Handmaid of the moon

Handmaid of the moon

In Brief

When Stephen thinks "Behold the handmaid of the moon" he parodies the Angelus, a Catholic prayer that celebrates the Annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel told Mary that she would bear the son of God. The prayer's Ecce ancilla Domini, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," recalls the words that Mary spoke to the angel in Luke 1:38, signifying her submission to the will of God. The prayer is recited at 6 AM, noon, and 6 PM, not only in religious houses but also by ordinary people during their workdays, so it might well pop into Stephen's thoughts at the hour of noon. This much seems straightforward, but Stephen's intentions in alluding to the prayer are much murkier.

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For starters, which female figure are readers to "Behold"? Gifford asserts that "The sea (the 'mighty mother') is, of course, the 'handmaid of the moon'." This accords with scientific reality (the sea's waters do submit to the pull of the moon), but it makes absolutely no sense in context. Stephen has been watching two "red Egyptians" on the beach. One is female, and he sees her "Passing now. / A side eye at my Hamlet hat....Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon.

In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise." Stephen's focus is centered on the gypsy woman in these sentences. She walks past him, glances at his hat, and keeps walking west, carrying her bag of cockles. The "tide" is "westering" in her "wake," but the "Tides" of the next sentence, said to be "within her," cannot be those of Dublin Bay. How could the tide contain tides? How, for that matter, could it contain "blood"?

It is easy, however, to imagine Stephen making a metaphorical connection between the tide flowing into the bay and the tides pulsing through human veins and arteries, and to see the woman's blood as "myriadislanded" because it contains countless blood cells. The figure in these sentences must be the gypsy woman, though Stephen does associate her with the sea: she has tides and islands within her, and the sea's tide follows "in her wake." He also imagistically conflates her with the moon. After calling her the moon's handmaid he thinks, "In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise." This sounds like an astrological account of the moon's rise, mapped onto a woman's waking from sleep. Slote notes a possible reference to Horatio's description of the moon in Hamlet, "the moist star / Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands" (1.1.118-19). But to make "she" and "her" refer simply to the sea or to the moon is to succumb to the effacement of external reality that perpetually threatens readers lost in Stephen's interior monologue. Somewhere out there, behind the gauze of his metaphors, a real woman is walking on the beach.

There is good reason not to airbrush the flesh-and-blood woman out of the picture, because Stephen seems to be weaving a complex symbolic structure rather than a simple one-to-one equivalence. He thinks of the gypsy first as if she were Eve, cast out of Eden and "followed by the sun's flaming sword, to the west," and then as a handmaid assisting the moon by pulling the westering tide behind her. The parallelism of sun and moon, and the further parallel of Eve and Mary (in Catholic tradition Mary is held to be the second Eve, an anti-Eve who regained lost paradise) suggest that Stephen is engaged in some kind of broad mythologizing of women. In the sentence following the last one quoted he thinks, "Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled." Damned temptress, blessed Mother of God, sun, moon, sexual partner, life-bringer, deathly apparition: the very profusion of associations argues against any singular account of the woman's significance.

Should Stephen's noontide devotion to this dark-skinned traveler be read sarcastically? His fantasy of her nighttime activities in Fumbally's Lane shows that he imagines her to be anything but a blessed virgin. Or might some real sense of reverence inhere in his parody? I incline to the second view. His thoughts of the mysterious, myriadislanded "blood not mine" do not ring with misogynist or racist contempt. The gypsy woman is an unknown universe passing before his own.

JH 2022
The Angelus, oil on canvas painting by Jean-François Millet (ca. 1857-59), held in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Source: renewablescg.com.