James Joyce Essay Example for Free

jam Joyce EssayIn James Joyces Ulysses readers encounter Stephen Dedaluss search for identity a search which will be present through the entire narrative. At the heart of Ulysses is Stephens relationship with his commence. Stephen describes both the real mother who rea wild him and is now dead and an imagined mother serving as a symbol who is a product of Stephens consciousness having fear and anxiety (Hill 329). let bed is idealized by Stephen in Ulysses Amor matris, says Stephen, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life (207). The concept of amor matris, or mother love, shows the magic power of the mothers fertility. Motherhood is the only fact of life astir(predicate) which Stephen is confident. A mothers love, the dyadic relationship in which the mother and child are inseparable, however, Stephen experiences only nostalgically. He attempts to articulate it, when it is over. Thus Stephens legerdemain of a selfless love is marked by a sense o f loss. Main Body Although Stephen has buried his mother, she subsequently appears as a ghost.With his own mother dead, it is normal for Stephen to direct his attention sooner or later to Molly Bloom, the Magna Mater presiding over Ulysses. just now Molly is something more than a mere somebody which serves in place of real mother. She symbolizes the sinful flesh, the claims of nature, and human love. Stephens attraction toward her is symptomatic of his disillusionment with all forms of patriarchal pressure (political authority and the Old Testament). She is like a moral goal towards which he is drawn as a result of his opposition to the church.As Murray explains If a man, who believes somehow in the reality and ultimate worth(predicate) of some religion of gentleness and unselfishness, looks through the waste of nature to find support for his faith, it is probably in the phenomena of motherhood that he will find it offset and approximately strikingly(Goldberg 36). For Stephen th e pain is very strong by the fact that his mother is dead. She has leftfield him alone. She has taken with her his assurance of being related to the world and to himself.She has left the terrible anxiety near his loss. Moreover, she became the ghost cleaning woman who appears to Stephen in the dream of death that lives in his memory throughout the daylight, together with memories and reflections about the mother in life. Added to his uneasiness about the psychic separation that is necessary for his growth into manhood is the hopeless realization that there is no physical woman to take the mothers place She, she, she, he says repeatedly in Proteus, What she? (426).As Stephen comes intermittently into focus through the text, so does as much again in strength the problem of the loss of his mother and his need for a woman to take her place. The Stephens persistent idea with his dead mother is lightened at times by tenderness, but gradually is darkened by tinge of distress, anger , and offence over the relationship. Stephens memories of his mother start in Telemachus with the recall of his periodic dream of her in her loose brown graveclothes (103-4), which draws from him his initial plea for way out let me live. Stephens reflection to the memories of his mother in life and in death vibrates at the beginning between the desire for separation and the desire for continuous dependence, and his plea for release in Telemachus No, mother Let me be and let me live (279). In order to acquire capable of giving immortality to his life, in art, Stephen must first become a man. This requires a rebirth, non through the spirit, as it is in religion, but like the birth from the mother, occurring through the flesh of the loved woman in womans womb. Stephen considers this rebirth seriously. At the end, Stephen is reborn in the text. This rebirth is textually completed at the middle of Ithaca, when Bloom opens the garden gate for Stephen, and a birth flick includes me anings of the pun on in womans womb. Bloom inserts a male key into an unstable female lock, to reveal an aperture for free egress and free ingress (215-19). This is the rebirth into a wise dimension and is also Stephens participation in the incarnation of the artist (Goldberg 96).Stephens image in Telemachus of his mothers glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. . . . to strike me down (273-76), brings from him the most dramatic raising of the terrible mother. Ghoul Chewer of corpses (278) is a manifestation of rejection which is definitely confirmed in Circe at the appearance of The Mother. Stephens mother shelters and nurtures her son with her body, her blood, her wheysour milk, who saves him from being trampled underfoot by the outside world (141-47).This motif of interchange between the loving and horrible aspects of the mother, presented in the first two episodes of Ulysses, is repeated in moments of memory all time Stephens mother becomes present in the text, until in Oxen of the Sun, the birth chapter, Stephen describes his release from the mothers threat through his proposed appropriation, as an artist, of her sophisticated power In womans womb name is made flesh, but in the spirit of the chip inr all flesh that passes becomes the account book that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation (292-94).Haunted through the whole of the day by the memories of his mother in death and in life, Stephen has moved from his loneliness in the morning, coupled with his inner plea to his mother to free him Let me be and let me live to this statement of purpose at the maternity hospital. And this statement leads to his claim to a creative power that is greater than that of the mother (Hill 329). In Circe, then, The Mother meets with Stephen directly as the terrible mother, in her leper grey, with her bluecircled hollow eyesockets in her noseless face, green with gravemould (156-60).And here in the brothel, Stephen releases from the mother. This release is necessary for Stephen to become the divine creator of his proclamation. The release is accomplished in the unconscious, which is the ruling principle of Circe. The conversation