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ABSTRACT
This article considers James Joyce’s representation of Irish dress, arguing that his ambivalent treatment of it accurately reflects his fractious relationship with the Irish Revival movement. The article begins with a discussion of the metaphor of performance and relates this to issues around “authenticity”. From here, it discusses Douglas Hyde’s thoughts on dress, as presented in “The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland”, contextualising these within a brief history of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Irish dress history, and recognising the important work of women in this. Assessing Joyce’s depictions of Irish dress, especially in “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Cyclops” and “Circe”, this article argues that Joyce sees Irish dress as a contingent and fragile cultural performance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1721-1734. Throughout Ulysses Bloom is sober and industrious, so the derogatory sense of the term, the stereotype of a lazy, drunk, and feckless Irishman, does not apply; when Joyce uses it as he does in “Circe”, the phrase suggests different to its usual meaning. Some readers have read the line as a compliment, though this is inconsistent with Lenehan’s criticism: Christy Burns claims that Bloom “is praised” by Paddy Leonard, and Alan Warren Friedman that Leonard “acclaim[s]” Bloom as a stage Irishman (Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1734; Burns, Gestural Politics, 43; Friedman, Party Pieces, 99). Other readers, however, see the comment as an insult, though this is inconsistent with Hoppy Holohan’s apparent praise: Julieann Ulin notes that Bloom is “rejected” by Leonard (Ulin, “Famished Ghosts,” 54). There is surely some irony in a character named Paddy being the one to deliver this verdict, and doing so while on a stage himself. Interpretation of the line also partly depends on how one reads the relationship between Joyce and Dion Boucicault, the latter widely credited with changing – improving – the representation of the Irish on stage. Neither Burns nor Friedman explicitly mentions Boucicault in their assessments of the line. The Stage Irishman was especially popular on the theatre and music hall stages throughout the nineteenth century: Paddy Leonard’s comment is made moments after Bloom performs a music hall sketch “with rollicking humour”. Boucicault’s influence is apparent in several places in Joyce’s work: he is named explicitly in “Lestrygonians” (8.601). Stephen’s mother rises through a floorboard and the man in the macintosh springs up from a trapdoor (15.4157, 15.1558), moments directly lifted from Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers (1852); Joyce reuses this sketch in Finnegans Wake (“cometh up as a trapadour,” 224.25).
2. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1490, 15.1521 (both original italics).
3. Though “galoshes” is the conventional spelling, I have stuck to Joyce’s idiosyncratic spelling here.
4. Joyce, Ulysses, 13.931, 15.3441.
5. Joyce, Ulysses, 1.113.
6. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.2249-50 (original italics).
7. Kershner, “ReOrienting Joyce,” 260.
8. Said, Orientalism, 177.
9. Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism, 11.
10. Hyde, “The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland,” 157–8.
11. Huck, “Clothes make the Irish,” 280.
12. Jaster, “Out of All Frame and Good Fashion,” 44–57.
13. Daly, Social and Economic History, 63; for an economic history of Irish linen production see Bielenberg, chapter one.
14. Daly, Social and Economic History, 72.
15. Bielenberg, Ireland and the Industrial Revolution, 3.
16. See note 14 above.
17. Daly, Dublin: The Deposed Capital, 42.
18. The field of Irish dress history is a small one. The earliest recognised work is Cooper Walker, An Historical Essay on the Dress of the Irish (1788). Following this, there was a long gap in scholarly work in the field until McClintock’s Old Irish and Highland Dress. Since the 1950s, when the Irish fashion industry began to expand due to the international success of Sybil Connolly, work in the scholarly field also increased. See de Cléir, “Creativity in the Margins,” 201–224; Chapter One in McCrum, Fabrics and Form; Dunlevy, Dress in Ireland. Newspapers can be used as a guide to dress history, but they can also be unreliable. Little historical dress has survived, because fabrics decay with time, though a few outfits have been recovered from the bogs.
19. Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1240–57.
20. Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” 119, 125.
21. “The Irish Industrial Exhibition,” 135.
22. Ibid.,139.
23. Ibid., 139–40.
24. Ibid., 143.
25. Ibid., 143.
26. Síle de Cléir provides a good summary of the CDB and the prominent women involved in promoting clothes made from these fabrics. See de Cléir, “Creativity in the Margins,” 204–6. Chapter four of Bourke’s Husbandry to Housewifery considers in detail the rise and decline of the home industries, with an emphasis on textiles. The home industries were in Donegal, Cork, Limerick, Wexford, Down, Monaghan, and Londonderry, which is to say, not Dublin. This is one reason why they are relatively absent from Ulysses; compounding this, most of this activity took place in the 1880s, two decades before the novel is set.
27. Helland, British and Irish Home Arts and Industries, 1880–1914. See also Ward “Dress and National Identity,” 193–212, for case studies of the women involved in these projects.
28. Joyce, Ulysses, 9.569.
29. Some can be seen in this image, dated 1880–1900, by zooming in: http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000251024 (accessed 15 March 2017).
30. Barry, “Aran of the Saints,” 490.
31. Haddon and Browne, “The Ethnography of the Aran Islands,” 814.
32. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/136631?redirectedFrom=pampootie#eid accessed 15 March 2017.
