Besides the literary evidence of Joyce’s misogyny previously detailed in this paper, plenty of incidents from his life support the view that he was a chauvinist. He had a problematic relationship with his mother, perhaps feeling abandoned by her when he was sent off to boarding school as a youngster and definitely disrespecting her for not being able to check the family’s decline into humiliating and demoralising poverty, as she produced child after child she and her husband could not financially or emotionally support. He was raised in a strongly patriarchal, misogynistic Roman Catholic religious tradition in a notably sexist, non-progressive [then] country. He was not successful with girls, and, as Margot Norris relates in her Introduction to A Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses, "ineptitude in romance…drove him to prostitutes in his teens" (Norris, 1998, p. 5). As a young man, he possessed the bitter knowledge that his lack of economic privilege or financial prospects doomed his chances with young ladies from the same social background and/or educational level as himself. During his stay as a young man in Paris he was "tormented by fantasies of homosexuality and sadomasochism, and did not know where his instincts, unrestrained, might lead him" (Maddox, 1998, p. 48). He was infamous for making rude comments about women, especially intelligent women, whom he claimed to detest. For decades he exploited and mistreated his ever-loyal, long-suffering supporters Sylvia Beach, his first publisher for Ulysses, and Harriet Weaver, his most generous benefactress, both financially and emotionally. He behaved with extreme ingratitude and unfeeling cruelty towards them both after they had all but given their life’s blood for him and his.
Even in his life-long devotion to Nora there were misogynistic elements. He coerced her into participating in his deviant sexual fetishes and degrading sexual aberrations. According to Maddox, summarising behaviours recounted in the Joyces’ personal correspondence, "He taught her to make what he called ‘filthy signs’ and ‘whorish gestures’ to excite him. His demands did not stop there. He persuaded her to defecate while he lay underneath her and watched. Nora was too embarrassed even to look at him afterwards" (Maddox, 1988, p. 139). He cruelly refused to marry her, even after their children were born, and even though he knew this made her very unhappy, ruined her reputation, and made her an outcast from her native land. Perhaps deliberately making her ‘unmarriageable’ was a conscious strategy of his for keeping her dependent on him. Her status as an unmarried woman openly living in sin was extremely precarious, as Maddox expounds: "Swollen with pregnancy, in a strange climate and culture, she had a man no better than her mother’s, and no legal tie through which to claim support for herself and the child if he left her" (Maddox, 1988, p. 86). Only concern for his adult son’s inheritance and his grandson’s legitimacy because he "very much wanted descendants who would carry on his family name" (Maddox, 1988, p. 339) persuaded him to marry Nora finally after twenty-seven years of cohabitation and jactitation. He constantly uprooted Nora and moved their household back and forth across Europe, perhaps because "By moving Nora to a series of unfamiliar environments and retaining the power of the purse, he kept her, in a sense, in servitude" (Maddox, 1998, p. 53). By forcing her with these moves to rely on him totally linguistically, financially, and socially, he kept her securely tied to him. When his teaching salary proved drastically insufficient, rather than ‘lowering’ himself to do any job that would bring in money to support his family, Joyce’s inactivity forced Nora to launder for other people, and he later bragged about how "Nora had taken in washing in the years of their extreme poverty but he did not say that she had done so three weeks after her first accouchement" (Maddox, 1988, p. 89). It seems the ‘artist’ would rather permit the mother of his son, a woman barely out of childbed, to do dirty, demeaning, hard physical labour rather than condescend to do any himself. He deliberately disseminated the impression that Nora, a former chamber maid, was a simple-minded country girl, never mind the fact that she negotiated several languages as they hopscotched around Europe, held hearth and home together though he did not provide adequately financially for the family the majority of the time, knew a great deal about opera, and provided the inspiration, ideas, and vocabulary that led to a great deal of his lauded work. When writing to his brother Stanislaus, "Joyce portrayed Nora as a naïve little primitive" (Maddox, 1988, p. 77), and he "liked to think of Nora as uneducated; it made her seem all the more his creation" (Maddox, 1988, p. 80). But the love letters Joyce wrote Nora when courting her the summer of 1904 reveal that he knew she was more cerebral than he let on to others; as Maddox explains, "they are not the type of letters addressed to an inferior intelligence. Joyce wooed Nora with words and he wanted hers" (Maddox, 1988, p. 46). Indeed, one of Joyce’s biggest ‘achievements’ — ‘creating’ the fluid, expressive feminine language of Molly’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses — is a result of Nora’s verbal talents, not his, though she did not get either public or private acknowledgement for this from Joyce. Joyce, when writing Molly’s soliloquy, merely mimicked the characteristic writing style (including lack of punctuation and capitalisation) Nora displayed in her correspondence with him. Regarding Nora’s letters to Joyce, Maddox discusses how he claimed she did not write any, but:
…he knew better. ‘I have thirteen letters of yours,’ he boasted six weeks after they had met in the summer of 1904. Nora did write letters; the problem is that few people, Joyce apart, kept them. Fortunately, enough have survived to show her enormous influence on Joyce’s writing style. She wrote as she talked; she was spontaneous, direct, humorous and, when she chose, vulgar. She was not shy of calling a penis a prick. She was also a good reporter (Maddox, 1988, p. 4).
