Loss is Gain: Gender in Joyce

BOOK REVIEWS Loss is Gain: Gender in Joyce Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum, eds. "Ulysses": En-Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. xvii + 345 pp. $39.95 "ULYSSES": En-Gendered Perspectives is something of an occasion in Joyce studies, marking the reprise of an editorial strategy inaugurated in 1974 by Clive Hart and David Hayman's James Joyce's "Ulysses": Critical Essays. The plan is simple: have a different Joyce critic write an essay on each of the eighteen episodes oÃ- Ulysses. The contrast between the two volumes tells us a great deal about changes in Joyce studies, for while the Hart and Hayman volume offered a relatively broad array of approaches, themes and concerns, this new volume is restricted to essays operating within a common framework of gender and en-gendering—specifically, on the way in which gender is constituted , textualized, performed, deconstructed and critiqued by Joyce's texts. The emphasis on gender was a choice made in light of the "expansion and diversification of Joyce studies" since the 1970s; as Kimberly Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum note in their preface, "[w]e chose to propose the concepts of gender and en-gendering—hegemonic tropes in the larger ideological network that figurations of the maternal are enmeshed in." Though there is overall a strong emphasis on Freudian and Lacanian formulations, we find in this volume gender studies approaches , "new historical" readings, Derridean-style deconstructive analyses, and the kind of etymologically based close readings that have long been a staple of Joyce studies. Garry Leonard's reading of the "Telemachus" episode begins the volume and articulates a point of view that is common to many of the essays : "In order for 'masculinity' to be culturally intelligible, it must be performed, which means all presentations of the self, coded as 'masculine ,' are potentially decodable as performative, and, therefore, 'feminine .'" The idea of gender as a performance is derived from theorists like Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan and has led many critics, like Leonard, to equate femininity with performativity and masculinity with representation . Margot Norris makes a similar argument in her reading of "Circe," in which the familiar privileging of performance over representation is given a provocative new orientation by articulating Joyce's strategies of "harlotizing" and "theatricalizing." These strategies, which re-present the "mise-en-scène" of the brothel, foreground the ways in which coercion and cruelty have defined gender relations. Theater func123 ELT 45 : 1 2002 tions as a kind oÃ-pharmokos (a drug or agent that acts as both poison and cure), "a technology that creates illusions but simultaneously makes illusion apparent and visible, and that inherently constructs and deconstructs perception." The modes of "disenchantment" that Norris locates in "Circe" are not unlike the "detumescent" monologue of Leopold Bloom in "Nausicaa," which John Bishop describes as a "deflationary" counterpart to the gender idealizations of Gerty MacDowell. Bishop counters the tendency to read "Nausicaa" as an episode about gender opposition by reading it instead in terms of a "metaphysics of coitus" in which Bloom and Gerty play off of each other in mutually determining performances of gender. The oppositional nature of gender relations is analyzed by a number of contributors. Cheryl Herr, for example, reads "Proteus" through the lenses of feminist philosophy, especially that of Luce Irigaray, and sketches what we might call an "embodied epistemology" that can unveil the interrelated conditions of birthing and knowing. In a similar way, Kimberly Devlin explores the "perverse discourse of ocularity" in "Hades," stressing the marginal status of women in perspectival terms—that is, where they fall in terms of narrative attentiveness. Her insights on the status of working women and on the paradox of widow's insurance "injuring" men economically points up the complexity of gender relations in turn of the century Dublin as well as the complex perspective Joyce develops to make these relations "visible" to the reader. Bonnie Kime Scott and Maud Ellmann, on the other hand, stress the "spatialization" of women's experience. Scott's analysis of "Wandering Rocks" posits a counter-discourse of "mystery" in which women challenge the "mastery" of "professional" traversais of space enacted by men...