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

The sexual relations that Deasy and the citizen load with political implications do not map out accurately on Davin's experience either. This pregnant Helen of the Ballyhoura hills does not cross national boundaries or incite war. Insofar as sexual activity is limited within the confines of her Catholic culture to the goal of reproduction, her putative pregnancy renders the erotic invitation she extends to Davin a sort of redundancy, an excess. Because another (marital) sexual encounter has apparently already taken place, she simultaneously plays the roles of Ireland as mother and as whore, undermining the validity of each of these familiar types with her doubled gesture. While I am tempted to read the woman's invitation as a gesture of abundance and eroticism, Stephen's memory is not explicit in this way. Her erotic gesture could just as easily be motivated by loneliness or revenge. Whatever the unnamed catalyst, her actions introduce an excess into the expected economy of a monogamous Catholic marriage; her desire is inherently subversive of the institution by which she is bound.

The woman's erotic impulse also serves to remind us that occupation (marital or colonial) does not promise either control or permanence. The marriage laws that have promised her absent husband ownership of his bride are easily broken. Even while the mark of that ownership lies on her body, even as her pregnancy provides a visible sign of occupation by his seed and their progeny, her actions exceed the control of ownership or occupation. She can repeat the sexual act that promised her husband dominion over her body. By initiating that act with another she insures that neither man will have permanent control. Her promiscuity gives new meaning to the traditional notion of Ireland as a prostitute who invites the stranger into her bed. The very prostitution that seduces the stranger also promises the impermanence of his reign and ultimately guarantees her own sovereignty. The pregnant woman's sexual invitation recalls the multiple colonial occupations whose progeny became the hybrid nation of modern Ireland. In Finnegans Wake, for example, Joyce describes Ireland as a nation of "miscegenations upon miscegenations" (10).

If Davin had chosen to occupy this woman's bed, he would have filled that role only temporarily. The seduction and its outcome are limited by evidence that this occupation is only the most recent in a series.(7) Nor does the woman's pregnancy give primacy to her husband's previous occupation of her bed. On the contrary, impregnation facilitates her adulterous longing as it makes her new erotic encounter safe from the worry of procreative repercussions.

When Davin declines the woman's invitation, the myth is displaced once more and emphasis is shifted from the blame placed on a promiscuous woman to the burden of choice that devolves on her suitor. It is not that her pregnancy makes the woman seem more virtuous. Perhaps the opposite is true. Rather, as we understand the experience mediated through Davin's perspective, we are made aware of his responsibility in the thwarted coupling. While characters such as Deasy and the citizen blame women from Eve to Kitty O'Shea for the deleterious results of their sexual desire, Davin's refusal indicates his shared responsibility. Davin is specifically presented as an Irish nationalist, highlighting a rarely noted aspect of Devorgilla's mythic betrayal. Her erotic pursuits did not lead her to the bed of an Englishman but to a rival Irish leader. It is her husband who made a strange bedfellow of the English by inviting Strongbow to aid in his revenge.