This piece from James Joyce was probably the most vulgar thing I have ever read, but that also allowed me to get some serious emotion from it. It is one long stream of consciousness from a female narrator that seems to come deep from a place of internal anger and discomfort in a world governed by men. The narrator seems to be talking about a mix of sexual activities in her interactions with men, either harassment or odd kinks, and she also experiences fantasies of domination over men. I thought I kept seeing the repetition of adultery as a theme in the chapter, either by the narrator with the married men she describes, or the men she describes with other women. Due to this, I began to question the very nature of marriage in early 1900s culture. According the British Parliament on their website: “Before 1914 divorce was rare; it was considered a scandal, confined by expense to the rich, and by legal restrictions requiring proof of adultery or violence to the truly desperate. In the first decade of the 20th century, there was just one divorce for every 450 marriages.” Which (if my math is right), means that less than one percent of couples in the early 1900s in the UK got a divorce. Compared to a statistic from the United Kingdom’s Office of National Statistics, in which the UK had a 10.9% divorce rate among opposite sex couples. While this increase in numbers likely has to do with less restrictive divorce laws conceived over the century, it has me wondering what the actual divorce rate would have been during the time Joyce wrote Ulysses if the subject of divorce was not so taboo and gated only to the rich. The narrator from Joyce’s story experiences a rollercoaster of emotions during her internal monologue, likely frustration she feels and experiences due to the unfair treatment of men and women in relationships and other affairs which is clearly shown when she thinks “men again all over they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes” (Joyce). I also find it interesting that since this story is written by a man, men also realized the struggles of inequality that women faced, and even Joyce wanted to shed more light on it in his own creative way.
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