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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Thaine Stearns

   The bifurcation of the hitherto single order of sensed-existence
   into the two orders of thought-existence and real-existence
   matches precisely that emergence of dual agencies, opposite but
   related, which supervened upon the organic world in the principle
   of propagation of organic species by the joint action of male
   and female.... Both create their antithetically related differences
   out of powers which basically are homogeneous and one.
   ("Our Philosophy" 68)

In other words, the split between time and space harbors other divisions between mind and matter, subject and object, and male and female. Marsden viewed these "antithetically related differences" as constituent parts of a complex whole. Simply put, while Stephen (and in Marsden's stated view, Joyce) articulated traditional philosophic bifurcations, she believed her modern philosophy would serve as a corrective to this misconception.

Ultimately, however, Joyce and Marsden concurred in their treatment of time and space. Both viewed the idea of existence as divided into two opposing realms as a persisting construction to be undermined. In fact, Marsden's reading of "Proteus," like that of many Joycean critics who followed, misses Joyce's ironic treatment of Stephen, or she disregards it intentionally to foreground her argument about time and space, an argument that is, finally, against gender categories. Despite his effort to analyze perception as dichotomous, Stephen cannot finally make the distinction between time and space that he tries to enact by shutting his eyes as he walks along the beach. In her "opposing" account, Marsden argues that space is neither organic nor intuitive; it emerges as a construct that stands in contrast to sensory, external images:

   The idea of space took its origin in men's minds as the spontaneous
   logical translation of the limited power of the organic
   nucleus to negotiate sensory forms, either by moving through
   them or round them. The idea sprang up betimes in man's cultural
   history, and came by its most indelibly marked features at a
   time when man was more habituated to the acceptance of sense-forms
   at their face-value than he is now.
   ("Space and Substance" 102)

In her view, then, images (or "sense-forms") were like "natural" signs, insofar as they were "spontaneous logical translations" integrated into the vital flux of the individual being. However, she also argues that images become part of a spatial construction in men's minds (these minds are gendered male) as a consequence of their inability to translate or to conceptualize them as integrated into a spatial-temporal flow. Moreover, just as she viewed the idea of space as a cultural and historical construction, so she also asserted that simple time is another human invention, intended to organize these disconnected "sensory forms":

   This imperfect time is our new man-devised instrument for
   arranging into a new kind of order all the spatially arranged
   items which man finds lying higgledy-piggledy about his universe.
   Just as space serves as a sort of laboratory bench upon
   which the substantial items he strewn in mere superficial
   contiguity, so time serves as a powerful refractive instrument: an
   amazing synthetic device. ("Measure of Authority" 36)