
[settling] down in a nice snug and cosy little homely house, [and] every morning [she and her husband] would both have brekky, simple but perfectly served, for their own two selves and before he went out to business he would give his dear little wifey a good hearty hug and gaze for a moment deep down into her eyes.45)
In the chaste and innocent married life Gerty foresees for herself, her relationship with her husband-to-be is conceived of as one “just [like] a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess”;46) thus, her married life is, as she sees it, a substitution of a happy childhood that she was not privy to and is anxious to recreate even in her adult life. Though Cissy was depicted as tomboyish and immature, a disconcerting nexus was forged between her childlike vulnerability and sexuality. Likewise, Gerty’s naiveté does not exempt her from occupying a sexualized position as the ingenue’s “titillating striptease” ultimately leads Bloom to his masturbatory infidelity; she becomes a true “Lady of the Rocks: part Virgin, part temptress, with the boundaries ambiguously blurred.”47) Moreover, allusions to Gerty’s menstruation implicate her as a “bleeding whore.”48)49)
45) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 352 46) Ibid., p. 364 47) Suzette Henke, 1982, op. cit., p. 141, Lesley Higgins 1997, op. cit., p. 56 48) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 499 49) Higgins finds problematic Bloom’s preoccupation with women’s menstrual cycles; she claims that in late 19th century, menstruation was “believed to be evidence of evolutionary retardation” and references to it in Joyce result in the dehumanization of the “bleeding whore” “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 141
Transformed from the exemplar of Victorian womanhood to a hemorrhagic jezebel, Gerty is relegated to a figure of Bloom’s erotic fantasy and thus becomes implicated in “an eroticized economy of feminine availability.”50) It would seem then that Gerty’s conformity to the norms of white femininity does not render her any less susceptible to the intervention of the masculine and the imperial discourses than her blackened and infantilized friend Cissy. As Bloom contemplates in “Sirens”:
Blank face. Virgin [I] should say. Write something on it: page. If not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. [...] Body of white woman, a flute alive. Blow gentle. Loud. Three holes all women. [...] Ventriloquise.51)
To Bloom, women, in effect, are flutes to be played; though Bloom is not specifically referring to Gerty here, he still foresees “decline [and] despair” for the woman without the masculine master narrative dictating her course of action. And as such logic was invariably applied to the colonized, the patriarch and the white colonizer are again tightly interwoven together. Consequently, Bloom’s echoing of the predominance of masculine and imperial authority underlines the disempowerment of the racial and gendered others. Henke notes that “Bloom is the perfect Platonic lover: like a chaste courtier, he pierces his lady with nothing more dangerous than a burning gaze”;52) Bloom’s gaze, however, may be more pernicious than Henke
(59); for instance, when Bloom notices Gerty’s “monthlies,” he muses that women become “devils they are when that’s coming on them. Dark devilish appearances” (U 13.369). 50) Such critics as Kimberly Devlin allude that Gerty reduces Bloom to the role of spectator in her performance of femininity and inverts the patriarchal order by taking her own voyeuristic pleasure in the spectacle of Bloom’s masturbatory act (882); however, as was the case with Cissy, being a subject of performance does not necessarily elicit subjectivity for Gerty. Jen Shelton, 1996, op. cit., p. 88, 91 51) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 285 142 인문과학연구 제31집 suggests in its culpability of blackening Cissy and transforming Gerty into a “hot little devil.”53) Also, it is via Bloom that Gerty’s physical deformity is brought to the attention of the readers; Gerty is initially posited as the feminine par excellence, but as Bloom’s gaze fixes itself on her limp, she is compromised as the feminine ideal just as Bloom’s focus on Cissy’s “handicap” exacerbates her alienation. Thus, it is Bloom’s gaze that inflicts as well as reinforces, through his visual confirmation, the supposed “inferiority” of these two female characters whose representations are greatly skewed and convoluted. Perhaps as a way to redeem Joyce, some critics have argued that Gerty is a “pale shadow of the more flamboyant Molly Bloom.”54) Molly also can be seen as an extension of Cissy in that Molly is a character who mingles sexual and racial difference; while Molly is not nigrified, she is placed within a racial continuum by her Spanish and Irish ancestry. Moreover, Molly is persistently sexualized by her husband Bloom and other men who mainly describe her as “buxom, flirtatious, nonmonogamous woman with a singing voice but no brains”; considering that she is having an affair with Boylan, Molly is then presented as “impure both sexually and racially.”55) However, Molly does not remain as the voiceless, nameless brown figure of “Araby,” nor is she exiled to the periphery after being racialized as Cissy is. Her narrative, unlike Gerty’s, is not ridiculed and her narrative authority is not thwarted by her husband’s. If Cissy, Gerty, and Mangan’s sister in “Araby” are all limited in their ability to speak, it is significant that Molly who encapsulates all three is not only polyvocal
