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James Joyce
Christin Mary Mulligan
“SAOR AN TSEANBHEAN BHOCHT!”: A PLUMMY, POSTCOLONIAL PROGRESSION FROM HAG TO SPÉIRBHEAN IN JOYCE’S ULYSSES OR WHAT IF CATHLEEN NÍ HOULIHAN HAD BEEN MONICA LEWINSKY?

A recent trend in postcolonial scholarship has been to replace a close reading of aesthetics in favor of the application of politics and economics. I argue that in addition a careful attention to and analysis of James Joyce’s deliberate deployment of specific rhetorical strategies, innovative language that crosses borders, and particular symbolic motifs opens up emerging signs of colony and resistance in Ulysses (of course, for the reading of Joyce, the very concept of a “post-”colonial Ireland is problematic, because Ireland had not yet achieved independence(1) at the time he was writing the novel). As such, this essay endeavors to examine Joyce’s use of the motif of the crone or “an tseanbhean bhocht”(2) and its counterpart “an spéirbhean,”(3) the images’ historical role as emblems of Ireland,(4) as established by the aisling genre that figures Ireland as a goddess of sovereignty, appearing to the poet in a vision, first as an old woman and then as a resplendent queen transfigured by sexual union with her rightful mate and savior, usually one of the Stuart Pretenders, most notably in the popular lyric “Roisin Dubh” and throughout the work of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, and possibly dating back even further to Fenian tales like “Mis and Dubh Ruis”.(5) The pairing of the crone and the sky-woman have both been integral cultural emblems of Irish sovereignty at least since the Jacobite period, pervasive throughout song, verse, stage,(6) and iconography. I argue that Joyce invokes these images to limn feminine subjectivity and resistance to patriarchy(7) in a decolonizing Ireland.

In the introduction to their aptly-titled essay collection, Semicolonial Joyce, Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes discuss the various issues regarding the precariousness of the term “postcolonial” in relation to Ireland:

If Ireland can be said to have been a British colony, when can colonialism in Ireland be said to have ended? With the treaty of 1921? The 1937 constitution? The 1949 repeal of the External Relations Act? The recent peace accord? Or some future final resolution?....When did Britain first colonize Ireland? During the invasions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? Those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The dissolution of the Irish parliament under the 1800 Act of Union?(8)

For my, and I would argue Joyce’s ends, as Attridge and Howes suggest, the exact time of the commencement of colonialism (or imperialism—whether internal or archipelagic or not) in Ireland is not as relevant as the fact that the culture of imperial oppression had been the norm for however many hundreds of years by the time Joyce was writing; and its end—especially at the time of Ulysses’ composition—is debatable. Furthermore, I must also contend with another post-term, the postmodern and its relationship to modernism. Rather than get bogged down in a petty terminological debate, I will simply concur with Vicki Mahaffey’s assessment that the erroneous concept of a single, “ideologicially unified Modernism” with-a-capital-“M” often neglects to consider,

the penury of its practitioners, the status of many of them as colonized and disenfranchised subjects, as well as the diversity of the supporting cast of socialists, communists, lesbians, and feminists who struggled alongside men with aristocratic, fascist, or misogynist leanings to envision possible new orders that might be assembled from the shards of cultural collapse.(9)

Mahaffey insists that we remember what Eavan Boland has elsewhere called the “wounded history” of political violence(10) and the diverse variety of traumatized perspectives and “volatile responses such a history provokes.”(11) As such, I am interested in a multiplicity of historically and culturally sensitive (post)modernisms, specifically Joyce’s writing within and against Irish conventions of the hag and the sky-woman. For the sake of expediency, I will continue to use both terms, despite their ambiguities, since in my reading of the Aeolus episode, Joyce and Stephen Dedalus are using the Plum Hags aspirationally and comedically to imagine Dublin as a postmodern (or at least endeavoring to contend with its repute as a supposedly-modern urban space but also simultaneously and problematically a semicolonial backwater), postcolonial locale. The scope of this particular paper will only enable me to address Anne and Flo as mock sean mná bocht in the manner of the aisling tradition, but the entirety of this chapter of my dissertation addresses classic examples of the genre which establishes both images’ use throughout Ulysses, including Old Gummy Granny in “Circe,” the unnamed Milk Woman in “Telemachus,” Molly Bloom as spéirbhean, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s subsequent engagement with the tropes across her poetic corpus.

