Having mused silently on "A crazy queen, old and jealous.
Kneel down before me," Stephen expands his list of masters: "And a third,
Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs." The crazy
old queen cannot be Victoria: she was dead by 1904, and
England has already been spoken for as a master. She is almost
certainly Ireland, in the ardently nationalistic person of the
Shan
Van Vocht.
In A Portrait of the Artist, when his friend Davin
says that "man's country comes first, Ireland first," Stephen
replies, "Do you know what Ireland is? Ireland is the old sow
that eats her farrow." He is not speaking only of his
countrymen's small-minded religious and cultural intolerance,
but of their complicity in subjugation: "My ancestors threw
off their language and took another, Stephen said. They
allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. . . . No
honourable and sincere man . . . has given up to you his life
and his youth and his 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."
In Circe the cannibalistic old sow and the jealous
old queen morph into "Old Gummy Granny," who
appears "seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast."
Stephen says, "Aha! I know you, gammer! Hamlet, revenge! The
old sow that eats her farrow!" Granny turns out to
be a demented religious patriot who urges Stephen to die a
martyr's death. With two murderous British soldiers
threatening him with bodily harm, she urges him to join in the
game: "(Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand.)
Remove him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and
Ireland will be free. (She prays.) O good God, take
him!"
In Ulysses as in A Portrait, Stephen
rejects the idea that he belongs to something called Ireland.
"Ireland," he says in Eumaeus, "must be important
because it belongs to me."
