Joyce's notes 5

If Robert really prepares the way for Richard's advance and hopes for it while he tries at the same time secretly to combat this advance by destroying at a blow Richard's confidence in himself the position is like that of Wotan who in willing the birth and growth of Siegfried longs for his own destruction. Every step advanced by humanity through Richard is a step backwards by the type which Robert stands for.



Richard fears the reaction inevitable in Robert's temperament: and not for Bertha's sake only, that is, not to feel that he by standing aside has allowed her to go her way through a passing love to neglect but to feel that a woman chosen by him has been set aside for another not chosen by him.



Beatrice's mind is an abandoned cold temple in which hymns have risen heavenward in a distant past but where now a doddering priest offers alone and hopelessly prayers to the Most High.



Richard having first understood the nature of innocence when it has been lost by him fears to believe that Bertha, to understand the chastity of her nature, must first lose it in adultery.



Blister - amber - silver - oranges - sugarstick - hair - spongecake - ivy - roses - ribbon.



The blister reminds her of the burning of her hand as a girl. She sees her own amber hair and her mother's silver hair. The silver is the crown of age but also the stigma of care and grief which she and her lover have laid upon it. This avenue of thought is shunned completely; and the other aspect, amber turned to silver by the years, her mother a prophecy of what she may one day be is hardly glanced at. Oranges, apples, sugarstick-- these take the place of the shunned thoughts and are herself as she was, being her girlish joys. Hair: the mind turning again to this without adverting to its colour, adverting only to a distinctive sexual mark and to its growth and mystery rather than to its mystery. The softly growing symbol of her girlhood. Spongecake; a weak flash again of joys which now begin to seem more those of a child than those of a girl. Ivy and roses: she gathered ivy often when out in the evening with girls. Roses grew then a sudden scarlet note in the memory which may be a dim suggestion of the roses of the body. The ivy and the roses carry on and up, out of the idea of growth, through a creeping vegetable life into ardent perfumed flower life the symbol of mysteriously growing girlhood, her hair. Ribbon for her hair. Its fitting ornament for the eyes of others, and lastly for his eyes. Girlhood becomes virginity and puts on 'the snood that is the sign of maidenhood'. A proud and shy instinct turns her mind away from the loosening of her bound-up hair-- however sweet or longed for or inevitable-- and she embraces that which is hers alone and not hers and his also-- happy distant dancing days, distant, gone forever, dead, or killed?



ROBERT: You have made her all that she is. A strange and wonderful personality.

RICHARD, darkly: Or I have killed her.

ROBERT: Killed her?

RICHARD: The virginity of her soul.



Richard must not appear as a champion of woman's rights. His language at times must be near to that of Schopenhauer against women and he must show at times a deep contempt for the long-haired, short-legged sex. He is in fact fighting for his own hand, for his own emotional dignity and the liberation in which Bertha, no less and no more than Beatrice or any other woman is coinvolved. He does not use the language of adoration and his character must seem a little unloving. But it is a fact that for nearly two thousand years the women of Christendom have prayed to and kissed the naked image of one who had neither wife nor mistress nor sister and would scarcely have been associated with his mother had it not been that the Italian church discovered, with its infallible practical instinct, the rich possibilities of the figure of the Madonna.