The "quiet church" from which the sound of
prayer "streamed forth at times" is obliquely
named at the end of the sentence, when we learn that the
prayers are addressed to "Mary, star of the sea."
Mary, Star of the Sea is a Roman Catholic church in Sandymount
that at the time of the novel was located very close to the
shore.
Stella Maris is one of many Catholic titles for the Blessed
Virgin Mary, inspired in part bby a passage in the book of
Revelation: "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a
woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and
upon her head a crown of twelve stars" (12:1). The association
with the sea is as ancient as St. Jerome, holding both
metaphorical significance (Mary is "a beacon ever to
the stormtossed heart of man," offering deliverance
from the waves of passion and temptation) and literal (Mary,
in this guise, represents hope to seafarers). Polaris, the
ancient reference mark for sailors, has sometimes been called
the sea-star.
Prayers are being addressed to the Virgin late on a Thursday
evening because a temperance retreat is being conducted in the
church. Joyce had represented such a retreat once before, in
"Grace," the next to last story of Dubliners. That
retreat took place in "the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street,"
in the north part of central Dublin. But the Sandymount church
holds significance for Mr. Kernan, the alcoholic whose
Catholic friends maneuver him into attending a temperance
retreat, and especially for his wife: "In her days of
courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure:
and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding
was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid
pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church
in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man who
was dressed smartly in a frockcoat and lavender trousers and
carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm.
After three weeks she had found a wife's life irksome and,
later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she
had become a mother."
Mrs. Kernan's association of the Star of the Sea with a
happier time of life, before eager anticipations of marriage
were supplanted by the brutal reality of living with an
alcoholic, no doubt has bearing on the associations
established in Nausicaa. This is the parish church
of Paddy Dignam, whose home is likewise very close to the
shore, and whose alcoholism has just shepherded him to an
early grave and left his family confronting poverty. Gerty
MacDowell, who sits on the shore listening to the ceremony in
the church, has grown up in a home where her father's
alcoholism sometimes led to domestic violence. She passes her
days dreaming of marriage to a prince charming, but she is
also well aware of men's capacity for brutality, and by
modeling herself so obsessively on the Blessed Virgin she
seems in part to be aspiring to a condition of perpetual
chastity.