between mother and son in a fundamental manner repeats Stephens encounters with her memory in the daytime, more or less changed, but still with the same odd balance between the loving and the horrible that is associated with the conscious memories.For although The Mother brings with her a meat of death All must go through it, Stephen. You too (182-83) she contains powerful features of the loving mother. As Stephen frightfully denies responsibility for her death Cancer did it, not I (U 154187) The Mother claims, You sang that song to me. Loves bitter mystery ( U 154189-90). This line from Yeatss Who Goes with Fergus? can be found in Telemachus, as mulligan leaves the parapet, humming And no more turn aside and broodUpon loves bitter mystery For Fergus rules the brazen cars. (239 -41). The paradox found in loves bitter mystery colours The Mothers answer to Stephens plea, Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men (U 154192-93). Twice before Stephen has asked the same question in his thoughts about the word known to all men in Proteus (435) and in Scylla and Charybdis (429-30). In all the episodes in which the question is asked, in only one is a die answer given.The answer, actually, had never been in the published text of Ulysses until Hans Walter Gablers 1984 Critical and Synoptic Edition interpreted five lines in Scylla and Charybdis (U 9427-31) forty-three words, eleven of them in Latin (Deming 129). This text, restored to one of the most scrutinized carefully segments in Ulysses, the source of most liked quotations about art and life, about fathers and sons, about mothers and sons, described love as the word known to all men (Deming 129).Richard Ellmann, in his 1984 presentation address to the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt, presented the audience with his own identification of the word known to all men as love, claiming that the word was perhaps death (Deming 129). Kenners position that it might be death is much more than clear in his 1956 Dublins Joyce, where he describes Dublin as the Kingdom of the Dead and characterizes Mollys final yes as the Yes of authority authority over this animal kingdom of the dead. The mother thus becomes the image of the bitter mystery. The complete answer to the question Stephen asks about the word known to all men is not love or death but love and death for whatever is born of the flesh through love will die at the end (Goldberg 156). In Circe, The Mother answers to Stephens plea with a at odds(p) blending of the loving and the terrible mother. The Mother in Circe is not gentle. True, she gives evidences of her love for her sun amor matris in terms that echo Stephens own thoughts that his mother had saved him from being trampled underfoot (1 46) Who saved you?Who had pity for you? (196). But when she asks for Stephens penitence, she becomes for him The ghoul Hyena (198-200). And as the Mother continues to present assurances of her love and concern I pray for you Get Dilly to make you that boiled rice. Years and years I loved you (202-3) her simultaneous threat of the fire of hell brings from Stephen the words of appeal, The corpsechewer Raw head and bloody bones (212-14), together with the echo in Circe of his rejection in Telemachus Ghoul Chewer of corpses (278).Up to this point in the meeting with The Mother, although mother and son communicate, they do not touch each other. But with Stephens frantic denial of The Mothers final demand for remorse, a backbite unexpectedly appears, and mother and son touch through the screech. This green crab with malignant red eyes, although evidently autonomous, is nevertheless mysteriously, ambiguously connected with The Mother, who raises her blackened withered right arm slowl y towards Stephens breast with outstretched finger, uttering, Beware Gods hand as the crab sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephens heart (217-21).This crab is real, and at the same time Cancer did it, not I (187) has all features of a primary zoology from the dark depths of Stephens unconscious. Stephens crab is not visible to others, and his inner creature is not certainly visible even to him. But the terrible ghost with whom both crab and dragon are connected remains for the reader and for Stephen himself Stephens mother (Hill 329). Even Stephens references to Mother Ireland, Cathleen ni Houlihan, are tinged with gender bias. Stephen betrayed his mother as advantageously as Mother Ireland.In the early morning at the Martello tower, he connects the old milk woman with the Shan van Vocht, silk of the kine and poor old woman (403), but doubtfully recognizes that the wandering crone serves the conqueror and her gay betrayer Mulligan (403-5). Unlike the patriots who glorify Mot her Ireland, Stephen thinks of Gaptoothed Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house (184). Mulligan and Stephen at the Martello connect woman with nature the great sweet mother (78) of the sea. Our mighty mother (85) is, as in case with the amorous poets, nature (Rickard 215).Conclusion In Ulysses, there is Stephens misogyny. He realizes the significance of womans place in a mans life and in his sense of himself. Ulysses is, without doubt, typically a mans book. It begins and ends with the mother figures who complete the male artists self. The mother, who is the first incarnation of the anima archetype (330), enters Ulysses with young Stephen and stays with him throughout most of Bloomsday. Thus, in Ulysses, though there are not many women, Joyce has presented to readers in symbolic terms the important interdependence and complementarity of the man and the mother.Works CitedDeming, Robert H. James Joyce The Critical Heritage. Vol. 2. Routledge London, 19 97. Goldberg, S. L. The Classical Temper A Study of James Joyces Ulysses. Chatto Windus London, 1961. Hill, Marylu. Amor Matris Mother and Self in the Telemachiad Episode of Ulysses. Twentieth Century Literature. Vol. 39, no. 3, 1993. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York Vintage, 1986. Rickard, John S. Joyces Book of Memory The Mnemotechnics of Ulysses. Duke University Press Durham, NC, 1999.