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Fluid Boarders and Naughty Girls: Music, Domesticity, and Nation in Joyce’s Boarding Houses

This essay redresses a critical neglect of Joyce’s “The Boarding House” by identifying the boarding house as a key domestic site and national symbol in Joyce’s work. The structure of the boarding house reenacts Ireland’s twelfth-century colonial-origin story and poses a threat to the romantic nationalist vision of the Irish home and the quest for a nation purged of the stranger. Polly Mooney, the landlady’s daughter, performs “I’m a Naughty Girl” from the opera A Greek Slave, and the full song reveals how Joyce links home and nation through the figure of the “naughty girl.” The boarding house represents a commercial and commodified domestic space that depends upon the entry of the stranger and rejects the ideals of female sexual purity. Joyce’s reintroduction of the characters from “The Boarding House” in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses indicates the centrality of this domestic site to the debate between Bloom and the Citizen over the definition of a nation. In his repeated use of the figure of the lodger and his representation of home as temporary and transient for many Dubliners, Joyce acknowledges Ireland as irretrievably and irreversibly open.