Nora Barnacle

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Nora Barnacle as a young girl

Nora Barnacle (* March 21 or 22 , 1884 in Galway / Ireland ; † April 10, 1951 in Zurich ) was the partner and later wife of the writer James Joyce . She is considered the role model for Molly Bloom in Ulysses , the main work of James Joyce. Her life served as a template for the film Nora from 1999/2000.

Life

youth

Nora was born as the daughter of the baker Thomas Barnacle and his wife Annie Honoraria, b. Healy was born in the Galway City Workhouse , a municipal hospital. Your exact date of birth has not been determined, as the civil and ecclesiastical entries differ from one another. Nora had seven siblings. After attending school between 1889 and 1896, she became a porter at the Presentation Convent in Galway at the age of 13 . In the same year, her parents separated because of the father's drunkenness . In 1896, Nora's childhood friend Michael Feeney, a sixteen-year-old teacher, died of typhoid and pneumonia . After a second friend died in 1900, Nora was considered a "men-killer" in her hometown. After another relationship and an argument with her uncle, she looked for a job in Dublin in 1903 , where she worked as a maid at Finn's Hotel .

Joyce's partner

On June 10, 1904, she met twenty-two-year-old James Joyce. Her relationship with Joyce began on June 16, 1904, the day the novel Ulysses is set and which has been celebrated in Ireland as Bloomsday (after the main character Leopold Bloom ) since 1954 .

On October 8, 1904, she traveled to the continent with Joyce and since then has shared his unsteady life, which led her via Paris , Zurich and Trieste to Pula , again to Trieste, then to Rome and back to Trieste through various run-down pensions and apartments. Nora was gifted with languages, so that she quickly mastered the various languages ​​and dialects, and later also Zurich German .

Although Nora had been raised Catholic, she lived in " wild marriage " with Joyce until her marriage in 1931 and did not have her two children baptized either. In 1905 she gave birth to their son Giorgio and in 1907 to their daughter Lucia. After a miscarriage in 1908, Joyce's relationship worsened, and Nora wrote letters to her sister complaining about his sister's alcoholism, extravagance, and jealousy scenes. In addition, her daughter suffered from mental disorders as a child , which had worsened since 1930.

In 1909 there were two separate months of separation, when Joyce traveled to Dublin and left Nora in Trieste. The obscene correspondence between Joyce and Nora, which went down in literary history as "Dirty Letters", dates back to this time . In one of these letters Joyce wrote: “ One moment I see you like a virgin or madonna the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half-naked and obscene ”. So Joyce saw in Nora the saint and at the same time the whore, which is also reflected in the image of women in his works.

After the split, Joyce returned to Nora for good in 1910. During these difficult years, when Joyce couldn't find a publisher and made her way as a language teacher, Nora also contributed to the family's livelihood by washing and ironing. Joyce and Nora argued frequently, but Nora believed in his breakthrough as a writer and saved Stephen Hero (Stephen the Hero) manuscript that Joyce tried to throw into the fire in a fit of anger. Joyce was able to publish this work as an autobiographical novel after revising it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916.

In 1912 Nora and Joyce visited Ireland with their children. After the Dubliners' publisher refused for immorality, they decided never to return to Ireland, which only Joyce did.

Joyce got a job as a teacher at the high commercial school in Trieste and also had his first literary successes after he had found an English publisher. After Italy entered the First World War , the couple had to leave Trieste in 1915 and emigrated to Zurich. When they registered they pretended to be a married couple and named as their marriage date October 8, 1904, the day on which they had left Ireland together. Nora made herself two years younger and stated that her year of birth was 1886.

Joyce was diagnosed with glaucoma in 1917 and Nora has been his secretary ever since. During Nora's spa stay in Locarno , Joyce began with the first chapters of Ulysses. On her return Joyce had to undergo eye surgery, from which he recovered with difficulty. After the financial situation had stabilized somewhat, Joyce founded an English-speaking theater company, the English Players , together with his friend Claude Sykes , not least to premiere the autobiographical play Exiles , which was rejected, but this failed. Nora worked in the ensemble as an actress. Joyce, for whom Nora was a source of inspiration, wanted to induce Nora to infidelity in order to have material for his Ulysses. But he did not succeed.

