Chapter 4—
Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses
SERGIUS: Louka: do you know what the higher love is?
LOUKA: (astonished) No, sir.
SERGIUS: Very fatiguing thing to keep up for any length of time, Louka. One feels the need of some relief after it.
Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man
The architectonic structures in Ulysses taken from early Irish literary tradition are not limited to those from The Book of Invasions; a second set of symbolic structures in Ulysses pertains to the Sovereignty of Ireland, one of the oldest and most pervasive patterns of Irish myth, a pattern that had also been exploited before Joyce by the Anglo-Irish literary revival. In Ulysses the symbolic structures related to the Sovereignty interlock with those from The Book of Invasions, underscoring and extending their meanings. Because the Sovereignty is a female figure, this second set of mythological elements from early Irish literature naturally clusters around Molly Bloom.
Molly has been such a focus of critical inquiry that no attempt can be made here to treat her comprehensively. Accordingly, this discussion is not intended as an "even-handed" account: many aspects of Molly's character and position in the narrative will be set aside. Rather, the goal is to offer a compensatory treatment, to address issues about Molly that have long been neglected, and to focus on the mythic and structural aspects of
her character.[1] For the sake of convenience, the material here is organized into four sections. After a brief survey of goddess figures in early Irish literature, there is a detailed consideration of the parallels between Molly Bloom and Sovereignty figures elsewhere in Irish literature. The chapter then turns to the significance of the mythic structures for understanding the character of Leopold Bloom. The discussion concludes with the implications of Joyce's mythic structuring of Molly—implications for Ulysses as a narrative, for the place of Ulysses in the tradition of Irish literature, and for the ideological dimension of Ulysses.
i. A Survey of the Irish Goddesses
Female figures play a large role in early Irish myths and sagas and are often associated with fertility and the well-being of the landscape.[2] Some of the female mythic characters are territorial goddesses whose names are coded in the landscape: Anu, for example, gives her name to the double mountain in Kerry known as Dá Chích Anann, 'The Two Paps of Anu'. A striking aspect of certain early Irish mythic females is their connection with war: they may be leaders of armies or frankly supernatural characters like the Morrigan, a war goddess who can metamorphose into a carrion crow. Still another common figure is the goddess associated with a river or well; the Boann is probably the most well known example of this type of goddess. Though there is no Celtic goddess of love, most of the female figures in the early literature display a vigorous sexuality, illustrating their connection with love in its functional and ritual aspects rather than in its personal aspect. The most distinctive Irish goddess is the Sovereignty, whose union with the rightful king was thought to result in the fertility and prosperity of the land. Her union with the sacral king was signaled by her metamorphosis from hag to beautiful young girl. Before turning to Joyce's application of Irish Sovereignty materials in Ulysses, I will briefly survey these types of goddess figures in early Irish tra-
[1] The discussion of Molly by B. Scott in Joyce and Feminism, 156–83, serves as a guide to recent criticism about Molly. Scott's discussion draws together the materials in a fresh way and begins also to demonstrate Joyce's debt to early Irish literature in his portrait of Molly. An earlier survey of the Molly criticism from a very different perspective is found in Mark Shechner, Joyce in Nighttown 196–97; cf. Herring, "Bedsteadfastness of Molly Bloom" 57–59.
[2] For a more extensive discussion of the Celtic goddesses, see Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology, and Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain 265–301.
dition. This overview is intended to indicate the extent to which the figure of the Sovereignty has deep historical and mythological roots, the way in which it permeates Celtic tradition and informs the Irish world view.
One of the most important innovations of insular Celtic myth seems to be the concept of the mother of the gods, a notion reflected in the term Túatha Dé Danann, 'the tribes of the goddess Danu'. The idea of a great mother is not particularly Indo-European in character; it may be a legacy of the pre-Indo-European peoples of the British Isles, deriving from the Neolithic people and their descendants who became assimilated with, and left lasting cultural marks on, the Celts in the British Isles.[3] Goddesses were also important in Celtic traditions on the Continent, where they figure frequently in Gaulish statuary as triads of matres or matronae. The Gaulish goddesses are clearly associated with agrarian practices, fertility, and health (Georges Dumézil's third-order concerns);[4] frequently they are portrayed with emblems such as infants, textiles, fruits, and grain products that illustrate their connection with these aspects of life. A common Gaulish figural representation also shows a goddess as consort of a ruler god, and in some of these instances it appears that the goddess is the embodiment of the tribe or the district over which her male companion has dominion. These iconographic representations of goddesses have textual parallels in early Irish literature, where there is a series of imperious, strong-minded, alluring, and sexually active women.
A striking and significant aspect of the females in early Irish literature is their connection with war. As leaders of armies or warriors themselves, or as frankly supernatural characters who can metamorphose into carrion crows delighting in battlefields, many female figures in early Irish literature are imposing characters associated with violence and destruction. Such connections with war would appear to be inconsistent with fertility associations, but the great mother, especially when she is associated with the earth, is at once the source of life and the repository of life after death.[5] Moreover, the welfare and fertility of a people depend on their security against external aggression, and the warlike aspect of
[3] Evans, Irish Folk Ways, discusses the debt of Irish culture in general to Neolithic culture, showing how it influences various facets of Irish traditional life; survivals of religious myth are therefore not to be ruled out.
[4] For a summary of the ideas of George Dumézil, see Littleton.
[5] For the distinction between the fertility and chthonic aspects of the earth mother, see Hillman 35–45, as well as references cited there.
supernatural females may represent such military resistance of the territory. Warlike action can thus have a protective aspect.
The Morrigan most clearly illustrates the goddesses' associations with war. Her name may mean 'phantom queen', and she appears on battle-fields, often in the shape of a crow or raven. The Morrigan is a fateful goddess; she claims, for example, to be able to set a term on CuChulainn's life in Táin Bó Regamna (The Cattle Raid of Regamna) (AIT 213), and she speaks a prophecy of doom at the end of The Second Battle of Mag Tuired (AIT 47–48). But the Morrigan has connections with fertility as well. She is a mother (albeit of a sinister son who must be killed before his destructiveness gets out of hand), and in early Ireland there was a place named Dá Chích na Morrígna, 'The Two Paps of the Morrigan', a parallel with the Munster site noted above (Stokes, "Rennes Dindsenchas[*] 15: 292–93). Moreover, in The Second Battle of Mag Tuired the Morrigan copulates with the Dagda, thereby seeming to ensure victory for his side (AIT 38–39).[6]
Many of the Irish mythic females are associated with the land, and there is ample evidence that some were originally territorial goddesses. The clearest example is the triad of goddesses Eriu, Fotla, and Banba, who bear the three names of Ireland itself and who embody the island, welcoming the Milesians when they invade Ireland in The Book of Invasions (AIT 17–18). It appears that there were goddesses of this type representing the individual provinces of Ireland, and perhaps individual tribes as well.[7] Several of these figures have survived in Modern Irish folklore.
Celtic goddesses also are associated with or embodied in rivers. They are frequently pictured as guardians of springs or wells, and many of the principal rivers of Europe and the British Isles are named after Celtic river goddesses. The Seine, for example, is named after the goddess Sequana, and at its headwaters was a major sanctuary in her honor where an immense number of votive offerings was submerged. In Ireland the Boyne bears the name of the Boann, consort of the Dagda, a ruler god of the
[6] The Morrigan's name can also be interpreted as 'great queen'. For a discussion of the name and other aspects of this goddess, see DIL s.v. "Morrígan," as well as discussions of the Morrigan in Ross and in Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology. The story of the Morrigan's son Meche is found in Stokes, "Rennes Dindsenchas[*] " 15: 304–5.
[7] See Mac Cana, "Aspects of the Theme."
Tuatha De Danann. The evidence indicates that river goddesses are simply one specific manifestation of the fertility goddesses and the mother goddesses: water is, of course, associated with both health and fertility. We see this link specifically in the goddess Matrona, 'the divine mother', who gave her name to the river Marne.
Although there is no Celtic goddess of love equivalent to Aphrodite, the female figures and the goddesses in Irish literature often "display a vigorous sexuality"; love in its functional and ritual aspects of union and procreation, rather than love as an emotional or personal experience, is highlighted in Irish myth (Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology 85). Union is frequently the explicit point of a story, and the concern may be to determine which one of several competing royal men will be joined to the female figure. As is apparent from this brief treatment, fertility is the leitmotif of the Irish myths about goddesses, and it is linked to the rule of the rightful sovereign, the sacral king.[8] It was believed that during the time of a good king there would be plenty; during the time of an evil king, the land would fail. A good deal of evidence suggests that actual historical kings were believed to be wedded to the local territorial goddess and hence to the land that she embodied. As Proinsias Mac Cana notes (Celtic Mythology 94), the goddess "symbolized not merely the soil and substance of [the] territory, but also the spiritual and legal dominion which the king exercised over it." War, failure of animal, vegetable, or human fertility, and unfavorable weather were all taken as signs that there was an improper union of king and goddess.
In a number of early Irish stories, a goddess appears who is called explicitly In Flaithius, 'The Sovereignty'. In these stories the goddess ensures the rule of a king or his successors by granting a drink (or drinks) of ale or other beverage. The stories are associated with the motif of the transformation of the Sovereignty from hag to beautiful young woman, and R. A. Breatnach has claimed that metamorphosis is the hallmark of the Irish form of the Sovereignty myth (335): that though other cultures have developed myths in which king and goddess are joined, the feature of the puella senilis, the hag changed to young girl by the new union, is particularly Celtic. In the most well known of these stories, Echtra Mac nEchach Muigmedóin (The Adventure of the Sons of Eochaid Muigme-
[8] Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology 117–21, has a brief discussion of the Celtic institution of sacral kingship.
don), Niall and his four brothers are subjected to a number of tests to determine who is most suited to be king (AIT 508–13). At the last the young men go out hunting and become lost after their successful hunt. When they eat their meat, they become thirsty. One by one they go to find water, and each encounters a hideous hag by a well who says she will grant the water only in exchange for a kiss. All refuse to kiss her except Niall, who volunteers to lie with her, whereupon she is transformed into a beautiful girl. She identifies herself as the Sovereignty of Ireland, and Niall is recognized thereafter as the rightful king.
Because Ireland was politically fragmented through most of its history, a tribal society rather than a national one, there is a proliferation of goddess figures in the early literature, each with similar functions and characteristics, rather than a single goddess who can serve as the mythological prototype for the image of the goddess in the Irish collective unconscious. Moreover, the mythological tradition of female figures continued to be influential in later Irish tradition, with the two aspects of the Sovereignty, hag and beautiful woman, becoming distinct literary prototypes after the seventeenth century. Breatnach has traced the continuity of the tradition of representing Ireland as a young, beautiful woman from the medieval period to the eighteenth-century aisling ('dream, vision, apparition') poetry.[9] In the aisling poems the poet has a vision or dream of a beautiful woman who comes to appeal or lament to him. The woman in the aisling represents Ireland, and her misery is associated with Ireland's political bondage; she is often portrayed as languishing for her rightful spouse—associated at this period with the exiled Stuart line.
