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10 Modernity and Its Discontents Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” Yu-chen Lin Blazes Boylan stands out among the hundreds of ill-clad characters in Joyce’s Dublin. With his fine taste in clothes he is no doubt one of the most eyecatching Dubliners to stroll the city streets on 16 June 1904. Attired this day in an elegant, mass-produced dark blue suit matched with a sky-blue necktie (which in turn matches the color of his eyes and socks), Boylan incarnates the modern ideal of the dandy. The dandy is meticulous in his dress and can easily charm women while remaining himself immune to their charm (Boucher 363); Boylan, for his part, is probably Dublin’s most notorious lady-killer, and aspires to play this playboy role to the full. He advertises himself not only by his apparel but also by carrying between his lips a flower he takes from the shopgirl at Thornton’s after he has briefly flirted with her. Perhaps not incidentally, his self-conscious womanizing ways are punctuated and counterpointed in “Wandering Rocks” by “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” a popular song about a desirable working woman that serves as the “theme” of Boylan’s promenade (as well as of a sporting event held at Trinity College). The significance of this song has not escaped the attention of Zack Bowen, one of the most attentive readers or “auditors” of the music in Ulysses. He suggests that the song forms the center of “an elaborate and delicately interwoven tapestry of music based on the rivalry and usurpation themes” culminating in “a political allegory” (95). In this reading, Rose, the Yorkshire girl of the song, becomes the epitome of female characters who betray the male protagonists and, by extension, Ireland. As a woman who manipulates her husband and her former lovers, Rose anticipates Molly Bloom, who is fought over by several lovers, including her husband and, by the far the most formidable 164 Yu-chen Lin combatant, Blazes Boylan. In “Circe,” Rose provokes Stephen’s oedipal aggression when this song is played in Bella Cohen’s brothel, accompanied by the patrons’ wild dancing; the latter becomes a “[d]ance of death” (U 15.4139) triggering Stephen’s confrontation with the ghost of his dead mother and a choir of confessors singing a hymn to the Virgin. Within the logic of compression and displacement that rules this episode, Rose becomes a synthesis of May Dedalus and the Holy Mother Church, whose oppressive presence Stephen expels by wielding his ashplant at the chandelier. Finally, Rose is also conflated with Cissy Caffrey, an Irish girl emerging in this context as a prostitute who privileges Privates Carr and Compton over Stephen, allegorically a suitor of Ireland (Bowen 92–95). Sensitive to the song’s figurative bearing on the central themes of Ulysses, Bowen’s reading nonetheless elides its materialistic particulars, which are so historically gender-specific and yet self-contradictory that they call attention to its underlying ideology. In this regard Andrew Gibson’s discussion, in Joyce’s Revenge, of Joyce’s decolonizing gender politics is inspiring even if Gibson is silent about this particular lyric. In contrast to current postcolonial Joyce studies, which largely focus on Joyce’s place within the domain of Irish nationalism, Gibson takes into consideration English cultural nationalism in order to explore how Joyce exacts his revenge on the empire in Ulysses. This often-neglected phase of English culture originated, on the one hand, from the empire’s anxiety over the loss of its economic supremacy, under the pressure of international competition, during the period 1880–1920, and on the other hand from its apprehension about its stability under the threat of a democratic economy and popular culture. In this crisis the English people looked to cultural institutions—guardians of national character—for a response to the demand for renewed leadership. This explains why the question of the “English spirit” was, in the early twentieth century (Gibson 8–13), a preoccupation of English cultural institutions, which relentlessly promoted an ethic of “national fitness” as the cornerstone of “national efficiency.” Such an ethic, in turn, builds on a domestic ideology that entails the virtues of “motherhood, domesticity, and self-sacrifice” (Gibson 131), leading to the appropriation of women’s labor. Pursuing Gibson’s line of argument, I would suggest that, more than a gendered figure of internecine betrayal, Rose is deployed as an ideal woman in order to celebrate the English spirit...

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