Joyce and feminism

Joyce's writing played little part in the upsurge of interest in feminism and feminist literary criticism that took place in the 1960s. Kate Millet in Sexual Politics found Joyce worthy of no more than a passing mention. She wrote that he was guilty of naive participation in the ‘cult of the primitive’ and ‘fond of presenting woman as “nature”, “unspoiled primaeval understanding”, and the “eternal feminine”’. Critics tended to represent Joyce either as uninterested in such issues or else were led to admit, if reluctantly, that his fictional representation of women seems to fall into many of the faults against which modern feminists complain. ‘It seems certain,’ wrote Marilyn French, with a disturbing conviction, ‘that Joyce had contempt for women’.

Perhaps it is not altogether to be regretted that there has been this kind of neglect, since some feminist critics have been keen to diagnoze characteristic failings in past literature, and with the increasing philosophic and psychological complexity of their arguments, have found failings in most male writers. Yet that neglect has obscured important ways in which Joyce's fiction suggests a continuity of feeling with some of the strongest traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminist thought.