However, Feminist critics are not so confident. Margot Norris (1976: P.216) looks further than the effect of the women on Gabriel Conroy and deals with their portrayal. She sees the story as consisting of a: ‘loud and audible male narration challenged and disrupted by a silent discounted female countertext that does not, in the end, succeed in making itself heard.’ Norris suggests that the reader is invited, throughout, to agree
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with Gabriel’s view, as he argues with the critical Molly Ivors or admires his wife as she stands on the stairs. The women’s voices are not the genuine expression of women’s views but artifices designed to help us see as Gabriel sees. This view I think would seem to place Margot Norris on the side of those who regard Joyce’s portrayal of women with disfavour. From this point, however, her thinking takes an interesting turn. She writes that although, the narration favours the patriarchal, there are ‘gaps and contradictions’ (P.220) which, whether Joyce intended them or not introduce notes of scepticism which encourage questions. “The Dead”, she concludes, is predominantly patriarchal, but leaves loopholes through which alternative interpretations are possible.
Henke (1990: P.76) shows us the extent to which in Portrait, women are treated as extensions of Stephen’s inner state rather than as characters in their own right. We do, of course, see everything in the novel from Stephen’s perspective and this perspective is extraordinarily self-regarding. Stephen’s ideas of women exist within a framework of opposites, primarily in a dichotomy between spirit and flesh in which women are associated with the physical – a charge levelled often by feminist critics of Joyce.
Henke writes that Stephen’s image of women tends to the stereotypes of virgin and whore. We watch Stephen becoming masculinised by the culture around him, his education, his family and so on. The Christmas argument over Parnell, for example, establishes women as either the champions of the repressive Church or pacifiers, while the two men seem to be arguing for something freer and more noble.
Women in Portrait are depicted as nuns, wives or prostitutes, but there is also the object of purity, beings capable of redeeming others from sins, particularly those of the flesh. As Gulvin states: ‘To Stephen women were comprised of several species - saints, martyrs, mothers or sinners.’ The nuns, as with other religious figures within the text, are represented as being the traditional interpretation of asexual beings. They are women to the extent that they have a womanly form; however, they lack any distinct characteristics or behaviours that can be defined as masculine or feminine. Stephen’s own mother, Mary, is the example of how today’s readers see the mother figure as a woman of long forbearance and suffering who is responsible for caring for herself, her house, her children and most importantly for the period, her husband. The prostitutes are barely human to Stephen; they appear and fade in swift succession with few descriptions given of who they actually are, merely what they do for the artist as
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and when he chooses. This active choice empowers the men within the text. Their ability to disregard women as they choose is an important part of the power structure created and signals to the reader Stephen’s sanction of this structure. Similarly, they are the objects of worship that are also represented for the use of men. Stephen creates within himself visions of beauty based on women who strike him as beautiful. This highlights the dichotomy created by the text in the differential between the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church regarding sexual abstinence and the necessity of those same pleasures in the continuance of the species. Carnal lusts are condemned by the Church but, through figures such as the Virgin Mary, the Church creates feminine figures of sexual purity similar to the female objects of purity worshipped by Stephen. However, due to the teachings of the priests, Stephen feels condemned to a personal hell and expresses this through his relationships with women. As the narrator describes, ‘He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin’ (P. 106).
Because of the presence of other strong Catholic males within his life, including his father and especially the priests, Stephen rejects the idea that the Church is at fault in its teachings, instead opting for his own fault. This simply shifts the focus of the power structure so that Stephen views women as inferior for different reasons without realising that there remains a gender inequality. This dichotomy, Stephen’s battle between lust and his interpretations of his own damnation, causes him to classify women as either deserving of damnation (prostitutes) or admired as objects of purity, the Madonna figures. Men are not interpreted in this manner. Harkness (1990: P.54) explains, ‘women stand in shadows….separate from the work of the world, or from the world of the fiction itself.’ Therefore the women in Portrait are marginalized and sidelined by their lack of strong presence in the text.
