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'

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Marian Eide

How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them, that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own? And under the deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes, under trees by the edges of streams and near the poolmottled bogs. A woman had waited in the doorway as Davin had passed by at night and, offering him a cup of milk, had all but wooed him to her bed; for Davin had the mild eyes of one who could be secret. But him no woman's eyes had wooed. (Portrait 183)

Given his spotty record in romance, Stephen despairs of the influence he might have through creativity in parenting. But he demands of his art a greater influence, that it might parent an altered Irish race. Stephen thinks about his art and its audience in immediate association with Davin's encounter with a woman in the Ballyhoura hills. For Stephen, she represents a troubling yet auspicious alternative view of the nation he is writing for and about. This woman acts from a conscience that is freed from the repressive demands of traditional morality and that also metaphorically addresses the status of Ireland as a colony that demands its independence. In her figure and her choices, Stephen finds a model for his national esthetics as a coming into consciousness by way of an altered understanding of morality. The woman of the Ballyhoura hills is neither the Irish temptress who betrays her nation by bedding the English stranger, nor the devouring Irish mother who demands a blood sacrifice of her children and then betrays them to the conqueror, the "old sow that eats her farrow" (Portrait 203). Stephen's "Mother Ireland" is a figure of the plenitude and excess of creativity; hers is an erotic abundance that a nationalist might reject but Joyce clearly embraces.

While walking through Dublin streets to the university one morning, Stephen remembers the story about the Ballyhoura woman that Davin confided only to him. One night, stranded after a late-ending hurley match, Davin chose to walk the entire way home. On his way he grew thirsty and stopped at a lighted cottage to ask for a drink. Stephen recollects Davin's account of what followed:

I spied a little cottage with a light in the window. I went up and knocked at the door. A voice asked who was there and I answered. . . . After a while a young woman opened the door. . . . She was half undressed as if she was going to bed when I knocked and she had her hair hanging; and I thought by her figure and by something in the look of her eyes that she must be carrying a child. She kept me in talk a long while at the door and I thought it strange because her breast and her shoulders were bare. She asked me was I tired and would I like to stop the night there. She said she was all alone in the house that her husband had gone that morning to Queenstown with his sister to see her off. And all the time she was talking, Stevie, she had her eyes fixed on my face and she stood so close to me I could hear her breathing. . . . at last she took my hand to draw me in over the threshold and said: Come in and stay the night here. You've no call to be frightened. There's no one in it but ourselves. . . . I didn't go in, Stevie. I thanked her and went on my way again all in a fever. At the first bend of the road I looked back and she was standing at the door. (Portrait 183)