What Stephen Dedalus temporarily recognizes in the “two Dublin vestals” of his Parable of the Plums is their unexpected, overripe, fecund wisdom, which challenges the social order and endeavors to topple the phallic column of Nelson and his colonial oppression.(12) Joyce’s hidden pun is that these are figurative “prunes” eating plums. The latent term is doubly allusive to both the proverbial “dried up, old prunes” that these women have become and Early Modern slang for testicle, and as such, traditional emblem of the lusty bawd. In the Renaissance, a dish of stewed prunes was believed to be a cure for syphilis and thus commonly kept in the windows of houses of ill-repute during the period, referenced in dramas such as Lodge’s Wit’s Miserie, or the World’s Madnesse, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Merry Wives of Windsor.(13) The prune, later vilified by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, insinuates these bold seed-spitters are not quite as virginal as Stephen’s initial description suggests. In regards to either definition, we have frustrated conception. In the first sense, the crone women would be well beyond child-bearing and in the second—sex with a whore, however old—there is the implication of prophylactics (as in Leopold Bloom’s French letter). The women’s potential status as prostitutes is further confirmed when Myles Crawford refers to them as “two old trickies” and Stephen describes their immodest habit of “pull[ing] up their skirts,” so that theoretically any spectator beneath the pillar could get a full view of their undergarments or even more scandalously, their genitals.(14)

Johanna Garvey insists that Stephen is ultimately disdainful of the women’s subversive and covert erotic power and effectively ends their “plumy” narrative, ripe though it may be with sexual possibility, with his laugh:

Spitting out plum seeds as they look up at the “onehandled adulterer,”(15) the old women enact their own “conning,” on one level a laughing at the spectacle of the city as if spitting pits from the high rows of a theater, just as they seem to mock the colonizer and imagine his pillar toppling. Their seed-spitting also might serve as a form of fertilization, a usurping of power from the male. In this manner, Stephen’s story could offer a subversion of traditional roles, in a carnivalesque dialogue involving gender and creativity. From a different angle, however, the story offers a vision of creation-as-insemination, silencing “those slightly rambunctious females,” just as he is the one who has given momentary voice to the marginalized women.(16)

I would argue that this choice is entirely intentional on Joyce’s part to indicate that the ladies cunningly outwit Nelson and his imperial machinery by refusing to participate in the profligate propagation of colonial babies and thus ideologies. Granted, Nelson himself had but one eye and one arm, which suggests he hardly qualifies to produce an imperial super race. Nevertheless, David Weir has convincingly argued that the women’s actions in the parable can be read as a description of oral sex, which would not, of course, result in conception,

After saying that the two women have gotten a “crick in their necks” (U7.1023) from “peering up at the onehandled adulterer” (U7.1017-18), Stephen ends his story with the women “wiping off with their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting the plumstones out slowly between the railings” (U7.1025-1027). Stephen’s vulgar irony suggests that these two “Dublin vestals…elderly and pious” (U7.923) are in the submissive posture of fellatio, the plum-juice dribbling from their mouths and the seed-spitting suggesting the expectoration of semen.(17)

Whatever the sexual act implied, their seed-spitting is a conscious act of refusing what Garvey keenly describes as “insemination,” either by colonial philosophies or phalluses. Nelson’s pillar itself is obviously an icon of a massive erection, and the proverbial plumstones are figurative testes to be orally manipulated and their caustic juice or semen expectorated during erotic gratification. In his behemoth encyclopedic reference, Ulysses Annotated, Don Gifford notes that “in Christian art ‘the plum is symbolic of fidelity and independence’ ”.(18) Joyce, lover of a fine paradox, craftily combines the two by making the hags faithful only to their own autonomy above all else. They flout the prohibitions against the Cardinal sin of lust demanded by the Catholic churches they look down upon.(19) The genius of their (sinful) creativity, in fact, lies in refusing to create any offspring, and, rather, choosing to create a carefully-controlled (religious, imperial, and nationalist) defiance narrative, masquerading as a joke.

