The Double Life of Issy Earwicker: Victorian Values in the Mirror of “Finnegans Wake” by Christian Hein (review)

Finnegans Wake, a work notoriously difficult to read, also presents challenges to critics who wish to write about it. Whereas the best criticism moves seamlessly between the big-picture arguments and local details, demonstrating how macro-theories play out at the micro-level or discerning overarching systems from particulars, Finnegans Wake can have the effect of frustrating that movement, trapping critics in the arcana of disparate passages or confining them to broad gestures when examining the book.

One reason a work like John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark: “Finnegans Wake” stands up so well after twenty-two years is that it combines a systemic argument that is novel, persuasive, and useful with local readings that illuminate the text and provide an example of how to study other passages not contemplated in his book.¹ Bishop’s management of his text’s narrative allows readers to feel what they should experience when reading a critical book: a sense of connection between ideas, as well as a sense that the author is in control of his prose.

This cannot be said for Christian Hein’s new The Double Life of Issy Earwicker: Victorian Values in the Mirror of “Finnegans Wake.” While the premise of the text is compelling—Hein examines Issy’s “function as parodic double of Victorian women” whose mirror-double reflects “the self-confident and independent way of life of emancipated modern women at the beginning of the twentieth century”—the book lacks the coherence and narrative energy to generate a feeling that one has read some thing, as opposed to a collection of loosely related thoughts on a theme (15-16). It also lacks an index and, I fear, a copy editor, which adds to the frustration of reading the work.

Hein has chapters on Victorian morality; Issy’s multiple personalities and schizophrenia; mirror-images; Gerty MacDowell; two set-pieces from Finnegans Wake (Kersse the Tailor and the Norwegian Captain, and Tristan and Iseult); and, finally, mothers and daughters. The early chapters are compendia of information about their respective topics, loosely linked to the argument of the book, which is that Issy is a Victorian representation but her mirror-double, Pepette, is a modern woman. Later chapters delve into readings of particular episodes in Finnegans Wake. Hein’s contention, simplistically to my mind, asserts that “Issy is abiding to [sic] the law of the fathers whereas Pepette rejects it” (167). This implies that Issy and Pepette are two utterly unrelated characters rather than the symbiotic mirror-twins of whom Joyce writes. That interconnectedness might allow Hein to explore Issy’s agency in creating her double, enabling a less oppositional view of female sexuality (unavailable to married women because they are repressed; abundant in women who refuse the bourgeois Victorian moral system) and creating the possibility of seeing how “respectable” Victorian and modern women made space for their erotic lives. To choose just the simplest example in Joyce, Molly Bloom is both respectably married and able to indulge her erotic fantasies, at least at 4:00 p.m. and later while her husband slumbers. Her libidinal life is complex—not a basic choice between chaste, passionless marriage or sexual libertinism, as shown by that first time she says “[y]es” (U 18.1609). Joyce refuses to assume a simple acceptance or rejection of conventional moral codes for any of his female characters, and that is certainly true of Issy.

Hein’s chapter comparing Gerty and Issy displays the frustrating missed opportunities of his book. Titled “Issy and Gerty MacDowell as Parodic Doubles of Idealized Role Models for Victorian Women,” the chapter assumes that Gerty “represents the typical daughter of financially well-off middle class parents” (98). After two paragraphs and two block-quotations, Gerty disappears from the chapter, appearing later not as a subject of extended analysis but rather as a side note...