Enoch Arden

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D. B. Murphy is an Odysseus figure by virtue of the sea travels that have kept him away from home "for seven years now, sailing about." The novel makes Bloom an Odysseus figure too, displaced by a suitor in his own home, traveling about Dublin over the course of a very long day, and finally returning in the company of a young man. Bloom may well see in Murphy an embodiment of his own uncertainty about what awaits him at home. If he does not, readers can do it for him. The reference to Enoch Arden, the tale of a man who comes back to his wife after many years at sea, insinuates the idea that the Blooms' life together may have run its course.

In relaxed blank verse lines that recall Wordsworthian models like Michael, Tennyson tells the story of three friends in a poor English coastal village. Annie Lee is "The prettiest little damsel in the port," Philip Ray is "the miller's only son," and Enoch Arden is "a rough sailor's lad / Made orphan by a winter shipwreck." The three play together along the shore and entertain fantasies of which boy will marry Annie. When they grow up Enoch and Annie marry, leaving Philip bereft. After seven years of marriage, happy but feeling desperate to provide for a wife and three children, Enoch signs on as bosun on a merchant ship traveling to China, overriding the tearful protests of Annie, who fears that she will never see him again. The voyage does prove disastrous: on its return to England the ship is wrecked and only three men survive. Two more die on the uninhabited island they make their home, leaving only Enoch to wait for many years until a passing ship rescues him.

In England, Annie loses her third child and makes a poor go of it economically. Philip offers to pay for the education of her remaining son and daughter, and they grow up loving him as a father. At last, after ten years have passed with no news of Enoch, Philip proposes marriage to Annie. She asks him to wait for a year, and then for another half a year, and finally she becomes his wife. After a new child is born to the new couple, Enoch returns. His agony and his generous self-renunciation constitute the poem's climax.

Many details in the longish paragraph of Eumaeus in which Bloom imagines Murphy's return to Queenstown suggest that Joyce is thinking particularly of Enoch Arden, more than Ben Bolt, Rip Van Winkle, or Caoch O'Leary. The paragraph begins, "Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene, the homecoming to the mariner's roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones, a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife." Unlike the other three protagonists that Bloom thinks of, Enoch has indeed dodged death at the bottom of the sea (Davy Jones' locker) when his ship broke up. He has come all the way from China, and he has returned to his house at the side of the road,  (Rip Van Winkle and Caoc O'Leary have not been at sea. Ben Bolt has, for twenty years, but his poem mentions no such details.) And as the ship bringing him home approaches his native coast Enoch gets his first moist whiff of England at night, "beneath a clouded moon." No rain figures in Tennyson's lines––when Enoch walks up the hill to his home the next day the sun is bleakly shining––but "a sea-haze" rolls in and wraps everything in gray.

Later in the paragraph, elaborating his fantasy into a small prose vignette, Bloom imagines a very concrete scene: "The face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he finally did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned upon him anent his better half, wrecked in his affections. You little expected me but I've come to stay and make a fresh start. There she sits, a grasswidow, at the selfsame fireside. Believes me dead, rocked in the cradle of the deep. And there sits uncle Chubb or Tomkin, as the case might be, the publican of the Crown and Anchor, in shirtsleeves, eating rumpsteak and onions. No chair for father. Broo! The wind! Her brandnew arrival is on her knee, post mortem child."

"The face at the window" reproduces the climactic action of Tennyson's poem, when Enoch, many days after first arriving in the village, walks to the miller's house at twilight to spy on the new happy family. Gazing through a rear window, he sees a blazing "hearth" (Bloom's "fireside") with five contented people around it: Philip, his baby "across his knees" ("on her knee"), Annie, and her two children. A grass widow is a woman whose husband has been absent for an extended period, and Annie does indeed believe that Enoch has drowned. (She has agreed to marry Philip after asking God for a sign that her husband is gone. A randomly found biblical verse reveals that he is "Under a palmtree," and then she dreams the scene, which she misinterprets as signifying that he is now in heaven.) The people around the hearth are enfolded in a circle of happy warmth from which the watcher is forever excluded. As Bloom thinks, "No chair for father."

Bloom's summation––"Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I remain with much love your brokenhearted husband D. B. Murphy"––closely approximates the end of Enoch Arden. Brokenhearted, Enoch lives for a while longer at the village tavern, unrecognized by all because of the hardships he has suffered. When he senses that he is dying he swears the innkeeper to silence and tells her who he is, with instructions to give the news to his wife, his children, and Philip only after he is gone. To each of them he sends unselfish love and blessings. Love returns to him in the form of one of the costliest funerals the village has ever seen.

The strong appeal to emotional response in Tennyson's poem (its effects depend entirely on arousing tender sentiments in readers, though it never lapses into sentimentality) is utterly absent in Joyce's echoes. The narrative presents Bloom's thoughts in a joking, irreverent way that seems suited to his disrespect for the blowhard "Murphy" but not at all appropriate to the gravity of his own marital peril. One might respond to this disconnect by supposing that Bloom never sees himself in Murphy, never thinks of himself as anything like an Odysseus returning home after twenty years. But later in Eumaeus he does see himself in the story of Katherine O'Shea abandoning her husband for Parnell, and in those passages he again dodges thoughts of marital injury: "Whereas the simple fact of the case was it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch, with nothing in common between them beyond the name, and then a real man arriving on the scene." In Ithaca Bloom imagines himself as a homeless beggar wandering the world after losing his family.

Bloom knows Enoch Arden well enough to recreate in his own way the climactic scene in which Enoch sees himself displaced, but he avoids emotional involvement. He is in something of a triumphalist mode in Eumaeus, successfully making connection with a brilliant young scholar and heroically leading him out of danger. It is no time to contemplate just how ravaged his life may actually become.