A link between the languishing women of the aisling tradition and women who are vigorous in their sexual demands can be seen in the eighteenth-century text Cúirt an Mheadhón Oidhche (The Midnight Court), by Brian Merriman. In Merriman's poem the dream framework is fused with the medieval court-of-love convention; in this context the women of Ireland bring their complaint that they languish for husband and child. They make their humorous but imperious demands for more sexual fulfillment and better sexual arrangements, for the young men to marry young women rather than to wait to marry until they are old or to prefer the old but rich spinster and widow.
The aisling tradition passed into Anglo-Irish through translations and
[9] See also Corkery 126–42; J. Williams and Ford 217–19.
the ballad tradition. The folk poem "Róisín Dubh" was translated into English as "Dark Rosaleen" by James Clarence Mangan in 1837, and Diane Bessai ("'Dark Rosaleen'") has shown that Mangan's translation of a love poem fuses an allegorical interpretation of the poem with aisling elements to produce an emblem of Ireland with strong nationalistic overtones:
O my dark Rosaleen,
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The priests are on the ocean green,
They march along the deep.
There's wine from the royal Pope,
Upon the ocean green:
And Spanish ale shall give you hope,
My dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,
Shall give you health and help, and hope,
My Dark Rosaleen.
Over hills, and through dales,
Have I roamed for your sake;
All yesterday I sailed with sails
On river and on lake.
The Erne, at its highest flood,
I dashed across unseen,
For there was lightning in my blood,
My dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Oh! there was lightning in my blood,
Red lightning lightened through my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer,
To heal your many ills!
And one beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
Would give me life and soul anew,
A second life, a soul anew,
My Dark Rosaleen!
(Colum 269–71)
In Mangan's translation the sexual elements of the original are muted in favor of romantic adoration. In the original Irish the last stanza quoted above runs:
Dá mbeadh seisreach agam threabhfainn in aghaidh na gcnoc
is dhéanfainn soiscéal i lár an aifrinn do mo Róisín Dubh;
bhéarfainn póg don chailín óg a bhéarfadh a hóighe dom
is dhéanfainn cleas ar chúl an leasa le mo Róisín Dubh.
This is translated more literally by Thomas Kinsella as follows:
If I had six horses I would plough against the hill—
I'd make Róisín Dubh my Gospel in the middle of Mass—
I'd kiss the young girl who would grant me her maidenhead
and do deeds behind the lios with my Róisín Dubh![10]
(Ó Tuama and Kinsella 308–11)
Mangan's interpretation fuses Marian emblems of the virgin queen and the lover's eagerness for martyrdom, giving spiritual longing where the Irish poet has more carnal things in mind. Mangan's English translation became a nationalist byword, signifying "total adherence to a cause that is never won and a hope that is never questioned" and appealing on an emotionally intimate level (Bessai, "'Dark Rosaleen'" 80). In addition, the poem represents a stage in the establishment of rose imagery as emblematic of Ireland in Anglo-Irish literature, imagery that permeates the poetry of Yeats and that can be found in Joyce as well.[11]
The other face of the Sovereignty, that of the old hag, also had an extensive literary development in later Irish and Anglo-Irish tradition.[12] The
[10] A lios (or liss ) is translated 'a courtyard, ring-fort'.
[11] On the rose imagery in Joyce's works, particularly Portrait , see Seward, Symbolic Rose 187–221. Seward focuses almost exclusively on the international aspects of rose symbolism in Joyce's works rather than the Irish nationalist valences.
[12] For a more extensive treatment of this topic, see Bessai, "Who Was Cathleen Ni Houlihan?" as well as the references she cites.
most significant presentation of this figure in English for our purposes here is the "Shan Van Vocht," whose name is found in a ballad with that title. The name is from the Irish an seanbhean bhocht, 'the poor old woman'. The figure of the Poor Old Woman appeared originally in a satiric Irish song about the marriage of a young man to a wealthy old woman, but the Irish tune was reused and its refrain adapted at the end of the eighteenth century for a patriotic song in English celebrating the French landing of 1796. In the English song, the old woman is only a name rather than a character per se; however, her name conjures up a typology that had been established elsewhere in the literature (Bessai, "Who Was Cathleen Ni Houlihan?" 117). The political message of this ballad is clear; in it the voice of the old woman predicts the coming of the French, the decay of the Orange, the rising of the yeomen, and the freedom of Ireland. The yeoman will "swear that they'll be true / To the Shan Van Vocht" (Colum 98–99). The song was widely popular throughout the nineteenth century. A figure related to the Shan Van Vocht is Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The name originated in a love song but came, like the aisling women, to represent Ireland. By the end of the eighteenth century there were two variants of an Irish poem celebrating Cathleen. Both were translated by Mangan, who worked from the literal translations of his predecessors; one of the poems he worked with, both in the original and in his translation, suggests that Cathleen is an ugly hag who would become transformed if she were joined with "the king's son" (Bessai, "Who Was Cathleen Ni Houlihan?" 119ff.).
The Sovereignty mythos had been given still other literary filters before Ulysses appeared. In 1901–2. Yeats seized upon the tradition of Ireland as the poor old woman and remolded it for his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. In one speech by the title character, Yeats deliberately fuses two names for the mythic type he is treating: "Some call me the Poor Old Woman, and there are some that call me Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan" (ll. 277–79).[13] Yeats's old woman is more a "pathetic mild old woman" than a disgusting or gross hag, as many of her antecedents had been (Bessai, "Who Was Cathleen Ni Houlihan?" 115, 119, 125–25). It was the perfect role for Maud Gonne, a "daughter of Ireland" and "servant of the Queen" whose imagination had already been stirred by the
[13] This quotation and all subsequent citations of Yeats's plays are from The Variorum Edition of the Plays .
iconography of the Sovereignty.[14] In Yeats's play the old woman is explicitly associated with the heroes of Ireland's patriotic past:
Many a man has died for love of me. . . . There was a red man of the O'Donnells from the north, and a man of the O'Sullivans from the south, and there was one Brian that lost his life at Clontarf by the sea, and there were a great many in the west, some that died hundreds of years ago. (ll. 199–214)
Yeats's play is associated with a revival in the twentieth century of the early Irish heroic ethos, and it can be seen as a kind of call to arms. By fusing Irish patriotic history with themes of the dispossession, the folk ideal, Christian martyrdom, and a heroic thirst for fame, Cathleen ni Houlihan set the stage for the Easter Rising. Yeats later wondered in "The Man and the Echo," "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?" The answer is almost certainly yes. In Cathleen ni Houlihan the Sovereignty has become a kind of war goddess.[15]
In Yeats's play, as in Mangan's "Dark Rosaleen," the Sovereignty is sexually pure. She says, "With all the lovers that brought me their love I never set out the bed for any" (ll. 247–48). Chaste herself, she leads the men who follow her to chastity. In the play Michael turns from an earthly bride to the old woman even before Cathleen's epiphany. For Yeats, Ireland in her guise as woman demands chastity in her followers. Yeats's characterization fit his times: it suited Victorian and Catholic morality and a nationalism that courted those values. The results of this presentation of Ireland can be seen in the actual life of Patrick Pearse, who gave up family, love, and marriage, and died for his country. The most striking feature of Yeats's Cathleen is, of course, her transformation at the end:
PETER: Did you see an old woman going down the path?
PATRICK: I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen. (ll. 345–48)
In the transformation we see the influence of medieval Irish literature, in particular the influence of stories like that of Niall, in which the hag metamorphoses into a beautiful woman.
To summarize, then, the early Irish mythological figures survived and
[14] See MacBride, Servant of the Queen, for this iconography in Maud Gonne's autobiography.
[15] R. Clark discusses the development and mutual influences of the war goddesses and the Sovereignty in Anglo-Irish literature.
were adapted in later Irish literary tradition, particularly in the aisling poems; still later they were used by Anglo-Irish writers, most notably Yeats in his Cathleen ni Houlihan .[16] The two faces of the Sovereignty, hag and young woman, both continued in the tradition, leading to such figures as Mangan's Dark Rosaleen on the one hand, and to hags such as the Shan Van Vocht, the Poor Old Woman, and Cathleen Ni Houlihan on the other. By the end of the nineteenth century the revival of interest in Ireland's medieval literary heritage and the attempts to reclaim that heritage through the publication, translation, and adaptation of texts meant that these female types had become part of the cultural consciousness of the nation. Because of the mythic heritage of Ireland and the nationalist literary revival of that heritage in English, the semiotics of female figures in Irish and in Joyce's Anglo-Irish tradition is distinct from the semiotics of female figures in other English-speaking areas or in Continental tradition. Lack of awareness of these semiotic values of women has been a serious limitation of the critical orthodoxy regarding Joyce's women.
The question of Joyce's early Irish sources for his Sovereignty imagery is complex since the imagery was so well established in the Ireland of his youth. It can nonetheless be documented that he was acquainted with a number of publications that would have familiarized him with stories about the Irish goddesses and other euhemerized female figures of early Irish literature. Many of the early stories related to the female mythological characters are summarized in the general histories of Ireland as well as in d'Arbois de Jubainville's Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology . Augusta Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne and her Gods and Fighting Men are other sources in which Joyce would have found the main lines of much of early Irish literature, including an outline of the goddess figures. There is also evidence that Joyce read some scholarly sources for early Irish tradition in 1901–2, when he was studying Modern Irish, and by the time he wrote Ulysses he was familiar with Táin Bó Cúailnge, which features the figure of Medb, a sexually vigorous and imperious female.
Joyce knew Mangan's reworkings of the aisling tradition as well; his enthusiasm for Mangan is well known, and he writes of both Mangan's
[16] For more detailed treatments of the topic, see Breatnach; Corkery 126–42; Bessai, "Who Was Cathleen Ni Houlihan?"; and Bessai, "'Dark Rosaleen.'"
