To Go and Sin Once More: Confession and Joyce's ‘Nausicaa’ Episode

What is it about?

The Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941) was a well-known critic of the Roman Catholic church. But though he rejected the fundamental beliefs and practices of this religious institution, he understood it thoroughly and recognized the central influence it wielded on the Irish psyche. In his best known work, Ulysses (1922), the foundational place of Catholic thought and practice is seen in every Catholic character, and in one of the book’s more surprising examples, twenty-something Gerty MacDowell uses Catholic teaching to talk herself through a sexually provocative display for the lascivious “hero” of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. In particular, the Catholic sacrament of penance—popularly known as “confession”—promotes the belief that one can be absolved of one’s sins, and it’s among the ideas Gerty deploys to convince herself that everything is OK.

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Why is it important?

Gerty's narrative is much analyzed by Joyce scholars, but this reading takes it from a different angle, one which complicates standard readings without completely contradicting them. The analysis illustrates well the subtlety with which Joyce was able to bring so many different modes of thought to bear on deceptively simple scenes.