The Bestial Feminine in Finnegans Wake

Abstract

Female characters frequently appear as animals in the unstable universe of James Joyce's a Finnegans Wake. What Kimberly Devlin terms "the male tendency to reduce women to the level of the beast" is manifest in Finnegans Wake on a large scale. From the hen pecking at a dung heap which we suppose is a manifestation of matriarch Anna Livia Plurabelle, to the often lascivious pig imagery (reminiscent of Bloom's experience with brothel-keeper Bella in the "Circe" episode of Ulysses) associated with juvenile seductress Issy, the lines between animal and human are frequently blurred when it comes to representing the feminine in the Wake. As scholars such as Devlin have highlighted, such constellations of images have their roots in blatantly misogynistic iconographies. Indeed, the reinscription of female characters into bestial roles in the Wake echoes a religious history of the dehumanisation of women. Yet, while this gendered representational tendency has been noted in Joycean and, more recently, wider modernist studies, its deployment and impact as a cultural and literary trope has not yet been interpreted according to the sociohistorical and cultural contexts which shaped the composition of Finnegans Wake. In particular, the culturally-specific sexual politics of Free State Ireland (1922)(1923)(1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929)(1930)(1931)(1932)(1933)(1934)(1935)(1936)(1937), against which Joyce arguably pushes throughout the entirety of the Wake, offer a suggestive lens through which to view the text's interconnected representations of the feminine and the bestial. This article suggests that, in Finnegans Wake, the nonhuman is a mode through which Joyce explores the fraught sexual politics of early twentieth-century Ireland. Specifically, the bestial feminine becomes an avenue to inspect, expose, and satirise prevalent contemporary fears over female sexual licentiousness and national moral decline. Historicising the text's grappling with themes of carnality and baseness, the article discusses the ways in which the woman-as-animal is deployed in Finnegans Wake as a grotesque symbol of an unbridled and threatening female sexuality-an extreme embodiment of 1920s and 1930s Ireland's worst fears surrounding the perceived degeneration of Irish women's modesty. Unearthing the Wake's social contexts in order to interpret its sexual politics, this article ultimately asks whether the trope of the woman-as-animal stages a complete resistance against the conservatism of early twentieth-century Ireland's sexual politics, or whether Joyce's invocation of a historically misogynistic and patriarchal construction risks reinforcing the dehumanisation of women, moving the text's sexual politics further away from the liberatory.

Anna Livia Plurabelle’s normless interactions in Finnegans Wake

“…In Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), the wife of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), is the river-woman, who opens the novel and her monolog concludes the book and frequently transforms throughout the novel in different forms of “mythic, natural, cultural, and historical human manifestations across time and space, even as she is unbound by time or space” ( Reilly, 2020 ). In response to the contextualization of the Irish social and ideological context with the characteristic of female and male power relations, which Joyce problematizes in his works and “an unbridled and threatening female sexuality” ( Lovejoy, 2017 ) in the 1920s and 1930s Ireland, in this paper, I suggest that ALP is portrayed as a neurotic woman–not pervert, which is commonly known–who tries to accomplish her needs by adopting a normless personality. Based on Horney’s definition of neurosis, I will study how ALP’s detached personality compels her to move away from people and makes her neurotically alienated because of the following three needs she struggle for in society.…”

Hideous Hobgoblins: Monstrous Form in Darwin, Marx, and Joyce

“…"Undeniably," she argues, "the trope of the woman-asanimal is inseparable from deeply entrenched connotations of inferiority, and these are never irrelevant in any literary representation of bestial women and feminised animals." 29 Despite overtones of abject and unforgivable misogyny, there is, for Lovejoy, a contextually-specific liberating dimension to this kind of monstrosity: "in addition to the negative connotations often conveyed by pet metaphors when applied to women, such metaphors can connote sexual attractiveness, playfulness or desirability -characteristics which undermine certain patriarchal models of feminine sexual purity, as in the case of 'kitten.'" 30 Here, as it was for Bloom in Ulysses, the monstrous indicates transgression of the human by a nonhuman other in ways that, whilst predicated on debasement, are politically recalcitrant if not revolutionary.…”

“…(FW, 35. [28][29] In other words, the Cad's watch has been expropriated -taken under law of usucaption -and that expropriation has been enacted by the sanction of "communionism," an anti-colonial portmanteau that combines the monstrous right of communion -monstrous because of its predicates in transubstantiation and cannibalismwith the revolutionary politics of communism. While the exchange reveals little more about the threat posed by this figure, we can nevertheless identify a structure of opposition, in that HCE articulates himself in this episode as an exemplarily petit-bourgeoise business-owner: "Hence my nonation wide hotel and creamery establishments which for the honours of our mewmew mutual daughters, credit me, I am woo-woo willing to take my stand, sir, upon the monument, that sign of our ruru redemption any hygienic day to this hour and to make my hoath to my sinnfinners, even if I get life for it, upon the Open Bible and before the Great Taskmaster's" (FW, 36.…”