"Kathleen-Ni-Houlahan" and "Dark Rosaleen" as poems he appreciated (CW 79–80). Joyce was familiar with the aisling tradition in general, as references in Finnegans Wake indicate (e.g., 179.31). He was also sensible of the emotional and political overtones of the Sovereignty imagery used by Mangan, as he indicates in his 1902 lecture; indeed, Joyce analyzes Mangan by himself using Sovereignty imagery:
In the final view the figure which [Mangan] worships is seen to be an abject queen upon whom, because of the bloody crimes that she has done and of those as bloody that were done to her, madness is come and death is coming, but who will not believe that she is near to die and remembers only the rumour of voices challenging her sacred gardens and her fair, tall flowers that have become the food of boars. (CW 82; cf. CW 185–86)
This assessment of Mangan's Sovereignty imagery shows that Joyce was critical of the political views behind the Irish nationalist use of the figure; it is clear that Joyce believed that the old Gaelic nationalist ideal was beyond reviving. Joyce also knew Yeats's refraction of the myth of the Sovereignty, Cathleen ni Houlihan, but found it of little appeal. Stanislaus Joyce reports that his brother "was indignant that Yeats should write such political and dramatic claptrap" (MBK 187). It is significant that in Ulysses it is the Citizen, rather than Stephen or Bloom, who embraces the symbols of Yeats's play. This is Joyce's comment on the nature of Yeats's audience for the play and the type of mentality that would welcome that particular manifestation of Gaelic nationalism.
ii. Petticoat Government: Molly Bloom as Sovereignty
Joyce had used Sovereignty imagery before writing Ulysses . Janet Grayson has shown that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is structured around the motif of the kiss, "on each occasion . . . offered by a temptress, all of whom are aspects of the land, Ireland—correspondences Joyce takes pains to develop" (121–22). The kiss becomes symbolic of submission to Ireland and to Ireland's history, both of which Stephen rejects lest his life as an artist be compromised. Yet, ironically, as Grayson suggests, Stephen will become no artist until he learns "to love the old girl, imperfect though she may be" (125). It is as if Stephen cannot become the artist-as-priest until he is willing to kiss, just as only a young man willing to kiss the Sovereignty will become the sacral king. Here the connection
of becoming an artist with kissing or accepting a woman symbolic of Ireland shows that the Sovereignty functions as the poet's muse—a development implicit in some of the aisling poems and explicit in Yeats's work, particularly in his treatment of Red Hanrahan (Bessai, "Who Was Cathleen Ni Houlihan?" 129). In Joyce's work the motif of kissing also figures in Exiles , where a kiss "is an act of homage" and "an act of union" (E 41) and where the woman also represents Ireland. The language in Joyce's play suggests the sort of political overtones that Sovereignty imagery has always evoked in Ireland; the phrase "an act of union" is particularly suggestive.
Arguing that Sovereignty imagery pervades much of Joyce's work, Hugh Kenner sees in Joyce's tendency to use doubled female figures a legacy of this Irish mythological pattern. Kenner maintains that the doubling of females may have evolved from Joyce's brooding over the metamorphosis scene in Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan . According to Kenner, Joyce rejects the transformation of the hag to young woman: "The look of a queen, that is what Joyce rejects. He sees the old woman who beckons to young men to go off and die, and not marry, and he will let no fine talk deflect attention from that" ("Look of a Queen" 118). Kenner contends that many of Joyce's women, from Gretta Conroy to ALP, have a devouring aspect and that in Ulysses there are several examples of this typology, including the Church and Stephen's mother. In the dyad Molly/ Milly, Kenner sees one example of Joyce's tendency to double his female protagonists. Kenner overstates the devouring nature of Joyce's female figures by reading them solely in the context of English literature, but it is clear nonetheless that Sovereignty imagery is explicit in Ulysses .
The figure of the Shan Van Vocht appears prominently at the opening of Ulysses in the person of the poor old woman selling milk who comes to the Martello tower. The old woman in Ulysses fits the pattern of the Sovereignty—the hag who has a drink to offer, as in The Adventure of the Sons of Eochaid Muigmedon . The fact that she sells milk is both a touch of realism and mythically apposite. In the twentieth century milk is a staple of the Irish diet as it has been since time out of mind: because Irish culture was traditionally pastoral, dairy products have held a larger place in the Irish diet than in the diet of most other European nations. In early Irish culture dairy products were called "white meats" (e.g., AIT 553ff.), and the prominence of dairy products in the Irish diet was an object of mockery for English travelers in Ireland in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. At the same time the mythic importance of milk is seen in the magic cows that play such central roles in early Irish literature and Modern Irish folklore, as well as in the many early Irish goddesses who seem to have special dominion over cows. One such example of a goddess associated with milk is found in Táin Bó Cúailnge , where the Morrigan, disguised as an old woman milking a cow, offers a drink to CuChulainn.[17]
In Ulysses the old woman represents peasant Ireland—the revivalist ideal of many of Joyce's contemporaries—but a peasant Ireland that appears to be beyond reviving. The crone herself has lost her country's native language; and when Haines the Englishman speaks Gaelic to her, she takes it to be French. With her "old shrunken paps," distributing "rich white milk, not hers" (1.397–98), Joyce's poor old woman is also asexual and infertile. Joyce does not have her metamorphose; she is bound for the grave, not a second life. For Joyce, Gaelic Ireland is dead, and its symbol, the Shan Van Vocht, is only the butt of jokes, unable to compel young men to pay for their milk with farthings, never mind their lives.
On Bloomsday Stephen is obsessed with the Shan Van Vocht. Throughout the day his thoughts turn repeatedly not only to Mangan's ballads but to Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan as well. For Stephen the Shan Van Vocht has become "a crazy queen, old and jealous" whose message to him is "Kneel down before me" (1.640). She metamorphoses into the nightmare of Gummy Granny, who demands of him "odd jobs" (1.640), murder and self-destruction:
OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand ) Remove him, acushla. At 8:35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. (she prays ) O good God, take him!
(15.4736–39)
She, like Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan, devours young men, causing them to consume each other and in the process consuming them herself, sending them to their deaths. Fused with images of Stephen's own dead mother, in part because both are associated with a very conventional type of Irish nationalist Catholicism, the old woman has become "the old sow that eats her farrow" (15.4582–83; cf. PA 203) and, like Death itself, "the corpsechewer" (15.4214). These images echo the early Irish iconog-
[17] See C. O'Rahilly 196–97; cf. Tymoczko, Two Death Tales 87–88.
raphy of the war goddesses who can metamorphose into ravens and scaldcrows, the scavengers of the battlefield; in addition, Stephen's aphorism about "the old sow that eats her farrow" is a multilingual pun on one of the traditional names of Ireland, Banba, which is homophonous with banb, 'young pig'.[18]
If Joyce directly rejects the image of Cathleen ni Houlihan and the Poor Old Woman, he relies on other aspects of the Sovereignty in early Irish literature for his treatment of Molly Bloom. Molly has long been recognized as a goddess figure and has been identified with a "Gaea-Tellus" type.[19] The Gaea-Tellus model for Molly fits with the Joycean exegetical tradition based on classical myth, and it is signaled in the text itself (17.2313). Only relatively recently has the character of Molly as classical earth mother begun to give way to a mythic conception of Molly that shows some Celtic configurations, including those of the Celtic goddesses associated with the land. This aspect of Molly's nature is suggested in Joyce's note to "Ithaca" that reads "her rump = promised land" (Herring, Joyce's "Ulysses" Notesheets 463), which establishes her as an earth goddess in terms that recall the theme of Ireland as the second promised land, a central theme of The Book of Invasions .
The importance of history and pseudohistory in Irish literature has already been touched on, but it must be emphasized that historicization is the hallmark of Irish mythology. Though The Book of Invasions was composed to parallel such classical histories as those of Origen and Eusebius, gradually it accreted bits of cosmogony and old myth and eventually became the organizing referent for all of early Irish tradition. The process of historicization was both the salvation and destruction of early Irish mythology. On the one hand, because the material was euhemerized, much of Celtic religious mythology survived Ireland's conversion to Christianity. On the other hand, euhemerization has irrevocably marked and distorted all of early Irish narrative: the old myths were remolded as history; the mythic time frame of the old gods was coordinated with the progress of Judeo-Christian history; the character of the gods became obscured. Since virtually all of the old hero tales and tales of the gods were
[18] Joyce here anticipates the type of linguistic play that characterizes Finnegans Wake .
[19] For a discussion of this typology and a bibliography of the critics who have investigated it, see B. Scott 158–59 and the reference cited there.
located at points on the Christian-Latin time line of history, there are euhemerized mythic figures in all the major cycles of early Irish literature.
Molly Bloom thus takes her place in the long line of Irish euhemerized goddesses. Indeed, the way Molly's character is poised between mythic and realistic components itself recapitulates almost perfectly the presentation of most of the great female figures of early Irish literature, particularly as presented in the sources Joyce would have known. The female figures take their place fully in a historical context, yet their characters are informed by mythic patterns. The most striking and well known example of this sort is Medb of Cruachan, the queen of Connacht and leader of Ulster's enemies in Táin Bó Cúailnge. Many aspects about Medb—from her name, which means 'the intoxicating one' (connecting her with the ale of sovereignty), to her wide onomastic connections, to her history in one text of having a long series of husbands[20] —indicate that she is the euhemerized Sovereignty of Tara who has been translated to Connacht, yet she is localized in one specific temporal period and treated as a historical figure in the text of Táin Bó Cúailnge itself.
Celtic myth provides many parallels to Molly's urination and menstruation, symbols that are central to the linked destructive and procreative powers of Celtic mother goddesses. Charles Bowen ("Great-Bladdered Medb") has argued that menstruation and urination in early Irish literature are both centrally connected with the powers of the Celtic mother goddesses. The blood of menstruation, the literal demonstration of female fertility and the female life force, is one reason the goddesses were connected with bloody war. Bowen connects urination, by contrast, with the life-bringing powers and creative fertilization of water—rain, rivers, and amniotic fluid. Bowen sees this water symbolism as linking the territorial or Sovereignty goddesses with the Celtic river goddesses. The dual symbolism of blood and urine is found at the end of Táin Bó Cúailnge, where Medb fills three lakes with her fúal fola, literally her 'urine of blood' or her 'bloody urine' (C. O'Rahilly 133).
These elements of blood and urine are also central to the portrait of
[20] See O'Neill; an alternate title for the text is Ferchuitred Medba (Medb's Portion of Men ). Medb of Cruachan also has a double, Medb Lethderg, 'Medb redside' or 'Medb halfred', of whom it is stated explicitly, "She it was who would not allow a king in Tara without his having herself as a wife." For these points as well as a general survey of Medb as a Sovereignty figure, see Ó Máille.
