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  • James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity
  • Ellen Carol Jones (bio)
James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, by Katherine Mullin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 236 pp., 6 illustrations. $75.00 hardback; $43.00 paperback.

At the 1998 Miami J'yce Conference, Katherine Mullin received a rare standing ovation for her exploration, now the centerpiece of this book, of how Joyce in writing "Eveline" responded to contemporary Irish nationalist propaganda cautioning against emigration and to social-purity propaganda warning against white-slave trafficking. Essential reading for all scholars of Joyce, Katherine Mullin's James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity unveils Joyce as an "agent provocateur" in his battle against censorship: appropriating to his art contemporary debates about morality and sexuality, Joyce anticipated the censorship his texts would solicit.

Mullin explores the populist discourse on sex by advocates of social purity, a discourse that paradoxically intended to suppress the explicit expression of sexuality in art, particularly in fiction. Situating Joyce's struggles to publish his art within the strictures imposed by the social-purity movement, Mullin focuses on the evangelical Protestant ideologies and organizations dominant in the United Kingdom, particularly the National Vigilance Association, whose branch in Dublin, the Dublin White Cross Vigilance Association, actively promoted social purity during Joyce's residence. This focus on Protestant vigilance organizations does not deny the importance of the Catholic Church in regulating sexuality in Ireland, but highlights those aspects of social control and discipline that operated outside Catholicism: the secular public policing of private morals that utilized "far more socially pervasive techniques such as street patrols, agitation for legislation, confiscation and prosecution" (20). Joyce's efforts to publish his art within these strictures became an integral element in the modernist avant-garde fight against censorship, the publication of his texts "a symbolic act of cultural rebellion" staged, in turns, as heroic epic and as melodrama (17). Such struggles determined not only the reception of Joyce's work but also, Mullin argues, the very shape of it. And that Joyce anticipated—and deliberately provoked and courted— "the eventual vice society intervention into the publication of Ulysses in 1921 which would win him worldwide notoriety" Mullin proves through her analyses of three chapters crucial to the trials of the publication of Ulysses in The Little Review, demonstrating how the threat of censorship becomes increasingly integral to Joyce's aesthetic project (27, 210).

Historicizing Joyce's assault on social-purity ideology and legislative censorship in the context of the support, critique, or condemnation of these institutions by various feminist movements enables Mullin to argue that "Joyce's sporadic aversion towards 'emancipated' or 'intellectual' [End Page 162] women, despite his friendship for and gratitude to a coterie of women who must be classed as such, can be particularised as hostility towards one particular and dominant strand, the purity feminist mainstream" (206). His art politically aligns itself with the radical feminists who proved his most active helpers, as Bonnie Kime Scott and other scholars have so fully documented: the dissident emancipated women who waged their own assault against cultural taboos, social proscriptions, and politically charged disciplinary acts.1

Given social purity's "increasing reliance upon legal coercion, its collaboration with the state, its love of surveillance and its status as an unofficial branch of the police force," it is not surprising that the Irish viewed this Protestant and Unionist movement, so aligned with the state repressive apparatus, as yet another social, cultural, and political manifestation of British imperialist suppression, appropriating to state control and discipline the private realms of the body and erotic fantasy (208). Mullin thus posits that the acceptance by the Irish of the social-purity movement serves as one of Joyce's examples of the grateful oppression of the Irish under British colonial rule. Yet one would need to examine in more detail precisely who in Ireland—and of course in Joyce's fiction—advocates, practices, and benefits from the regulation of social purity in order to substantiate such a claim.

Of all the copious archival research Mullin conducted for this book, no material is more fascinating than the propaganda propelled by the moral panic over white slavery. Sensationalist, veering on the salacious, this propaganda...

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