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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Thaine Stearns

   [they] were torn in their allegiance, finding satisfaction neither
   in calling heaven (the soul of the world) Satan, the principle of
   evil; nor in calling Her (the All-Mother) the All-Father; nor in
   calling Her (who was the source of all) a non-entity: non-being:
   nothing-at-all; while as for styling Her what She truly was (i.e.
   at once the mother-principle and the governing, form-determining
   principle, the nurse and home of all remaining things), the
   emphasized masculinism of the period could not easily brook it.
   The net result was a veiled yet fiercely real intellectual war.
   (199)

The idiosyncratic theological aspects of her "science of first principles" underscore Marsden's effort to narrate an epistemological ontology that subverts masculine hierarchies in thought and language. She also tried to avoid setting up just another hierarchical structure: instead, the text posits a female deity presiding over its masculine other, yet operating together in a conjunctive, "non-differentiable whole" (168). In this system, space constitutes an ocean-like continuum, while time is a moving stream. Although these tropes are conventional, her text offers this original slant: space is the source of time, which is a "secret" that she had "uncovered" and that she imagined would change the course of thought.

While her text is constructed as a series of philosophical analyses and histories, Marsden was entirely cognizant of composing a kind of fictional ontology in this work. Much earlier, in her 1914 essay "Culture," she had asserted that "All our Gods we create on one principle: we create them in our own image, and give them proportions to match our own" (321).When she later made claims for a female deity in The Definition of the Godhead, then, she understood that she was engaged in an imaginative act. In this later work, she explicitly refers to her own process of thinking as one of construction, which, unlike a "cosmogonical" or scientific intellectual activity, is an artistic act of imagination. Distinguishing the two forms of intellectual activity from each other, Marsden writes:

   Now, concerning ontology, we have to say ... that this intellectual
   activity is not to be regarded as a science, for all forms of the
   latter are activities bent upon the discovery of the generative
   factors which go to produce things. Ontology, on the contrary, is
   an art. It is the art of classification, of grouping, of arranging
   the universal content on a plan not of a genealogical-table linking
   up parents and offspring: effects with their causes: but of a
   segregating (mentally) of like form with like form. (41)

By proclaiming ontology an art, Marsden argues for her philosophical practice as a radical engagement with metaphor, the juxtaposition of linguistic images in an imaginative association. In effect, Marsden understood her work as poetic creativity; in this regard, the text asserts, "theories of the rank of first principles are required to interpret poetically" (163). Poetry therefore constitutes the only language practice capable of transfiguring temporal, transient things into the eternal. Indeed, she defines poetry as the presentation of "mundane things in the light of the eternal" thus defining what her "science of first principles" must accomplish.