{"id":3332,"date":"2025-07-26T09:22:52","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T09:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joycefoundation.ch\/?page_id=3332"},"modified":"2025-08-16T09:27:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T09:27:14","slug":"women-and-joyce","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/joycefoundation.ch\/de\/james-joyce\/women-and-joyce\/","title":{"rendered":"Frauen und Joyce"},"content":{"rendered":"
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James Joyce’s career illustrates that the stereotype of the ‘solitary genius’ is just that: a massively oversimplified view of the process of artistic creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patronage and Modernist Networks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the men who influenced Joyce’s career in important ways were the poets W. B. Yeats<\/strong> and, even more crucially, Ezra Pound<\/strong>. Together with Pound, Yeats was instrumental, for example, in securing a British government stipend for Joyce in 1915, during one of the latter’s stays in Zurich<\/a>. Pound, on his part, helped Joyce find magazines that were willing to serialize two of his works: Ein Portr\u00e4t des K\u00fcnstlers als junger Mann<\/a> <\/em>in the London-based journal The Egoist<\/em>, and Ulysses<\/a> <\/em>in The Little Review<\/em>, which was published in New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crucially, however, both of these journals were publishing venues founded, financed, and edited by women. The Egoist <\/em>had been founded by Dora Marsden<\/strong> \u2013 and Harriet Shaw Weaver <\/strong>was not only the journal’s main financial backer, but would also go on to become Joyce’s most important patron. The Little Review<\/em>, meanwhile, was the joint project of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap<\/strong>, who were among the many lesbians who made essential contributions to modernist culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women as Publishers \u2013 and Joyce’s Attitudes Toward Women<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, however, not only as publishers of journals that women contributed to Joyce’s career. Most crucially, Sylvia Beach<\/strong> \u2013 an American who owned the English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company in Paris \u2013 offered to publish Ulysses<\/a> <\/em>for Joyce, at a time when the book could not be published anywhere in the Anglophone world due to a 1921 obscenity trial<\/a> that had forced Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap to cease the serial publication of Joyce’s novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the importance of women for Joyce’s career is beyond dispute, his views as reflected in his life and works are more controversial. On the one hand, Joyce’s fictional women<\/strong> transcended the conventional binary of the pure ‘Angel in the House’ who was pitched against the wayward, sexually fallen woman; Molly Bloom, for example, is not only a psychologically complex character, but also gets the final word in Ulysses<\/a><\/em>, in the famous Penelope chapter that ends Joyce’s novel. On the other hand, Joyce’s treatment of real-life women like Marthe Fleischmann<\/strong> or his depiction of some female characters (e.g. the unnamed young woman desired by the narrator of Giacomo Joyce<\/a><\/em>) can certainly be considered misogynist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These latter, problematic facets makes it even more essential to acknowledge that, without his life-long partner Nora Barnacle<\/strong> and countless other women, James Joyce would not have become the modernist icon that he is today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further Information & Ressources<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n