Building the Foundation: Women in the IJJF

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 12, Summer 2001© 2001 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945), 3. 2 Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Building the Foundation: Women in the IJJF KAREN R. LAWRENCE Gertrude Stein begins her book Wars I have Seen by saying, “I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember. To begin with I was born, that I do not remember but I was told about it quite often. . . .”1 I have heard about the early days of the Joyce world only through stories, mostly from friends who were there at the time when the International James Joyce Foundation was formed. I had not yet read Joyce in 1967 when Tom Staley, Fritz Senn, Murray Beja and Berni Benstock, along with others , were inspired to create a foundation that sponsored an international symposium in European cities in which Joyce lived at some point in his life. A few women attended the first Dublin symposium. However, since my “assignment” is to offer a personal recounting of women and feminism in Joyce studies and my own experience as President of the Foundation from 1990 –96, I will take a short cut through the prehistory of my acquaintance with Joyceans and cite the introduction to Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of “Finnegans Wake” by Margaret C. Solomon, published in 1969.2 Margaret Solomon was one of the few women listed in the program of the First International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin in 1967 and the Second in 1969. What struck me about Solomon’s introduction when I reread it recently was the following: the only critic whom Solomon mentions is Adaline Glasheen, the woman who helped launch Finnegans 164 building the ijjf 3 Modern Fiction Studies Vol. XV, no. 1 (Spring 1969). 4 Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Wake criticism in the early issues of A Wake Newslitter. In her introduction , Solomon does not make typical obeisance to her predecessors and excuses its absence by saying: “I hope Joycean critics will not be offended by my failure to mention, in many instances, the work others have done on particular passages. Scholarship on Finnegans Wake must progress through community labor, and I have been helped considerably by an exhaustive reading of all available critical material” (ix). I mention this not to suggest that Solomon failed to pay her “dues” to her colleagues (indeed, Berni Benstock’s work is prominently mentioned in a later chapter), but to suggest that the few early women Joyceans played a significant role for each other, particularly in what Solomon called the “sexplication” (viii) of Finnegans Wake. Glasheen was clearly an important colleague for Solomon in the endeavor she refers to as the “community labor” of exploring Finnegans Wake, a kind of labor that the Wake invited and in which women often excel. (It is interesting that much of the early work by women focused on the Wake or Dubliners rather than Ulysses and A Portrait.) The ratio of male to female critics of Joyce was overwhelming. In a 1969 Modern Fiction Studies special issue on Joyce, all the contributors were men, and the Selected Checklist of Joyce criticism published that year included few women commentators among the hundreds listed: Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, Margaret Church, Maria Jolas , and Hélène Cixous among the most notable; two Catholic “sisters ” who wrote essays on ritual in Joyce and Joyce and Hopkins; and a few who discovered his work via other writers and discussed it in essays on “Joyce and . . .”—Proust, Ibsen, Beckett, and the French symbolists.3 The collection, Women in Joyce, edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless in 1982 reflected some of the tensions in the first wave of feminist attention to Joyce, which tended to focus on Joyce’s fictional representations of and personal relationships with women.4 Many women Joyceans, like some Marxist Joyceans, felt a need to justify the critical attention and sympathy they lavished on him. Women in Joyce is symptomatic of a certain critical moment...