SOURCE: Kupinse, William. “Household Trash: Domesticity and National Identity in The Lamplighter and the ‘Nausicaa’ Episode of Ulysses.” South Carolina Review 32, no. 1 (fall 1999): 81-87.

In the following essay, Kupinse considers The Lamplighter's relationship to James Joyce's “Nausicaa,” noting that Joyce's use of Cummins's novel draws attention to the manner in which discourses of domesticity and established roles of womanhood are subsumed within larger discourses of national character and identity.

Although the role of consumer culture in Ulysses has received significant recent critical attention, what is frequently overlooked is how often Joyce presents society's “massproducts” both in the process of consumption and as the remainder that that consumption leaves in its wake as waste, rubbish, and trash. The violent trajectory of the missile the Citizen hurls at Bloom in “Cyclops” involves an empty tin of Jacobs' biscuits, thus revealing the material trace of a commercial product that remains...