The Plum Hag’s outing is presented to us by Stephen as a parable and serves as Stephen’s gentle mockery of Christ’s didacticism in thirty-odd(20) stories like the parable of “The Sower and The Seed” (Matthew 13:3-9), “The Wise and Foolish Virgins” (Matthew 25:1-13), and the parable of “The Barren Fig Tree” (Luke 13:6-9), is significantly tamer than Mulligan’s later blasphemous “Ballad of Joking Jesus”. But much like the Lord before him, Stephen’s Parable of the Plums also delivers a moral message that endeavors to imagine a possible strategy of anticolonial resistance in Dublin. Much like the anti-mercantile(21) and anti-Anglo sentiments of the young male narrator of “Araby” in Dubliners, here Joyce adopts a different Middle Eastern motif to serve his own purposes. Unpacking this particular parable any further would necessitate a treasonous and dangerously direct indictment of the entire imperial project. Instead, the Hags’ parable allows the hidden seeds of rebellion to fall from atop the pillar onto “good ground” and “bring forth fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold”—not to those “who hath ears to hear”—but rather, to those who have eyes that read between the lines (Matthew 13:9). I believe that what Enda Duffy aptly describes as the women’s “murkily allegorical tale” must end with a snicker just where it does and be kept ostensibly in the realm of fable: a harmless old-lady-joke on the surface, with hidden political and allegorical depths that beg to be plumbed (pun intended) by the savvy reader.(22)

The Parable of the Plums represents Joyce’s complex adaptation of a common Biblical trope; whereas Jesus is concerned with the growth of faith in the wild, tangled gardens of the human heart, Joyce is interested in invoking both barrenness and its counterpart over-ripeness as subtle parabolic metaphors to engender doubt and cast aspersions on Britain’s systematic domination of the Irish people. As Weir suggests,

Stephen’s narrative has to be set against [Prof. MacHugh’s] earlier recitation of John F. Taylor’s speech concerning the [Irish] language movement, which plays upon the comparison of the Irish to the Israelites and of the British to the Egyptians and hence concerns the larger issue of Irish political and cultural independence.(23)

The Plum Hags engage in a covertly rebellious feminine opposition to religious, colonial, and nationalist erotic and ideological tyranny with aplumb, where Irish women cannily refuse to reproduce more subjects of the Commonwealth and indoctrinate these hypothetical children with ideas of their own inferiority. This passive strategy also represents Joyce’s profound ambivalence towards the colonial status quo. Whereas his critique of Irish nationalism is more overt and scathing in episodes like “Cyclops,” which features another troublesome one-eyed giant, his critique of colonialism here is discreetly couched in layers of symbolism(24) and is ultimately enacted by two fictitious lonely old women atop a pillar, hardly enough to inspire any serious anti-colonial dissent. In her discussion of Joyce’s relation to postcolonial history, Emer Nolan points out that

The appropriate subjects of a postcolonial history are neither the emerging self-conscious citizens of the modern nation, nor the working class, but the “people-nation,” which [Partha] Chatterjee (optimistically enough) believes still subsists in the margins of the nation, as a site of potential excess over the official nation-state, “struggling in an inchoate, undirected and wholly unequal battle against forces that have sought to dominate it.” ….a genuinely emancipatory politics must supersede the old politics of the nation-state.(25)

I would insist that the Plum Hags are just such subaltern(26) subjects on the margin, spinsters with only enough means to afford a small bag of plums and spend the afternoon at a free kitschy tourist locale. In fact, they are so marginal they are entirely hypothetical, mere figments of Stephen Dedalus’ imagination. Indeed “if Ulysses accords with the paradigm of subaltern history, it already illustrates the irony of such a history—in announcing that articulation has been denied to some, we necessarily articulate their case on their behalf”.(27) Joyce’s Parable of the Plums represents just such a mock subaltern history and this is underscored by its light, humorous tone and the fact that he manufactures dialogue for these “two old Dublin women” in the form of a hilarious headline: “SOME COLUMN!—THAT’S WHAT WADDLER ONE SAID”.(28) Nolan goes on to emphasize that subjects in postcolonial history must not supplant one form of ideological oppression with another and concurs with David Lloyd that Joyce’s “critique of nationalism is inseparable from a critique of post-colonial domination”.(29) What Nolan terms “genuinely emancipatory politics” would instead focus on the expanding the rights and liberties of the individual in lieu of a nation-state-centered model. Is there a right more fundamental than to reproduce or not?

