“INDIFFERENT WEIB”: GIORDANO BRUNO AND THE HERETICAL MODE OF VISION IN “PENELOPE”
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Abstract
This paper suggests that Joyce wove the ontological immanentism of Giordano Bruno’s thought into the text of Ulysses, specifically from Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity. It explores the extent to which his engagement with the Brunonian doctrine of the coincidence of contraries influenced the composition of “Penelope” as a text in which the scholastic principles of form and matter are destabilised. It argues that Joyce’s “indifferent Weib” (LI 170) is constructed as a conscious and deliberate challenge to the ontological proscriptions of contemporary Ultramontane Catholicism and neo-scholasticism, particularly in the episode’s subversion of patriarchal and proprietal conceptions of the feminine.