As if in response to Stephen's salvo about God being a shout in the street,
which cannot possibly make any sense to him, Deasy's
argumentative tirade trails off into irrelevancy and sheer
unintelligibility. He scores a glancing ad hominem
blow: "I am happier than you are." But then he veers into
thoughts of sexual sin: "We have committed many errors and
many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a
woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway
wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A
faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here,
MacMurrough's wife and her leman, O'Rourke, prince of Breffni.
A woman too brought Parnell low." What is one to make of all
the misogyny? One possibility is that there has been adultery
in Deasy's marital past.
In addition to Eve, who tempted Adam to transgress God's
command and thereby "brought sin into the world,"
Deasy mentions "Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus,"
whose adulterous elopement with Paris occasioned the long and
catastrophic Trojan War. Stuart Gilbert argues that this
reference to ancient Greek history makes Deasy like Nestor in
the Odyssey, since Nestor tells Telemachus about the
adulterous Clytemnestra's murderous reception of her husband.
Two more references to adultery follow. Another "faithless
wife" who caused disaster was Devorgilla, the
spouse of "O'Rourke, prince of Breffni,"
whose adulterous elopement with Diarmait "MacMurrough,"
the king of Leinster, contributed to MacMurrough's deposition
and subsequent conspiracy with the English king Henry II to
launch the first Anglo-Saxon invasion of Ireland, and thus "first
brought the strangers to
our shores here." Thornton observes that Deasy has
managed to switch the two men, turning MacMurrough into the
husband and O'Rourke into the lover: Deasy gets his facts
wrong once more.
But this domestic history seems to be a staple of Irish
political mythology. In Cyclops, the Citizen makes
the same claim about how the "strangers" came to Ireland: "Our
own fault. We let them come in. We brought them in. The
adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here.
. . . A dishonoured wife, . . . that's what's the cause of
all our misfortunes." A third faithless wife,
Katherine O'Shea, "brought Parnell low" when
their adulterous affair was discovered.
Deasy's list of female sinners makes an odd lead-in to his
assertion that "we" have committed "Many errors, many
failures but
not the one sin," which seems to
reprise his claim that the Jews "sinned
against the light." And it does not contribute
intelligibly to the exchanges he has been having with Stephen
about Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Tories, and Fenians.
It may, however, make some sense in terms of Deasy's personal
life. In Aeolus Myles Crawford tells Stephen that he
knows Deasy, "and I knew his wife too. The
bloodiest old tartar God ever made. By Jesus, she
had the foot and mouth
disease and no mistake! The night she threw the soup in
the waiter's face in the Star and Garter. Oho!" After
recalling Deasy's misogynistic catalogue, Stephen asks the
editor whether Deasy is a widower. Crawford replies, "Ay, a
grass one," i.e. a man separated from his wife.