Molly in Ulysses since Molly produces a large volume of mixed menstrual flow and urine (18.1104–48), and they connect Molly with the Irish river goddesses. Frank Budgen pointed in this direction as early as 1934, when he described Molly's monologue in terms of a river: "Marion's monologue snakes its way through the last forty pages of Ulysses like a river winding through a plain, finding its true course by the compelling logic of its own fluidity and weight" (Making of "Ulysses" 262). It is not simply that the monologue represents "the displacement to language of her urinary and menstrual flow," a kind of mental punning on the body, as Mark Shechner (217) would have it. Rather, Molly's bodily flow and fluid language are both part of her mythic nature as Joyce has delineated it in Ulysses; they are counterparts and complements to the earth-goddess aspects of her portrait. The circularity of Molly's soliloquy, which begins and ends with "Yes," is more than a counterpart to her nature as earth goddess, a sign of her as the "huge earth ball slowly . . . spinning" (Letters 1:170); this circularity is also one facet of Molly as a river deity. Joyce matured and perfected the image of Molly as river goddess in the figure of ALP in Finnegans Wake; but as in Finnegans Wake the circularity of Molly's speech should be related to the continuous cycle of the waters running from cloud to rain to river to sea to cloud again.
The associations of the goddesses' urine with fertility may explain why one early Irish text stresses women's urination as a measure of sexual potency. In Aided Derbforgaill (The Death of Derbforgaill) the women of Ulster have a contest urinating on a phallic pile of snow; the one whose urine penetrates most deeply is deemed to have the greatest sexual potency. The winner of the contest, Derbforgaill, arouses so much jealousy among the other women that they disfigure her, causing her eventually to die of shame (Marstrander, "Deaths of Lugaid"). Molly's urination and her sexual nature, like Derbforgaill's, are interconnected by Irish iconography. All these considerations indicate that what appears to be a touch of naturalism in Ulysses —Molly's chamberpot sequence, complete with the emphasis on the volume of her urine and the beginning of her period—has its place in the mythic framework of Joyce's early Irish prototypes. It is probably significant that toward the end of his life Yeats also drew on these same mythic elements, particularly the Derbforgaill story; in "Crazy Jane on the Mountain" Yeats uses early Irish prototypes to represent the full-bodiedness that twentieth-century Ireland has lost, and he refers to CuChulainn's wife as "Great bladdered Emer." Molly, like
Derbforgaill in the Irish story and Yeats's Great bladdered Emer, is a heroine of micturition.[21]
Molly's urinary capacity is only one of the Celtic mythological components related to her sexuality. Bonnie Kime Scott has observed (180–81) that Molly, like all the Sovereignty figures, has had a succession of lovers, and like them she is not apologetic about her sexual appetites. Whether or not we accept David Hayman's view that Bloomsday is special because it marks Molly's first affair within marriage ("Empirical Molly" 113ff.),[22] it is obvious that sexuality is a vital part of her character. Robert Adams suggests that it would be grotesque to suppose that she would "be content with one sexual contact in ten years," since she "exists in an atmosphere of sexual provocation" and the whole tenor of her thought is against the assumption of a single lover (37–41). Adams attributes some of the textual disarray with respect to Molly's actual sexual contact to the fact that Joyce was a jealous man "who used the object of his jealousy as a model." It seems, however, that in this instance the break in the mimetic surface of Ulysses is as likely to be related to Joyce's mythic prototypes for Molly as to his psychological dispositions toward his wife: this is again one of Joyce's "portals of discovery" (9.229). That the list of Molly's possible lovers ends "and so each and so on to no last term" (17.2141–42) is a signal to the reader that this woman has the immortal status of the Sovereignty and that her series of potential lovers extends through the eternal time frame of the gods, just as she herself through metempsychosis and shapeshifting will persist.[23]
Like her predecessors in Irish literature, Molly engages in sexual acts for their own sake. No more than her Irish mythic foremothers is Molly interested much in sentiment and romantic love; like them, she neither exhibits guilt about her sexual acts nor expects to curtail her behavior. Sexuality is of Molly's essence, just as sexuality is essential to the Sovereignty goddess. Medb is again an accessible example of this mytholog-
[21] We might ask in fact whether Yeats's image of "Great bladdered Emer" and his more frank treatment of sexuality with respect to Crazy Jane was influenced by Ulysses and his perception of Joyce's treatment of Irish tradition or whether Yeats and Joyce are simply drawing independently on the same literary heritage. I incline to the former alternative.
[22] See also the supporting arguments in references cited by Hayman, as well as Kenner, "Molly's Masterstroke" 23ff.
[23] For another view of this listing as the narrator's imagination brooding on Molly's affairs, which take on "truly epic proportions," see McCarthy 613–16.
ical dimension of Irish female types: without apology Medb tells her consort Ailill that she requires a husband with no jealousy, for, she says, "I was never without [one] man in the shadow of another" (C. O'Rahilly 138). Medb, like Molly, also thinks about sleeping with even more men than she does—offering her "friendly thighs" throughout Táin Bó Cúailnge .[24] This Irish paradigm for Molly, which includes the vigorous sexuality of early Irish goddesses, resolves the paradoxes of her character as both earth mother and "thirty-shilling whore."
In the earlier discussion of Molly's flow, I noted that Shechner (219) sees Molly's monologue as being a linguistic and mental reflection of her physical menstruation; thus, he sees the roses and crimson sea in her musings (18.1601 ff.) as correlates of her own menstrual blood. Perhaps more to the point, the crimson images and the menstrual blood of the soliloquy link Molly to the war goddesses of Irish literature, for women's capacity to bleed and not die, their shedding of menstrual blood, is a prime source of their terror to men.[25] But Molly is associated with war in more direct ways as well: as a daughter of a soldier in an Irish regiment of the British army, her connections with war are manifest. She is proud of being a soldier's daughter (18.881–82), and she has been brought up in a military environment.[26] She loves seeing soldiers on parade, and her first lovers are young soldiers. It is a brilliant touch of naturalism that Joyce should explain both her military connections and her Spanish origin by having her father in service with the British troops in Gibraltar, as many Irishmen actually were. Molly's connections with war are rather muted, however: she appreciates the more harmless aspects of the military, such as its pageantry and the handsome bodies of the young men in service. In these aspects of Molly's characterization we perhaps see Joyce's pacifism attenuating what he may have felt to be a requisite part of the Irish delineation
[24] See Kinsella's translation.
[25] Irish goddesses are at times associated with the color red, and the appearance of the Morrigan in The Cattle Raid of Regamna is a particularly striking example: "They saw before them a chariot harnessed with a chestnut horse. The horse had but one leg, and the pole of the chariot passed through its body, so that the peg in front met the halter passing across its forehead. Within the chariot sat a woman, her eye-brows red, and a crimson mantle around her. Her mantle fell behind her between the wheels of the chariot so that it swept along the ground" (AIT 211–12).
[26] Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 504, 517, emphasizes the military nature of Gibraltar.
of mythic female figures.[27] Note that Molly is also literally daughter of 'a soldier of Spain'—or, as the Irish would say, daughter of Míl Espáine, hence a Milesian. Here Joyce is creating an image involving verbal realism that links naturalism, mythic symbolism of the Sovereignty and the war goddesses, and symbolism from The Book of Invasions.
Despite her connections with the military, Molly's primary associations, like those of most Irish mythological women, are with fertility. She delights in the produce of the earth, in flowers and fruit—aspects that link her to Tailltiu of The Book of Invasions specifically and to the Celtic mother goddesses in general. Her union with Bloom, marked by the transfer to him of the seedcake during their lovemaking, associates her, like many Irish goddesses, with grains.[28] Bonnie Kime Scott notes also that Molly intends to give Bloom eggs in the morning and that eggs are symbols of fertility (181). The emphasis on Molly's breasts throughout Ulysses may be related to the importance of milk in Irish culture and to the Irish interest in the goddesses' paps. She is obviously "a good milker"–she had a "great breast of milk" when she was nursing Milly (18.570–71), Bloom himself has tried her milk and found it good enough to want to milk her into the tea (18.578), and he appreciates "her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder" (4.304–05). Finally, though Molly's concern with nutrition may be related to Joyce's Aristotelian concepts of women (Voelker 39–40),[29] it also fits the pattern of Celtic mother goddesses, who are patrons of agrarian concerns of all types and thus intimately connected with nourishment.
In assessing Molly's fertility we cannot ignore the fact that she is menstruating every three weeks (18.1151). She is potentially fertile inconveniently often, having roughly the shortest menstrual cycle that still falls
[27] Shechner (221–22) and others have noted that Molly is the agent of Joyce's vengeance, embodying the cutting edge of his wit: her condescension cuts a swath through the corn of Dublin, and her judgments are the means by which the suitors are slain. These aggressive aspects of her character also connect her with the war goddesses.
[28] See Máire Mac Neill, passim. A number of female figures have names that specifically link them with cereals, including Eithne, 'kernel', and Gráinne, 'grain, seed'.
[29] In general the philosophical predisposition Voelker outlines can be nicely integrated with the mythological framework of mother goddesses. See below, for example, on the mythological dimension of Molly's stationary quality, and cf. Voelker 38.
within the normal range. The fact that she has borne only two children despite her frequent ovulation should not suggest that she is infertile. It seems to be her choice not to have had more children, for she has the sense she could choose to bear another child at any time (18.166). The small number of her children coupled with her frequent fertile periods can most easily be explained by realism. Molly is a modern woman who chooses to limit the number of her children through the use of birth control; ALP and HCE make the same choice in Finnegans Wake. Molly's assertion of reproductive choice may relate to a controversial aspect of Ulysses: the "disrupted" sexual relations between Molly and Bloom. Although it is true that Molly no longer finds sexual relations with her husband fully satisfying, we can perhaps best understand their sexual patterns in the historical context of 1904, when coitus interruptus was the most available, most dependable, and most widely practiced form of birth control short of abstinence. This reading of the sexual relations between Molly and Bloom fits with the fact that Joyce nowhere says they don't have intercourse;[30] instead, he specifies the limits of their relations: "there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ" (17.2282–84). It is Molly who has apparently claimed to Blazes Boylan that she and her husband do not have sexual relations, but she is glad that Bloom will not be accompanying them to Belfast since she fears her deception will be revealed: "its all very well a husband but you cant fool a lover after me telling him we never did anything of course he didnt believe me" (18.354–56). Her decision not to have children results in coitus interruptus with her lover as well as her husband (18.154–55; cf. 18.168), and at the end of the book she is relieved that she has started her period, knowing that she's not pregnant (18.1123) despite the fact that she let Boylan finish it off in her the last time they made love.
There are also mythological parallels to Molly's practice of birth control, for in Irish myth, as in myth and folklore worldwide, women are sometimes credited with the ability to control conception voluntarily.
[30] Cf. Hayman, "Empirical Molly" 115, who notes that their sexual arrangements do not preclude coitus interruptus, cunnilingus, manual stimulation, and the nightly buttock kiss.
