Flower Power: Desire, Gender, and Folk Belief in the Joycean Mary Garden

Abstract

Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin’s Eco-Joyce (2014) largely overlooks a historical basis for ecocritical thought. The absence of a historicist view requires consideration not only of the natural world but folk botany, such as the Mary Garden that is a phantom presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as in “Nausicaa” and “Penelope” in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The undergrowth of the garden reconfigures human action and subtly predicts it with its compendium of theological and devotional meanings for the burgeoning sexuality expressed by Gerty MacDowell and Issy Earwicker as well as the mature longing of Molly Bloom. This essay will establish a fresh Deleuzian paradigm of Becoming-Flower to demonstrate how the Mary Garden blooms to present new perspectives on Catholicism, eros, and gender identity in Joyce’s major works.

Keywords

• James Joyce
• ecocriticism
• Mary garden
• sexuality
• theology
• gender
• Ulysses
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Finnegans Wake
• Gilles Deleuze