Abstract
This article uncovers the complex and tangled intertextual relationship between the 'Sirens' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses and the many competing narratives about barmaids at the turn of the century. For some, barmaids were ambiguous sexual personae who characterized a modern and freer age. For others, barmaids were in acute moral peril, in need of rescue and salvation. While 'Sirens' has often been read as a chapter more preoccupied with style than with politics, it seems that Joyce was intimately engaged with intensely political debates over the role of women in the public sphere. Through satirizing contemporary moral unease surrounding the figure of the barmaid, Joyce covertly attacks those moral reformers who would also successfully censor his own work.
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