James Joyce could hardly be considered a feminist author. As a young man, he often made fun of the "new woman" seeking social and economic independence at the end of the nineteenth century. He took a bemused attitude toward Francis Sheehy-Skeffington's passionate defense of women's rights. And his own relationship with Nora Barnacle swerved erratically between sexual obsession and filial dependence. "I wonder is there some madness in me," Joyce wrote to Nora. "Or is love madness? One moment I see you like a virgin or madonna the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half-naked and obscene" ( L II, 243).

Joyce's own attitude toward women always remained highly ambivalent. The dichotomy in Joyce's mind was not, apparently, between virgin and whore, but between narcissistic virgin and phallic mother--between the untouched and untouchable ingénue and the experienced maternal female. In the guise of a Dublin coquette, the Virgin Mary of Catholicism became for Joyce a nubile temptress, coyly flirting with adult sexuality. At the same time, Joyce was fascinated by the Circean image of a dangerous, threatening "phallic mother"--an omnipotent female who could nurture or destroy the male enthralled by her charms.

For Joyce, woman is, first and foremost, a figure of motherhood. "Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life" ( U207). Woman emerges in his work as virgin or whore, but usually within the context of maternity. The mother is a figure of material immanence, bound to mortality through the navelcord of physiological process. And the temptress is portrayed, more often than not, as a "potential mother" in training. Compelled by the life-force of the species, she becomes a pawn to the instinctual drives of racial propagation. From her Oedipal role as "Papa's little bedpal. Lump of love" ( U39), the adolescent girl learns narcissistic tricks to tempt the ingenuous suitor. Her body is her sole commodity, the one "good" that she can trade for the infinite security of marriage. Most of Joyce's female characters move from adolescent narcissism to shrewish maternity. All too frequently, their conjugal affiliations prove physically onerous and psychologically diminishing. Unfortunately, Joyce's single women fare little better than their married sisters. The "spinsters" in his fiction look forward to barren lives of isolation, cut off from life's feast of amorous delectation.

It is not a very great leap from a celebration of the feminine archetype to a denigration of the female stereotype. As Simone de Beauvoir reminds us, the idealization of woman as goddess can be just as debasing as a negative representation: "To say that Woman is Flesh, to say that the Flesh is Night and Death, or that it is the splendor of the Cosmos, is to abandon terrestrial truth. . . . Woman is not merely a carnal object. . . . To assimilate her to Nature is simply to act from prejudice." ³ Feminist critics who object to Joyce's writing often attack the archetypal dimensions of his female portraits. Kate Millett, who devotes a chapter of Sexual Politics to a critique of D. H. Lawrence, mentions Joyce only in passing, as an author "fond of presenting woman as 'nature,' 'unspoiled primeval understanding,' and the 'eternal feminine.'" ⁴ Annis Pratt, who is willing to acknowledge Joyce's literary genius, nevertheless remarks that "it is difficult not to feel about Molly Bloom on her chamberpot what Eldridge Cleaver must feel about Jack Benny's Rochester." ⁵

There is, however, another side to Joyce's writing--a more ironic and compassionate dimension evident to the reader who applies a judicious, "parallactic" perspective to the canon. Joyce clearly eschews the literary fraternity that Shulamith Firestone describes as "Virility, Inc." As early as Dubliners, he emerges as a revisionist thinker determined to see old institutions in a new light and to question traditional patterns of social organization. He openly challenges an authoritarian power structure and draws acerbic caricatures of masculine bravado. By comically deflating prevalent stereotypes of male prowess and female passivity, Joyce advocates a more enlightened ideal of androgynous behavior for both sexes.