Thus, for Joyce, temporary abstinence followed by strategic oral sex represent the intimate via medias(30) between begetting more future-Unionists in favor of repressive colonialism and more future members of Sinn Fein in favor of repressive nationalism. It opts for neither of these problematic extremes as only a riposte can. In her study of the complicity of patriarchal domination and heterosexual Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin famously claims, “…women are unspeakably vulnerable in intercourse because of the nature of the act—entry, penetration, occupation;...in a society of male power, women were unspeakably exploited in intercourse.”(31) The Hags, however, are neither vaginally penetrated nor silent. They retain control of the imagined pleasure and refuse to be, in Dworkin’s terms, either “vulnerable” or “occupied.” The women retain their agency.

While Yeats romanticized, spiritualized, and sexualized Ireland as “the Rose” across his early poetic history(32) and used the young, vibrant, and beautiful image and her counterpart the sainted crone as “a nationalist clarion call,”(33) Joyce is interested in comically exaggerating the imagined crows’ feet of the nation, all her little wrinkles and licentious imperfections, in all of her humorous monstrosity. An appreciation of the nuances of the aesthetic and rhetorical is necessary to our understanding of how Stephen and Joyce grasp the political. The uproarious and tawdry political allegory of the Plum Hags is so vibrantly inseparable from language and the “trickies" it can perform.(34) Joyce’s strategy is not a Yeatsian “clarion call” to political action but instead implies a general malaise regarding any genuinely satisfactory resolution of the Irish situation outside of the realm of parable, and this distancing is part of the colonial masking, or deformation. While Anne McClintock points out that typically in nationalist discourse, “women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking, and natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity”,(35) Joyce perverts this notion by making the nation a pair of free-thinking and bold, precipice-gazing (potential) whores. Granted, the Plum Hags are frightened by the scope and height of their view of the city, but I think they deserve some credit for staring down at Dublin and contending with its uncertain future from atop the pillar, located not far from Dublin’s infamous brothel quarter.(36) The women’s fear represents Stephen’s anxiety over whether a new, postcolonial metropolis will ever exist, as embodied by their turning back reticently towards Nelson, emblem of the British Empire, . In fact, as the final headline shows, even the Hags themselves cannot stick to the plan(37): “DIMINISHED DIGITS(38) PROVE TOO TITILLATING FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. ANNE WIMBLES, FLO WANGLES—YET CAN YOU BLAME THEM?”(39) The utter, comic ridiculousness of such a sexless scheme in reality shows that Stephen (and I would argue Joyce) see(s) no end in sight to Ireland’s (post)colonial troubles and any supposed-solutions are in themselves the insubstantial stuff of jokes much like Swift’s infamous Modest Proposal. Indeed, the joke itself offers a solution: gratification without reproduction. I would read the women’s very failure to resist the infamous “one-handled adulterer” as a form of resistance in itself. As I mentioned earlier, Weir interprets the their actions with the plums as covert fellatio, which, of course, would not beget children. Though Anne and Flo may indeed be caricatures of the midwives Stephen assumes he saw earlier on Sandymount strand in “Proteus,” he makes a pivotal revision of their function in his parable. The “frisky frumps” do not facilitate the delivery of a postcolonial Ireland; they do not give birth to anything at all, beyond an idea of independence from the strict mores of Christianity, mores that have been traditionally used by both sides of the Irish question to control women and their sexuality. Contra Genesis, the Plum Hags are truly fruit(-)ful(l) but will not multiply.