52) Suzette Henke, 1982, op. cit., p. 143 53) James Joyce, 1990, op. cit., p. 368 54) Suzette Henke, 1982, op. cit., p. 132 55) Laura Doyle, 1993, op. cit., p. pp.182-3 “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 143
(fluent in both Spanish and English) but it is on her words and thoughts that Ulysses concludes. In this way, Molly subverts the racial and sexual stereotypes that crippled and silenced the three women who preceded her. Cheng notes that by depicting the Irish as other races, “Joyce show[ed] that being like (or just being) other races is a positive thing.”56) Overcoming a lineage of women who were inscripted and ventriloquised by the dominant discourse, Molly, the potent, vivid, autonomous, and hybrid character that she is, finally destabilizes this trope of the other. Still, I am somewhat hesitant to absolve Joyce so easily from the allegation that he selectively bolsters rather than subverts the dominant discourse in Ulysses; I maintain that Molly, though an empowering figuration of Irish womanhood, cannot be a magic cure-all for Joyce’s treatment of other female characters who are devalued and dehumanized. As Florence Walzl astutely observes: “That Joyce felt sympathy for women caught in restrictive social conditions is clear, but it is a sympathy often tempered by ironic dissection of feminine weakness or hypocrisy or sometimes biased by male ambivalence or even hostility [towards women].”57) Notwithstanding the numerous and sincere attempts Joyce may have made to commiserate with the woes of those who are othered by their race and gender, it is difficult to deny that there are characters in Ulysses to whom subjectivity is never granted; Higgins advocates, and I concur, that rather than trying to downplay the details that may mar its greatness, we make a concerted effort to consider the “antifeminist message so thoroughly enshrined”58) in this modernist masterpiece as a way to tackle and better
56) Vincent J. Cheng, 1995, op. cit., p. 47 57) Florence Walzl, 1982, “Dubliners: Women in Irish Society” Women in Joyce (U of Illinois P, Urbana & Chicago) p. 53 58) Lesley Higgins, 1997, op. cit., p. 60 144 인문과학연구 제31집 understand the pervasive discourse of racial and gender hierarchies in the early twentieth century. “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 145
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek, 1995, “Foreword” Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge UP, New York & Cambridge) pp.xi-xiii Brivic, Sheldon, 1995, “Afric Anna: Joyce’s Multiracial Heroine” Joyce’s Waking Women: An Introduction to Finnegans Wake (U of Wisconsin P, Madison & London) pp.54-67 Butler, Judith, 1990, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, New York) Cheng, Vincent J., 1995, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge UP, New York & Cambridge) Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément, 1986, The Newly Born Woman Trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester UP, Manchester) Curtis, L. P. Jr., 1968, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (U of Bridgeport P, Bridgeport) Devlin, Kimberly J., 1989, “‘See Ourselves as Others See Us’: Joyce’s Look at the Eye of the Other” PMLA 104.5 pp.882-93 Doyle, Laura, 1993, “Races and Chains: The Sexuo-Racial Matrix in Ulysses” Joyce: The Return of the Repressed. Ed. Susan Stanford Friedman (Cornell UP, Ithaca & London) pp.149-8 “Golliwogg” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwogg
Johnson, Jeri, Ed., 2010, “Explanatory Notes” Ulysses. By James Joyce (Oxford UP, Oxford) pp.763-981 Joyce, James, 1914, Dubliners (Penguin, New York & London, 1993) , 1922, Ulysses (Vintage International, New York, 1990) Kupinse, William, 1999, “Household Trash: Domesticity and National Identity in The Lamplighter and the ‘Nausicaa’ Episode of Ulysses” South Carolina Review 32.1 pp.81-7 Norris, Margot, 1998, “Modernism, Myth, and Desire in ‘Nausicaa’” James Joyce Quarterly 26.1 pp.37-50 Odom, Herbert H., 1967, “Generalizations of Race in Nineteenth-Century Physical Anthropology” Isis 58 pp.5-18 Shelton, Jen, 1996, “Bad Girls: Gerty, Cissy, and the Erotics of Unruly Speech” James Joyce Quarterly 34.1 pp.87-102 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Norton, New York & London, 1994) Tindall, William York, 1959, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (Noonday Press, New York) Walzl, Florence, 1982, “Dubliners: Women in Irish Society” Women in Joyce Eds. Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless. (U of Illinois P, Urbana & Chicago) pp.31-56 “Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” ❚ 정혜연 147
<국문초록>
“Madcap Ciss with Golliwog Curls” : Race-ing and Erasing the Body Feminine in Ulysses’ “Nausicaa”
*
정혜연 59)
본 논문은 제임스 조이스의 모더니즘 소설 율리시스(1922) 의 13번 째 챕터인 “나우시카”에 나타난 아일랜드 여성성의 재현문제를 다루고 자 한다. 이 챕터에 대한 선행연구의 대부분이 주인공 블룸 (Leopold Bloom)과 거티 (Gerty MacDowell)의 관계에 초점을 맞춘다면, 이 논문에 서는 부수적인 인물인 씨시 (Cissy Caffrey)를 분석하는 데 주력하였다. 특히, 씨시는 인종화되어 지배담론에 의해 배척의 대상이 된다. 또한 그 녀는 백인여성성의 전형으로 등장하는 거티와 대치되기도 하지만, 결국 두 여성인물 모두 제국주의 및 가부장 담론의 객체로 전락하게 된다. 종래의 전통이나 권위 등에 반대하고 이를 전복시키는 데 의의를 둔 모 더니즘 계열의 작품인 율리시스에서 제국주의, 가부장제, 백인우월주 의 등의 지배담론이 유지되는 듯한데, 씨시에 대한 재조명을 통해 율 리시스내에서 기존질서의 잔류 문제에 대해 논의하고자 한다.
주제어: 제임스 조이스 (James Joyce), 율리시스 (Ulysses), 아일랜드 여성성 재현
(Representation of Irish Femininity), 인종화 (Racialization), 제국주의, 가부장 담론
(Imperial and Patriarchal Discourses)
* 성신여자대학교 영어영문학과 조교수 148 인문과학연구 제31집
투 고 일: 2013년 1월 17일 심사완료일: 2013년 2월 3일 게재확정일: 2013년 2월 15일