Grandmother

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In Helen of Joyce (2022), Senan Molony suggests that the fox burying his grandmother under a holly bush is code for Joyce burying his grandmother under the surface of the text. Helena O'Connell, known as Ellen, married James Augustine Joyce on 29 February 1848. She died in 1881, eight months before the writer was born, but she was uncommonly beautiful and had a name to match. Molony argues that the long Greek siege of Troy prompted by Paris's abduction of Menelaus's wife––represented in the Iliad and referenced often in the Odyssey––informs Joyce's story of the invasion of the Bloom home by an adulterous lover. In this retelling Molly is Helen, but Homeric analogues attach themselves to different Dubliners in different ways as the novel proceeds, and in Nestor Joyce wanted to introduce a central archetype long before Molly herself appears.

There are many pieces of evidence to support the claim. The fox whose grandmother it is must be Stephen: he is preoccupied with his dead mother; he is called a "dogsbody" in Telemachus; in Proteus he identifies with a dog who digs in the sand. Joyce lashes these associations tightly to the riddle just before the answer is announced: "Stephen, his throat itching, answered: / — The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush." Why the odd detail? Molony points to the Aesopian fable that Lenehan reads to Miss Kennedy in Sirens, in which a fox has an irritated throat: "Ah fox met ah stork. Said thee fox too thee stork: Will you put your bill down inn my troath and pull upp ah bone?" Stephen is still thinking of the fox in Circe, changing the words of the riddle slightly ("The fox crew, the cocks flew") and linking the animal to matricide: "Thirsty fox. (He laughs loudly.) Burying his grandmother. Probably he killed her." In Molony's view the identification is strengthened by the pseudonym of Charles Stewart Parnell, Mr. Fox, which also comes up in Circe.

A few moments before he poses the riddle in Nestor, Stephen thinks of the nights he spent reading in the Ste. Geneviève library, "sheltered from the sin of Paris." Again, Joyce's additon of this detail is odd, because Stephen neither required nor sought "shelter" from prostitutes. Molony suggests that the literal sense is less important than the phrase's symbolic suggestion of a Trojan prince stealing a Greek wife. Why "under a hollybush"? That detail is part of the traditional riddle, but Molony notes the evergreen's association with "Yule," which sounds like Ulysses, the text in which Helena Joyce is being buried. And there are hints too in the couplet that enters Stephen's mind before he poses the riddle: "Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro. / My father gave me seeds to sow." Molony remarks that "The seeds, or generations, are on Joyce's father's side, leading to his paternal grandmother. These are seeds to the solution (while the old Dutch verb Helen, archaic German Hehlen, meant to conceal, even to bury)" (32).

Any one of these claims might be challenged as overingenious reading of an isolated detail, but collectively they are persuasive, especially when one reads to the end of the chapter. Mr Deasy begins his misogynistic list of femmes fatales with a Biblical archetype and a Homeric one: "A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy." Joyce had an abiding fear of female infidelity that he mined for artistic effect: he was devastated by Vincent Cosgrave's insinuation that Nora had a liaison with him in Joyce's absence; he made Gretta Conroy's revelation to Gabriel of a previous lover the basis of one of the greatest short stories in the English language; he tried to make Ibsen-like drama out of the attraction between Bertha and Richard Rowan's friend Robert. All these earlier versions of infidelity were shot through with ambiguity, but Ulysses tells the story of actual adultery. The Penelope of the Odyssey is an imperfect vessel for that message, but the Helen who lies behind the Iliad is a perfect one. It makes sense that Joyce would have found a way to include her in his epic.