The Woman of the Ballyhoura Hills: James Joyce and the Politics of Creativity

Abstract

Irish Revival was in its ascendancy when James Joyce embarked on his career as a writer. And while there is increasing evidence that he had sympathy with movement's expression of revolutionary Irish politics and its attempt to recreate an Irish national culture,(1) his differences with specific positions and attitudes represented by proponents of Irish nationalism are dramatized throughout his writings. In A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man, Joyce addresses nationalist personification of Ireland as either an idealized woman (Mother Ireland or beautiful queen) or a degraded seductress (the woman who invites a stranger into her bed) by creating his own, resistant personification of Ireland in woman of Ballyhoura hills. This Irish peasant woman presents a brief though complexly realized figure of nation. In rendering her portrait, Joyce indicates his strong commitment to an esthetic practice grounded both in an Irish national identity, and in a progressive sexual politics. Joyce's version of national identity demands full consciousness as basis for a morality comprised of equal parts responsibility and desire, without bonds of repression or hypocrisy. Joyce, then, counters a stereotypical morality that would equate responsibility and repression. In Portrait, his Irish national artist models full consciousness in act of creativity. Readers might recognize Joyce's investment in connection between an artist's sexual experience and esthetics that would express a nation's identity emerging in a notebook Joyce kept in Trieste while revising Portrait. In one entry he expresses concern over prevalence of sexual repression in Irish culture: One effect of resurgence of Irish nation would be entry into field of Europe of Irish artist and thinker, a being without sexual education (Portrait 295). This entry records Joyce's belief that Irish writing will have a separate and particularly national identity and that it will have to compete in field of European thought. idea of a sexually inexperienced Irish artist concerns Joyce, and he counters this type through variety of sexual encounters Stephen Dedalus experiences. Through Stephen's sexual preoccupations Joyce associates sexual and intellectual expression. Esthetics, national politics, and sexuality are for Joyce mutually informing forces that Irish national literature must address. Mary Reynolds has pointed out that inception of Joyce's career was marked by his competition with more idealist writers of Irish Revival, and with Yeats and Synge specifically. substance of that competition was to be his rival representation of Irish nation. In The Day of Rabblement, Joyce writes that Irish Literary Theatre has succumbed to popular, unthinking nationalism of crowd and to the contagion of its fetishism and deliberate self-deception (Critical Writings 71). In The Holy Office, he rehearses his role in Irish art as a counter to idealism of his predecessors, a role that makes him the sewer of their clique. / That they may dream their dreamy dreams / I carry off their filthy streams (Critical Writings 151). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce takes direct aim at movement by calling it cultic twalette (344.12), a phrase that both parodies Yeats's book Celtic Twilight and names Joyce's role as sewer of an idealist movement.(2) In Portrait, his critique is more indirect. Resisting idealism of Revival, Portrait responds with a myriad of representations that express an ambivalent view of emerging nation. Several emblems of creativity preoccupy Stephen and, as I will argue, inform political dimension of his developing esthetic theory in fifth part of Portrait. first emblem is ambiguous image of a pregnant woman who stands in doorway of her lighted cottage inviting a stranger into her bed. second recalls Shelley's idea of a fading coal brought partially to light by an inconstant wind. …