Trapping the Fox You Are with a Riddle: The Autobiographical Crisis of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses - n't - Critical Essay

* Offense to decorum. The stage direction indicates that the widow Dignam, shirking her mourning duties, "is rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips, and nose" (554). Gertrude too is a widow who, at least as Hamlet considers it, shirks her mourning duties. Of her, Hamlet complains that "[e]re yet the salt of most unrighteous tears / Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, / She married" (1.2.154-56). Moreover, Hamlet implies that Gertrude is willfully, or unnaturally, lascivious when he insists to Gertrude that "at your age / The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble, / And waits upon the judgement" (3.4.68-70).

* Profligacy. In the stage direction, Mrs. Dignam is flushed with "deathtalk, tears and Tunny's tawny sherry," her child Patsy has "a hank of porksteaks," and Mrs. Dignam is holding a large marquee umbrella and wearing "streamers flaunting aloft" (553, 554, 544). The revel of Claudius, occurring only two months after his brother's death, is described by Hamlet as profligate: "[A]s he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, / The kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out / The triumph of his pledge" (1.4.10-12).

* Usurpation. The stage direction has Mrs. Dignam toting her husband's life insurance policy and wearing "her late husband's everyday trousers and turnedup boots" (554). Hamlet, of course, regards Claudius as a usurper and "A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, / That from a shelf the precious diadem stole, / And put it in his pocket" (3.4.100-102).

* Neglect. The stage direction indicates that the widow Dignam's bonnet is crooked, her child Patsy wears a collar that is loose, her child Freddy is whimpering, her daughter Susy is "crying with a cod's mouth," and her daughter Alice is "struggling with the baby" (554). When the attentive King Hamlet, who "would not beteem the winds of heaven / Visit her [Gertrude's] face too roughly" (1.2.141-42) dies, Hamlet regards the world as "an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely" (1.2.135-37).

An image of the Elizabethan London in which Stephen situates Shakespeare is at one place superimposed on the farcical scene of Mrs. Dignam, "a pen chivvying her brood of cygnets" (554), for Stephen reports that Shakespeare, walking about London, "does not stay to feed the pen chivvying her game of cygnets" (186). This scene's connection to Shakespeare, then, made glaringly obvious, has spurred this made-up Shakespeare's anger. By having the widow Dignam chivvy (chase) her cygnets, the narrator, despite his relative silence within interior monologues, has distorted the emblem of an autobiographical Shakespeare into absurdity. This (mis)application of the Elizabethan London setting also emphasizes that Ulysses, for all of its "street furnishings," as Joyce's details of Dublin are known, is not necessarily more authentically autobiographical for having them.

But the undermining of the autobiographical Shakespeare is soon transferred directly to Stephen, as the narrator figures Stephen, by means of stage direction, as just another puppet: Stephen appears "with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a painted smile on his face," and when speaking, he "gabbles, with marionette jerks" (555). If Stephen were the puppet of himself, he could then be autobiographical, but the presence of "Joyce," who ventriloquized as Shakespeare's reflection, jerks the strings of Stephen's sovereignty playfully around.