There is one thing in Joyce’s life which defies belief. Never in all the years since her death did he allude to his mother. It is hard to think that she who had such a lasting influence on him was not mentioned in any of his letters home and not referred to after his father’s death or his daughter’s breakdown. It is a fierce and determined repudiation. Her death he had described “as a wound on the brain” and elsewhere he spoke of words as being the sea “crashing in on his breaking brain.” Mother’s words and sea inseparable. Bloom would muse on the womb-state—“before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship”—but James Joyce went on to disavow that. At the time of her death he seemed to show no grief and when he first met Nora a few months later he said that his mother had died from his father’s ill treatment and his own “cynical frankness of conduct towards her.” But it was more complicated than that. His banishment of her was absolute and when she came back in his fiction it was as persecutor. Stephen Hero says, “Thou has suckled me with bitter milk. My moon and my sun though has quenched forever. And thou hast left me alone forever in the dark ways of my bitterness and with the kiss of ashes thou hast kissed my mouth.”
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