'The New Womanly Man': Cross-dressing and gender inversion in Joyce and his contemporaries

This thesis, ‘The New Womanly Man’: Cross-dressing and gender inversion in Joyce and his contemporaries, explores questions of gender identity and performance by examining depictions of cross-dressing and gender inversion in James Joyce’s Ulysses, contextualised through close-readings of other modernist texts, genetic criticism, and the historical and cultural context of the early twentieth century. Chapter 1 compares Joyce’s depiction of cross-dressing and sex-change to those in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. Looking at Orlando as a text composed independently of Ulysses, I evaluate their respective sex-change scenes, investigate their origins using genetic criticism, and discuss the importance of names and pronouns. I also consider gender ambiguity in the sex-object choice of these ‘New Womanly Men’ using Otto Weininger’s universal law of attraction as a framework. The key argument of this chapter is that Joyce and Woolf differently respond to the rapid scientific and social changes associated with modernism by leaning into the sexological construction of gender (Joyce) or rejecting that medicolegal prescriptivism in favour of a cultural definition based on clothing, language, and behaviour (Woolf). Chapter 2 reflects on ‘modernist womb envy’ and compares Joyce’s use of a procreative metaphor to Djuna Barnes’s novels Ryder and Nightwood, moving from a metaphorical “womb of imagination” (P 217) to the organ as a site of somatic trauma. Although both Joyce and Barnes present essentialist definitions of ‘woman,’ Barnes’s “third sex” challenges the dominant narrative by making suffering, not biology, the shared burden of womanhood, especially in the case of Doctor O’Connor, whom I argue meets all the criteria of being a trans woman. The medicalisation of gender is foregrounded in my comparison of how Joyce and Barnes use sexology to transcend social barriers, but in so doing, perpetuate stereotypes based on racist pseudoscience and biologism. Writing from the perspective of Elaine Showalter’s ‘hypothetical female reader,’ in Chapter 3 I present “Penelope” as a performance of gendered writing that imitates sexual difference by dressing heterosexual male desire in Nora Barnacle’s linguistic underpants. I argue that Joyce’s ‘female voice’ is an example of ‘sexophonologistic schizophrenesis,’ a Wakese neologism I define using Aldous Huxley’s anti-Freudian novella, “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow.” Using feminist theorists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray as theoretical models, I argue that although the episode has been read as an example of écriture féminine, “Penelope” problematises the relationship between body, mind, gender, and language through unheimlich, nonmimetic ‘authorial cross-dressing.’ Chapter 4 addresses costume and cross-dressing in Ulysses using a queer materialist lens. After contextualising fin-de-siècle Orientalism and theorising a construction of gender that racially Others the feminine, I discuss Gerty MacDowell as an idealised portrait of Western femininity in “Nausicaa” and the parallel construction of Irish masculinity in “Cyclops,” which inform Bloom’s cross-dressing and sex-change fantasies in “Circe.” Applying cultural materialism and Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, I discuss these episodes’ theatricality and costumes, as well as Joyce’s sources, in order to reveal the embeddedness of gender inversion in the modernist zeitgeist. Finally, I turn to Bits of Fun, an important source for Bloom’s transformation fantasy in “Circe,” both as a genetic source and as a historical record that captures ephemeral exchanges between real queer people. The implications of this reading, as well as ethical concerns, are covered in my conclusion.

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