Sex, Culture, Joyce

ELT 41: 1 1998 "degenerate" Jew that the self-hating, suicidal Jew Weininger posited; but Bloom himself is not, and in his victorious battle with the Photo-Bits nymph, realizes that he is not, degenerate. Bloom at the end of the day becomes "empowered as both a man and a Jew" in Davison's reading: while one does not become a Jew simply by declaration, the entire text of Ulysses has gone to great lengths to demonstrate, through Bloom, that the establishment of a Jewish identity must be based on the psychological affirmation of a "Jewishness," which in turn must be based on at least the central tenets of Judaism, a compassion for Jews and other sufferers, and the ability to rise above pernicious stereotypes of "the Jew." As Davison realizes, many of the same problems arise in discussing Joyce's presentation of "the Jew" as arise in his presentation of "woman," and for similar reasons. Few readers may agree on the success with which Davison has negotiated the many pitfalls that await such an investigation, but very few indeed will think the effort not worth making. R. Brandon Kershner ________________ University of Florida Sex, Culture, Joyce Christine Froula. Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. xvi + 316 pp. Paper $18.00 WRITTEN FROM A DUAL perspective of feminist theory and psychoanalytical theory, Christine Froula's Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce is an intensive and extensive study of Joyce's novels A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Taking as its focus Joyce's construction of male subjects within the framework of his own psychohistory and suppressed feminine attributes , the volume unfolds in three substantial segments (each on a separate novel) which are set between an introduction and afterward and followed by over fifty pages of supplemental notes and index. Froula's arguments are meticulously supported with material from Joyce's texts—the three novels as well as other narratives such as "The Dead," Stephen Hero, and Exiles. Extensive notes and a thorough index assist the reader in following the nuances of the author's argument, which in her own words is a "departure] from earlier feminist views of Joyce as a misogynist, a patriarch, an inventor of écriture féminine, a masochist." Instead of retracing well-worn inroads of Joyce study, Froula forges outward to "ally Joyce's vow to bring his culture's collective 108 BOOK REVIEWS unconscious to consciousness and conscience with the revolutionary energies of feminism and psychoanalysis." Opening with the summary statement that "James Joyce's portraits of the artist are also portraits of his culture," Froula scrutinizes these portraits as ideological texts formed of the autobiographical matter of Joyce himself. She works to disclose "the hidden dynamics" of these artists/Joyce and to expose "the psychopolitical underpinnings of the authority wielded over sexuality and gender not only by church, state, and the socioeconomic marriage system but also by Nighttown's psychosexual underworld, with its phantasmic mother/whores, and the symbolic estate of arts and letters." She complicates and enriches this network by situating within it close studies of real and fictive artists including Joyce as well as Stephen of Stephen Hero, Stephen Dedalus of Portrait and Ulysses, Ovid's Daedalus, Gabriel Conroy, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, and others. In chapter one, "Symbolic Wombs: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young WoMan," Froula "trace[s] Stephen's progress toward his Virgin/artist identity through his subjection and resistance to such initiatory agencies as family, school, church, state, and literary and folk cultures." Stephen's initiation consists of three stages, "whereby the boy undergoes separation from his mother's world and symbolic death as his mother's child; proceeds through a disorienting, identityless liminal stage in which temporary, fleeting, virtual selves are tried on and cast off like masks; and, through 'rites of incorporation,'is at last 'reborn'or consolidated as a masculine subject, his fathers' child." While Froula credits Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner for the identification of these three stages, she performs an original investigation of each initiatory stage, elucidating Stephen Dedalus's and Joyce's developments as...