"A Gracecup Fulled of Bitterness": Sexuality and Anxiety in Finnegans Wake III.4

Throughout Book III, Chapter 4 of Finnegans Wake—the penultimate chapter of Joyce's last book—Joyce uses references to the Biblical stories of Lot and Noah, and the myth of Tristan and Isolde, to set up the sexual dynamics of the chapter. This essay examines the connections of each of these stories of sexual transgression to the others and to the park incident. It also demonstrates how the chapter's bedroom scene is complicated by the husband's anxieties about incest and the wife's anxieties about pregnancy.