The time after the First World War

After the end of the First World War , Nora and Joyce initially returned to Trieste from exile in Switzerland, but moved to Paris in 1920 on the mediation of Ezra Pound , where they lived in various hotels and apartments until the outbreak of the Second World War .

In the spring of 1922, Nora left her partner Joyce to return to Ireland with the children. Joyce tried desperate and submissive letters to persuade Nora to return.

“Obviously it is impossible to describe to you the despair I have been in since you left. [...] I always carry your picture in my heart. O my dearest, if you would only turn to yourself now [...] and take me to you, alone to do what you want with me! "

Sobered by the beginning of the Irish Civil War , Nora returned to Joyce.

When Joyce's eye condition worsened again, she helped him conceptualize Finnegans Wake . This emerges from notes on Dante's Divine Comedy in Nora's handwriting. In an appendix she wrote: “Today, June 16, 1924, twenty years later. Whether anyone will remember that date. "

Although Joyce refused to marry, he consented to a civil marriage in 1931, mainly to legitimize his son Giorgio, whose illegitimate birth and adopted name "Joyce" was a flaw in the eyes of the daughter-in-law.

The next few years were overshadowed by Lucia's mental illness , which at the end of 1935 led to her being admitted to a closed institution .

Shortly after the almost blind Joyce was able to complete and publish Finnegans Wake in 1939 , the Second World War began . Fearing the bombing raids, Nora and Joyce first moved to the village of Saint-Gérard-le-Puy in Auvergne and, for a short time, to Vichy , which they had to leave again because of the partial occupation of France and the Vichy regime . On December 16, 1940, James Joyce and Nora emigrated with their son Giorgio and their grandson to Zurich, Switzerland, where Joyce died on January 13, 1941.

Nora stayed in Zurich even after the end of the Second World War. She died on April 10, 1951 of acute kidney failure ( uremia ). In 1966 the remains of James Joyce and Nora were reburied and buried in a grave of honor in the Fluntern cemetery in Zurich .

Nora in the works of Joyce

Honorary grave of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Zurich

For Joyce, Nora was a source of inspiration, and he even recorded Nora's erotic dreams.

  • Many of Nora's character traits have flowed into the female characters in The Dubliners' story collection . According to Kerstin Groß-Stranz, the figure of Gretta Conroy in The Dead anticipates Molly Bloom in Ulysses . At the same time, Gretta's biographical narrative is reminiscent of Nora's experiences, such as the memory of her deceased childhood sweetheart, here called Michael Furey. "I think he died for me, she answered."
  • In the autobiographical drama Exiles (Exiles) from 1914, Nora is portrayed as Bertha. She Weeps Over Rahoon is also found in Joyce's notes . Rahoon is the eastern part with the Galway cemetery, where Nora / Bertha mourns the death of her childhood sweetheart, "him whom her love murdered", a motif that also appears in the story The Dead .
  • Molly Bloom at the Ulysses . The novel takes place on the day Joyce and Nora's relationship began. In characterizing Molly, Joyce even adopted Nora's style and quirk of writing without punctuation. Whether and to what extent he used Nora's original letters and notes remains uncertain.
  • Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake has some of the traits of the more mature Nora.

Reception and aftermath

The role of Nora Barnacles in Joyce's life has long been misunderstood. Thomas Wolfe , who only got to know Nora briefly in 1926, described her in a letter as: “one of a thousand French middle-class women, [...] a vulgar, rather slack mouth; not very intelligent. "

The time was after Nora's death in 1951, at least a few words of appreciation and endorsed her that she was the "long-time confidante and literary midwife her famous writer husband."

In the following years Nora was portrayed more and more negatively, and she was considered a slut, as well as an "uneducated and unread woman" who "never spoke the language of the country in which she lived." It was also criticized that she had refused the Ulysses to read or other works of her husband. However, this only applied to Ulysses . On the other hand, she liked to quote Joyce's poems and loved Finnegans Wake . Her circle of friends, however, knew about Nora's leading role in Joyce's life, as well as that it was mainly thanks to Nora that Joyce had not lost his creative power through his alcoholism.

