Gendered phenomenology: gynaecological authority in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Metaphysics and authority in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) at first appear to be male-centric. Giambattista Vico’s New Science is woven into the text’s structural fabric as the novel begins following an age of renewal, highlighted by a return to divinity following a process of ‘commodious vicus of recirculation’ (3.02). Additional structural and thematic references to philosophers Giordano Bruno and Nicolas De Cusa are seen through allusions to coincidentia oppositorum (the ‘equal and opposite brunoipso’ and ‘of the Cusanus philophism in which old Nicholas pegs it’). Thinkers such as Descartes, Socrates, Plato, and Kant serve to complicate the overarching question of the text which haunts HCE’s polysemic and all-encompassing identity, as we ask ‘who is he?’ and therefore, who are we? (261.28).
This thesis functions as a disorientation, and reorientation of phenomenology and authority in Finnegans Wake, unravelling preconceived notions of the Wake as a male-dominated text, by establishing new and original ways of reading female phenomenology in Joyce’s work. Centring around questions of history, gender, theory, and phenomenology, I seek to elucidate how a gynaecological examination of Finnegans Wake enables an authoritative female phenomenology to emerge within Joyce’s text. I do so through readings of the Joycean O, speculum, womb, and bodily fluids, illuminating how this authority operates in unison with the already acknowledged male authority of the Wake. I also determine how this female authority strengthens and underpins the text’s metaphysical complexities, providing readers with a deeper understanding of the Wake’s enigmatic centre.