Thus, for example, in Tochmarc Emire (The Wooing of Emer) Cu-Chulainn elicits the agreement from Aife that she will bear him a son, the implication being that the ability to do so or not is within her control (AIT 167). Note also that the fertility of the Sovereignty in early Irish literature is not always demonstrated by her bearing many children herself. As Mac Cana has observed ("Aspects of the Theme" 7: 88, 95, 98), it is primarily in her role as the mother of a sovereign or the founder of a lineage that the procreation of the goddess is stressed. In stories emphasizing union or the relations of the Sovereignty with a spouse—as we might argue Ulysses does on a realistic level—childbearing per se is less significant.
Like the Sovereignty goddesses, Molly is also queenly and imperious. She lies in bed while her husband serves her, and she cuckolds him in his own bed. Bonnie Kime Scott (181) has pointed out that Molly also demands tributes: another book and lotion for her eternal youth. When we see Molly in the context of Irish literature rather than English or Continental literature, there is no reproaching her for these qualities. They are part of her typology.
Clearly Molly is a recumbent figure, and Celtic and classical models converge in their prototypes for this recumbency, for there are earth goddesses in both traditions. The Celtic Sovereignty goddesses are sometimes literally identified with specific districts that bear their names; they are tied to a place. Molly's beddedness and stationary physical location are thus appropriate qualities for a Sovereignty figure. Moreover, since rivers flow in beds, Molly's location melds both earth-goddess and river-goddess imagery, and again she prefigures ALP in this regard. Nonetheless, Molly's preference is not to be at home—her fondest memories are of walking out in the world (cf. B. Scott 170). In this respect she is not unlike Celtic territorial goddesses, who were mobile in their human form and walked about in their territory, though it was not given to every mortal to see them on such occasions. The readers of Ulysses are in the position of ordinary mortals with respect to the Sovereignty: we hear reports of Molly's appearances in the world, but it is not ours to encounter her on such an occasion. In fact, aside from the chamberpot episode, we see her out of bed only once: as the flash of a white arm distributing largesse to a beggar (10.222, 250–53, 542). The activity is appropriate for a euhemerized fertility goddess, and this veiled glimpse of a woman pow-
erful enough to rearrange the furniture of her house (as a goddess might rearrange her territory) is like the epiphany of a divinity.[31]
I have elaborated on the parallels between Molly and early Irish literature to show that Joyce's character fits thoroughly in the framework of Irish literary tradition as well as in the framework of Irish myth and Irish archetypes. The parallels are so deep and so pervasive that they cannot be the result of fortuitous likeness or polygenesis. Although the comparisons between Molly and women in early Irish literature have been somewhat detailed, they are by no means exhaustive. Much remains to be done. A review of the criticism of Ulysses shows that virtually every aspect about Molly has been investigated save the ways she is a product of Irish literary history and Irish symbology—the ways she should be referred to Irish literature as much or more so than to life or to other literary systems.
Aside from the reluctance of most orthodox Joyceans to consider Joyce's Irish literary heritage seriously, the neglect of Molly's Irish mythic background results from the fact that sexuality in Ulysses is expressed in modern forms rather than early Irish ones. Because the forms of sexual encounter are different, the connection between Molly and the sexual females in early Irish literature is somewhat effaced. Here it is well to remember one of Joyce's earliest aesthetic statements, delivered in his lecture "Drama and Life" in 1900: "The forms of things . . . are changed. . . . But the deathless passions, the human verities which so found expression then, are indeed deathless, in the heroic cycle, or in the scientific age" (CW 45). We have become more comfortable with female sexuality in the years since Ulysses was published, yet it is worth noting that Molly's frank thoughts about penises or her enjoyment of obscenity are modern counterparts to the medieval characters' direct solicitations of their lovers; they are also manifestations particularly appropriate for narrative in the form of interior monologue. Joyce merges Irish mythic structures and convincing mimesis smoothly in his portrait of Molly in Ulysses.
The sexual elements of early Irish literature would have particularly appealed to Joyce, and he no doubt enjoyed renewing them in modern guise. He loathed the tenets of sexual purity preached by the church, by
[31] For the argument that Molly has herself rearranged the furniture in honor of Boylan's visit, see Honton.
Victorianism, and by contemporary feminists (B. Scott 33), and we can surmise that he disliked the emphasis on chastity in Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan. Joyce's attitude toward sexuality in general distinguishes him from most of the other writers of the Anglo-Irish revival. In fact, the sexual aspects of early Irish literature were an embarrassment to most of the major figures of the Irish revival and were one element leading to the suppression and distortion of early Irish literature in English translations.
The mythic components related to the Sovereignty interlock with the architectonic structures from The Book of Invasions . Molly's identification with Tailltiu is particularly apt since Tailltiu clearly is a Sovereignty figure. Wife of successive kings, foster mother to a third king, situated in a plain profuse with flowers, Tailltiu draws together a number of the Sovereignty characteristics. We have also seen that Molly is identified with Ireland as the second promised land and that she is a daughter of Mil Espaine. Molly's one surviving child is named Milly, and it is amusing to find that the Milesians are called "Clan Milly" in the text of Ulysses (14.371), a term found also in Collier's History of Ireland for Schools (10–11), which was part of Joyce's personal library in 1920. It is no accident that the symbol systems pertaining to the Sovereignty and The Book of Invasions reinforce and amplify each other: that is the way of a vigorous, coherent tradition. An author writing in a tradition of this kind will tap its power on several levels simultaneously, just as Joyce has done in Ulysses .
iii. King and Goddess: Bloom, Unconquered Hero
If Molly is a Sovereignty figure, Bloom cannot simply be considered a henpecked, mealymouthed husband: his waiting on her, his serving her breakfast in bed, his running errands for her and bringing her offerings are things one might expect of the mortal consort of a goddess. Molly is an earth goddess, associated with dominion as Celtic Sovereignty figures are; thus, when Bloom kisses her rere on returning to her domain, her bed, he does not act very differently from Ulysses himself, who kisses the earth after landing at Ithaca. The Sovereignty framework thus provides a perspective on the relationship between Molly and her husband as well as an alternate reading of Bloom's character. Still, the question must be put directly: is Bloom the rightful spouse for a Sovereignty goddess? The
reader, echoing Bloom's own question (11.732, 13.1209), must ask why Molly chose Bloom.
In exploring the Sovereignty theme in A Portrait of the Artist , Grayson observes (124) that the chosen male frequently has a marked name and that Stephen Dedalus's special name is consonant with Joyce's development of this theme in A Portrait. In Ulysses Joyce again signals the hero's status by conferring on him a special name, choosing Bloom for the name of Molly's husband. Molly is explicit about the fact that the name is pleasing to her (18.841), and for an English speaker the presumption must be that this is the case because of the connection with flowers and fertility. So it is, and Bloom's name is, moreover, a piece of verbal realism; he is essentially connected with flowers, for his father's Hungarian name, Virag , 'flower', was merely changed to the equivalent English signifier, with the signified remaining stable. As it turns out, Molly's "fib" to Mulvey that she was to be married to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora (18.773–74) prefigures her marriage to Bloom; her statement is prophetic, another instance of verbal realism inasmuch as the name de la Flora may be read as an alternative to Bloom , signifying her "destined" spouse.
As an essential bloom, Bloom can also presumably recognize his kind, and he wins Molly with his words as much as his deeds: "yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life" (18.1576–77). Bloom perceives that Molly is a flower (cf. 8.910), and she conceives of herself in the same way (18.1602); thus, there is an element of recognition in their mating, similar to the recognition that is associated with Sovereignty stories like The Adventure of the Sons of Eochaid Muigmedon . In their essences as well as through the magic of words, Bloom and Molly are alike, fitting mates.
Let us digress a moment to consider Molly-the-flower-of-the-mountain. If she is a flower, what sort of flower is she? Joyce here invites us to penetrate the signs he has left and the rhetorical question implicit in the text: she is a flower, a dark flower, a woman who would love "to have the whole place swimming in roses" (18.1557–58), a woman who wears roses in her hair ("a red yes") (18.1603), a woman "in her roses" (cf. 5.285). In Irish tradition the semiotics of the flower imagery suggests that Molly is to be construed as a rose—as, in fact, the rose, the Dark Rosaleen. The references to roses throughout Ulysses confirm Molly as a Sov-
ereignty figure and tie Molly to Mangan's "Dark Rosaleen," to the Anglo-Irish symbolism that derives from Mangan, and to the earlier Irish "Róisín Dubh"; and Joyce's humorous view of Molly, like his humor throughout Ulysses , does not invalidate this identification. Though full-blown on Bloomsday and no longer "the little dark rose," róisín dubh, Molly's floral nature is a semiotic concomitant of her Sovereignty status; and Bloom's name, as well as his ability to recognize her nature, is a sign that he is her rightful spouse. With the rose imagery Joyce lightly, playfully, but traditionally evokes established political and literary symbolism for female figures representing Ireland and for their male partners.[32]
These aspects of Bloom's name are essential but do not exhaust the meaning of the name Bloom. Within Irish tradition there is yet another level of significance, for the name holds a place in Irish mythology and toponymy, with Bloom being the English eponym of Slieve Bloom, the prominence in the midlands of Ireland called Sliabh Bladhma in Irish. This place name is twice mentioned in the text of Ulysses, and in one of those instances it is identified with Leopold Bloom specifically: "Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At their joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom" (4.138–39; cf. 12.1833). This well-known mountain had figured in Anglo-Irish refractions of the mythic literature; thus, in Standish O'Grady, for example, "Eire" the great queen of Ireland has her throne on "Slieve Blahma" (History of Ireland 1: 70). Joyce might also have found information on Slieve Bloom in P. W. Joyce's works. For example, in Origin and History of Irish Names of Places Slieve Bloom is said to be named after "Bladh, [one] of Brogan's sons," a Milesian who, P. W. Joyce suggests, might also have given his name to Lickbla, "Bladh's flagstone" (Liag Bladhma ), in Westmeath. P. W. Joyce also notes that "Arderin ['the height of Ireland'] in the Queen's County is the highest of the Slieve Bloom range; and the inhabitants of the great central plain who gave it the name, signifying the height of Ireland, unaccustomed as they were to the view of high mountains, evidently believed it to be one of the principal elevations in the country" (373). Since James Joyce refers to
[32] Molly's pleasure in flowers of all kinds, with its Aristotelian overtones and its fertility associations, acts at the same time as a naturalistic envelope for her symbolic association with roses and her flower nature. In the multiple levels of this aspect of the text is encapsulated Joyce's manipulation of the modes of realism and symbolism, his use of the mythic, the philosophical, the political, and the historical.
