Irish Identity and Nationalism Theme Analysis

Ulysses is Joyce’s ambitious attempt to condense the universal range of human experience into one novel, but it’s also deeply rooted in the particular historical, cultural, and political context of a specific place and time: Dublin, the capital of colonized Ireland, at the turn of the 20th century. Joyce’s distinctive local dialects and wordplay, his meticulous attention to Dublin’s geography, and his constant references to Irish history and politics make Ulysses as much a distinctively Irish novel as it is a canonical work of Western literature in general. Joyce wrote and published Ulysses during the period when Ireland was securing its independence from Britain (the late 1910s and early 1920s). However, he chose to set the novel in 1904, when political life was overwhelmingly focused on the question of independence, but the path to it was not yet clear. As a result, Ireland’s predicament as a long-suffering colony constantly materializes in the background of Ulysses, most prominently in terms of the conflict between pro-British unionists and pro-independence nationalists. Joyce supports the cause of Irish independence in Ulysses by showing how British colonialism devastated Ireland. But he also viciously mocks Irish nationalists, whom he presents as absurdly narrow-minded and intolerant: in Ulysses, they’re so focused on praising Ireland’s greatness and getting back at the British that they reject everything foreign and never actually work to build a better society. Always suspicious of grand political dogmas and promises, Joyce supports Irish independence but argues that nationalism is self-defeating because it leads people to turn inward, limits their horizons to their own small group, and overlooks more meaningful political questions about how society and public life should be organized.

Ulysses is set against the backdrop of English colonialism in Ireland and the Irish nationalists’ struggle for independence. The novel repeatedly suggests that Dublin’s political tensions are coming to a boil. Almost every extended conversation in Ulysses eventually touches on politics—for instance, Stephen Dedalus can’t even pick up his paycheck without sitting through a political rant from his obnoxious unionist headmaster Mr. Deasy. Protestants and Catholics are at each other’s throats. The novel’s characters walk past Nelson’s Pillar, a giant monument to English colonialism in central Dublin, and then listen to Ben Dollard sing the patriotic nationalist song “The Croppy Boy” in the Ormond Hotel. In short, Dublin is split in two by politics.

On the one hand, Joyce thinks that the nationalists are right to blame British colonialism for Ireland’s problems. He shows that resentment, poverty, and despair plagued Dublin in 1904. The city was less industrialized than other comparable British cities, so its economy was based on trade, government, and services like the numerous prostitutes who serve British soldiers in nighttown. In fact, Joyce uses prostitution as a metaphor for Ireland’s situation: the island’s labor and resources have been prostituted off to the British. Bloom also sees the evidence of English colonialism firsthand: Irish cattle get herded onto ships to be slaughtered and eaten in England, for instance, while he can only afford to eat cheaper meat, like pork kidneys. Bloom’s parents’ generation also remembers the devastating potato famine of the 1840s-50s, which shows that historical wounds are still open in 1904. Similarly, Stephen Dedalus’s poverty was not by any means unusual. It’s no surprise that Bloom constantly thinks about business ideas to enrich the Irish economy, while Stephen imagines that his literature could help the Irish people build a new identity and a more promising future. At the end of “Circe,” his insults against the English win him the ire of Privates Compton and Carr, who go on to viciously attack him. In a nutshell, then, Stephen, Bloom, and virtually all of their acquaintances understand that colonialism is a bad deal for Ireland—the only people who actually support the English in this novel are pretentious dupes like Mr. Deasy.

However, Joyce is suspicious of both sides: while he agrees with the nationalists’ call for independence, he fundamentally rejects their view of Irish identity, culture, and art. Specifically, he thinks that many nationalists are attached to an outdated and backwards vision of Irish identity, in which “true” Irish people are poor rural peasants. Even Dublin’s literary scene is divided: one faction thinks Irish literature should focus on the traditional characters and concerns of the Irish countryside, while another group (which includes Joyce) thinks that Irish literature should speak to more universal concerns. Meanwhile, some of the more rigid nationalists, like the citizen, reject anyone who doesn’t fit their personal mold of an Irishman. This creates lots of problems for Bloom, whose father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and whose dark features stand out in Ireland. During the “Cyclops” episode, this leads him into a bar fight with the citizen, whose pride in Ireland is so excessive that he cannot stand to see the value in any other culture or country. He hates anything English, to the point of declaring that England has never produced any meaningful art and cursing the local paper for publishing Englishmen’s obituaries alongside native Irishmen’s. The citizen also hates Jews, science, and political tolerance, among other Bloomian values. Unsurprisingly, he absolutely despises Leopold Bloom and ends up attacking him. While Joyce certainly didn’t mean to suggest that all (or even most) Irish nationalists were as narrow-minded or violent as the citizen, he does make a strong case against the nationalists’ anti-modern, racist, and reactionary elements.

For Joyce, the key question is not whether Ireland ought to be independent from English rule, but rather what kind of independent country it ought to be. Although he could have scarcely avoided politics in Ulysses if he wanted to, he actively chose to make it central to the plot and make his hero a Jewish immigrant. So clearly, he was deeply concerned about Ireland’s ability to become the tolerant, peaceful, pluralistic, Bloomian nation of his dreams.