“her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes”.
The presence of the ghost of Stephen’s mother symbolises another connection in the text, the deliberate intertextual reference to the Ghost Of Hamlet’s Father links Stephen to Leopold and Molly before they have even met (and in fact, significantly, Stephen and Molly never meet) through the theme of adultery and betrayal.
.In Telemachus the reader is immediately confronted with the ghost of Stephen’s mother, and in Penelope the reader is given a chance to relate intimately to Molly. Mrs Dedalus is mute in Telemachus, her memories are told to the reader by Stephen –
“Her secrets: old feather fans, tassled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl”.
As a contrast, Molly breaks free from constraint in her stream of memories and unspoken thoughts. However, in both these sections Joyce effectively melds the masculine with the feminine in order to create a distinctly masculine and a distinctly feminine voice and persona which are reliant upon the natural opposition of male and female.
Penelope is an exuberant and warm exploration of Molly’s inner thoughts and feelings. Joyce starkly contrasts some of the more poetic language -
“my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all of a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is…”
with her crude references to adultery and sex with her husband. In giving Molly a voice and such a prominent position in the text, Joyce asserts her importance as a representation of the feminine in Ulysses. Penelope is also interesting as it emphasises the (ironically) close relationship enjoyed by Leopold and Molly, which Joyce examines throughout the novel. Bloom is the centre around which Molly’s stream of thoughts and memories revolve –
“I put my arms around him yes and drew him down on me so he could feel my breast yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes”.
Allowing Molly’s voice to articulate the closing words of the novel seems to signify the importance Joyce attaches to the pervading feminine influence of passivity and acquiescence. Neither Leopold Bloom nor Stephen Dedalus can exist as characters without their corresponding feminine influences. The same is true of Molly and Mrs Dedalus, and so Joyce emphasises the essential symbiotic nature of the voices in his novel, once with the pairing of Stephen and his mother and Leopold and Molly, and secondly with the parallels and conflicts between these two significant female characters.
Sexuality, and lack of sex are major themes running through Ulysses and it is important to examine them as they are the bonds which tie together masculine and feminine voices within the text, but also significantly, create conflict and tension throughout the novel.
In Nausicaa, Joyce parodies the feminine register and the masculine persona in the forms of Gerty MacDowell, who is sitting on the beach, and Leopold Bloom, who is watching her. Joyce at once parodies and celebrates in a somewhat negative way, the different perceptions the two characters have of the situation. Gerty perceives Leopold in a strange, artificial and extremely romanticised manner, clearly influenced by the trashy novels she reads:
“…she knew he could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips…That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don’t tell”
Leopold on the other hand has a much harsher, though not cruel view of Gerty, he is quick to dismiss her as a cripple and speaks judgementally about her, this perhaps reveals more about Bloom than Gerty as only a few minutes beforehand he had been enjoying the sight of her exposing herself to him:
“Jilted beauty…Hot little devil all the same. Wouldn’t mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses”
The entire Nausicaa chapter revolves around the silent and imaginary rapport between Gerty and Leopold. Neither of their thoughts or voices would resonate quite so loudly as they do had they not been juxtaposed by Joyce. By weaving fantasy with reality and feminine with masculine (ironically aligning these four concepts into pairs for the reader to examine) the chapter is given significance, both for the reader and for the characters. Gerty’s interpretation of feminine is naïve and quite sterile, she and Leopold share many similar characteristics – they are both crippled, Gerty – physically and Bloom – sexually and their encounter on the beach adds insights into the character of Leopold Bloom.
Latent sexuality also pervades the atmosphere in Calypso “No. She did not want anything. He heard then a warm sigh, softer as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled”. This is a telling conflict with the repetition of “yes” in Penelope, a word which Molly seems to be permanently associated with. However despite what some may see as a stinging rebuke, Leopold and Molly carry on as normal. Leopold’s bittersweet reminiscences of Molly and him in their youth weaves their masculine and feminine personas together by emphasising the amount of time and the large portion of their lives they have shared:
“Old fashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform. And the little mirror in his silk hat. The night Milly brought it into the parlour. O, look what I found in professor Goodwin’s hat! All we laughed. Sex breaking out even then. Pert little piece she was.”
Leopold sounds wistful and almost pathetic, passive in the face of his wife’s adultery and in this way Joyce makes him appear quite feminine and receptive. He is almost complicit in Molly’s affair with Blazes Boylan as he is fully aware of Molly’s adultery yet prefers to retreat rather than face up to the truth of the matter. Bloom’s purchase of Sweets of Sin for Molly becomes a curious act of generosity towards an unfaithful wife, a kind of collusion, a vicarious participation in his own cuckolding. This idea is reiterated in Circe in which Leopold attempts to look through a keyhole to catch a glimpse of Molly and Boylan and instead sees a mirror. The reappearance of the mirror motif is significant again as it shows the relationship between the masculine and feminine – how Leopold’s insecurities and anxieties feed his imagination, how Molly fuels these anxieties and how both Leopold and Molly suffer because of their sexless marriage. The affair ironically binds Leopold and Molly together in their refusal to get to the root of the problem and their tacit agreement of silence, in this sense Joyce meshes together the masculine and feminine silences in order to create a marriage of silences, literally and metaphorically.
Ulysses is a novel consisting of many different voices. The parallels and contrasts, the mirroring and the interweaving of this array of thoughts, personalities and voices make up the main body of the text. Throughout his writing James Joyce allows his many different characters and often even objects to converse with the reader and with each other. The female characters in Ulysses are given voices and status within the text, however, throughout his novel Joyce constantly blends and contrasts these with the male voices. The essence of the novel therefore is neither masculine nor feminine but a delicate and intricate balance between the two. Unlike T.S. Eliot, Joyce does not appear to distrust the feminine in his literature anymore than he distrusts the masculine. Joyce may frequently mock his characters and use them as vehicles for parody but his warmth and affection for humanity underpins the novel as a whole. Ulysses does not appear to the reader as one coherent voice, indeed, Joyce refuses to allow any one voice or personality to dominate the novel – characters and voices co-exist, complementing and conflicting with each other within the text - “I am another now and yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant”. The incoherence and the imperfect combination of characters, language and voices allows Joyce to create a work of art which truly represents mankind’s subconscious voice. The different voices in Ulysses always retain their individual registers and nuances and Joyce constantly constructs and deconstructs relationships between the voices, ironically and at other times sincerely undermining both the feminine and the masculine registers. Ulysses is a democratic novel in this sense, as each voice is given equal importance, or lack of. While the novel may seem incoherent , or even as D.H. Lawrence wrote – “Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness” it is undeniable that Joyce has created a novel which does not exclude or castigate, but includes and celebrates humanity in many different forms - “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
James Joyce “Ulysses The 1922 Text”, OUP, 1993
Sheldon Brivic “Joyce the Creator”, The University Of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1985,
Claire A. Culleton “Names and Naming in Joyce” The University Of Wisconsin Press, London, 1994
Daniel Mark Fogel, “Covert Relations – James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Henry James”, University Press Of Virginia, London, 1990
Maggie Humm “A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism”, Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, 1994
Robert Kiely “Beyond Egotism – The Fiction of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence”, Harvard University Press, London, 1980
Colleen Lamos “Deviant Modernism – Sexual and textual errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Marcel Proust”, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998
Darcy O’Brien “The Conscience of James Joyce”, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1968
“Deviant Modernism” page 3