The "woman of no appearance": James Joyce, Dora Marsden, and competitive pilfering

Joyce's recognition that Marsden was engaged with questions and issues similar to his own is evident in his expressed intention to borrow from Marsden's The Definition of the Godhead for Finnegans Wake. In addition to the letter quoted in the second epigraph to this essay, Joyce initially communicated his interest in Marsden's work in another letter to Weaver, while her book was being readied for printing by the Egoist Press:

   I am sure that you are passing many valuable things through
   your hands in going through Miss Marsden's work and if I had
   sufficient energy to be lively about anything at present I should
   be as restless as a small boy outside a pantry thinking of all the
   nice little bits I could pilfer with no loss to her but oh the
   difference to me, as Mr Wordsworth remarked. (Letters 272)

Joyce's intention to "pilfer" from Marsden's forthcoming book is all the more striking because of his allusion to Wordsworth's poem "Song," one of the "Lucy" poems. (15) The allusion is significant for several reasons. The narrator of the poem describes his subject elegiacally: "She lived unknown, and few could know/When Lucy ceased to be." From 1920 until 1935, Marsden lived in Seldom Seen, a nearly deserted miner's hamlet in Cumbria County, in Wordsworth's beloved Lake District, the setting for his "Lucy" poems. Marsden's status as a respected activist and writer had declined significantly from the previous decade, and the irony presented by the name of her chosen residence was not lost on Joyce. His implied comparison of Marsden to Lucy is especially telling when we recognize that in Wordsworth's poem Lucy has already died: "But she is in her Grave, and Oh! / The difference to me." Wordsworth's Lucy causes him to mourn, but Joyce picks up on the irony of the loss: it is her death that has given the poet the opportunity to articulate his own lyric subjectivity in the form of his poem. For Joyce, pilfering

from Marsden's book would mean little to her; like Lucy she had become unknown, "Half-hidden from the Eye!"

Joyce's borrowings from Marsden's text become evident when Marsden's claims about time and space in The Definition of the Godhead are delineated. Her main argument shifts the emphasis from her earlier critique in the Egoist essays of gendered constructions of time and space. Instead of a singular "Space-Time," Marsden argues for first principles in a dualistic universe, working together as contraries. In this book Marsden figures space as an eternal mother and time as an eternal father in the universe, two contraries that together forge the "One; the Absolute" (19, 28-29). Positing space and time as interconnected dualities then enables her to argue that feminine space is the source of everything, including time. According to Marsden, this understanding was lost because men had found this conception of the universe a "stumbling block." In effect, she challenges conventional tropes of philosophic thought for their misogyny, asserting that men found the "truth" of a feminine first principle problematic: