Post a Comment. Renoir's washerwomen, c Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver that the Anna Livia episode was "a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone. The words of the washerwomen are not distinguished from each other on the page. Crosby Gage edition, Joyce told an old school friend, Sarsfield Kerrigan, that the episode was "an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water.
He went down that evening to the Seine and listened near one of its bridges to its waters He came back, he said, content. Anna Livia does not speak any of these languages, she speaks the speech of a river. It is the river Liffey. That is a woman, it is Anna Liffey. She is not quite a river, nor wholly a woman. She could be a goddess or a washerwoman, she is abstract. So he wanted the episode to look and sound like a river, whose flow would be broken up if the words were set as dialogue.
Joyce wrote to Curran that ''The piece should be read half aloud, without a break and rather rapidly. The two washerwomen have very different personalities and voices and, until the end, it's usually clear which one is speaking.
The first speaker has a young voice. She is enthusiastic, energetic and excitable, urging the story on:. Hustle along, why can't you? Spitz on the iern while it's hot. I wouldn't miss her for irthing on nerthe. Not for the lucre of lomba strait! Oceans of Gaud, I mosel hear that! Ogowe presta! The second speaker, who is providing the gossip, is old, bitter and often complains about her physical ailments and the disgusting work she has to do as a washerwoman.
The two washerwomen make one other appearance, as banshees at the end of the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes, on pages They gather up the Mookse and Gripes, who have been transformed into washing, leaving 'now only an elm tree and but a stone' In Irish myth, banshees often appear as washerwomen, washing bloody clothes at night at the ford of a river, as an omen of death.
