Mourning Becomes Dedalus: Ethics, Prosopopoeia, and Impossible Mourning in Ulysses

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the ethics of Stephen Dedalus's approaches to mourning his mother in Ulysses. Using Jacques Derrida's writings on impossible mourning, I argue that Joyce uses Stephen's struggles over his mother's death in Ulysses to reflect on the proper ways to commemorate the dead, as his brooding over the face of the departed May Dedalus becomes a perpetual mourning process inhibited by his ambivalence towards his continued ethical responsibility to her. I thus conclude that Stephen's inability to "[g]ive up the moody brooding" throughout Ulysses highlights both the impossibility of such relinquishment and the resulting obligation to the other that persists beyond the grave, themes that recur throughout a Joycean oeuvre consistently shrouded in mourning.