In its criticism of the Catholic Church, the novel is also then a criticism of the traditional masculine values created by such an entity. The lack of female counterparts to the priests shows the way in which the modern Catholic Church disregards the necessity of women. Stephen succumbs to the cavalier attitude to bonds of emotion between men. As Harkness further states ‘Stephen appears quick to identify with his father and his father’s chums, not so his mother’ (P.56). By rejecting his heritage in favour of Art, Stephen moves away from the religious value systems of masculinity advocated by his father. He is father to himself. His lack of requirement of an actual woman disempowers the women of the text, particularly his own mother, to whom he no longer has connections. His succession of whores point towards an
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acceptance of male promiscuity, as does the appearance of the fact that he assimilated this behaviour from his own father, casting no doubt on Stephen’ inability to have changed masculine perceptions to a more equitable arrangement of power between genders.
‘How women appear to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of their life’ asserts Berger (1972: P.46). This emphasis upon appearances is not applied, however, to Stephen, or any other male characters. This support of the patriarchy as mentioned previously is due to the fact that women are portrayed exclusively from Stephen’s point of view. These characters maintain their control over the women by neither party usually being quite aware of the situation. Awareness, when it occurs, is rapidly suppressed. Father Arnell’s comment, that ‘He came to the woman, the weaker vessel’, indicates the roles that the Catholic Church prescribes for men and women. As Henke states: ‘In the battle between male and female, Mother Church emerges as a bastion of sexual repression’ (P.67). However, the feminist movement may have found some sympathies within Joyce. This is shown by the revolutionary attitudes expressed by some of Stephen’s compatriots:
’Stephen, you're an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I’m not. I'm a democrat and I’ll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes’ (P. 191-92).
The novel confirms popular stereotypes of the period. The priests are of particular importance in this as they demonstrate, as other males, the masculine ability to ignore women as they so choose. This choice of the exclusion or inclusion of women disempowers women within the male-dominated social arena. The offer for Stephen to join as a member of the priesthood is symbolic of his contribution to the continuance of the religious forms of masculinities.
Stephen represents the modern patriarchal man; learned, secular and sensitive within his relationships with other men. As he is described by Heron, ‘Stephen is a model youth. He doesn't smoke and he doesn’t go to bazaars and he doesn’t flirt and he doesn’t damn anything or damn all’ (P.80). As much as the other characters may see Stephen as an embodiment of the modern male form, he is, nonetheless, an active participant in the maintenance of patriarchal power structures. In my opinion he is as guilty as any other man within the text of actively preventing women from gaining power.
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Henke gives Joyce the benefit of the doubt. She sees the irony in Joyce’s presentation of Stephen and concludes that Joyce ‘seems to imply that the developing artist’s notorious misogyny will prove to be still another dimension (and limitation) of his youthful priggishness’ (P.87).
Throughout Ulysses, Joyce deliberately problematises gender and interrogates sexual practice. The novel unfolds as a radical exploration of different forms of Psychic mobility. Henke (1990:P.7) argues ‘sexual identity is at once ambiguous and polymorphous, a state to be achieved through the textual exploration of a series of ostensibly perverse psychological drives.’ One of the prime themes of Ulysses is the importance of paternity and some feminist critics have seen women and particularly Molly Bloom, as marginalized by this emphasis. Molly is clearly linked to the flow of life: the tumbling words of her uninhibited monologue coming like water over the dry rocks of the scientific ‘precision of Ithaca and the rambling aridity Eumaecus’ (Henke: P.7). Thus Molly is the life principle and male critics have associated her with the womb, with Nature, with the earth Mother and with an animal goddess.
Molly appears as the sum total of all of the novel’s female characters. Fusing Mrs. Breen and Mrs. Cunningham together, Molly presents herself as the beleaguered wife of a difficult man, all the while admitting her own ‘kimono’ antics. Molly’s thoughts on maternity contrast with Mina Purefoy’s and the midwives, because of her dismal attitude, no doubt influenced by her husband’s refusal to inseminate her during sex. Molly also evokes the images of sexual conquest and competition, having vanquished Martha Clifford; Molly confirms the superiority of songs over flowers as the medium of love. In this regard, Molly Bloom resembles Douce and Kennedy of the Ormond Bar, but her closest link is to the ‘Nausicaa’ character, Gerty MacDowell. Molly’s first sexual experience involves masturbating a man into her handkerchief and like MacDowell, she found religious confession to be an inhumane institution: ‘there’s nothing like a kiss long and hot down your to soul almost paralyses you then I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan’ (P.78). Molly’s possessiveness and odd sense of piety produce a Nausicaa like commentary: ‘hed [Leopold Bloom] never find another woman like me to put up with him’ (P.81).
