Nora and Marthe

Abstract

The first two chapters of this study—focusing on Nora Barnacle and Marthe Fleischmann, and Katharine and Charles Stewart Parnell—will provide openings, however brief, into crucial moments and key players for Joyce’s texts.¹ One might even consider these pairs avatars, exemplifying and illuminating the concerns we will be exploring. In his affair with Nora, Joyce sought to write through his desire, to bridge the unbridgeable distance between himself and the beloved. Crucial to this process is the mutual creation of the we through text, through story. In Katharine and Parnell, Joyce saw the infinite potential for such creation as a way to reach the beloved other, strange and unknowable. It is that very unknowability, and the pain and desire it engenders, that drew Joyce to the story of adultery. But here we begin with Nora Barnacle and Marthe Fleischmann, and the fragments of them that remain.

Keep my letters to yourself, dear. They are written for you.

—SL 173