Although Prof. MacHugh references Christ’s parable of “The Wise and Foolish Virgins” directly when he dubs the women “wise virgins” (and indeed, even though this is well before the era of Monica Lewinsky, in the context of Stephen’s tale, the women remain technically virginal) after their Biblical complements,(40) and that story heralds wakefulness, watchfulness, and preparedness for a post-Apocalyptic Judgment Day when Jesus himself will return, The Parable of the Plums seems to exist suspended in the flux of its own (quasi-Apocalyptic(41)?) interregnum, embodied by Stephen’s alternate title: A Pisgah Sight of Palestine. This title implies that like Moses(42) before them, the Irish audience, once more compared to the wandering Israelites, may glimpse the holy land of a liberated Éire but only at a distance and not able to enter it. Furthermore, Stephen refuses MacHugh’s title for the tale, “Deus nobis haec otia fecit,” a quotation from Virgil’s Eclogues, suggesting Ireland is not a locale of breezy, pastoral, peaceful leisure but rather a space of anxious metropolitan unrest.(43) While David Weir contends that “Nelson’s pillar affords no view of the promised land: the two women see only church roofs, and then turn out of fright to the statue of the British conqueror”,(44) I would argue that The Parable of the Plums allows us to dream with Stephen and Joyce, hopeful—but not without doubts—that there will ever be a time when Ireland will truly be “the promised land”: decolonizing, independent, and free at last of the shackles of Catholic, nationalist, and/or imperial psychosexual subjugation.(45) The faulty machinery of publication in the newspaper office and Bloom’s failure to get the ad also echo a frustrated conception of ideas that fail to come to full fruition in “Aeolus.” And though we may mourn the Plum Hags’ all-too brief cameo appearance in the episode, their parable’s oblique allusion to a time of reckoning and liberation is underpinned by the dark potentiality of brutality suggested when the motif of the crone and all her power recurs with force in the form of Old Gummy Granny in “Circe.” The sovereign crone of Ireland, a sexy but ultimately harmless, frothy fantasy in “Aeolus,” is as mutable as the structure of Ulysses itself and undergoes a harrowing and vicious transformation in Stephen’s “Remember, Erin” jeremiad in “Oxen of the Sun”(46) and Granny’s exhortations to violence in “Circe”(47) as a result of his intoxication . For lo, Anne and Flo Ní Lewinsky get bitten by a vengeful Green Fairy.

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek and Marjorie Howes. “Introduction.” Semicolonial Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 1-20.

Breatnach, R.A. “The Lady and the King: A Theme of Irish Literature.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review. 42 (1953): 321-36.

Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern Ulysses. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Flood, Jeanne A. “The Sow That Eats Her Farrow: Gender and Politics.” James Joyce and His Contemporaries.Ed. Diana A. Ben-Merre and Maureen Murphy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. 69-76.

Garvey, Johanna. “City Limits: Reading Gender and Urban Spaces in Ulysses.Twentieth Century Literature 41.1 (Spring 1995). 108-124.

Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Los Angeles: U of Cal. Press, 1988.

Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse. 1987. New York: Basic Books, 2006. 169.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random, 1986.

“Lust.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. 1914. Online. (21 July 2010)
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09438a.htm

Mahaffey, Vicki. “Heirs of Yeats: Éire as Female Poets Revise Her.” The Future of Modernism. Ed. Hugh Witemyer. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997.

---. Reauthorizing Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

MacCana, Proinsias. “Aspects of the Theme of King and Goddess in Irish Literature.”Études Celtiques. 7, 8. (1955-1958): 76-114, 356-413, 59-65.

McClintock, Anne. “No Longer in A Future Heaven: Gender, Race, and Nationalism.” Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. 352-389.

Murphy, Maureen. “James Joyce and the Folk Imagination.” James Joyce: The Artist and the Labryinth. Ed. Augustine Martin. Great Britain: Ryan, 1990.

Nolan, Emer. “State of the Art: Joyce and Postcolonialism.” Semicolonial Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 78-95.

Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

“Parable.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. 1914. Online. (24 September 2009) http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11460a.htm

“Parable.” Oxford English Dictionary. Online. 2nd Edition. (24 September 2009).

Romanets, Maryna. “Cartographers of Desire: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Versus the Love Canon in Irish Poetry.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 29. 2/3. June-Sept. (2002): 321-342.

Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 66-112.

Thomas, Kate. “Prunes.” Syllabub: Words on Food. Online.
http://syllabub.blogspot.com/ (18 May 2009).

Weir, David. “Sophomore Plum(p)s for Old Man Moses. James Joyce Quarterly 28.3 (Spring 1991): 657-661.

