The woman of the Ballyhoura Hills: James Joyce and the politics of creativity - character in Joyce's book 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

3 One prominent example of Roman Catholic church involvement in Irish liberation politics is the local parish aid for Daniel O'Connell's mass meetings, which reformed penal laws and allowed Catholics more rights under British rule in the nineteenth century.

4 In Ulysses, Stephen, quoting Jesus, describes himself as a servant to two masters and refers explicitly to the Roman Catholic church and the imperial British state.

5 This classroom is the location in the draft version where Stephen delivers his essay on esthetics. Retaining this location in the revision, Joyce introduces the figure of the dean, who asks Stephen about his esthetics and unwittingly introduces the problem of language in the same context. The dean's conversation and the location are one indication of the connection between the loss of a national language and identity and the artist's esthetic responsibility.

6 For a more complete account of this event, see Foster.

7 The pregnant woman's autonomy is echoed by an "Ithaca" narrator in Ulysses during Bloom's sleepy reverie about his wife's sexual history:

To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity. (17.2127-2131)

8 Mary Reynolds offers a different explanation for Davin's refusal. She points out that his reaction is partly defined by years of English terrorism among Irish peasants. For although the Irish countryside at Portrait's narrative time, 1902, was prosperous (as indicated by Davin's well-made boots), the people who resided there still reacted to centuries of English oppression. "Stephen realizes that what repels him in his peasant friend. . . is Davin's slow reluctance of speech and deed - these qualities are actually a survival of the peasant response to English terror, a dehumanizing effect. . ." (231).

9 Vincent Cheng in "'The Bawk of Bats"' explores this bat metaphor by drawing on its implication of prostitution. Certainly the element of prostitution in national and sexual politics is a strong part of the material with which Stephen struggles in assessing Davin's story. Stephen's metaphor questions whether Ireland prostitutes herself or expresses desire.

10 Suzette Henke eloquently presents this point of view.

WORKS CITED

Cheng, Vincent J. Joyce, Race, and Empire. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.

-----. "'The Bawk of Bats' in Joyce's Belfry: The Flitter in the Feminine." Joycean Occasions: Essays from the Milwaukee James Joyce Conference. Ed. Janet E. Dunleavy, Melvin J. Friedman, and Michael Patrick Gillespie. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1991. 125-37.

Foster, R. F. Modern Ireland, 1600-1972. London: Penguin, 1988.

Henke, Suzette. "Stephen Dedalus and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Misogynist." Women in Joyce. Ed. Suzette Henke, Elaine Unkeless, and Carolyn G. Heilbrun. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982, 82-107.