Fierce Feminism in Finnegans Wake

ELT 40:3 1997 occasionally given to high wit, and definitely contributes several engaging and provocative essays to the field. Christy L. Burns ________________ College of William & Mary Fierce Feminism in Finnegans Wake Sheldon Brivic. Joyce's Waking Women: An Introduction to "Finnegans Wake". Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xiii + 162 pp. Cloth $45.50 Paper $17.95 IN JOYCE'S WAKING WOMEN, Sheldon Brivic focuses feminist issues through the lens of Lacanian theory to read Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) as feminist heroine with strong ties to colonized peoples, who, by the end οι Finnegans Wake, is moving beyond male-female polarity and, in doing so, is escaping patriarchy. By this act, ALP joins Joyce's other "waking women"—Gretta Conroy, Bertha Rowan and Molly Bloom—in resisting male domination. One of her and her daughter Issy's techniques for doing an end-run around patriarchy, according to Brivic, is to deconstruct hierarchies. Brivic places Joyce on a list of men who "deserve a place in the history of feminism" that includes Sophocles, John Webster, John Stuart Mill, Henrik Ibsen, and Jacques Lacan, noting that although each had "serious limits in his views of women," these writers all contributed to modifying cultural expectations about women. Joyce's contributions involve critiquing patriarchy through his evocation of the psychologies of men and women, representing the historical and cultural conditions to which women have been subjected, and helping establish the concept of "feminine language" by his "developing styles that broke down masculine logical structures and released feminine flow." Brivic marks the limitations in Joyce's vision of gender relations in Finnegans Wake in the "salaciousness" with which Issy is presented as well as the "sentimentality " associated with Anna. Claiming that the Wake builds analogies between the conditions of women and colonized peoples, Brivic notes the frequent association of ALP with the Third World. He identifies her as "predominantly AfroIrish " and wants to show that "Anna's non-Western side is a leading function, crucial to what she stands for." He sees his text as serving to introduce readers to Finnegans Wake and therefore chose to keep its length at a minimum in order to facilitate that process. Following the introductory chapter, in which Brivic lays out some of the complexities involved in Joyce's relationship to women, chapters two through four 358 BOOK REVIEWS develop ALP's ties to the Third World; chapters five through seven explore ALP as feminist heroine. A brief conclusion completes the text. Two of these chapters I found especially strong: five, "Going to the Chapel," and six, "The Terror and Pity of Love." In the fifth chapter, Brivic explores how love and marriage operate in Finnegans Wake; in the sixth, he uses Lacanian ideas to develop an economy of female and male consciousness. While a number of Joycean feminist scholars have surveyed Joyce's works with regard to feminist concerns, Brivic's is the first book to focus on the Wake in order to demonstrate its feminism, a "fierce" feminism at that. Noting that most of Joyce's writings end "by focusing on a woman's resistance," Brivic differentiates ALP's resistance from that of other Joycean women resistors by delineating her efforts as rebellious heroine to move beyond the position of female opposing male, a position that, because oppositional, cannot resolve the binary situation such a polarity creates. Though Brivic admits that ALP's success in achieving this position is incomplete, he believes that Joyce wrote the Wake in such a way that each time we reread the text, we experience ALP as moving closer and closer to her goal. Thus, Brivic implies for the Wake's structure a spiral rather than a circular pattern. While Brivic does not claim that feminism is the Wake's primary orientation, he believes that "radical feminism in the Wake forms an elaborate and carefully articulated system." I found several other claims Brivic makes for the Wake's feminism particularly provocative, including his observation that though usually submerged, female narrative is present in the gaps of male discourse. Brivic observes that while male narrative "enacts conflict and decline," female narrative "may be seen as showing discovery and development that proceed through the...