Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2006

Thesis Director

Michael Loudon

Thesis Committee Member

Fern Kory

Thesis Committee Member

Ruth Hoberman

Abstract

My thesis explores the role of Rudolph Virag, the father of Leopold Bloom, in James Joyce's Ulysses. I compare the migration of Rudolph Virag throughout Europe within that novel to the historical Jewish experience in the same locations Joyce places Virag. Although I detect parallels between Virag's movements and actual patterns of nineteenth-century Jewish migration, I argue that Joyce makes subtle changes in timing to create a literary connection between the exodus of Rudolph Virag and Leopold Bloom, and Ireland's political and cultural struggle as an English colony.

Virag's history is then used to further explore Joyce's literary techniques in relation to his beliefs about time, especially the idea of metempsychosis. Rudolph Virag's experience's, representing the Jewish experience in these European locations, helps Joyce make an economic argument relating to Ireland's own colonial situation. Basically, my study of Virag allows me to better understand the intersection of history, time and economics within Ulysses.

What is not discussed is the debate over the Jewishness of Bloom, and his father's Jewishness. For the purposes of this thesis, I accept the thesis of Robert Tracy's "Leopold Bloom Fourfold: A Hungarian-Hebraic-Hellenic-Hibernian Hero," which maintains effectively that, "Bloom's Jewishness is [...] a carefully contrived part of Ulysses and an essential element in the presentation of him as modern man, the rootless and dispossessed wanderer" (525). Bloom and Virag, regardless of their conversions to Christianity (accomplished by marrying Christian women), would have been seen as Jewish by the domestic population, and I agree with Tracy that Joyce chose to use the Jewish people as a literary analog for the Irish.

Chapter 1 focuses primarily on the actual, historical experience of Jews within the cities and countries Rudolph Virag called home. Chapter 2 then discusses how those movements relate to Joyce's theory of time. In Chapter 3 I connect my arguments about Virag's travels and Joyce's notion of time to show that Bloom offers a more promising economic model for Ireland than does his father. Throughout, I read Ulysses as a postcolonial text, arguing that Joyce uses Virag's migration to show the dangers and rewards of revolution and emancipation, in the process offering Ireland a way to imagine an effective identity for itself in the face of British colonization.

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