"DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN" is often attributed to Sydney
Owenson, Lady Morgan (ca. 1781-1859), an Irish socialite and
writer best known for The Wild Irish Girl (1806). In a
survey of sources of the expression on JJON, John
Simpson notes that evidence shows "it arose within Lady
Morgan’s circle or comparable aristocratic circles in Britain,
but does not confirm that Lady Morgan is herself responsible
for it." Linguistic precursors ("Dear, dirty...Scotland,"
"dear Dublin," "dirty Dublin," "dear, droll, dirty Fabulist,"
"dear little Dublin," "dear little Ireland") extend far back
into the 18th century, and in the 1820s similar phrases
(including the "dear dirty" pairing) circulated in Lady
Morgan's upper-class circles. In her Memoirs she wrote
that she returned to "our own dear but dirty little home" in
Dublin in 1829 after traveling abroad. In the 1830s, the "dear
dirty" pairing of adjectives gained wide currency and was
sometimes applied to Dublin. In the 1840s and 50s "dear, dirty
Dublin" became a common expression.
Finally the origins of the phrase are less important than the
ambivalence conveyed in it. In her Memoirs Lady
Morgan called Dublin "unfortunate," "a dreary desert occupied
only by loathsome beggars," the "Wretched" capital of
"wretched Ireland." She loved her native city but found its
poverty and filth revolting. This mix of attitudes is
maintained in Aeolus. The newspaper-like headline
conveys a syrupy tone of sentimental tenderness toward the
Hibernian metropolis: our dear home may be a bit tawdry, but
we all love it. Stephen's story, however, draws on the dirty
parts. Two over-the-hill, overweight, and half-infirm women
from a really dismal area in the Liberties trudge into the
commercial heart of Dublin, buy some cheap food, shell out
some hard-earned pennies for admission to Nelson's imperial
monument, wheeze their way up the 168 stone stairs inside
while piously invoking God and the Blessed Virgin, and
collapse on the viewing platform, dribbling plum juice from
the corners of their mouths and spitting seeds onto the street
below while evidently entertaining some sexual fantasies in
the presence of "the onehandled adulterer."
There is nothing particularly "dear" about this portrait.
James Joyce took his first small step toward epic artistic
accomplishment when he began recording little vignettes of
Dublin life that he called epiphanies or epicleti. The
religious language did not imply a Symbolist transformation of
ordinary experience. It indicated only flashes of revelatory
insight into the perfectly ordinary human realities that
interested Joyce. By 1906 he had expanded these little
glimpses of mundane human life into the stories he called "Dubliners"––one
of the greatest short story collections ever––and the
manuscript was accepted for publication by London publisher
Grant Richards. But Richards got cold feet and did not consent
to publish the stories until 1914. Joyce's letter of protest
to the weak-kneed Richards suggests that the miserable
tawdriness of "dirty Dublin" was at the heart of the
standoff:
It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits
and old weeds and offal hangs round my
stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course
of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from
having one good look at themselves in my nicely-polished looking-glass.
Dubliners paints a series of portraits of people
fatally mired in dead-end lives, paralyzed by poverty, piety,
sexism, alcoholism, colonialism, romanticism, asceticism, and
general inertia. Stephen's story of the two aged virgins is a
little more cheerful, but it does not feel out of place among
these bleak pictures of human futility. Indeed, it seems to be
partly informed by the reminiscence of another couple he saw
walking on the beach in Proteus, a gypsy woman and her
pimp plying their dismal trade in the same Blackpitts area
where Stephen places the two old women's home: "Damp night
reeking of hungry dough. Against the wall. Face glistening
tallow under her fustian shawl. Frantic hearts." His
willingness to try out these epiphanic scene-paintings as a
pathway to fictional creation ("On now. Dare it. Let there
be life") suggests that he is ready to leave behind his
fairly sterile
career as a poet and turn toward the writing of prose
fiction.
In Joyce's case this led to the writing of Dubliners,
and perhaps Stephen will eventually write some stories
himself. But what readers get in his little Parable
of the Plums is equally evocative of the methods
of the great novel that came next. Ulysses contains
all the bleak realities and ruined lives found in Dubliners,
but it shows them through the lenses of choice, possibility,
affirmation, and hope. It is a book of what the Professor
calls "prophetic vision": Stephen may become the artist
he aspires to be, the Blooms may find happiness in their
marriage, dark horses may win life's races, and Ireland may
find liberation from England. (This last prophetic prediction
proved true in 1922, the same year the novel was published.)
Stephen thinks, "I have a vision too," and if his tale
contains one it is to be found at the end, when the two women
behave in a sexually suggestive manner sprawled on their
petticoats looking up at the statue of the English conqueror.
This is truly parabolic––strange,
obscure, as resistant to easy interpretation as the most
baffling of Jesus's tales. But when the two women "lift up their
skirts" to Lord Nelson, one distinct possibility is that
readers should see them symbolically defying the British
empire by casting an apotropaic spell on its representative.
This kind of symbolism––perhaps not even remotely available to
the consciousness of the ordinary people walking the streets
of Dublin, but integral to the greater organization of the
book that gives them life––is all too typical of Ulysses.
If Stephen intends it, then he shows himself already capable
of writing a book greater than Dubliners. But first he
has "much, much to learn" about the city that can
provide a canvas for such cosmographic generation of meaning.
