“Dirty Cleans”: Laundry in Ulysses

This essay considers the representation of laundry in Ulysses. While laundry in “Clay” and Finnegans Wake has attracted extensive scholarly attention, its suggestive presence in Ulysses has mostly been overlooked. There is a discussion here of the nature and variety of Catholic and Protestant laundries in Dublin at the start of the twentieth century. Such laundries required “fallen” women to wash clothes and associated the work of laundry with atonement for perceived sexual misdeeds. In addition to this, laundry was also an economic necessity in the city at the time, since most homes lacked the capacity for people to be able to wash their own clothes. As such, the essay considers commercial and charitable laundries, as well as those women in Joyce’s fiction who complete washing in a self-employed capacity. In his depiction of washing, Joyce variously skirts around notions of sinful behavior while making visible the overlooked labor of women. Drawing on examples from “Calypso,” “Wandering Rocks,” “Nausicaa,” “Circe,” “Eumaeus,” and “Penelope” and on work by Frances Finnegan, Maria Luddy, and Mary Douglas, this essay illustrates Joyce’s sustained interest in the activity and shows what it can reveal about Joyce’s attitude to sexuality, gender, and labor.