SOURCE: "The Woman Hidden in James Joyce's Chamber Music, " in Women in Joyce, edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless, University of Illinois Press, pp. 3-30.

In the following essay, Boyle discusses the feminine imagery in Chamber Music.

Joyce developed his suite of songs in an effort to create in words, like Stephen Dedalus forming his Mercedes, the "unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld." The youthful Joyce's interest, like that of young Stephen, focused primarily on his own soul, and only secondarily on that fragile and fragmented image which that not-so-constant soul sought to bring into unity. Thus the woman who emerges from Joyce's arrangement of his songs reveals in many ways her varied sources and the adolescent narcissism, insecurity, and ineptitude of her creator. Yet it is the young writer's artistic power that reveals this evanescent but constantly intriguing woman who, like a rainbow on...