Woman's hand

In Ithaca Bloom attributes Stephen's "collapse" in Circe to his having consumed too little food and too much alcohol, but Stephen blames it on "the reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both from two different points of observation, Sandycove and Dublin) at first no bigger than a woman's hand." The reference is to the cloud that both men saw covering the sun at about the same time early in the morning ("matutinal"). By the time represented in Oxen of the Sun this cloud, or a windborne successor, has covered the sky and unleashed a downpour, whose thunderclaps terrify Stephen by making him think of divine judgment. His reference to a woman's hand in Ithaca alludes to a rainstorm in the Bible that similarly manifests the will of God. It also imports the fears of divine judgment that he associates with his dead mother.

In 1 Kings, chapter 17, the prophet Elijah announces a drought whose effects will punish the wicked king Ahab. In chapter 18, after years of famine, God calls off the terrible drought and sends rain. Elijah sends his servant to look toward the sea, and the servant (after six unsuccessful tries) tells him, "there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand. And he [Elijah] said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not. And it came to pass in the mean while, that the heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain" (18:44-45).

Stephen may have thought of the passage in Kings early in the morning and brooded all day on whether a little cloud's appearance might indicate that divine wrath could be coming later in the day in the form of a rainstorm. Or he may have heard divine wrath in the rainstorm and thought back to having earlier been disturbed by a cloud covering the sun. In either case, it is hard to say which is more remarkable: his uncanny ability to call up a symbolic literary analogue well suited to both events, or his indifference to the merely meteorological considerations that would occupy most people's thoughts. The labyrinthine operations of his mind appear even more striking when one reflects on why he may have changed the "man's hand" of the biblical verse to "a woman's hand."

In Telemachus the sun's disappearance behind a cloud makes Stephen see the curve of bay behind him as "a bowl of bitter waters" similar to the china bowl filled with green vomit that stood beside his mother's deathbed, and he thinks back to her tearful responses to a song he was singing in a nearby room. Several paragraphs later he is remembering her ghostly return from death in a dream, reproaching him for his sins. He imagines her as a "Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!" This version of his mother returns in Circe when Stephen and his companions whirl madly around the room to the strains of My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl. His mother appears again as a ghoulish apparition, recalling the song and its message of love and demanding that he repent for his sins: "Beware! (She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly towards Stephen's breast with outstretched fingers.) Beware God's hand! (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.)" The woman's hand here is a cancerous claw doing the vengeful work of a hangman god. It makes sense, then, that this image from Stephen's personal nightmares should become woven together with the biblical image of a hand-like cloud manifesting the will of God.

Bloom sees Stephen's psychotic break in the whorehouse as the result of "gastric inanition and certain chemical compounds of varying degrees of adulteration and alcoholic strength, accelerated by mental exertion and the velocity of rapid circular motion in a relaxing atmosphere." Stephen sees the hand of God striking him down. In the morning the two men saw the sun go behind a cloud and both felt their moods darken, in a strikingly convergent—parallactic, or stereoscopic—effect. Now Ithaca describes their mentalities as dissimilar. A little later the chapter says that they embody "two temperaments": "The scientific. The artistic."

The passage in 1 Kings occupied Joyce's imagination early and late. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that it inspired the title of the Dubliners story "A Little Cloud." The little cloud returns in Finnegans Wake (157-59) as Nuvoletta, one of Issy's instantiations. The Italian word comes from Dante's Inferno, where Elijah's chariot ascending to Heaven is pictured as a "flame alone / ascending like a cloud (nuvoletta) into the sky" (26.38-39). Attentive readers will note that this ascent to heaven is imitated at the end of Cyclops—and Elijah, of course, is the prophet who predicts the rainstorm.

John Hunt 2025