"The “Nightmare” of the Great Famine: Guilt-Ridden Paralysis in Ulysses"

Abstract

The Great Famine of the 1840s, one of the most catastrophic events in the history of Ireland, had been nearly absent from Irish writing until the 1990s when Eagleton noted that the Famine was hardly referred to in the Revival literature or Joyce. It can be said that the Anglo-Irish Protestants, leading the Revival and belonging to the land-owning class, evaded the tragic event which their immediate ancestors had survived mostly intact. Joyce, the Irish Catholic, was not free from the historical trauma either, which makes him only allude to it in his work, particularly Ulysses. The Irish Catholics were not completely innocent victims but often complicit in their own tragedy. The Church inculcated them with the scrupulousness of morality, which made them starve rather than withhold the landlord’s rent during the Famine. Their submissiveness to the Church led them to be indifferent to the suffering and death of others as well as their own. Thus, the Irish feel a sense of guilt for the horrible memories of the Famine, which inhibits them from remembering the history altogether. The memories come back only as a nightmare or a ghost, like the ghost of Stephen’s mother in Ulysses. The mother’s ghost, evoking the starving and dying during the Famine, symbolizes the guilt of the Irish Catholics, as well as Stephen’s personal guilt of declining his mother’s last wish. Stephen, only trying to awake from the nightmare of his mother’s ghost without confessing his guilt, remains paralyzed. With the Famine memories missing, Irish history remains a nightmare from which they will never awake.