‘The girl, or woman, or whatever she is …’: Femininity and Nationalism in Joyce

Abstract

Nationalist women in Joyce’s texts are marginal figures, peripheral to the narrative centrality of Stephen D(a)edalus, Bloom and Molly and the other assorted voices of Dubliners and of Ulysses. Both Emma Clery of Stephen Hero and E—C—of A Portrait remain shadowy, insubstantial figures, filtered through the perceptions of the Stephen D(a)edaluses. And while Dante Riordan is central to the Christmas scene in A Portrait she is later recalled only as ‘a name’: ‘A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe’ (P 93). Where a nationalist woman is central to the narrative — as in the figure of Mrs Kearney in Dubliners — nationalism is de-centred in her description. Mrs Kearney’s nationalism is only a screen for her ambitions as ‘a mother’. This chapter considers those nationalist women who have been marginalized both within the texts and in critical considerations of Joyce. It examines the very figuration of these women as marginal and reads this figuration against dominant nationalist constructions of femininity.

He knows nothing at all about women.

Nora Barnacle to Samuel Beckett

But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

Stephen Dedalus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man