P. W. Joyce's volume in the broadside "Gas from a Burner" (CW 244), it is quite possible that he knew these particular entries related to Slieve Bloom, but it is also possible that his knowledge derived from other sources, including oral ones.
Thus, not only is Bloom associated with flowers through his name and essential nature, but he is also the namesake of a primordial Milesian in whose territory the eponymous goddess of Ireland resides. The toponymic associations for Bloom's name fit with the heroic elements in his characterization; moreover, in his identification with placelore and the land, Bloom anticipates the placelore associated with the male figures of Finnegans Wake . Thus, in virtue of his name Leopold Bloom is the destined consort for the Sovereignty, having suited in another incarnation Eriu herself (cf. J. Williams and Ford 218).
While Bloom's name suggests his fitness to be consort of Molly-as-rosy-Sovereignty, it is essential to consider the larger lines of his character and to compare them to other consorts of Sovereignty figures in Irish tradition. Here Ailill, the spouse of the Sovereignty figure Medb, serves as a useful parallel. Though Ailill is somewhat burlesqued in Táin Bó Cúailnge ,[33] he is a character of some standing elsewhere in the early tales. In the "Pillowtalk" introduction to the twelfth-century version of Táin Bó Cúailnge Medb makes it clear that she, not Ailill, chose their union and that she believes he is the right man for her because of his qualities. She tells him:
I demanded a strange bride-gift such as no woman before me had asked of a man of the men of Ireland, to wit, a husband without meanness, without jealousy, without fear. If my husband should be mean, it would not be fitting for us to be together, for I am generous in largesse and the bestowal of gifts and it would be a reproach for my husband that I should be better than he in generosity, but it would be no reproach if we were equally generous provided that both of us were generous. If my husband were timorous, neither would it be fitting for us to be together, for single-handed I am victorious in battles and contests and combats, and it would be a reproach to my husband that his wife should be more courageous than he, but it is no reproach if they are equally courageous provided that both are courageous. If the man with whom I should be were jealous, neither would it be fitting, for I was never without
[33] Similarly, Medb is the butt of medieval misogyny in the text, particularly in the twelfth-century version.
[one] man in the shadow of another. Now such a husband have I got, even you, Ailill mac Rosa Ruaid of Leinster. You are not niggardly, you are not jealous, you are not inactive. (C. O'Rahilly 138)[34]
The qualities Medb values in her spouse in this early Irish passage are relevant to an assessment of Bloom's character and his relation to Molly, for there are close parallels in Ulysses .
In the critical literature on Bloom both his generosity and his bravery have been discussed at length: Bloom has been described as the Homeric hero and the hidden hero (see Kenner, "Ulysses " ch. 5), but the same characteristics demonstrate that he is worthy to be a Celtic king. Like Ailill he shows he is without meanness by giving a sizable contribution to the Dignam family and by offering to take Stephen in, thus exhibiting the Celtic heroic virtues of generosity and hospitality. And his lack of fear—or perhaps his courage, in a post-Stephen Crane sense—is shown in Barney Kiernan's pub and in Nighttown. Bloom's lack of jealousy is a primary reason he is laughable and unheroic (or worse) within dominant Western standards (cf. French 61), a problem summed up by Bloom himself: "I am a fool perhaps. He gets the plums, and I the plumstones" (13.1098–99). Yet it is this attitude that is most easily understood in the context of Irish intertextuality. The comparison with Ailill suggests that Molly's infidelities and Bloom's tolerance of them need to be seen in a mythic context rather than in the framework of petit-bourgeois morality. Molly, like Medb, has chosen her marriage because her spouse has a character appropriate to her. Her phrasing of the matter, however, is less blunt, more Victorian, than that of her medieval counterparts: "I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him" (18.1578–80).
Like Ailill, Bloom should be viewed as a man without jealousy, achieving equanimity in the face of his wife's adultery in part because the impetus to union—particularly in a Sovereignty figure—is natural:"As as natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity" (17.2178–80). Just as Ailill tolerates Medb's having always "one man in the shadow of an-
[34] Joyce would have known versions of this passage both from reading Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne and from the quotation of the passage in Maud Gonne's speech on Medb, which was printed in the United Irishman 5 Oct. 1901.
other," so Bloom will tolerate Molly's involvements with men—on whatever level they occur—"to no last term" (17.2142), because such liaisons are particularly de naturae of Irish female mythic figures such as Medb and Molly.
Medb has selected Ailill as a mate who is "without meanness, without jealousy, without fear"; Bloom also fits Medb's requirements and therefore, like Ailill, could be a candidate for her consort. In selecting a mate with the same characteristics as those desired by Medb, Molly establishes her own mythic nature and at the same time valorizes Bloom's character. Leopold Bloom does appear to be the right man to be joined to a Sovereignty figure, and it is thus perhaps less surprising that throughout Ulysses he is periodically referred to as a king or prince (15.1471ff., 18.3, 18.931; cf. 11.359, 11.523, 11.1000). Despite the humor and fantasy on the literal level of the text, these references can be considered examples of the author's verbal realism pointing to the mythic pattern behind Bloom. Bloom is a rightful king, albeit a modern, domestic representation of one whose kingdom has shrunk to the size of a semidetached villa. Hence, he rightly commands the fruits of the earth—eggs for breakfast—which the goddess will deliver, and the Sovereignty returns to him despite other dalliances she might enjoy.
In early Irish stories the Sovereignty figure usually initiates, invites, and arranges the union with the male, which is sealed with a kiss or sexual intercourse, or both. In Ulysses it is thus fitting that Molly initiates sexual contact with both Bloom and Boylan (cf. Honton 26–27). Bloom and Molly both acknowledge that she took the lead in their union, and she is explicit on the point in her monologue: "I got him to propose to me . . . I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn't know . . . and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again" (18.1573–1606). In keeping with the mythological prototypes that Joyce is following, neither Molly nor Poldy has memories of their wedding ceremony itself in Ulysses . In her memory, the day that marks their union is their day of lovemaking on Howth Head, the day of their breathtaking kiss: "the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear
like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain" (18.1571–76). For Leopold, too, that was the decisive day:
Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me. (8.904–16)
These passages entwine the flower imagery, the initiation, and the theme of the kiss all associated with Sovereignty figures.
In Ulysses the emphasis on kissing as the seal of union between the Sovereignty and her consort is an extension of the Sovereignty theme as it is used in A Portrait of the Artist. Stephen cannot kiss the old girl and hence will never be a poet. Bloom, by contrast, has a touch of the artist about him and is a passionate and ready kisser of women. He has patience even with old, unattractive women: Bloom's seemingly ridiculous relationship with Mrs. Riordan should be read in the light of Joyce's Sovereignty imagery. In Molly's interior monologue, not only is their kiss on Howth Head remembered fondly, but the memory itself brings the "transformation" of her attitude toward her husband: her Yes is the assent of the Sovereignty. Stephen's obsession with the devouring Shan Van Vocht and his inability to kiss contrast with Bloom's willingness to embrace women, Bloom's ability to bring about their transformation, and Bloom's obsession with the fertility of the women in his world.[35] These differing attitudes toward the Sovereignty and toward women are key in Joyce's shift of focus from Stephen Dedalus to Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and
[35] Even the menstrual blood of women, which can potentially be connected with war and destruction, is attractive rather than repellent to Bloom; it becomes a sign of their fertility.
part of the significance of the work, involving a transfer of both the author's and the reader's identification to the older and more "all round" protagonist.
Bloom is also a fit spouse for Molly because of his sexual eagerness, which itself has antecedents in early Irish literature. Though the goddess may initiate sexual contact with her prospective partner, in the early Irish Adventure of the Sons of Eochaid Muigmedon , for example, Niall can be seen as a fit consort for the Sovereignty because of his sexual readiness: he does more than what the Sovereignty invites him to do by lying with her in addition to kissing her.
So then Niall went seeking water and happened on the same well. "Give me water, O woman," said Niall.
"I will give it," she answered, "but first give me a kiss."
"Besides giving thee a kiss, I will lie with thee!" Then he threw himself down upon her and gave her a kiss. But then, when he looked at her, there was not in the world a damsel whose figure or appearance was more loveable than hers! (AIT 511)
If early Irish literature is filled with sexually potent females, it has as well its share of vigorous men like Niall. One example is the Dagda, who copulates with the Morrigan and thus helps to ensure victory in The Second Battle of Mag Tuired . The Dagda can be a humorous figure whose distended belly causes problems when he tries to copulate with his enemy's daughter, but he is also known as Eochaid Ollathair, 'Eochaid the Great Father', and his fearsome club both kills and restores life. Fergus mac Roich is another male with prodigious sexual prowess. His name means 'manly strength [or 'potency'] son of great horse'; in "the heptad of Fergus" already quoted he is described as having a penis as long as seven fists and a scrotum the size of a bushel measure, generally requiring seven women to satisfy his sexual desire (Stokes, "Tidings of Conchobor Mac Nessa" 27). Fergus mac Roich also copulates with Medb in Táin Bó Cúailnge ; and though he loses his sword in the process (!), he is apparently a fitting match for that powerful woman. Fergus's sexual potency is appropriately commemorated in contemporary Irish folk tradition, for the six-foot-long phallic stone at Tara was known to the country people as "the Penis of Fergus" up to the present century (Petrie 225).
Like the Dagda and Fergus, Bloom may be absurd or even burlesqued at times, but that should not deflect us from recognizing his stature any
more than we should underestimate the Dagda because the latter can raise a laugh. The estimation of Bloom's character, therefore, must be made not only within the context of Irish myth but also within the parameters of the narrative patterning of Irish myth, including its double consciousness about humor. Like Niall, Bloom was an eager suitor, and Molly remembers fondly his courtship antics, which went far beyond the things she incited him to do (18.294ff.): pestering her for bloomers, threatening to kneel in the public street so as to get a view under her skirt, and so forth. On 16 June 1904, Bloom is a fully mature and vigorous sexual male. His skirt chasing and sexual fantasies are modern expressions of sexual appetites and sexual presence. Like Fergus, he enjoys more than one woman a day—albeit through correspondence and fantasy rather than in the flesh. His penis makes several appearances in the book and even in its limp state is crowned "father of thousands" (5.571). Irony and verbal realism, which are finely balanced in all Irish myth, are reproduced in the Joycean text as well.
