Joyce and Militarism

5. Barracks and Brothels

5 Barracks and Brothels I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to do, you know, and the young man run up behind me. But I’m faithful to the man that’s treating me though I’m only a shilling whore. Ulysses 15.4381–83 One of the more striking transformations in Ulysses is that of Cissy Caffrey from suburban child-minder to Nighttown prostitute. When she appears in “Nausicaa,” the good sister minding younger brothers Tommy and Jacky on Sandymount Strand, the protean possibilities of the location are already evident from Stephen’s early morning walk there. Even so, the revealing remark about her professional identity shows a drastically different person from several hours before. One might be tempted to dismiss her change as one more in the long line of hallucinatory details in “Circe,” yet the duality is more than just fanciful invention. It is an accurate reflection of women’s limited economic opportunities and dual social identities in early-twentieth -century Dublin. Whether Cissy is actually streetwalking or working at Bella Cohen’s brothel, or merely a recycled figment of Bloom’s imagination, her role as prostitute is set in conjunction with the largest, and most controversial , client of the Dublin sex industry: the British garrison. Earlier in the day, Cissy’s military affiliation was prefigured in her brothers ’ sailor suits and Martello-tower sandcastle (U 13.14, 42–45). During the mock interrogation of “Circe,” the connection is confirmed by her alibi that she was “in company with the soldiers” (U 15.4381). The pun conjoins a casual phrase with an official designation for a military unit smaller than a battalion. (One might say, for example, the Coldstream Guards regiment was divided into four battalions and fourteen companies, or the Number Seven Company of the Guards is preparing for deployment.) In offering suchunabasheddisclosureofheroccupation,Cissyembedsherselfwiththe British military in Dublin in every sense of the word. • 190 · Joyce and Militarism Exchanging private intimacies for privates’ pay, she assumes a place in the sex trade and, with it, the language and identity of her military customers . Doing so, she becomes representative of countless Dublin women who turned to prostitution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and whose common patrons were soldiers and army officers. By referencing the interdependence of British garrison and Dublin red-light district, she acknowledges the economic context that surrounded such a choice. Cissy joins in the camaraderie and jargon of the barracks, and even her bargain rate as “only a shilling whore” (U 15.4383) echoes the infamous weekly wage paid to British Army recruits well into the twentieth century. As Nora Barnacle’s mother wrote of her son Tom’s enlistment in December 1915, “at present he is only getting a shilling a Weeke he sined me half his pay than I am getting seperation allowance” (qtd. in Maddox 139). Taking the “king’s shilling” was a hard choice made by the thousands of Irishmen who opted to serve in the army out of financial necessity rather than patriotic loyalty. Cissy’s identification with the same monetary value suggests a parallel involvement of prostitutes in the imperial military mission. The overt link between private and prostitute also appears in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man via Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts of his “gloomy secret night” in the “squalid quarter of the brothels”; his anticipatory memory includes, among other sensory minutiae, “a photograph of two soldiers standingto attention”(P96–97). The mundane detail is one of Joyce’s many realistic images that form part of the brothel’s expected décor; however, it seems to say much more owing to its surroundings and the limited-omniscient perspective of the narrative. “Standing to attention” suggests not simply a notion of upright infantry but a double entendre of phallic readiness, a meaning perhaps only fully realized in its context on the brothel wall. If in other locales—say a post office billboard or recruiting station door—pictures of soldiers might just be soldiers, here they are sexualized objects and sexualclientele.Awaitingtheirturn, theprivatesseethemselvesinthepinup on the wall, and the photograph serves to regularize their status and their territorial control—over the brothel, the women’s bodies, the city overall. These suggest a possible reading of the content and context of the photograph , but questions linger as to its pretext: besides Joyce’s fiction and Stephen’s memory, who put the photo there in the first place and why? Was it...