In Dubliners, Joyce portrays a society radically torn between sentimentality and squalor, with female characters at the focal point of this caustic, multi-dimensional mimesis. Women provide a translucent screen on which men act out melodramatic scripts or engage in bizarre, narcissistic behavior. Many of the stories reiterate the theme of patriarchal futility. The males of Dublin struggle to defend the law and the word, though reason and logic founder in sentimental drunkenness. The women of Dubliners, even more than the men, are clearly depicted as societal victims. Female characters are condemned to involuntary celibacy by their own timidity and fear, or to loveless marriages and altruistic motherhood. Subservient to fathers and patriarchal husbands, they vent their anger through shrewish and manipulative practices. In a land of decay, women are the natural victims of authoritarian abuse, and children become emotional casualties of adult frustration. All too often, critics have maligned, misapprehended, or simply ignored the women of Dubliners. In "Dubliners: Women in Irish Society," Florence Walzl attempts to redress the balance by examining some of the gender attributions operative in late nineteenth-century Ireland. ⁶ Edward Brandabur, in A Scrupulous Meanness, offers a detailed psychoanalytic study of the individual stories and provides a lucid analysis of sexual repression. ⁷

The women characters in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist are thinly sketched and fairly two-dimensional. Seen through the eyes of a self-consciously rebellious young man, females are perceived as threatening or enchanting, seductive or aloof. Their demeanor is largely contingent on Stephen's adolescent attitude and misogynist frame of mind. Joyce's notes for Stephen Hero suggest that the protagonist feels a need "to avenge himself on Irish women who, he says, are the cause of all the moral suicide in the island" ( SH200). The shadowy Mercedes of A Portrait becomes the romantic object of Stephen's prepubescent fantasies, just as the Virgin Mary later appeals to his ascetic, "monkish" mentality. Once at university, the more sophisticated Stephen rejects Irish puritanism and the sexual mores of bourgeois society. In Stephen Hero, he proposes to the ingenuous Emma that they "live one night together," then "say goodbye in the morning . . . never to see each other again!" ( SH198). Understandably shocked, Emma dismisses her bohemian suitor as an incipient madman. Stephen, in turn, rationalizes his rejection "by anathemising . . . Emma as the most deceptive and cowardly of marsupials" ( SH210). ⁸

Both Stephen Hero and Portrait might be seen as extended delineations of Stephen's "flight from woman," first in the guise of a maternal authority figure, then as a Circean temptress. ⁹ Like Schopenhauer, Stephen devises "a theory of dualism which would symbolise the twin eternities of spirit and nature in the twin eternities of male and female" ( SH210). He sees women as emblems of the flesh allied with the chaos of nature. Terrified of the "eternal temptress," and haunted by fears of erotic compulsion, Stephen seeks Freudian mastery through the "spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri" ( P252). The poet can control the vagaries of sexual excitation by banishing the temptress to a refrigerated world of aesthetic stasis. The creative process functions as an exercise in emotional compensation: it allows Stephen to "transubstantiate" the female into an accessible objet d'art.

The temptress of Stephen's villanelle in chapter five is most likely a further projection of E----- C----- in still another poetic emanation. ¹⁰ The young woman whose "strange and wilful heart" eludes the suffering Stephen is here celebrated as a voluptuous muse-naked, yielding, "odorous and lavish-limbed," possessed in a moment of aesthetic ecstasy. Emma merges with all the sirens and beautiful women of religious history and myth--with the Virgin Mary, Dante's Beatrice, and Yeats's "secret rose." As seductress and autoerotic muse, she offers the poet both sensuous and imaginative satisfaction.

Throughout A Portrait, Joyce appears to be satirizing Stephen's brash misogyny as a dimension of adolescent narcissism. The young man's fear of woman and his flight from the "eternal feminine" are factors that inhibit his artistic growth. Before Stephen can become a true priest of the imagination, he must first allow his consciousness to be "feminized." He must incorporate the anima--the fluid, fertile, feminine principle--into the logocentric domain of his art.

Richard Rowan, the protagonist of Joyce Exiles, shares some of Stephen's misogynist propensities. Joyce warns us in a note that "Richard must not appear as a champion of woman's rights. His language at times must be nearer to that of Schopenhauer against women and he must show at times a deep contempt for the longhaired, short-legged sex" ( E120). In Exiles, all the world is a stage, and Richard Rowan assumes the role of author-director in the drama of his own betrayal. Horrified by the prospect of cuckoldry, he wants to plunge into the void of incertitude and "freely" offer his commonlaw wife Bertha to her suitor Robert Hand. Like Kierkegaard, Richard defines ultimate spiritual possession as an act of sacrificial generosity. Voluntary renunciation frees the individual from the ponderous burden of jealousy and desire. Having choreographed the scene of erotic temptation for Bertha and Robert, Richard may then withdraw, like the god of creation, "within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork" and remain indifferent, "paring his fingernails" ( P215). Paradoxically, Richard plays the benevolent patriarch by assuming that Bertha is a conjugal possession; he takes for granted that she is his to give away, like a cow or a piece of movable property. Hence the irony of Richard's parabolic lesson to his son Archie: "While you have a thing it can be taken from you," he tells Archie. "But when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. . . . It is yours then for ever. . . . It will be yours always" ( E46-47). Bertha, evidently, is the "thing" in question, and Robert the potential robber.

