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Back to summary of chapter 1 / Thanks, Chandra, for your summary of chapter 1. Most enjoyable and enlightening. I would only add that the imagery of the old woman is a common folk tale element. Usually the old woman represents a downtrodden, colonized people. Certainly true of the Irish. In many legends the old woman is in disguise. She is really a beautiful young woman, sometimes her disguise is deliberate and intended to test the steadfastness of a lover and sometimes it is the result of an evil spell. The theme is found in the Arthurian legends as well as in many native American legends. Best Bob Williams � Some very interesting thoughts, Chandra. About the old woman - she is of course, as Bob says, - a young beautiful woman because using the Odyssean parallel, she is the form that the goddess Athena takes when visiting Telemachus. She reminds me of the old woman who is actually a beautiful young woman in Yeats's Kathleen Ni HOulihan (if i remember rightly) which will have been well known by Joyce. Interesting you say that Stephen is not free of the image of his dead mother. I always feel that Joyce is trying to emphasise how "alive" people are when they have passed on, in the memory of those that know them - and isn't this precisely what "history" (which is "to blame" (Haines)) is made up of? The memories of those that are dead? When Buck thinks calling his mother "beastly dead" he offends "the memory of your mother", Stephen says it was an offence to himself, to his mother. There is a certain cold and true logic about this, that a memory of a dead person cannot be offended because she is simply dead - the only people that can be offended are the people that are still alive to feel offence, therefore Stephen feels personally offended. I dunno . . .not entirely sure about this . . . Thanks, Bod |