When Stephen thinks "Behold the handmaid of the moon" he
parodies the Angelus, a Catholic prayer that celebrates the
Annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel told Mary that she
would bear the son of God. The prayer's Ecce ancilla
Domini, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," recalls the
words that Mary spoke to the angel in Luke 1:38, signifying
her submission to the will of God. The prayer is recited at 6
AM, noon, and 6 PM, not only in religious houses but also by
ordinary people during their workdays, so it might well pop
into Stephen's thoughts at the hour of noon. This much seems
straightforward, but Stephen's intentions in alluding to the
prayer are much murkier.
For starters, which female figure are readers to "Behold"?
Gifford asserts that "The sea (the 'mighty mother') is, of
course, the 'handmaid of the moon'." This accords with
scientific reality (the sea's waters do submit to the pull of
the moon), but it makes absolutely no sense in context.
Stephen has been watching two "red
Egyptians" on the beach. One is female, and he sees her
"Passing now. / A side eye at my Hamlet hat....Across
the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming
sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges,
schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide
westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded,
within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea.
Behold the handmaid of the moon.
In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise."
Stephen's focus is centered on the gypsy woman in these
sentences. She walks past him, glances at his hat, and keeps
walking west, carrying her bag of cockles.
The "tide" is "westering" in her "wake," but the "Tides" of
the next sentence, said to be "within her," cannot be those of
Dublin Bay. How could the tide contain tides? How, for that
matter, could it contain "blood"?
It is easy, however, to imagine Stephen making a metaphorical
connection between the tide flowing into the bay and the tides
pulsing through human veins and arteries, and to see the
woman's blood as "myriadislanded" because it contains
countless blood cells. The figure in these sentences must be
the gypsy woman, though Stephen does associate her
with the sea: she has tides and islands within her, and the
sea's tide follows "in her wake." He also imagistically
conflates her with the moon. After calling her the moon's
handmaid he thinks, "In sleep the wet sign calls her hour,
bids her rise." This sounds like an astrological account
of the moon's rise, mapped onto a woman's waking from sleep.
Slote notes a possible reference to Horatio's description of
the moon in Hamlet, "the moist star / Upon whose
influence Neptune's empire stands" (1.1.118-19). But to make
"she" and "her" refer simply to the sea or to the moon is to
succumb to the effacement of external reality that perpetually
threatens readers lost in Stephen's interior monologue.
Somewhere out there, behind the gauze of his metaphors, a real
woman is walking on the beach.
There is good reason not to airbrush the flesh-and-blood
woman out of the picture, because Stephen seems to be weaving
a complex symbolic structure rather than a simple one-to-one
equivalence. He thinks of the gypsy first as if she were Eve,
cast out of Eden and "followed by the sun's flaming sword, to the
west," and then as a handmaid assisting the moon by pulling
the westering tide behind her. The parallelism of sun and
moon, and the further parallel of Eve and Mary (in Catholic
tradition Mary is held to be the second Eve, an anti-Eve who
regained lost paradise) suggest that Stephen is engaged in
some kind of broad mythologizing of women. In the sentence
following the last one quoted he thinks, "Bridebed,
childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled." Damned temptress,
blessed Mother of God, sun, moon, sexual partner,
life-bringer, deathly apparition: the very profusion of
associations argues against any singular account of the
woman's significance.
Should Stephen's noontide devotion to this dark-skinned
traveler be read sarcastically? His fantasy of her nighttime
activities in Fumbally's Lane
shows that he imagines her to be anything but a blessed
virgin. Or might some real sense of reverence inhere in his
parody? I incline to the second view. His thoughts of the
mysterious, myriadislanded "blood not mine" do not ring with
misogynist or racist contempt. The gypsy woman is an unknown
universe passing before his own.
