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The Flower: Women and the Soul

by Anita Kumar

James Joyce wrote to his wife Nora Barnacle Joyce on December 2, 1909 with the words, "Yes, dear, it is a nice name 'My beautiful wild flower of the hedges! My darkblue, rain drenched flower!" You see I am a little of a poet still. But side by side and inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beastlike craving for every inch of your body. My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes. You are mine, darling, mine! I love you. All I have written above is only a moment of two of brutal madness./ Nora, my faithful darling, my sweeteyed blackguard school girl ... you are always my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my darkblue raindrenched flower" (Ellman 269). In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus associates the image of a flower, as does Joyce, with women as well as with the fluctuating growth of his soul. This dualassociation links the growth of his soul to his relations with women and the development of his anima. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, motifs like flowers, water, eyes, cows, and roads are critical tools to understanding the fabric of the novel. Each motif acts as a thread which is sewn through the five chapters and stitched into the development of Stephen as an artist, an Icarus, a lover, and a free spirit. In the letter to Nora, the image of "the wild flower of the hedges" is the catalyst for Joyce to wrestle with the relationship between spiritual love and lecherous love; a relationship that Stephen also struggled with as he sorted his physical desires with his spirituality and artistry.

Stephen begins his fantasies of finding a damsel when he reads The Count of Monte Cristo. He creates the dream world as "he build up on the parlour table an image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers" (43) and imagines the beautiful Mercedes flanked always by a rich garden. Stephen becomes the knight who does not find Mercedes, but rather the whore who lives far from gardens amongst the "yellow gasflames ... burning as if before an altar" (70). The yellow flames, like the priest's yellow pages of The Memoirs of Vidoq in Araby and the fireworks of Michael Furey in The Dead., are tied to lust and to hell. After Stephen experiences his personal hell during the religious retreat, he attempts to purge himself by immersion into the Catholic church. He fails to push his entire soul and body into religion as his body continually bobs up, tainted with physical desires and passion. He describes "his soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash registernot as a number but as a frail column of incense or as a slender flower" (106). The flower reappears as the rosaries, "transformed themselves into coronals of flowers of such vague unearthly texture that they seemed to him as hueless and odourless as they were nameless" (106). These pallid, lifeless flowers hint at the absence of the red flower of passion. When the priest bids Stephen to join the priesthood, Stephen realizes a falseness to the situation as the priest speaks of les Jupes, the skirts. This triggers for Stephen the "delicate and sinful perfume"' which allows his mind "amid softworded phrases or within rosesoft stuffs..to conceive of the soul or body of a woman moving with tender life" (111). In these rosestuffs lies Stephen's passionate heart, far from the hueless flowers of the church. In the final chapter, the white flame of the church "had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. That rose and ardent light was her strange and willful heart, strange that no man had known or would know, willful from before the beginning of the world: and lured by that ardent roselike glow the choirs of the seraphim were falling from heaven. The roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her willful heart" (158). Stephen's heart is set ablaze with his passion for this girl and the hopeful entry to her heart. Destroying the forces of the angels and men, her heart supersedes with the luster of passion and ardor. The flowers which surrounded Mercedes have begun to burn and emit powerful rays; ray which initiate Stephen's surrender. The bestial side of Stephen is everpresent although no longer satisfied by the whore in whose room sat the false doll of vulgar love. Stephen has now intertwined spirituality, beauty, and lust in his passions. He repeats, "Are you not weary of ardent ways,/ Lure of the fallen seraphim?/Tell me no more of enchanted days" (158), yet Stephen desires the enchantment of the heart, the ability to write and like the fallen seraphim, Lucifer, Stephen falls. "Shrinking from that life he turned towards the wall ... scarlet flowers of the tattered wallpaper. He tried to warm his perishing joy in their scarlet glow, imagining a roseway from where he lay upwards toheaven all strewn with scarlet flowers. Weary! Weary! He too was weary of ardent ways" (161). Weariness overcomes Stephen, yet he is not weary of ardent ways. He cannot bind himself to the church and commute because he envisions a path to heaven strewn with scarlet flowers. Catholicism will not allow him to ride the wings of passion to its heaven. Incapable of detaching himself from "her nakedness, radiant, warm odorous and lavish limbed,"' Stephen's soul is helplessly tied to women and passion. The flower image is clearly embossed upon Stephen's image of women, but how upon his soul?

The soul of Stephen, like a flower, blossoms, folds under storms, withers, and grows. After committing the mortal sin and gulping the powerful words of the priest into the depths of his soul, "Stephen's heart had withered up like a flower of the desert that feels the simoon coming from afar" (77). Stephen's soul began to disintegrate as his recognition of his guilt changed root from pride to fear to repentance. After repentance there is hope and his soul, like the ciborium, was full. Yet the fullness of his soul is realized at the Bull when the bird girl transports him high above the earth. He flies not with the simple pleasure of witnessing mortal beauty, but upon the wings of his Greek soul, Stephanoumenos. Analogous to the end of The Dead, Gabriel's perspective, triggered by jealousy and the concept of death, zooms out hundreds of times until he perceives the universe and a greater cosmic question. Similarly, "[Stephen's] soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? The flower comes back to us and ties Stephen's exploring soul to his passion and his anima. In Jung's discussion of the anima, he quotes a medieval text of an anima figure who says, "I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys. I am the mother of fair love and of fear and of knowledge and of holy hope" (Jung 186). As Stephen becomes increasingly cognizant of "the flower" in his field and its ability to guide him Stephen "had spoken of a mother's love. He felt then the sufferings of women, the weakness of their bodies and souls: and would shield them with a strong and resolute arm and bow his mind to them" (179). As Stephen wrestles to find his positive anima, not the whore or "the flower girl in the ragged dress with damp coarse hair," he find his Self, the conscience that may answer the questions the church cannot.

At the conclusion of the story Stephen must leave and free himself from the destroying forces like the simoon which threatened the flower of his soul. This simoon can be understood as his father, Simon, or as the nets he describes as "'nationality, language, and religion" (148). As Stephen leaves he will discover more facets of his soul as he rides like the boy in Araby who sits in a solitary tram anxiously pondering the destination of his steed. Hearing "the sound of hoofs upon the road ... They are heard now far away,. hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as gems, hurrying beyond the sleeping fields to what journey's end what heart bearing what tidings" (184). Although his "'vague emotion" lacks the bearings he may be in search of a north and a south the needle of the compass is perpetually spinning between Ireland and the land beyond, religion and intellect, as well as spiritual and physical love. Darcy OBrien's analysis of the aforementioned letter that Joyce wrote to his wife states, "Here in this letter to Nora, Joyce juxtaposes the physical and spiritual sides of love, arguing for the incompatibility of the two, yet asserting the inevitability of their coexistence." For Stephen, too, there must be a similar coexistence.

Sources

Ellman, Richard, ed. Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 2. The Viking Press, New York, 1966.

Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated, 2d ed. University of California Press: Berkley, 1982.

Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. Doubleday: New York, 1964.

O'Brian, Darcy. The Conscience of James Joyce. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1968.

Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. N.A.