The Image of Women in Joyce's Works

A Vision of the Irish in their Subconscious

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss in what sense the image of women in Joyce's works is based on not only his individual experience but also on a vision of the Irish in their subconscious.
In 1904 Joyce met his future wife Nor Barnacle for the first time who was from Galway in the west of Ireland, the center for the traditional culture of the Celts. For Joyce she was the woman who embodied the ideal image of Ireland. In a letter to Nora, Joyce wrote: “You have been to my young manhood what the idea of the Blessed Virgin was to my boyhood.” The beauty of Nora seemed to be like that of the Blessed Virgin Mary and his soul reflected as if it were “the pale passionate beauty of a pearl” when he met her first. The veneration for the Blessed Virgin Mary is considered to have represented his platonic love for girls in the boyhood just as was the case with other Irish boys in those days. However, when Nora appeared before him as a woman who had both physical and spiritual beauty, Joyce came to love her as a real woman who reflected the image of “the love inside him.”
The encounter with Nora proved to be a major turning point forJoyce' s life as an artist. According to Chester G. Anderson, Joyce stopped writing poetry after he met Nora and began to work on his four masterpieces, because he needed no longer to describe a girl as his
“ soul-love” as he did in the collection of poems, Chamber Music. Nora was his “muse” who inspired Joyce to write his works, and the image of women in his works seems to be based on her. She was the incarnation of Ireland, and although he eloped with her as a self-chosen exile for the Continent, always keeping her close to him as his companion, he kept his mind fixed on his homeland. He tried to recreate Ireland in the art of his writing restoring its ancient glorious figure of Mother Ireland represented by the Irish Goddess Dana.
This paper in the final stage discusses the artistic power Joyce exercised over Ireland in his description of the Irish male protagonists being awakened into rebirth from their spiritual death of paralysis. This spiritual transfiguration or rebirth is caused by the great “motherly wo men”who have the image of the Goddess Dana, an envoy from the court of “Tir-na-Og, ” the legendary land of everlasting youth and life in the Celtic mythology located in the bottom of the sea in the far west just like “Ryugu-jo” in Japan. In “The Celtic Element in Liter ature, ” W. B. Yeats describes this legendary land, which the Irish have been longing for, as “a world where anythihg might flow and change, and become any other thing.”