Some feminist critics see Molly as a proto-feminist undermining male authority while others see her a slovenly self-absorbed, ignorant, vain and insulting stereotype. Gilbert and Gubar (1985: P.45) see Joyce as confining woman, giving her no existence outside her body. Feminist critics who share this viewpoint indicate,
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tellingly, that Molly is never seen out of bed except as a dismembered arm at a window and that her first word in the novel is not even a proper word: ‘Mn’ (P.45), rather like the cat’s ‘mrkgnao’ (P.27). Feminist critics have resented this association of Molly with the purely physical, playing no part in the worlds of ideas and art. Her ignorance is established earlier on when, having asked Bloom the meaning of the word ‘metempsychosis’ which she pronounces ‘met-him-pike-hoses’, she dismisses her husband’s attempts to explain. Her preferred reading material is Ruby: The Pride of the King, although she complains ‘There’s nothing smutty in it’ (P.78). Molly is seen by some feminist critics as a caricature typifying a male view of women. Her spectacularly successful copulation with Boylan is just a ‘male masturbatory fantasy’ says Henke (P.156) and Molly, the ‘fat heap……with a back on her like a ballalley’ (P.343) as the narrator “Cyclops” describes her, is just a cartoon, a man’s view of woman.
Other Feminist critics like Sherry (1994: P.77) have taken a different view of Molly, and much feminist writing interprets Joyce as other than a writer at the head of a patriarchal literary heritage. This view of Molly sees her as an anarchic figure, mocking and overturning all the male certitudes and values, which have been expressed in the rest of the book. What men find deadly serious, she finds ridiculous. Where the men in the novel are detached from their emotions regarding them at a distance, Molly is gloriously in touch with hers. She is not fooled by Boylan. The view of the suspicious narrator of the “Cyclops” episode may echo male triumphalism: ‘That’s the bucko that’ll organise her, take my tip’ (347), but the reality is different. Molly’s monologue shows that it is Molly who is using Boylan for her sexual gratification, which she is denied at home. She does not find him satisfying in any other way, however, and remarks upon his limitations and his gross familiarity, resenting the slap on the behind he gave her. Her affirmation at the end of the novel is for Bloom – although, as always, it is tempered by practicality: ‘I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get around him’ (P. 389). Maddox also (1988: P.56) points to the fact that Molly is a woman who ‘subverts male authority’, however other critics are more sceptical.
Thus we may well conclude that, although the roles and positions given to women by Joyce in Dubliners, Portrait and Ulysses seem subordinate, inferior, subsidiary and represent a highly patriarchal society, Joyce, as might be expected, remains contradictory and ambivalent in his treatment of women. Widely quoted is his remark
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to Mary Colum, stating that he hated intellectual women. Nora expressed to Samuel Beckett her exasperation with those who praised Joyce’s’ deep understanding of a woman’s viewpoint, ‘That man knows nothing about women’ (quoted in Maddox P.278). Joyce talked of the “Penelope” episode as an addition, saying that the book proper ended with “Ithaca”. He also, however, told Frank Budgen that Molly was the axis upon which the whole book revolved. Hence it is inappropriate in my opinion to take Joyce at face value and without a deep understanding of his intention in the novels.
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Bibliography
Berger, John. (1972). Ways of Seeing. Penguin. London.
Gilbert, S & Gubar, S. (1985). Sexual Lingistics, Gender, Language and Sexuality. Yale University Press. New Haven.
Gulvin, L.F. (1990). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a Critical Study. Longman. London.
Harkness, Marguerrite. (1990). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Voices in the Text. Twayne Publishing. Boston.
Henke, Suzette. (1990). Joyce and the Politics of Desire. Routledge. London.
Joyce, James. (1992). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin. London.
Joyce, James. (1992). Ulysses. Penguin. London.
Lawrence, Karen. (1981). James Joyce’s Style. Princeton University Press. Princeton.
Norris. Margot. (1976). Joyce and his women. Hopkins University Press.
Sherry, V. (1994). Joyce – Ulysses. Cambridge University Press.
Unkeless, Elaine. (1982). Women in Joyce. University of Illinois Press. Urban.