1 As we well know, Ulysses was written between 1914 and 1921, which includes the Easter Rising of 1916, the establishment of the secessionist Sinn Fein Dail (parliament) in 1918, the “guerilla” War of Independence from 1919-1921, and was published in Paris one month prior to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that officially marked Ireland’s status as a free state (Duffy 2-3).
2 Anglicized pronounciation: “The Shan Van Vocht.”
3 Anglicized pronunciation: “An Spare Van.”
4 Vicki Mahaffey succinctly summarizes the history of the image by “beginning with the myth that the invading Milesians named the country after a woman at her request (the De Danaan goddess Éire), and proceeding through the aisling tradition of the Middle Ages, which was politicized during the Jacobite period, producing the legacies of Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the Shan Van Vocht, and Dark Rosaleen, among others” (“Heirs” 103).Later in Finnegans Wake, Joyce claims that Ireland is peopled by “romance Catholeens” (239.21), a play on romantic Cathleens as well as Roman Catholics. This history also continued in IRA propaganda in the late 1990’s when the image was revived in Belfast graffiti espousing the necessity of Irish reunification, “Saor an tseanbhean bhocht!” or “Free the poor old woman (eg: Ireland/the six counties)!” Thanks to Patrick O’Neill for pointing this out to me.
5 See Breatnach, R.A. “The Lady and the King: A Theme of Irish Literature.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review. 42 (1953): 321-36; MacCana, Proinsias. “Aspects of the Theme of King and Goddess in Irish Literature.” Études Celtiques. 7, 8. (1955-1958): 76-114, 356-413, 59-65; Flood, Jeanne A. “The Sow That Eats Her Farrow: Gender and Politics.” James Joyce and His Contemporaries. Ed. Diana A. Ben-Merre and Maureen Murphy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. 69-76.

