“Telemachising” the Poor Old Woman: Cathleen ni Houlihan “Restaged” at the Martello Tower

Abstract

In 1904, Joyce launched his satirical broadside, “The Holy Office”, attacking the members of the Abbey Theatre. For the young Joyce, it appeared “that mumming company”, run by Yeats and Lady Gregory, had “surrendered to the popular will”. He craved to show how he had broken away from what he considered the folksy, pseudo Irishness of “gold-embroidered Celtic fringes” and those who in their “foolishness . . . sigh back for the good old times” (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings 28) – times encapsulated, for him, in Cathleen ni Houlihan. Despite telling us that “Cathleen was received with rapturous applause”, Stanislaus Joyce stresses the fact that his brother “was scornful and indignant that Yeats should write such political and dramatic claptrap” (My Brother’s Keeper 187). In “Telemachus”, the more mature Joyce took the opportunity to put his art at the service of his taste for personal and literary revenge through incorporating a brief, parodic take on Yeats and Gregory’ play through the scene with the milk woman. By setting “Cathleen” before his “cracked lookingglass” (Ulysses 6), he was able not only to explore an ironic echo of various tensions between the colonised Irish and the colonising Englishman, but also to ridicule the romanticised view of Ireland presented by much Celtic Revival writing – including drama – at the time Ulysses was set, and that would extend well beyond the time in which it was written and published.