Bertha, to her credit, maintains a combination of dignity and naturalness throughout the play. She instinctively penetrates the convoluted psychodynamics of Richard's manipulation. "For your own sake you urged me to it," she accuses. "To be free yourself" ( E103). In a conversation with Beatrice, Bertha angrily dismisses the false world of "ideas and ideas" ( E100). "Do you think I am a stone?" she asks bitterly. "I am very proud of myself, if you want to know. . . . And you . . . will never humble me, any of you" ( E100). Reversing the Pygmalion/Galatea relationship earlier envisaged by Robert, Bertha claims with fierce, maternal pride that it is she who made Richard "a man" ( E100). Through love and amorous devotion, she has spiritually given birth to the mature artist who will, in turn, conceive and give birth to poetic ideas. At this point in the drama, Bertha proves to be a fiery, passionate heroine, independent and free. In her own right, she asserts a creative liberty that transcends the sexual imbroglio engineered by Richard.

Bertha emerges as the "heroine" of Joyce's Ibsenian drama. Until recently, however, few critics have acknowledged the centrality of her role in the play. ¹¹ Most scholars have focused attention on Richard, whom Ellmann describes as a "metaphysical victor." ¹²

William York Tindall bluntly dismisses Bertha as Richard's "stooge," a woman who gullibly cooperates in her own victimization. Carole Brown and Leo Knuth share Tindall's acerbity when they describe Bertha as "little more than a psychological satellite," "annoyingly imperceptive," and "neither emphatic nor discerning." And Hugh Kenner, who reads the entire play as an exercise in Joycean irony, sees Bertha as a neurotic "parody of the exiled Eve." ¹³

It is not surprising that so many critics have responded to the protean portrait of Joyce's heroine and to the dramatic ambiguity of Exiles with some doubt and a great deal of skepticism. Doubt, Joyce would tell us, "is the thing. Life is suspended in doubt like the world in the void. You might find this in some sense treated in Exiles." ¹⁴

From the very beginning of Ulysses, Molly Bloom emerges as the clou of Joyce's novel--the key to the male-dominated, anti-heroic modern epic, and the nail in the coffin of bourgeois, sentimental literature. Her world view is gynocentric, and her monologue "turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and [cunt] expressed by the words because, bottom, . . . woman, yes" ( L I, 170).

Molly is both mother and lover to Leopold Bloom, whose infantile desires for maternal domination clothe themselves in sadomasochistic, Circean reverie. Other women in the novel are either forebears, extensions, or pale shadows of Joyce's modern Penelope. When Bloom takes a polymorphously perverse delight in imagining an affair with the "nextdoor girl," his daydream suggests a younger, more vivacious Molly--the kind of woman who would not hesitate to flagellate a miscreant spouse. Bloom thrills at the voyeuristic image of a woman's ankle and takes masturbatory pleasure from the sight of Gerty MacDowell's transparent stockings. A fetish for legs, ankles, stockings, and hats displaces a more focused desire for Molly's "peachy" thighs and for the vestigial phallus ascribed to the powerful, authoritative female. When Bloom plays the transvestite, he is, in fact, offering himself in fantasies of abasement before Molly as voluptuous matriarch. Molly Bloom is metamorphosed in her husband's erotic imagination into the threatening figure of Bella/ Bello, a castrating whoremistress who punishes and emasculates. Bella represents the phallic mother par excellence--a vampiric woman who seduces and devours her timorous mates. Preying on the "beastly" sensuality of the male, this surrealistic Circe exposes the nightmare underside of lascivious fantasy.