Women in Joyce, by Suzette Henke and Elain Unkeless, provides “a contemporary perspective” on the women Joyce created. Contrasting the kind and degree of attention that has characterized critical treatment to date, the editors note that for the most part traditional criticism has presented Joyce’s women either as symbols or as representatives of a virgin/whore dichotomy. But Women in Joyce perceives a realistic dimension that extends interpretive possibilities of each female character beyond the limitations of preconceived literary or social categories. (Dunleavy, 1983). 

The year of 1983 witnesses the great epoch-making moment in Joyce study when the women’s Caucus is built, thus feminist trend in Joyce criticism has come into being. With the help the Caucus, the influence of women Joyceans greatly increased. “Studies of women characters and thematic approaches to female oppression and subversion either condoned or critiqued in Joyce were overtaken by more fluid notions of sexual identity and identification” (Lawrence, 2000:238).

Apart from those Anglo-American feminist critics, the French critics also show great interest in Joyce. But these two groups have some differences in their research. While the former prefers to analyze Joyce’s work by interpreting the background of society, history and Joyce’s biographies, the latter adopt the psychoanalytic perspective. Feminist psychoanalytic reading of literature does not easily lend itself to description. That is the case not simply because it is not one practice but multiple practices with complex histories, and not simply because all the players—feminism, psychoanalysis, reading, literature—are themselves multiple with complex histories. The difficulty in capturing it stems especially from the way the four players are related: they are all implicated in one another; they traverse one another, to borrow language. (Rooney, 2006:262)