Stephen thinks of his mother's "shapely fingernails reddened
by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts."
Head lice were a widespread problem for Dublin’s poor. The
Joyce family’s periodic moves northward, from the comfortable
suburbs south of Dublin into poorer and poorer neighborhoods,
landed them in the midst of this urban plague.
In A Portrait of the Artist and again in Ulysses,
Stephen meditates on how physical affliction produces a
spiritual humbling. The final chapter of A Portrait
begins with a representation of the family’s poverty during
Stephen’s university years. Later, it shows how lice on his
body make him doubt the value of his rarified thoughts:
A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and,
putting his thumb and forefinger deftly beneath his loose
collar, he caught it. He rolled its body, tender yet brittle
as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger for an instant
before he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or
die. There came to his mind a curious phrase from Cornelius a
Lapide which said that the lice born of human sweat were not
created by God with the other animals on the sixth day. But
the tickling of the skin of his neck made his mind raw and
red. The life of his body, illclad, illfed, louseeaten, made
him close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair: and in the
darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies of lice falling from
the air and turning often as they fell. . . . His mind bred
vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of
sloth (254).
Robert Burns’ poem about a louse explores similar thoughts about
how the louse-infested body can humble the mind’s pretensions.
