Joyce and women: Gerty, Molly, Anna Livia Plurabelle

As discussed in the previous video, the narrative style of Gerty Dowell in the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses mimics the potential reading habits of a young woman from Dublin in 1904: from romance novels to various advertisements from ladies’ magazines.

The narrative and projects the extreme self-consciousness of a twenty-one-year-old young woman who is painfully aware that she is being watched and judged. Which, of course, she is: literally by Bloom, and symbolically by the patriarchal gaze keeping women confined, afraid, and violated in insidious ways at home (by their fathers, as is the case for Gerty, as well as for Eveline in Dubliners), in public spaces, and by political and religious institutions. Subsumed in Gerty’s stylistic posturing is a painstaking effort to convince us that she is pure and virginal like Mary, Star of the Sea; that she thinks, reads, and does only what ladies are supposed to; and that she is a regular, naïve, unthreatening, airheaded, able-bodied girl who has never had a dirty thought. Bloom falls for this performance, as have one too many Joyce readers.

Gerty’s narrative style embodies the drag of gendered shame and secrecy: just as she conceals her disability from Bloom in order to feed his masturbatory fantasy, her seemingly artless narrative style is designed to distract us from the unspeakables and the unmentionables of her gendered experience. For example, she references Widow Welch’s Female Pills, a patent medicine advertised in ladies’ magazines at the time—a reference as easily dismissable as the literary value of what Gerty reads. But, as scholar April Pelt points out, these ‘female pills’ were well-known abortifacients: a major cultural taboo to this day. Later, when Gerty talks about life at home with her father, it becomes apparent—albeit difficult to confirm—that she has experienced domestic and possibly sexual violence at home.

That Gerty is pretty but also has a limp, raises the awkward matter of disability and a shame hidden under her dress while feeding Bloom’s fantasy, only to inadvertently reveal it as she stands up to walk off at the end. Trapped within the Virgin/Whore complex, which also affects Molly Bloom throughout the book, Gerty’s narrative style is, in fact, a kind of posturing—not only for Bloom but also for the novel’s readers who are also placed in an uncomfortable voyeuristic relation with this story of male watcher and female watched. Joyce describes the style as tumescence and detumescence, and the deliberate deflation of the style in the shift back to Bloom’s everyday interior monologue after his orgasm is one of the most challenging jokes in the book, which the contemporary reader might think is distinctly in bad taste.

Women played a major role in every aspect of Joyce’s life and work, however, and his writings offer a pointed gender-political position. And the politics, as so often in Joyce, is conveyed through style: ‘Penelope’, Molly Bloom’s monologue, is a representation of the most prominent female voice in Ulysses, to the extent that it doesn’t appear to be a representation at all, rather a woman speaking or thinking without narratorial mediation for 24,000 words of sparsely punctuated prose. By the time we meet Molly, gendered taboos such as women’s sexualities, reproductive health, bodily functions, and deviations from oppressive gendered ideologies, like the Virgin/Whore complex, become explored in the privacy of her nighttime thoughts, expressed in a speech and writing which, although it was ultimately written by a man, the French feminist theorist Helen Cixous called ‘écriture féminine’.

Joyce continued to experiment with the sound of women’s voices. One of the richest examples of this occurs in Finnegans Wake’s varied linguistic manifestations of Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP). When she speaks, and when others speak of her, the language of the text lisps with fricatives and swells with liquid consonants such as ls and rs, rolling and trickling through bright, open vowels (a’s and e’s) interspersed with quick-footed is, which are all contained in her full name, Anna Livia Plurabelle.

ALP is the all-powerful archetypal matriarch of Finnegans Wake. She moves the earth as her riverbed cuts and flows through it, pattering ‘arundgirond in a waveney lyne aringarouma […], dribbling her boulder through narrowa mosses’, bearing children, collecting spoils of foliage, ‘fallen griefs of weeping willow’, pebbles, shells, and rubbish to make her jewellery, collecting the blood shed from the violence historically enacted on her banks and making lipstick out of it, ‘from strawbirry reds to extra violates’, washing her husband’s dirty laundry and scrubbing clean his soiled reputation, and carrying on the stories of the Wake while simultaneously disrupting and changing them ‘with her mealiebag slang over her shulder’. ALP’s voice carries a multilingual register—a ‘mealiebag slang’— that is simultaneously distinctive in its own lisping, flowing materiality while also encompassing a whole country’s polyvocal history: her ‘slang’ comprises thousands of multilingual fragments collected from different bodies, voices, and events in history; she swallows up, rearranges, and transforms these linguistic particles and the cultural, historical, and subjective memories they hold.