27 October 2023
Casey Lawrence, Trinity College Dublin
For women in post-famine Ireland, James Joyce knew, marriage was an unlikely or at least substantially delayed prospect—and one of the only ways to secure economic stability at a time when they had few employment opportunities. Joyce was particularly attuned to the plight of women, having watched his mother suffer through seventeen pregnancies in twenty years of marriage to a progressively drunker, more violent, and less economically stable man. In 1904, he wrote to Nora Barnacle, who would soon become the mother of his children (and much later his wife):
My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment… When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin… I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.[1]
Although Joyce sought to have a more equal relationship than his parents’ marriage, as an unmarried mother in an unfamiliar country, Nora was in an equally precarious position—if not more so—than women in traditional marriages. Joyce’s fiction offers many examples of the precarity of turn-of-the-century Irish women, but academic tradition has left these largely overlooked.
In Dubliners, marriage is depicted as a much-sought condition, despite its many dangers and drawbacks. For example, ‘The Boarding House’ opens with a curt paragraph describing how Mr. Mooney, the butcher, ‘drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt… [and] ruined his business’, then ‘went for his wife with the cleaver’.[2] The victim of this domestic violence and financial abuse is nevertheless intent on marrying off her daughter. Thinking disparagingly of mothers who ‘could not get their daughters off their hands’ (71), Mrs. Mooney conspires to compel thirty-five-year-old Bob Doran into marrying nineteen-year-old Polly. Joyce slyly compares the scheme to prostitution by referring to Mrs. Mooney as The Madam, but it is with ‘all the weight of social opinion on her side’ as an ‘outraged mother’ that Mrs. Mooney demands marriage as ‘reparation… for the loss of her daughter’s honour’ when Polly is caught in Doran’s room (69–70). Unfortunately, Polly’s story does not end happily. In Ulysses, Doran is revealed to be ‘on one of his periodical bends’ and appears in the ‘Cyclops’ episode ‘snoring drunk blind to the world’.[3] By insisting on the match, Mrs. Mooney has unwittingly condemned her daughter to the same cycle of alcohol-fuelled violence and economic precarity from which she narrowly escaped.
There is plenty of evidence in ‘The Boarding House’ that the arrangement will lead to such an outcome, yet Joyce’s subtlety is such that the implications may be missed in a cursory reading. For example, it is largely unacknowledged that Polly secures a husband in the marriage market through entrapment only after being forced out of the workplace. Before the events of the story, Polly was employed as ‘a typist in a corn-factor’s office’ (Dubliners 67). This job is short-lived, however, due to the actions of ‘a disreputable sheriff’s man’ who would ‘come every other day to the office’ in search of her (68). Secretaries and stenographers, or ‘typewriter girls’, were ephemeral figures in turn-of-the-century offices. As Polly’s trajectory may suggest, typing was seen as inherently temporary work, because the young women in these positions sought marriage or better opportunities. Moreover, ‘typewriter girls’, with more access to men than those in domestic positions, were objectified and sexualized by virtue of their mere presence in the ‘male’ sphere. One might be reminded of the typist in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land suffering ‘undesired’ caresses from a ‘carbuncular’ admirer.[4] Although the clerk is ‘unreproved’, what Eliot depicts is essentially a rape:
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference. (239–42)
To protect Polly’s safety and reputation, Mrs. Mooney is left with the option to either financially support her daughter or get her married—and chooses the latter.
The clash between tradition and modernity in Polly’s story mirrors the decision in front of Eveline, another of Joyce’s precarious Dubliners. Torn between the possibility of marriage and her current occupation as a shop assistant, Eveline makes the ‘safe’ choice. Unfortunately, in both ‘The Boarding House’ and ‘Eveline’, the intergenerational trauma of sex-based precarity leads young women to make risky decisions, and despite going down different paths, both Polly and Eveline nevertheless find themselves doomed to the same perilous existence as their mothers. Eveline’s opportunity to leave Ireland for Buenos Ayres is juxtaposed with a bleak homelife: forced to give up her meagre salary of seven shillings and beg for money to feed her siblings, she is frequently ‘in danger of her father’s violence’ (Dubliners 38–39). Although Mrs. Mooney essentially prostitutes her daughter to avoid financially supporting her, Eveline’s father takes financial abuse to the next level by refusing to give his child her own wages: ‘he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets’ (39). That Mr. Hill sees his daughter’s wages as ‘his money’ emphasizes the precarious situation of women at that time, especially economically. Despite having an independent income, Eveline is trapped both by law and social convention to submit to her tyrannical father. That she even considers the extremely dangerous move of following Frank to Buenos Ayres without first being married demonstrates her desperation ‘not to be treated as her mother had been’ (38) and end the cycle of sex-based precarity in which both she and Polly are caught.
Even married women like Gretta Conroy, whose husband gallantly decides not to rape her at the end of ‘The Dead’ (248), and Molly Bloom, who offers sexual favours to her manager for professional advancement, are not protected from sexual harassment, violence, and exploitation. Lower-class women are even more susceptible: in ‘The Dead’, Lily is threatened with sexual violence by Gabriel Conroy and then paid off—he ‘thrusts’ a coin into her reluctant hand, echoing the language of sexual assault (203)—and the Blooms’ former domestic, Mary Driscoll, testifies that Leopold Bloom ‘surprised [her] in the rere of the premises’ and ‘interfered …with [her] clothing’, bruising her ‘in four places as a result’ of an assault (Ulysses 15.885-8). Unlike the accusations against Bloom elsewhere in his fantasy, Driscoll’s claims are corroborated by Molly in ‘Penelope’, although she, as a victim herself of misconduct bearing a striking resemblance to the accusations which spearheaded the #MeToo Movement, is unsympathetic and blames Driscoll for Bloom’s abuse of power: ‘that slut that Mary…padding out her false bottom to excite him’ (18.56–7).
Joyce’s portraits of Dublin’s female workforce not only hold a mirror up to the problems of his contemporaries, but reveal the conditions through which sex-based harassment and exploitation continue to be excused. In 2019, when I proposed that Boylan is associated with the word ‘no’ in a chapter full of ‘yesses’, suggesting an undercurrent of nonconsent, I was met with dismissal and even outrage from male colleagues. One prominent Joycean, after I quoted verbatim Molly’s numerous ‘no’s, told me, ‘You seem to have a whole lot of proof that it’s a rape, but I still don’t believe it’, and accused me of ‘reading like a woman’, whatever that can be taken to mean. To ret-con Molly and Boylan’s relationship from a triumph of female sexuality to exploitation—or perhaps even coercive rape—means necessarily re-evaluating how Molly has been perceived, mainly by male academics, as a sex object; it means putting her in conversation with Joyce’s other female characters, many of whom are also caught in a cycle of gender-based precarity, both as members of the workforce and ‘goods’ available at the marriage market; and it means reconsidering Molly’s legacy in literature as a model for affirmative consent. One hundred years later, we still live in a world in which aspiring entertainers are sexually exploited by managers, women are fired for being too attractive to employers, and even ‘good men’ can be guilty of sexual harassment. And through it all, victims are made to ‘shut up’ through bribes, threats, and intimidation, as Driscoll testifies: ‘and he remarked: keep it quiet’ (Ulysses 15.894).
Image credit: Nora Barnacle and James Joyce on their way to be married, with Fred Monro, 1931. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.
[1] Letters of James Joyce. Vol. II, ed. by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 48.
[2] James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Penguin Books, 1996, p. 66.
[3] Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 5.107, 12.251. Cited by episode and line number.
[4] T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by Michael North (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 238.
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