In their so-called ‘dirty letters’ Joyce even praises Nora for daring to be worse (i.e. more scatological and pornographic) than he (Maddox, 1988, p. 524). Molly’s stream-of-consciousness was not an invention of Joyce’s mind, but rather a reflection of Nora’s typical conversation and thought processes. As Maddox discusses, "Joyce, perhaps above all other authors, used his life as the raw material of his art. From the time he met Nora, her memories were as useful as his own…she talked and talked. Joyce listened and listened, and put her voice into all of his major female characters" (Maddox, 1988, pp. 4, 5). Indeed, "Nora’s experiences, in many ways so much more traditionally Irish than his own, quickly found their way into the stories he was writing" (Maddox, 1988, p. 75), resulting in the final versions found in the stories of Dubliners. Joyce’s great talent, then, was in reproducing Nora’s language and passing it off as his own creative genius. Exposure to his daughter Lucia’s schizophrenia may have been a major influence on the convoluted, mosaical language of Finnegans Wake; as Maddox explains, "It might even be described as ‘word salad’ — the term used for the new words and private language often coined by schizophrenics" (Maddox, 1988, p. 398). As far as Nora went, he considered even her one of his creations. As he wrote in one draft of Exiles, the fragments of which are now at Cornell, "I have destroyed and recreated in my own image a woman" (Joyce, 1992b, p. 361). Nora does not even get credit for her own development as a person; Joyce usurps credit for that, overestimating his influence on her while completely overlooking her influence on him. In reality, as Maddox reports, "Joyce scarcely took a step without Nora. His dependency was stressed by some of their old friends" (Maddox, 1988, p. 3). Joyce seems to have projected his own weaknesses onto Nora and to have taken credit for her strengths. In an extremely revealing line he says, "I feel as if I had carried her within my own body, in my womb" (Joyce, 1992b, p. 360). Here Joyce (as does Bloom in ‘Circe’) openly alludes to his womb envy, the futile male desire to create another human being. In arrogantly claiming Nora as Galatea to his Pygmalion, however, he totally denies her self-determination as an individual human being.
If Joyce was capable of maltreating, underestimating,
and misrepresenting the woman he loved and spent a lifetime with, then surely it
is not much of a stretch to admit he was capable of a certain degree of misogyny
in general. His apparent inability to give Nora her due was no doubt the result of
his ingrained chauvinism. I believe Joyce’s sexism, like the misogyny of many other
men, was rooted in fear of the other, particularly on a sexual level. Joyce was insecure
about his sexuality and intimidated by women and compensated for this by denigrating
women, particularly on a sexual level. Joyce’s oft repeated use of the misogynistic
trope of the witch is symbolic of his patriarchal attitudes towards women. By deliberately
linking the witch with the whore in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses, Joyce
encoded his fear and even antipathy towards female sexuality. Unfortunately, not
enough readers recognise how this symbolic code is misogynistic. Now that Ulysses
has been absorbed into the predominantly androcentric canon that it so overwhelmingly
alludes to, future readers and writers will perpetuate this negative, demonic portrayal
of female sexuality, unless we learn to temper our appreciation of a writer’s
talent with words with a closer analysis of the ideology informing the writing. I
have a great personal fondness for the literary characters of Circe, la belle dame
sans merci, and Cutty Sark as well as for the poets who immortalised them and the
poems they did so within; however, I do not appreciate having active, subjective
female sexuality demonised in the symbol of the witch. I have great respect for James
Joyce’s ear for language and for his intellect and vast literary knowledge, but I
abhor his dismissive treatment of women, both in terms of literature and real life.
The human race can no longer afford to tolerate the promotion of prejudice in any
form, and misogynists should not be able to hide behind the title of ‘artist’.