Silencing Stephen: colonial pathologies in Victorian Dublin - protagonist in author James Joyce's book 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Tracey Teets Schwarze

Joyce himself similarly observed that the modern nation's bloodlines are inextricable from centuries of invasion and conquest; as he put it, "To exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible" (Critical Writings 162). Spivak likewise problematizes the nationalist project; she notes that the subaltern culture never can be accurately recorded because neither the peasants themselves nor those who are most likely to transcribe their stories - members of the "counter-insurgency" or the nationalist "elite" - are immune from the influence of the Anglo-Saxon Other (203). Early in Ulysses, Joyce will demonstrate just this difficulty as Haines, Mulligan, and Stephen greet the old Irish woman who delivers their morning milk. Cheng has noted Haines's problematic pose as an Englishman engaged in Irish ethnography (and suggests his work will perpetuate the racial/racist stereotypes of the islanders pervasive at the turn of the century) as well as Mulligan's hopeful pimping of "Irishness" for the project. The Buck's first offering is an impressive one: colorful tales of the countryside, an "authentic" peasant woman, and Dedalus, the morose Irish poet (Cheng 156). Intriguingly, Duffy has also proposed that the old woman may not be as dispossessed of her language as most readers of Joyce initially assume; Duffy suggests she may be feigning ignorance in order to dupe - and resist - those who would collect her as some sort of national specimen (48). What becomes most clear to me in this scene, however, is Joyce's insistence on the impossibility of representing/recovering/purifying subalternity outside anglicized space. Multiple possibilities for transcribing the subaltern identity are rendered here, but all are irretrievably tainted by British influence: Haines, the only character actively engaged in the project, is an Englishman; Mulligan, a mercenary version of Spivak's nationalist "elite," pursues English sovereigns as he trades on "Irishness." Neither Stephen Dedalus nor the milkwoman are any less contaminated: Stephen's embittered, anti-imperialist eruptions in this episode suggest an evolving identity as Spivak's "counter-insurgent"; the milkwoman, whether or not she speaks Gaelic, certainly does speak English, and, as Stephen notes, seems infatuated with both Haines and Mulligan, "her conqueror and her gay betrayer" (Ulysses 1.405).

A variety of isolationist, nationalist-revivalist movements emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland to attempt the purgation of Saxon influence and return Irish culture to its "virgin" state; such movements gained full momentum in the late Victorian period with the formation of such organizations as the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language (1876), the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884), the National Literary Society (1892), the Gaelic League (1893), and the Irish Literary Theatre (1899). The Gaelic Revival, led by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill, latched onto a linguistic solution to Ireland's internal divisiveness; Hyde choose Gaelic, rather than Catholicism, as a signifier of "Irishness," in hopes of attracting both Protestants and Catholics to his movement (Cairns and Richards 65). William Butler Yeats and George W. Russell (who would part ways themselves), on the other hand, looked to rebuild Ireland's spiritual essence through a distinctive Irish literature - written in English. The literary movement took issue with Hyde's contention that reviving Gaelic was the only way to "de-anglicize" Ireland; Yeats replied to Hyde in an 1892 letter to United Ireland: