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.