If Molly is a great mother figure, Bloom seems her equal as a father figure. He is a literal father to Milly, a foster father to Stephen, a potential "father of thousands," a man with a lot of spunk (18.168). Here again his Jewish associations are useful, for they call to mind the term patriarch. Bloom is the male fit to match Molly, the great father to her great mother. Bloom's sexual preoccupations and his intrigues with Martha or Gerty are thus not simply pathetic; they indicate within a surface of realism that Bloom, like Molly, is sexually potent. Though Molly's sexuality is the more striking note in the book, he is her fitting mate. She rightly says that if she chooses to bear another child, it will be by him (18.166–68).
Feminist critics have noted that Bloom has some womanly qualities and have argued that he could be considered androgynous; these qualities can probably be attributed primarily to Joyce's mimesis.[36] However, some features of Irish tradition involve the inversion of Western gender markers and hence might lead to seeming "androgyny" in literature, if not in reality. Perhaps because the Sovereignty pattern is so pervasive in Irish literature, sexual advances in the stories are most commonly attributed to women: women in general are the sexual initiators and solicitors. There
[36] See, for example, Unkeless, "Leopold Bloom as a Womanly Man"; Herr (149) sounds a cautionary note on this interpretation.
is also a corresponding inversion in mythological stories associated with the motif of the metamorphosis of the lover from hideous object of fear to attractive beauty. Such metamorphosis is generally associated with women in early Irish literature (i.e., the motif of the puella senilis ), but elsewhere in Western tradition the motif is more commonly associated with the male sexual partner, as in the "animal groom" cycle of tales, including AT 425C, "Beauty and the Beast," where the male lover takes a variety of hideous forms. In Freudian readings this motif has been associated with the psychic acceptance of sexuality in its physical forms and the transference of love from parent to spouse.[37] Whereas in Indo-European tradition as a whole male figures generally symbolize these dimensions of sexuality, in early Irish literature female figures carry these roles. Similarly, early Irish tradition inverts the dialectic of desire. An example of this inversion occurs in the treatment of the motif "red as blood, white as snow" (Z 65.1), which is applied almost invariably worldwide to women or children; in Irish tradition, however, the motif has been adapted as a suitor test, with men becoming the objects of desire.[38] Inversions such as these form a psychic network within which Irish writers write and Irish audiences read. They may appear as "androgyny" in some contexts (particularly from the viewpoint of dominant Western tradition); such inversions are a factor in Joyce's characterizations of Leopold and Molly Bloom and contribute to the readings and misreadings of these characters by critics who do not understand the intertextual matrix of Irish literature within which Joyce wrote.
Claims about Joyce's intrapsychic (or personal) reasons for his presentation of males and females need to be reconsidered in this light. Thus, Shechner's theories in Joyce in Nighttown need to be reexamined with a closer understanding of the mythic and archetypal elements of Joyce's Irish cultural heritage. Insofar as Joyce's presentation of womanhood or manhood is "ambiguous," he is squarely within Irish mythological tradition. "Ambiguity" in the sexual roles of Joyce's characters need not be read as personal ambivalence; in Joyce's tradition it may be archetypal. At the same time, in delineating his characters' gender, Joyce is not necessarily attempting to present a "womanly man" or a "manly woman" in
[37] See, for example, Bettelheim 277–310. This cycle of tales occurs with male metamorphosis in Modern Irish folklore as well.
[38] Motif number H312.5 in Cross's Motif-Index; see also Tymoczko, "Animal Imagery" 146–49.
the contemporary sense of androgyny. His use of the Sovereignty pattern underlies much of the skewing of gender roles in Ulysses and delimits the areas of deviation from cultural norms. As a result, within a naturalistic framework Molly remains stereotypically female in her thought (Unkeless, "Conventional Molly Bloom" 157), however unusual she may be in other respects. Joyce does not reclaim gender stereotypes: it is only in virtue of her mythic and symbolic nature that Molly achieves a transcendent identity (Unkeless, "Conventional Molly Bloom" 164).
iv. Conclusion
The dyad of the unfaithful woman and the cuckolded husband is given heroic and mythic scaffolding in Ulysses: all the Irish goddesses and Sovereignty figures stand behind Molly, and their consorts second Bloom. These mythic structures from Irish literature support the meanings inherent in Joyce's treatment of Molly Bloom. Two representations of the Sovereignty emerge in Ulysses: the poor old milkwoman and Molly in her mythic aspects. The first manifestation Joyce rejects and undercuts; the second he elaborates and fleshes out in a contemporary guise. However, the two manifestations are not unrelated; it is no accident that Joyce has treated the Sovereignty theme twice in his book and that he has positioned the two treatments as he has. To see the import of these treatments of the Sovereignty, the way they structure Ulysses, and the significance of Molly's sexuality, we must look at the movement of the entire book. We must return to the image of the poor old woman at the opening of Ulysses.
Joyce begins with the thin, wasted body of the old milkwoman in the first episode of Ulysses, and ends the book with Molly's youthful sexual vigor, her round fully ripe body. The old woman is connected with nourishment, but she is a "witch on her toadstool" with "old shrunken paps" and "wrinkled fingers" (1.398–402). Molly contrasts with the poor old woman as soon as she is introduced, and her full breasts are specially noted (4.304–05). Joyce begins with a woman who, like Cathleen Ni Houlihan, is a wanderer, milking her cows in the field, peddling her wares on the road, never shown at rest or at home, and ends with Molly at home in comfort, well bedded.
Joyce begins with images of the land, but they are desolate images. The opening landscape is the barren shingle bordering a sullen "snotgreen
sea" (1.78). Images of death dominate: the drowned man, and the dog carcass, and his mother's body are in Stephen's thoughts as he walks by the sea. The land has apparently lost its fertility; images of the land, the lack of abundance, harmonize with the image of the poor old woman. Molly, like the old woman, is also associated with images of the land, but the landscapes she evokes are lush and rich. Fertility, which is a problem at the beginning of the book, is a leitmotif of the end: Molly dwells on images of abundance, and her soliloquy is laced with images of flowers, fruits, and vegetables.
The weather, too, is awry at the opening of the book. The land is in a "drouth" (4.44). The lack of rain has caused animals and plants alike to suffer. Bloom thinks of eggs for breakfast at the opening of his day and rejects them (4.43–44); since eggs are symbols of fertility, their failure here is significant. The end of the book brings rain, and the weather is restored to its proper patterns. The drought ends with thunder and a downpour, and the rain brings with it revival of the land. Fertility is restored, and Molly will be able to serve eggs for breakfast on the next day.
The mythic elements here are patent, but Joyce's images of barrenness in Ulysses do not depend solely on Irish tradition. They also relate to the wasteland imagery of the Grail legends, which were celebrated in Jessie Weston's stimulating book, From Ritual to Romance, published in 1920. Weston's influence on Eliot is well known, and he makes his debt to her explicit in his notes to The Waste Land , which, like the final episode of Ulysses , was written in 1921. In Ireland, where it rains almost daily during most seasons, four or five days of consecutive sunshine can be spoken of as "a drought"; in Ireland it is not therefore dry weather but overly wet weather that is the principal threat to fertility. Accordingly, in Modern Irish the expression meaning "to hay," an féar a shábháil, is literally 'to save the hay', a usage that carries over into Anglo-Irish; in most areas of Ireland the climate is so marginal for cereals that the harvesting of grain always has something of the nature of a rescue operation. For these reasons, in early Irish literature infertility of the land is associated primarily with wet, windy, and stormy weather—appropriately enough for a damp island where the annual rainfall ranges between thirty and eighty inches. This is the sort of weather associated with the failure of the sacral king and the wasteland motif in early Irish literature.
The drought and the rain that end it in Ulysses appear as an innocuous touch of realism, and in fact in June 1904 there was a dry spell. But these
elements, associated as they are with the dual images of the Sovereignty figures at the beginning and end of the book, seem to be connected with the motif of the rightful king; rather than use the Irish iconography of stormy weather or rain for the motif, Joyce chooses a more international manifestation of the mythic pattern, the iconography of which is apparently indebted to sources other than those in early Irish literature. A plausible influence on his treatment of the wasteland motif, leaving aside Eliot and Weston, is James Frazer's The Golden Bough, where the motif of the monarch's responsibility for rain and drought is discussed several times in the two volumes of Adonis, Attis, Osiris (see 1: 183, 1: 225–26, 2: 201–202), volumes that Joyce appears to have used in Finnegans Wake as well.[39]
The movement of Ulysses is similar to the movement of Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan, and it is even closer to the movement of the earlier Adventure of the Sons of Eochaid Muigmedon: the old hag gives way to the young woman, asexuality to fecundity and union. The movement of Ulysses echoes the transformation of the Sovereignty goddess and is closer to early Irish stories of the Sovereignty than to Yeats's play because the Sovereignty figure in Ulysses does not remain chaste as she does in Cathleen ni Houlihan. The contrasting images of land and fertility in Ulysses are also related to Sovereignty themes of union with the rightful king: a fitting union secures the fruits of the earth and perfect weather; improper union results in the failure of animal and vegetable fertility, in bad weather and barrenness.
The two women, the two images of the Sovereignty of Ireland, the old milkwoman and Molly, bracket the action of the book. Representing morning and night, they sum up the progress of the day. Though the land and weather become transformed, Joyce cannot use the motif of the physical metamorphosis of the Sovereignty within his realistic framework. Rather than metamorphosis of the female figure, there is replacement of character, transformation of the text. The old woman gives way to the young, the text turns from the old woman to Molly. The Sovereignty fig-
[39] These two volumes were also consulted by Eliot, and Atherton (193) finds traces of them in Finnegans Wake. Molly's heightened desire in spring ("it was May . . . Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year" [18.781–82]) may be intended to echo the motif of the annual slaughter of the ritual king that Frazer discusses. (Joyce's architectonics had been set and most of Ulysses written by the time Weston's From Ritual to Romance appeared.)
ure is a composite, the result of an iconographic palimpsest; and it is literary metamorphosis rather than physical shapeshifting that Joyce uses.
With respect to the relationship of Ulysses to Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan , it is significant that Molly's monologue is a kind of epilogue to Ulysses. The action of Ulysses properly ends in "Ithaca" (Letters 1: 172); yet as Joyce acknowledged to Budgen, Molly's episode is necessary and is the "clou" to the book (Letters 1: 170). Before Molly's interior monologue we hear about her from many sources but do not actually learn very much that can be held with certainty (cf. Hayman, "Empirical Molly" 103–11; D. O'Brien 140); it is only in the final episode that we see her ourselves, that Molly is revealed and the Sovereignty theme resolved. With regard to Molly and the Sovereignty mythos, Ulysses has the structure of an epiphany: the final chapter presents the reader with a sudden spiritual manifestation of Molly, in which her mythic nature is revealed. The narrative structure of Ulysses thus descends from Joyce's earliest experiments with literary prose and from his theory of epiphanies elaborated in Stephen Hero (210–13). But the trajectory of Ulysses should also be related to that of Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan, which concludes with an epiphany in which the transformation of the poor old woman happens offstage, outside the action of the play. In the same way the final revelation of Molly happens outside the action of Bloomsday per se.