33. Synge, The Aran Islands, 66, 79.
34. Ibid., 14.
35. Ibid., 15, 85.
36. See, for example, Barry, “Aran of the Saints,” 490; and Blackman, “Colouring the Claddagh,” 213–235.
37. Joyce, Ulysses, 9.1155.
38. Joyce, Ulysses, 12.172; Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 417.12; and Joyce, Ulysses, 14.1212.
39. Fogarty, “Ghostly Intertexts,” 232–5.
40. Lecossois, “Pampooties and Keening,” 142–4.
41. Holloway, 52.
42. Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism, 12.
43. A garment more commonly discussed in reference to Playboy is of course the “shift”, the mention of this garment considered by many to be the precipitating factor of the riots. However, the significance of the shift specifically within the play’s controversy has been overstated.
44. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1882; and Joyce, Ulysses, 15.3305 (both original italics).
45. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.2178; Platt, “Ulysses 15 and the Irish Literary Theatre,” 47; see Pinkerton, “The Highland Kilt and the Old Irish Dress,” for the origination of feile beg, 321.
46. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1740; and Synge, 15.
47. Joyce, “The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran,” 204.
48. Joyce, Ulysses, 16.6555-6.
49. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1805, 15.1804-10.
50. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1355.
51. Carden, “Cable Crossings,” 262; and de Cléir, “Creativity in the Margins,” 206.
52. Joyce visited the Abbey on 8 September 1909, just six months after the death of Synge in March that year. Of his visit, Joseph Holloway recalled “He has translated Synge’s play Riders to the Sea for the love of the thing […] I asked him how he liked the acting of the company, and he said, ‘Well’”. Holloway, Abbey Theatre, 130–1.
53. Carden, “Cable Crossings:,” 261.
54. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1960-2 (original italics).
55. Platt, “Ulysses 15 and the Irish Literary Theatre,” 54.
56. Joyce, Ulysses, 12.166-7.
57. Joyce, Ulysses, 16.1637.
58. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire, 241.
59. Joyce, Ulysses, 16.1638.
60. Joyce, Ulysses, 12.168-205.
61. Joyce, A Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland, especially “Dress and Costume”.
62. Joyce, A Smaller Social History of Ireland, 386, 394.
63. Berry, “Costume in Ancient Ireland,” 42.
64. Quoted in Berry, “Costume in Ancient Ireland,” 44.
65. MacAdam, “Ancient Leather Cloak,” 298.
66. Pinkerton, “The Highland Kilt and the Old Irish Dress,” 317–8.
67. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 151.
68. Dublin Historic Industry Database, presented to Geological Survey of Ireland, January 2011, 6.
69. Berry, “Costume in Ancient Ireland,” 40.
70. Berry, “Costume in Ancient Ireland,” 41; see also MacAdam, “Ancient Leather Cloak,” 293.
71. Reports on the origin of the kilt vary. Some, like Kiberd, claim it was invented by an English tailor (Kiberd, 151; Pinkerton, “The Highland Kilt and the Old Irish Dress,” 316). Others claimed that the kilt was the invention “of the Highland Irish, and should be just left to them” (Sigma, “Irish Costume,” 4). See also Hayes-McCoy, “Irish Dress and Irish Pictures,” 304.
72. Pinkerton, “The Highland Kilt and the Old Irish Dress,” 320 (original italics).
73. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, 96–112; and Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 107–26.
74. As if to stress the performative superficiality of the Citizen’s outfit, Joyce uses the same techniques as he does in his description of Gerty MacDowell’s outfit. Both descriptions feature an almost bewildering amount of detail and information regarding textures, fabrics, and production techniques. This excess also includes colour: as Gerty wears “electric” and “eggblue” shades, so the Citizen opts for “lichen” purple; both also have their legs “encased” in garments. Making the artificiality of the Citizen’s get up explicit, Joyce ends by noting his cudgel “rudely fashioned” from stone, the equivalent, surely, to Gerty’s “slightly shopsoiled” fabric.
75. Joyce, Ulysses, 12.173-199.
76. Curran, United Irishman, 19 November 1904. Cited in Bourke, 138.
77. The concept of the stage Irishwoman has attracted far less critical commentary than the stage Irishman, however see especially: Kibler, “The Stage Irishwoman,” 5–30 and Chapter Five of Mooney, Irish stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905.
78. Kibler, “The Stage Irishwoman,” 7.
79. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, 167.
80. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 152.
81. Osteen, “Seeking Renewal,” 719.
82. Richards, The commodity culture of Victorian England, 240. See also Chapter One of Strachan and Nally, Advertising, Literature and Print Culture.
83. Joyce, Dubliners, 136.
84. Brady, Dublin through Space and Time, 314.
85. Liddy, Dublin be Proud, 124.
86. Rains, Commodity culture and social class, 97.
87. Ibid..
88. Advertisement, Irish Times, 14 September 1903, 3.
89. See note 86 above.
90. For more on this, see Ward, “Dress and National Identity,” 193–212, especially 202.
91. Joyce, Dubliners, 187.
92. Eide, “Gender & Sexuality,” 80.
93. Morris, “The Tara Brooch,” 22.
94. Berry, “Costume in Ancient Ireland,” 40.
95. Panko, “Curating the Colony,” 360.
96. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1707-8.
97. Mooney, Irish stereotypes in Vaudeville, 132.