“Hugon come erindwards”: Finnegans Wake and Ireland’s Huguenots

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the rich variety of allusions to the Huguenots in Finnegans Wake, and considers the reasons for Joyce’s interest in this group of Protestant émigrés. Joyce makes several references to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the apotheosis of Huguenot persecution at the hands of the French Catholics, and he draws analogy between their experience and that of other groups of heretics and dissenters. Joyce celebrates the social, commercial, and cultural impact made by the migrants and their descendants, which was disproportionately great for the size of the diaspora. I argue that there are several reasons for Joyce’s engagement with the Huguenots. Their story of sectarian persecution, dispossession, and exile recalls the Irish Catholic experience, but it offers balance to the narrative of Catholic victimhood in depicting a Protestant group that suffered comparable oppression. Most importantly, the remarkable success with which the Huguenots integrated into Irish society offers a positive model for the plurality that Joyce espoused throughout his writing career, culminating in his final work.

KEYWORDS:

• James Joyce
• Finnegans Wake
• Huguenots

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Hylton, Unlikely Haven, 8. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. England, Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, 42–6. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

3. Pittion, “The French Protestants and the Edict of Nantes (1549–1685),” 41.

4. Ludington, “Huguenots in Irish History,” 2.

5. Murtagh, “Huguenot involvement in the Jacobite War,” 225–6. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

6. Ó Ciardha, “Boisselau, Alexandre,” 630.

7. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 223–7.

8. Kelly, “Lord Galway and the PenalLlaws,” 239–54.

9. Hylton, Settlement at Portarlington, 301.

10. Lee, Huguenot Settlements in Ireland, 172.

11. Hylton, Settlement at Portarlington, 309–11.

12. Crookshank, “A New History of Ireland,” 1740-1850, 505–6.

13. Dickson, Dublin, 113. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

14. McCarthy, “Marsh, Narcissus,” 369–72.

15. Simms, “Establishment of Protestant Ascendancy,” 8–9.

16. Lunney, “Dictionary of Irish Biography,” 435.

17. Lunney, “Dictionary of Irish Biography,” 433–4. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

18. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer.

19. Alphandery, “Albigenses,” 505–6.

20. Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin, 138.

21. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 491.

22. Fawkes, Dion Boucicault, 4–11.

23. McCormack, Sheridan le Fanu and Victorian Ireland, 1.

24. Ibid., 138.

25. Maume, “Le Fanu, Joseph Thomas Sheridan,” 417–9.

26. Joyce, ”Island of Saints and Sages,” 118–9.

27. Nolan, “Miss Dubedat and “Les Huguenots”,” 205–14.

28. McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, 350. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

29. Dunne, Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798, 247–64.

30. Earwicker’s multiple identities also include Dick Whittington, who came to town to make his fortune, and the Duke of Wellington, both a Dubliner and a hero of the Empire.

31. Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent, 9–17.

32. McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland, 15.

33. Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 408–10.

34. See Shovlin, Journey Westward, 70–78; and Owens, Before Daybreak: “After the Race”, 289.

35. Meyerbeer, “Les Huguenots”, 8.

36. Bowker, James Joyce: A Biography, 392–3.

37. Arnold and Ashley, “Meyerbeer, Giacomo,” 772–3.

38. Smiles. The Huguenots in England and Ireland, 299.

39. Joyce depicts the four provinces repeatedly in Finnegans Wake, usually in the order Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught. Here, Strangford Lough represents Ulster, Cork and Kerry Munster, the “leperties’ laddos” Leinster, and Sligo represents Connaught.

40. The “cracka dvine” alludes to Swift, the “mad cleric”, and the “esthers”, Swift’s young friends Stella and Vanessa, make one of their many Wake appearances here; see McHugh, 212.

41. James Clarence Mangan penned the aphorism “Maturin, Maturin, what a strange hat you’re in”; see McHugh, 335.

42. Boucicault, Arrah-na-Pogue.

43. Boucicault, The Shaughran, 22–3.

44. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Davin, Stephen’s friend, tries to persuade him to learn Irish and to support the nationalist cause. Stephen responds: “No honourable and sincere man…has given up to you his life and his youth and affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another”; see Portrait of the Artist, 170.

45. Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, 165.

46. Jackson and Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, 67–78.

47. Ibid., 70–72.

48. Owens, James Joyce’s Painful Case, 65.

49. Henry John Heinz, the American processed food magnate, coined the famous slogan, “57 varieties”, in 1892: see Alberts, The Good Provider, 130.

50. Anonymous, Portarlington and the Huguenots.

51. McManus, So This is Dublin!, 43, 63, 71.

52. Joyce, Letters I.

53. Wallace, The Life of Henry Laurens, 4.

54. Cullen, “Merchant networks of W. Europe,” 129–30.