Copyright by Jacqueline Kay Thomas 2007 The Dissertation Committee for Jacqueline Kay Thomas certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: APHRODITE UNSHAMED: JAMES JOYCE’S ROMANTIC AESTHETICS OF FEMININE FLOW Committee: Charles Rossman, Co-Supervisor Lisa L. Moore, Co-Supervisor Samuel E. Baker Linda Ferreira-Buckley Brett Robbins APHRODITE UNSHAMED: JAMES JOYCE’S ROMANTIC AESTHETICS OF FEMININE FLOW by Jacqueline Kay Thomas, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2007 To my mother, Jaynee Bebout Thomas, and my father, Leonard Earl Thomas in appreciation of their love and support. Also to my brother, James Thomas, his wife, Jennifer Herriott, and my nieces, Luisa Rodriguez and Madeline Thomas for providing perspective and lots of fun. And to Chukie, who watched me write the whole thing. I, the woman who circles the land—tell me where is my house, Tell me where is the city in which I may live, Tell me where is the house in which I may rest at ease. —Author Unknown, Lament of Inanna on Tablet BM 96679 Acknowledgements I first want to acknowledge Charles Rossman for all of his support and guidance, and for all of his patient listening to ideas that were creative and incoherent for quite a while before they were focused and well-researched. Chuck I thank you for opening the doors of academia to me. You have been my champion all these years and you have provided a standard of elegant thinking and precise writing that I will always strive to match. Your free and open thinking inspire uninhibited exploration, and that is the best thing a teacher can offer. I hope I can offer half as much to my students. Thank you so much for that. Most of all, a thousand and one thanks for introducing me to James Joyce. I next want to acknowledge and thank Lisa Moore for helping me articulate my unconventional feminist ideas these past four years. When few others heard me making any sense, she did. I will always remember her saying to me one day, “Jacquie, you just keep on telling us what you’re trying to tell us, we want to understand you.” That’s was the day I knew I would be able to complete this program. I want to thank you, Lisa, for not only providing the scheduled structure for my writing, but also for shaping it into coherent chapters with your sharp and tireless critical eye. You are as gifted a teacher as you are a scholar. I also would like to thank Samuel Baker for his enthusiastic encouragement and advice these last two years, and for his unstinting willingness to sort through many inchoate first starts on papers, conference proposals, and chapters. Sam, your class on romantic poetry was key to me writing my breakthrough chapter on Joyce and Shelley. Also, your suggestion that I explore Joyce’s view of Shelley through the lens of his Victorian education led me to study Walter Pater’s influence on him. That proved to be invaluable. Thank you for all of this and for your line-by-line critiques of my prose. vi And my very special thanks go to Linda Ferreira-Buckley and Brett Robbins, two professors who kindly joined my committee late in the process. I want to thank them for giving me extra time in recent weeks to finish my dissertation, even though it meant no small inconvenience to them. Linda’s expertise on Walter Pater, and Brett’s feedback as a Homerist will be crucial as I revise my chapters into publishable pieces next year. I appreciate your efforts and thank you for your support and interest in my project. I am also deeply indebted to Wayne Lesser who offered his attention, advice, and support in spite of the incredible schedule pressures he faces as professor, graduate advisor, and farmer/rancher. Without him, I would not have received the Cullen Trust Endowment fellowship, an award that allowed me to refine my research and polish my writing. Kevin Carney, our graduate coordinator, has also been a great help. His friendly and professional manner has always been effective and reassuring. Thank you, Kevin. My colleague, Matthew Russell, also deserves great thanks for his enthusiastic interest in and valuable feedback on my project. His recognition that the method I had discerned in Joyce’s fiction was in fact a mode helped me articulate the distinction between Joyce’s two uses of irony. His late arrival into my dissertation reading group coincided with my completion of my chapter on Joyce and Shelley. Having another friendly reader in the group in addition to Lisa really made a difference. The support of my friend and colleague, Audra Rouse, also made a big difference. When I was in distress over the process of finishing my dissertation and preparing for its defense, she offered sane and comforting advice. She also gave me flowers! Erin Boade also provided steady friendship and good-humored perspective on my worries and obstacles. For that and for her continued friendly support, I thank her. Finally, I owe many thanks to Giovanni Migliaccio for his help in formatting this document. His computer graphics skills and his patient, hard work made it come out the way I wanted it, on time. vii APHRODITE UNSHAMED: JAMES JOYCE’S ROMANTIC AESTHETICS OF FEMININE FLOW Publication No._____________ Jacqueline Kay Thomas, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2007 Supervisors: Charles Rossman and Lisa L. Moore In Aphrodite Unshamed: James Joyce’s Romantic Aesthetics of Feminine Flow, I trace the influence of romanticism and anthropology on Joyce, and argue that he renews by classicalizing an ironic romantic genre also inspired by anthropology, the fairy tale arabesque. Created by the random cobbling together of fairytale types, plot elements, and set pieces, the arabesque’s context was early anthropological work on folktales in Germany. I argue that, basing his fiction on this “nonsense” genre, Joyce mines the works of Homer, Shelley, Walter Pater, and Lucien Levy-Bruhl in order to promote—indeed, to narratively model—an abandonment of honor culture in favor of a neo-archaic culture of spiritualized sexual love. To do this, Joyce brings down to earth the airy Aphrodite of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and sexualizes the serpentine narrative trope Pater uses to aestheticize her power—both by chiasmatically structuring his fiction. Joyce envisions a world in which “cultural” men, because they sacralize and no longer shame female sexuality, participate in women’s “primitive,” i.e., not fully cultural, being. Indeed, I argue that, borrowing from Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s conception of the mystical viii epistemologies of “primitives,” Joyce viewed women as modern “primitives” capable of revitalizing overly intellectualized, alienated, and violent masculine Western culture. By creating recursive chiasmatic constructions of characters, images, and plot, Joyce creates layers of narrative infinity signs that body forth the unending “primitive” feminine rhythm that he makes the signature of his work. I argue that his work reveals that he viewed women as less than fully cultural, i.e., closer to rude animal life and the blunt forces of nature by virtue of sex, menstruation and child-bearing. He implicitly argues against the "new woman" and for women's continued “primitivity” in the service of his new, still male-produced, culture. His cooption of what he considers women’s “primitive” essence is thus meant to be a source for cultural renewal for modern Westerners. ix Table of Contents Introduction..............................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Joyce, Homer, and the Place of the Goddess...................................42 The Eclipse of the Goddess...........................................................................47 The Love Goddess in Epic............................................................................55 The Roots of the Goddess.............................................................................69 Barbarian Nature vs. Greek Culture in the Odyssey .....................................72 The Rebirth of the Goddess ..........................................................................86 Chapter Two: Joyce, Shelley and the Romantic Arabesque..................................94 Towards an Earthier Rebirth of Venus .........................................................98 The Artist as an Old Moon..........................................................................111 An Infinitely Serpentine Dance ..................................................................121 The Rose is on the Blooms .........................................................................132 Dancing on Solid Ground ...........................................................................140 Chapter Three – Joyce, Pater, and Decadent Renewal ........................................150 The Progress of Paterian Reason ................................................................157 Winding Roads, Sublime Roses..................................................................172 Joyce’s Sexualized Serpentine....................................................................191 The Two Faces of Emma ............................................................................204 The Goddess’ Rite and the Poet’s Rest.......................................................223 The Infinite Rhythm of Beauty...................................................................238