6 See W.B. Yeats’ Cathleen Nî Houlihan (1902).
7 Whether colonial, nationalist, or Catholic.
8 Attridge, Derek and Marjorie Howes. “Introduction.” Semicolonial Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 5-6.
9 Mahaffey, Vicki. “Heirs of Yeats: Éire as Female Poets Revise Her.” The Future of Modernism. Ed. Hugh Witemyer. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997. 102. Hereafter, “Heirs.”
10 EG: the bloody struggle for Irish independence and the First World War.
11 Ibid.
12 Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random, 1986. 7.923. Hereafter: U.
13 Thomas, Kate. Thomas, Kate. “Prunes.” Syllabub: Words on Food. Online. http://syllabub.blogspot.com/ (18 May 2009).
14 Joyce, U7.1009; Joyce, U7.1013.
15 According to Gifford, “Nelson lost an arm in an unsuccessful assault on Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands (1797). In 1798, Nelson formed a liaison with Emma Hamilton (c. 1765-1815), the wife of Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), the British minister in Naples. The liaison was widely published and became one of the ‘great scandals’ of the period” (152).
16 Garvey, Johanna. “City Limits: Reading Gender and Urban Spaces in Ulysses.Twentieth Century Literature 41.1 (Spring 1995). 119.
17 Weir, David. “Sophomore Plum(p)s for Old Man Moses. James Joyce Quarterly 28.3 (Spring 1991): 657-8.
18 Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Los Angeles: U of Cal. Press, 1988. 153.
19 The Catholic Encyclopedia (1914) explains transgressions involving “Lust” thusly:
The inordinate craving for, or indulgence of, the carnal pleasure which is experienced in the human organs of generation.
The wrongfulness of lust is reducible to this: that venereal satisfaction is sought for either outside wedlock or, at any rate, in a manner which is contrary to the laws that govern marital intercourse. Every such criminal indulgence is a mortal sin, provided of course, it be voluntary in itself and fully deliberate. This is the testimony of St. Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians, v. 19:
"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, . . . Of the which I foretell you, as I have foretold to you, that they who do such things shall not obtain the kingdom of God." (“Lust” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09438a.htm)
The Plum Hags are “guilty” of immodesty at the least and perhaps shameless, willful fornication.
20 The Catholic Encyclopedia (1914) claims, “There are no parables in St. John's Gospel. In the Synoptics ... we reckon thirty-three in all; but some have raised the number even to sixty, by including proverbial expressions” (“Parables” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11460a.htm).
21 If one reads the boy’s final disdain and anxiety regarding commerce, acquistion, or if you will, getting Mangan’s sister a gift from the bazaar as a comparable substitute for the boy’s burgeoning, frustrated desire to be begetting. Thanks to Nicholas Allen for suggesting the link between the two tales.
22 Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern Ulysses. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1994. 170.
23 Weir 659.
24 To grasp the subtlety of the prune metaphor the reader would have to be familiar with the history of it as an icon of the bawd in plays like Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure, and as a tool for overly zealous “proper” pronunciation as in novels like Dickens’ Little Dorrit and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (Thomas). Leopold Bloom even jokes about that history as advice he would give Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa:” “Say prunes and prisms forty times every morning, cure for fat lips” (Joyce U13.901-902). In the same episode, Bloom uses plums as a metaphor for his cuckolded status regarding Molly and her affair with Boylan, “He gets the plums, and I the plumstones” (Joyce U13.1098-99). Plumtree’s Potted Meat is also the preferred snack during Boylan and Molly’s illicit rendezvous in “Ithaca” and as such, is the subject of Bloom’s disdain for the company’s ill-placed obituary ad in “Lestrygonians” (Joyce U17.2123-25; U8.742-45). David Weir also points out Boylan’s beverage before their meeting is “‘sloegin’ (U11.350), a drink made from plumjuice” (658). In all these cases, as in “Aeolus,” plums are the fruit of choice to imply a scandalous sexual liaison. Bloom is also insulted by being described by the unnamed narrator of “Cyclops” as having “old plumeyes” (U12.1416).
25 Nolan, Emer. “State of the Art: Joyce and Postcolonialism.” Semicolonial Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 79.
26 Whereas traditionally in postcolonial studies, the figure of the subaltern, particularly the subaltern woman (especially in the (in)famous case of Gayatri Spivak’s example of the sati in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) is a figure of trauma and grief, silenced by the dual oppression of imperial/nationalist ideologies, “doubly effaced” for both her gender and her status as colonial Other (82). As such, subaltern women must therefore use their bodies as texts or in Spivak’s terms, “In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utterance’ ” (82). For Joyce, the subaltern Plum Hags are the subject of comedy, when contra Spivak, they speak through Stephen as well as by using their bodies to (temporarily) elaborate their insurgency.
27 Nolan 90.
28 Joyce U7.1004-1007.
29 Qtd. Nolan 79.
30 As Joyce remarked in a 1906 letter to his brother, Stanislaus: “For either Sinn Fein or Imperialism will conquer the present Ireland. If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language, I suppose I could call myself as a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognize myself as an exile, and prophetically, a repudiated one” (qtd. in Murphy 256, Note 4). These comments further emphasize Joyce’s ambivalence about Ireland’s political status.
31 Intercourse. 1987. New York: Basic Books, 2006. 169.
32 Mahaffey notes, “It is important not to simplify Yeats’ own changing attitudes in the process [of crafting the image of Ireland]. I agree with Boland when, in “A Kind of Scar,” she remarks that the later Yeats is a ‘rare exception’ to the tendency among male Irish poets to feminize the national and to nationalize the feminine” (“Heirs” 116).
33 Mahaffey, “Heirs” 106.
34 Thanks to Pamela Cooper for pointing this out to me.
35 McClintock, Anne. “No Longer in A Future Heaven: Gender, Race, and Nationalism.”
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. 359.
36 Thanks to Nicholas Allen for pointing this out to me.
37 David Weir takes it even further and insists, “…Stephen’s parable suggests that the English experience ‘gratification’ at the expense of the Irish, who far from resisting their rulers, submissively participate in their own exploitation” (659). I am more forgiving in my reading and believe the Hags deserve some credit for attempting to resist the imperial domination implied in the sexual contact (which I have argued is a form of strategic resistance in itself) and insist that we remember that the parable remains, at heart, a joke.
38 EG: Nelson. See Note 17.
39 Joyce U7.1069-1071.
40 Joyce U7.937.
41 From one perspective, if it became popular among the masses, the Hags’ initial strategy of abstinence and then only oral sexual contact could in fact result in the end of the Irish world as we know it.
42 Joyce U7.1056, See Exodus 12:25.
43 Latin: “God has made this peace [leisure/comfort] for us.” From Eclogues 1:6. Gifford 153.
44 Weir 659.
45 Joyce U7.1061. If such a place and time can be said to exist. See Attridge and Howes.
46 Joyce U14.367-380.
47 Joyce U15.4577-80; U15.4581-4590; U15.4736-39.