Kenner argues that in Joyce's treatment of the Sovereignty theme there is no metamorphosis and that this absence constitutes Joyce's "profoundest critique of the mythology of the revival" ("Look of a Queen" 124). Ulysses does fit Kenner's observation concerning dyads of women in Joyce's writing, but as I have just argued, there is transformation in Ulysses. The transformation is a replacement or exchange of Sovereignty figures, textual metamorphosis rather than physical metamorphosis. We begin with an old crone and end with a young girl. And though she may not have "the walk of a queen," she is at least a rosy "flower of the mountain" (18.1602). It should come as no surprise that Joyce can be seen remolding the mythos of Cathleen ni Houlihan in Ulysses, since Yeats's play was one of the most important pieces of the Irish literary revival, a piece that seized the imagination of a generation and that inspired the Easter Rising.
The Sovereignty myth is at the foundation of Joyce's conception of Ulysses, a sign of which is that Joyce had sketched out "Penelope" as early as 1916 (Letters 3: 31; cf. Groden 77), conceptualizing the end of
the work even as he worked on the initial episodes. The modulation of this controlling myth can also be traced in Joyce's revisions, for in the earliest draft of the first episode Joyce has Stephen (in an echo of Yeats's finale) recognize the old milkwoman as a "wandering queen," only later changing the phrase to "wandering crone" (1.404), thus muting the Sovereignty imagery just as he muted the Homeric parallels by removing the titles of the episodes. The initial version of Joyce's poor old milkwoman was less negative, bearing some of the grandeur of the puella senilis ; and by changing "queen" to "crone" Joyce emphasizes both the aura of defeat that the old woman emanates as well as her pathos in the final text.[40] Joyce's views of the mythic complex are reflected as well in Stephen's musings about Yeats's Cathleen: "Gaptoothed Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house" (9.36–37). Stephen quotes lines from Yeats's text even as he embroiders with the adjective "gaptoothed," indicating an awareness of a sexualized version of the Sovereignty myth, which Yeats has bowdlerized.
Not only is the transformation of the Sovereignty suggested by the contrast between the old milkwoman and Molly, but it is also operative within the framework of Molly's monologue itself. The monologue is marked by a regression in time: Molly enters her memories and is transformed from a middle-aged housewife into a young girl. Critics have interpreted this development in a variety of ways—for instance, as indicating Molly's confused mentality or her unhappiness. But Molly's thought in the episode is as easily seen as a progression rather than regression: it is a reflex of the Sovereignty as puella senilis on the level of stream of consciousness. The dialectic of transformation is explicit as she worries, "its a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me" (18.1399–1401), and reflects, "a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young" (18.1407–8). And it is the memory of the embrace on Howth Head that causes Molly to be regenerated at the end of the chapter in thought, if not in body.
The dual nature of the Irish Sovereignty—hag/girl, war goddess/fertility figure—may explain the devouring aspects that Kenner observes in
[40] The change occurs in the first page proofs. Note that he first tries "woman" and then settles on "crone," which associates the milkwoman with the Shan Van Vocht. Joyce may also have felt that "queen" was too opaque for his international audience.
Joyce's women. Because Irish mythic females link fertility and dissolution, they tend to be ambivalent figures; they represent the earth as source of life and final repository of the dead (Tymoczko, "Unity and Duality"). A writer who uses a mythic method and who refracts Irish Sovereignty myths will mirror these dualities in his own female characterizations. In Ulysses , however, Molly's "devouring" aspects are clearly secondary to her fertility associations. She and the book end with the affirmation of flowers, nourishment, revitalization: Yes .
Joyce does not avoid the physical shapeshifting of the old woman simply for the sake of realism or through a horror of romanticism, as Kenner would have it. He is juxtaposing the two female figures—as signaled by his placement of them at beginning and end—and implicitly posing a political question: which is the more appropriate and pleasing form for the Sovereignty of Ireland? He does not attempt to revitalize the old crone/ queen who represents peasant Gaelic Ireland; her day is done and her decrepit condition signals the death for Joyce of Gaelic Ireland, including its language and its rural, peasant life.
Kenner has shown that Ulysses begins with the "two peoples" theme of captivity and bondage at six removes, as Mulligan parodies the opening of the mass and the raising of the chalice ("Ulysses" 35–36). This imagery is biblical and Judeo-Christian, but it is associated with The Book of Invasions as well. By following this invocation with the appearance of the Poor Old Woman, from the perspective of Irish literary tradition Joyce fuses the bondage theme of the Milesians with the bondage themes in the aisling and Sovereignty traditions. Joyce is raising the problem of Irish nationalism covertly at the outset of his book in terms of the dual patterns from Irish mythology that he uses to structure all of Ulysses: The Book of Invasions and the Sovereignty myth. The ending of the book can be seen as an attempt to resolve these issues, raised at the outset in symbolic terms, a resolution that involves metempsychosis rather than transfiguration.
Joyce's treatment of the Sovereignty fits with his view of Irish politics: he did not accept the hypothesis that Gaelic peasant Ireland should be renewed so as to become the cornerstone of the new Ireland. Accordingly, in Ulysses he does not rejuvenate the old woman with all her associations—Catholic piety, chastity, insularity, limited vision. In a sense Joyce portrays the old woman as the wrong bride for the king; she is no longer
to be the object of union; she comes with images of the death of landscape, animals, and people.
Like early Irish literature, Ulysses poses ideological questions and sets answers in terms of mythic structures and literary formalism. Like early Irish literature also, Ulysses expresses these mythic and political elements humorously and lightheartedly, playfully and even ironically. Joyce's treatment of the Sovereignty material is never sanctimonious, and it may ultimately be the tonal differences between the Sovereignty pattern in Ulysses and its appearance in other writings of the Irish literary revival that have kept these elements of Ulysses from being recognized. It has been claimed that Finnegans Wake demonstrates that "for Joyce myth was not a way of mythologizing a nation; it was a way of demythologizing it" and that in Finnegans Wake Joyce was attempting to "demythologize the stock mythology of the new nationalist cult" (Hederman and Kearney, "Editorial").[41] In Joyce's choice of a sexualized version of the Sovereignty pattern for Ulysses, in his inversion of the nationalist values associated with the Sovereignty in Anglo-Irish literature, and in the humor associated with the mythic patterns, it is evident that long before Finnegans Wake Joyce was using Irish mythology in these ways. At the same time, in his use of Irish mythos and his encoding of ideological points in mythic and formal codes, Joyce acts like an Irish traditionalist.
The Sovereignty myth is also manipulated by Joyce in a visionary way. The development of Ulysses can be seen as a turning from the consecration of the blood of the chalice to the consecration of the blood of the chamberpot (Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey 171). That chamberpot blood is a symbolic node referring to native Irish mythology; thus, the consecration of the Christian chalice is replaced by the consecration of the blood of the Sovereignty, the blood of Ireland as woman. In weaving together realistic elements, Christian imagery, and Irish myth, Joyce stresses the potential of the emergent English-speaking urban Ireland for restoring and reviving the nation. He manifests this new Ireland in a woman with a new morality, with a naturalism of religion, and an international outlook. In Joyce's version of the renewal of the Sovereignty, chaste, religious woman-as-Ireland with her loss of Gaelic and her bank-
[41] The editorial continues, "Whereas Yeats's use of the myth was idolatrous, Joyce's was at all times iconoclastic."
rupt tradition gives way to modern, English-speaking, urban woman-as-Ireland with the richness of an expanding international outlook, contemporary morality, acceptance of the body, and a new religious freedom. Molly is a woman who, in Joyce's terms, is both spiritually and physically liberated, and in the context of Irish myth she represents a resolution of the dual theme of bondage that opens the book.[42] By using a sexualized form of the Sovereignty myth rather than the asexual version promulgated by the other authors of the revival, Joyce also links his view of national liberation more closely to the native heritage of Ireland.
In a sense Ulysses , first published in February 1922, can be seen as a birthday gift for the new Irish nation emerging in that year. Richard Ellmann has suggested that Joyce was offering in Ulysses a model of "new Irishmen to live in Arthur Griffith's new state" (Consciousness of Joyce 89). Joyce's political themes here move, however, on a mythic level as well as a naturalistic one. As he does with the mythic structures from The Book of Invasions, Joyce is creating the new free Irishman for the new Free State by actually returning to Ireland its ancient heritage, which predates the English conquest; in this case he restores the heritage of the Sovereignty myth, returning it in a form less mutilated than the one used by Yeats and the other Anglo-Irish writers, who were bound by an Anglophile morality and aesthetic. Ulysses, like Finnegans Wake later, shows that Joyce shared the revivalists' "preoccupation with the mythic figures and motifs of ancient Ireland," but "rather than sanctify modern Irish consciousness, [Joyce uses myth] to challenge its complacency and open up alternatives" (Hederman and Kearney, "Editorial" 156). With the Sovereignty patterns in Ulysses Joyce offers Ireland new physical, mental, and spiritual alternatives, which he paradoxically presents as Ireland's legitimate heritage since they stem from native mythos, native symbolism, and native archetypes. Joyce's thematic use of the Sovereignty myth again coincides with his thematic treatment of The Book of Invasions in this respect.[43]
[42] In feminist terms, of course, she is far from "liberated"; see Unkeless, "Conventional Molly Bloom" 150–68.
[43] Joyce saw Dubliners as "the first step towards the spiritual liberation of [his] country" (Letters 1: 62–63), and Ulysses may be taken as a major advance. From our vantage point we may question whether sexual liberation is so significant, but for Joyce sexual repression and sexual hypocrisy were a cultural function of church and state. Thus, sexual liberation was a first step toward spiritual liberation. On these points, see Manganiello 37–42; Shechner 105, 149, 176. On the rather late entry of sexual puritanism into Irish culture, see Lee.
The spiritual and political renewal of Ireland associated with the scaffolding from The Book of Invasions in Ulysses is reified in the Sovereignty symbolism of the book. Far from being simply ironic or even affirmative in merely a realistic way, Molly's sexuality is also sacramental. Joyce points the way to a new order: an Ireland for a free people as a free race; an Ireland free of the repressive yoke of England, Catholicism, and small minds; an Ireland able to affirm life spiritually and physically; an Ireland ready to reassume its own proper character after years of denial by political and spiritual oppressors. Though the change is formal, and hence subliminal for many readers, the overall movement of Ulysses brings transformation and renewal in images connected with the figure of the Sovereignty and the oldest strata of Irish literature.