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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Thaine Stearns

Marsden's borrowings from Joyce occur implicitly in essays she wrote for the journal that she was responsible for starting and that first published his writing. At the center of the literary circles that would constitute British modernism, Marsden wrote about the function of language and the role of the image in language at the same time that the journal was serializing Portrait. Then she wrote about time and space her theoretical responses to the first chapters of Ulysses--at the same time that these chapters were serialized in the journal. This nexus of ideas continued to be her major focus, emerging again in her first book-length text on metaphysics, The Definition of the Godhead.

Marsden had begun attacking some of the primary foundations of modern Western thought before her responses to Ulysses. While she did not address Lessing's essay directly, she participated in the general finde-siecle interrogation of post-Cartesian philosophy advanced by Bergson (10) and, to a lesser extent, by William James. As early as 1913, for instance, Marsden proposed in an essay that the stream of thinking, rather than static thought, is the force that joins the individual with the phenomenal world. These claims are followed by an explicit discussion of Descartes's ideas ("Thinking and Thought"), the first of several attacks that became increasingly forceful. (11) By 1917, Cartesian dualism had become one of Marsden's primary targets--in fact, a synecdoche for other binaries:

   The first important corollary to such a conception of space is
   that it forces an immediate overhauling of the dualism with
   which Descartes handicapped modern philosophy at its inception,
   and which has preyed upon its strength from that day to
   this. The essential oneness in difference of the cognitional
   activity involving as it does both "poles" (positive and negative,
   subjective or objective, just as we choose to name them), lays a
   ban upon a division into a "mind-stuff" which cognizes on the one
   hand and a "stuff" of a different kind which is cognized on the
   other. ("Observations" 19)

Thus, the first binary to be overhauled must be the Cartesian contrast between res cogitans, a thinking thing, and res extensa, an extended thing or material substance. (12) This same essay begins to lay out other associated dualities that issue from this first principle, but stops short of making an explicit claim against the idea that essential, fixed boundaries exist between subject and object, time and space, male and female. Her claim for a "oneness in difference," however, asserts a complex, multidimensional dialectic between opposing poles that results in new philosophical, linguistic, aesthetic, and political unities. If existence can no longer be divided into thinking things and extended bodies that are thought about, Marsden asserts, then there are critical effects implied for language and representation. She then articulates the need for a new kind of language practice to address the complexities that emerge with this post-Cartesian view. She communicated this idea in "Lingual Philosophy," the first in a lengthy series of essays on linguistics, the nature of the verbal image, and the metaphysics of time and space: "language ... must be made adequate to express time and space and all other and more complex aspects not covered" (100).