5. Conclusion 15

References 16

1. Introduction 

1.1 Literature Review

James Joyce is one of the most outstanding writers in the 20th century; meanwhile, he is also one of the writers that the feminist critics are interested in. 

As early as in 1930s when the western feminism movement came to the climax, some feminist critics such as Virginia Woolf and Mary Colum began to study Joyce’s view on women.

Joyce has once said, “I hate women who know anything” (Ellmann, 1982:634). Because of this, many feminist critics think he despise women and claim him as a misogynist. Virginia Woolf’s comment towards Joyce is mixed. On one hand, she affirms Joyce’s innovation and his effort on the development of modern fictional art; on the other hand, she can’t bear his male chauvinism. Thus, her attitude towards Joyce’s work turns from appreciation to criticism.  

Then in 1960s, with the flourishing of feminism movement, more and more critics begin to interpret Joyce’s work from the standpoint of feminism. 

Florence Howe, an American critic, shows her discontent with Joyce’s work and she thinks that “Joyce’s vision of reality is especially male-centered” and that “Joyce was neither reformer nor visionary” (Howe, 1972:263). She takes the A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as an example to verify Joyce’s arrogance and selfishness. As the same time, she also points out that under the influence of male chauvinism, female characters are usually described as “the other”.

Marty Ellmann in her Thinking about Women, points out Joyce’s “feminine stereotypes”. However, she also gives positive comment. Although Joyce always use “hackneyed criticisms of women in conversation”, he “reclaims women by affection, subtlety and wit” (Ellmann, 1982:196). What’s more, Ellmann notes that Joyce is more sympathetic with women when compared with Ernst Hemingway and Meiler. This view was also supported by Kate Millet. Millet compares Joyce’s view on women with Lawrence’s in her Sexual Politics, she concludes that Joyce is more positive than Lawrence since Joyce views women as “nature” “unspoiled primeval understanding” (Millet, 1970:285) while Lawrence treats the new women as the “enemy”.  

1980s is an active period for the feminist critics. Some critics such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Bonnie Kime Scott, Suzette Henke, Elaine Unkeless, Brenda Maddox focus on the main question about Joyce’s view on women and how to interpret his female character to find out whether Joyce despises women or not? Whether he describes women with great sympathy? Or whether his work embodies his male chauvinism? All these questions seem easy to handle, but actually is full of obstacle since Joyce himself as well as his work is intricate and contradictory.

In this period, there are two critics, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, hold negative view on Joyce. Their co-authored book No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century points out male writers’ selfishness. They also try to prove Joyce as a misogynist from Joyce’s biography, especially from his letters to his wife Nora.  

Unlike Gilbert and Gubar, Bonnie Kime Scott agrees with the idea that Joyce supports feminism and he is also the advocate of modernism women movement. In her monograph Joyce and Feminist, she explores the social status of Irish women, the women’s role in Joyce life and career as well as the relationship between Joyce and feminism in mythical, historical and cultural way. She confirms that Joyce’s writing provides “considerable dimension and variety” to “the investigation of gender in language and life” (Scot, 1987:105). However, at the same time, Scott finds Joyce’s treatment of women in life and his creation of them in literature to be unsettling. Also in Joyce and Feminist, Scott questions why Joyce’s female archetypes are always saved for codas rather than placed more centrally in his work, and in her more recent feminist study, James Joyce, she again notes that Joyce “capture women’s work with peripheral vision”.  《都柏林人》中的女性身份(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_50799.html