The stigma of femininity in James Joyce's "Eveline" and "The Boarding House."

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1993 by Earl G. Ingersoll

James Joyce made the intent of his organization of Dubliners clear in his famous letter to Grant Richards:

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. (5 May 1906; Selected Letters 83)

Joyce's classification of the quartet beginning with "Eveline" and ending with "The Boarding House" as stories of "adolescence" seems patently problematic. At 19, Eveline is technically "adolescent"; however, the central characters of the other three stories in this quartet - "after the Race," "Two Gallants," and "The Boarding House"-are hardly adolescents, unless we associate "adolescent" with "unsettled," or "unmarried." In the last of the quartet there is an adolescent, Polly Mooney, who is the same age as Eveline - 19. In a group of stories whose characters' ages are tantalizingly withheld - how old are the boys of the first three stories, for example?-the link of Eveline's and Polly's ages cannot be mere coincidence. Instead, it offers an example of Joyce's subtle counterpointing of two women who bear the stigma of "femininity" in seemingly opposing yet perhaps similar fashions.

Before exploring that connection, it might be useful to construct a framework of recent observations about the fascinating relationship between the use of literary tropes and indications of gender. In Reading Lacan Jane Gallop explores the gender associations of the two key tropes in contemporary critical theory-metaphor and metonymy. She traces concern with these tropes back to the seminal work of Roman Jakobson, who saw connections between metaphor and poetry, especially the poetry of nineteenth-century Romantics and Symbolists, and connections between metonymy and the realist novel. Jacques Lacan followed Jakobson in connecting metonymy with realism and metaphor with poetry; he asserts: "In a general manner, metonymy animates this style of creation which we call, in opposition to symbolic style and poetic language, the so-called realist style" (266). Gallop hypothesizes that metaphor and metonymy have gender implications as well; she writes:

Metaphor is patent; metonymy is latent. The latency, the hiddenness of metonymy, like that of the female genitalia, lends it an appearance of naturalness or passivity so that realism ... appears either as the lack of tropes, or as somehow mysterious, the "dark continent" [Freud's term for female sexuality] of rhetoric. (127)

Drawing on the work of the feminist psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray, who correlates the privileging of metaphor over metonymy in contemporary psychoanalytic theory with a "phallocentric neglect of femininity" (Gallop 127), Gallop concludes:

The most extreme and explicit form of metaphor's privilege in Lacan's text inhabits its association with liberation, which contrasts with metonymy's link to servitude. . . . metonymy's ellipsis can be considered "oppressive" . . . . Metaphor, on the other hand, is "the crossing of the bar." The word for "crossing" - franchissement" - has an older meaning of liberation from slavery, enfranchissement. The "bar" is an obstacle; metaphor unblocks us. (128)

In this way Gallop extends Irigaray's suggestions of a connection between metaphor and the "phallocentric" on the one hand, and between metonymy and the "feminine" on the other, to imply that liberation, movement, and activity are associated with the "masculine," while oppression, servitude, and passivity are associated with the "feminine."

For such readers of Lacan as Barbara Johnson, Shoshana Felman, and Jerry Aline Flieger, the "feminine" represents something other than conventional sexual identity. In her defense of Lacan's reading of Poe's "Purloined Letter" against Jacques Derrida's accusations of misreading, Barbara Johnson, for example, posits femininity as an indication of position. Discussing the repeated expropriations of the letter, Johnson comments on how the letter "feminizes its purloiners by being successively purloined from them" (123). In this context "femininity" cannot be attributed to just one sex, since it indicates a position of vulnerability for men as well as women.

One fascinating refinement of this effort at finding gender implications in Lacan's key tropes of metaphor and metonymy is offered by Naomi Schor in her article "Female Paranoia: The Case for Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism." Following in the male footsteps of psychoanalytic theorists like Lacan and Derrida in reading Poe's "The Purloined Letter" as an allegory of the signifier, Schor argues that Derrida "inadvertently" points out what Lacan missed in his purloined reading of Marie Bonaparte's reading of the Poe story - the little brass knob "between the legs of the fireplace." That knob is the clitoris that male theorists tend to omit in their discourse. If, as Schor argues, "the clitoris is coextensive with the detail," may we not legitimately propose a "clitoral school of feminist theory" "identified by its practice of a hermeneutics focused on the detail, which is to say on those details of the female anatomy which have been generally ignored by male critics. . ." (216)?