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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Thaine Stearns

Beneath the grandiose philosophical and historical framework and the argumentative rhetoric, Marsden's objectives in The Definition of the Godhead are subtler and more interesting than they might at first appear, as Joyce anticipated in his letters to Harriet Weaver. In part because of her dedication to the book, "To THE GREAT NAME HUSHED AMONG US FOR SO LONG of HER, HEAVEN, THE MIGHTY MOTHER of ALL," Marsden's conception of her text has been misconstrued by the few critics who have bothered to comment about her project. Garner and Lidderdale and Nicholson find this dedication curious or disturbing because of its religious tone. (16) However, both of these accounts miss the connection of this dedication to the title of Marsden's first journal, the Freewoman. As Robert von Hallberg has observed (66), this title comes from a passage in Galatians (4: 26) which is cited in Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (157), a key influence on Marsden and other early modernists: "The Jerusalem that is above is the freewoman; she is the mother of us all." With Joycean self-referentiality, the dedication in her later book alludes to the earliest of her published writing, when her essays were radically feminist and concerned with political and social ethics. The underlying objective of The Definition of the Godhead is similar: instead of feminist politics, Marsden shifts to a feminist philosophy in which she imagines a utopian Jerusalem, an emancipated freewoman signified by a female deity.

Marsden's assertion of a feminine godhead, freed from masculine misunderstanding, offers a means to interpret Joyce's most explicit reference in Finnegans Wake to his counterpart writer, the woman who founded the journals responsible for publishing his first novel. A few pages before the story "The Mookse and the Gripes" Issy announces, "I'm so keen on that New Free Woman with novel inside" (145), an exclamation that has perplexed some Joyce scholars because A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in the Egoist, not the New Freewoman. Joyce added Issy's utterance in one of his final revisions of part 1 in 1936 (Finnegans Wake Facsimile 287), which indicates that he viewed "The Mookse and the Gripes" as connected to Marsden and his own history with her journals in a more fundamental manner than when he originally conceived of the story in 1927. What this chronology does not explain, however, is why Joyce switched the title of the publication that was instrumental in fostering his career. Rabat argues that Joyce's inversion of the titles paradoxically demonstrates his preference for the later journal. (17) Kadlec argues instead that Joyce's conflation of the two journals reflects the lasting impression that they had on him as be wrote Finnegans Wake (276n20). While both of these readings are illuminating, Joyce's pilfering from The Definition of the Godhead needs to be taken into account as well. To be sure, Marsden's interest in the time and space debate appealed to him. Joyce was also aware of the Stirnerian connection of her journal's title to Galatians. Issy's reference in Finnegans Wake to "that New Free Woman with novel inside" thus refers not only to Joyce's first novel and its publication in Marsden's journal but also synecdochically to Marsden herself, as the new free woman, with a novel (both new ideas and a fictional text) inside. By doing so Joyce simultaneously gestures to Marsden's career, to the intersections with his own, and to her idiosyncratic ideas in The Definition of the Godhead.