Sirens opens with two women, "Miss Douce" and "Miss Kennedy," working behind the bar of the Ormond Hotel. Context makes them young and attractive: a gentleman in a carriage passing outside the window is seen craning his neck to get a better look, and when customers enter the bar the two women become the focus of much gazing and flirtation. In this capacity they clearly function as stand-ins for Homer's irresistible Sirens, but they also carry a whiff of local realism. Joyce took their surnames from two women who worked in another Dublin restaurant, slightly altering one to enhance its sirenic potential.

The women play important parts in the chapter's action but receive only sketchy biography. Miss Douce, whose hair is "bronze," is called "Lydia" a dozen times. Miss Kennedy, called "Mina" at the same rate, has "gold" hair and lives at "4 Lismore terrace, Drumcondra." Lydia has just returned from a seaside vacation in Rostrevor. She is by any measure the more sexually effervescent and adventurous of the two, rushing to the window to see the young man, wishing for the freedom that men enjoy, mocking a stodgy old druggist, playing suggestively with language ("I feel all wet"), suggestively stroking a beerpull, singing snatches of a song, flirting with Simon Dedalus and Blazes Boylan, showing Lenehan the swell of her breast and the inside of her thigh. Mina, by "exquisite contrast" to this live wire, is well-mannered, "Ladylike," a bit dull: "Miss Kennedy served two gentlemen with tankards of cool stout. She passed a remark. It was indeed, first gentleman said, beautiful weather. They drank cool stout. Did she know where the lord lieutenant was going? And heard steelhoofs ringhoof ring. No, she couldn't say. But it would be in the paper. O, she needn't trouble. No trouble."

In a JJON essay, John Simpson reports that James Meagher, an Irishman who emigrated to Australia in the 1920s, wrote a short memoir about his time in Dublin that mentions regularly lunching at the Bailey Restaurant on Duke Street. The "manageress" of the restaurant, he reports, was "Miss Douse of the golden hair." Simpson has located an Irish Times article of 24 August 1894 that mentions "A. Dowse, Proprietress." Several Dowse sisters, he notes, moved to Dublin from Tinahely in County Wicklow, and the 1901 census shows Alice and her husband as proprietors of the restaurant, Maggie as the manageress, and Helena (Ellen) as the cashier. Circumstances changed by Meagher's time, and Simpson infers from the available evidence that it might have been Ellen whom he knew as the Manageress. The 1901 and 1911 census rolls also list a "House Keeper" named Mary Kennedy living at the Bailey address.

Joyce moved the two women from Duke Street to the northern quays, gave them new first names and new work, and transferred the blond hair to Miss Kennedy. His most interesting choice was to change "Dowse" to "Douce," the French word for sweet. Of this minute act of poetic license one can only nod approvingly: instead of dousing desire's embers the barmaid sweetens its song.

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John Hunt 2025