In summary, Brenda Maddox wrote : "For a long time the only recognition she found was that of being her husband's portable Ireland."

It was only through Brenda Maddox's research and the biography based on it that the picture of Nora was corrected. According to Christian Barduhn, Nora embodied "for Joyce what he lacked: strength, security, warmth, lightness".

Based on the biography of Brenda Maddox, Nora's Life was filmed in 1999 and released in theaters in 2000.

Adaptations in musicals and films

  • 1980: Even before the biography was published, a musical about Nora's life was premiered at the Dublin Theater Festival.
  • 1987: The Dead (The Dead) . Based on the story in Dubliner , directed by John Huston .
  • 2000: feature film Nora. The passionate love of James Joyce . Directed by Pat Murphy, with Susan Lynch and Ewan McGregor , also as video (2001) and DVD (2003)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See also: Kerstin Groß-Stranz: Virgin, seductress, mother, female figures in selected works by James Joyce . (PDF; 1.58 MB) Dissertation 2007, p. 26.
  2. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 36
  3. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 42
  4. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 46f.
  5. ↑ So also Joyce, in the notes to his autobiographical piece Banished , see Brenda Maddox, Nora - The life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 50.
  6. ^ Carsten Beyer, Deutschlandradio Berlin, calendar, see web links.
  7. ↑ Quotation from the dirty letters , 1909, printed by Kerstin Groß-Stranz: Virgo, seductress, mother, female figures in selected works by James Joyce . (PDF; 1.58 MB) Dissertation 2007, p. 64.
  8. ↑ Kerstin Groß-Stranz: Virgin, seductress, mother, female figures in selected works by James Joyce . (PDF; 1.58 MB) Dissertation 2007, p. 64
  9. ↑ Cf. Brenda Maddox, Nora - The life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , page 123 (three weeks after Giorgio's birth) and page 196.
  10. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 198.
  11. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , pp. 232f. This date can still be found in many of the references to Nora Barnacle.
  12. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 249.
  13. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 254.
  14. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , pp. 267ff.
  15. ↑ In 1925 they moved into an apartment on Square Robiac, which they gave up in 1931, Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 373ff.
  16. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 324, undated letter from April (?) 1922.
  17. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 369.
  18. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , pp. 416–456, see also: Kerstin Groß-Stranz: Virgin, seductress, mother, female figures in selected works by James Joyce . (PDF; 1.58 MB) Dissertation 2007, footnote p. 115
  19. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 512.
  20. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 243.
  21. ↑ Kerstin Groß-Stranz: Virgin, seductress, mother, female figures in selected works by James Joyce . (PDF; 1.58 MB) Dissertation 2007, writes differently from the Maddox "Fury"
  22. ↑ Kerstin Groß-Stranz: Virgin, seductress, mother, female figures in selected works by James Joyce . (PDF; 1.58 MB) Dissertation 2007, p. 109ff.
  23. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p.139; P. 147.
  24. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 330; 337.
  25. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 368; 412ff.
  26. ↑ Elizabeth Nowell (Ed.): The letters of Thomas Wolfe , 115 f, quoted in Brenda Maddox, Nora - Das Leben der Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 386
  27. ↑ In the April 23, 1951 issue, Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 600.
  28. ↑ Quotations, Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , pp. 602f.
  29. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Nora - The Life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 599.
  30. ↑ Christian Barduhn, review of the Nora biography by Brenda Maddox, see web links
  31. ↑ Maureen O'Farrell, AJ Potter, Annette Perry: Nora Barnacle - The Musical . ( Memento of May 5, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Brenda Maddox, Nora - The life of Nora Joyce . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990, ISBN 3-462-02063-3 , p. 604 names the year 1977 differently.
personal data
SURNAME Barnacle, Nora
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Joyce, Nora
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Wife of the writer James Joyce
DATE OF BIRTH March 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Galway
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1951
Place of death Zurich