Summertime . . . and many of us yearn for the seaside.

We are drawn by its sensuous promise of coolness in heat, adventure on its sparkling surface and romance to the music of its evening sighs. Beyond the picture postcard images lie a myriad stories.

The sea has long had a powerful hold on our myth-making imagination, expressed in film, paint, music and words. It is my good fortune to live on the coast, near the site of the opening scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). This seems as good a place as any to embark on a discussion of the sea in books, not least because Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey as the template for his story. Ulysses’ adventures on his ten year voyage home from Troy are transposed to the streets of Dublin on one day, 16 June 1904, now celebrated as ‘Bloomsday’.

The Joyce Tower where ‘stately plump Buck Mulligan’ and the ‘jejune Jesuit’, Stephen Dedalus, started their day

Joyce begins in Sandycove and references to the sea recur throughout the narrative. Here is Buck Mulligan addressing his lodger, Telemachus/Stephen Dedalus as they stand on the parapet of a Martello[1] tower watching sunrise over the bay.

God, he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta!  She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.  

‘Algy’ is Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), the sexually explicit late Romantic poet, who laments a lost love in ‘The Triumph of Time’:  

 . . .

I will go back to the great sweet mother,

      Mother and lover of men, the sea.

I will go down to her, I and none other,

      Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me;
. . . 

Street art portrait of Joyce as a youngish man in Sandycove

The tower dominates the Forty Foot, a popular bathing place once reserved for ‘Gentlemen Only’ until invaded by a phalanx of nude feminists in 1974. From there you can see the promontory of Howth, setting for the final episode in Ulysses, and Penelope/Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy:

O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtree in the Alameda gardens  . . . and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The ‘swerve of shore’[2] between Sandycove and Howth includes Sandymount Strand, locus of an erotic encounter for the young Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and of the Nausicaa episode in Ulysses. The mass being celebrated in the nearby Star of the Sea church synchronises with fireworks playing over the water and Ulysses/Leopold Bloom’s masturbatory climax as he fantasises about a young woman, Gertie McDowell. She in turn indulges an erotic fantasy about him. ‘Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls . . . your head it simply swirls’. The old music hall ditty becomes an ear worm for Bloom when his teenage daughter, Milly, mentions it in a letter to him. She also says she is ‘getting on swimming in the photo business’, although the job has taken her inland.

The Forty Foot with view of Howth in the background

As you can see, Joyce casts the sea in an archetypal feminine role, image of the fluids of sex and birth. Women, however, see it differently. Just a couple of years before the feminists stormed the Forty Foot, American poet Adrienne Rich published ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (1971-2).

. . .

the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

. . .

The speaker descends to the seabed in search of ‘the thing itself and not the myth’, she is mermaid and merman, she and he, they, seeking the source before binary division of power and all that it entailed for women in particular.  

  Many women writers, however, have associated the sea with death. Kate Chopin’s (1851-1904) heroine Edna Pontellier, in The Awakening (1899) learns to swim, metaphor for her discovery of freedom from convention but ultimately drowns herself rather than return to oppressive domesticity. Likewise, the heroine of Maria Messina’s (1887-1940) story, ‘Behind Closed Doors’ takes comfort from the sea of her Sicilian childhood, and runs to it rather than return to her controlling husband in Rome.

She didn’t suffer being left alone. In the night’s silence she listened to the murmuring sound of the sea and the waves that crashed onto the shore: A random rose would sometimes brush against her hair. She felt that her spirit was at rest.

(Trans. Elise Magistro)

For Iris Murdoch scenes of near-drowning symbolise a spiritual death and resurrection into recognition of love. These include in The Nice and The Good (1968) Ducane’s dramatic rescue of Mary’s son, Pierce, trapped in a sea cave, where ‘perhaps without moving at all he made, more and more feebly, the yearning movement of swimming, of praying.’ Giving them both up for dead, Mary ponders love, death and chance: ‘This changed love moves upon the ocean of accident, over the forms of the dead, a love so impersonal and so cold it can scarcely be recognised . . .’ .

Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, (1978) is saved from drowning through the miraculous intervention of his Buddhist cousin, James. Returning to scene he experiences the ‘semi-sexual twitch of fear, such as I used to feel . . . before plunging into the lethally cold waters off Ireland.’ (Yes, they are!) Nevertheless, he strips and swims, ‘feeling the loneliness of the sea and that particular sensation which I now identified as a sense of death . . .  .’   

The Irish Sea is ‘lethally cold’ even in the sunshine

The sea is an almost constant presence in the work of Joyce’s exact contemporary and modernist rival, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), for whom it marks the passage of time and the approach of death. Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915)[3] published a year before Joyce’s Portrait, is, like Joyce’s novel, a coming-of-age story featuring a naïve but intelligent young woman, Rachel Vinrace, who travels to South America with her uncle and aunt. She becomes engaged to a young man, Terence Hewet, who reads Milton’s Comus (1634), a defence of chastity, to her and she is haunted by the line ‘Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave’. Shortly after this passion killer she takes mortally ill and pictures her death as a drowning:

She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then someone turned her over at the bottom of the sea.

As for Chopin’s and Messina’s heroines, death is Rachel’s only escape from the torment of the conventions imposed on women until the late twentieth century. They are imprisoned in the wreck that Rich explores in her prescient poem.

  The sea has many faces and these accounts of it are distinct from the many popular and brilliant stories of seafaring adventures, particularly those of Melville and Conrad. Topic for a later edition of What’s the Story?!  

---

[1] Martello towers, so named for the design of the Mortella Tower in Corsica, were built around Ireland, many on the east coast, in 1804 against the threat of a Napoleonic invasion.  

[2] Joyce, Finnegans Wake

[3] Woolf introduces Mrs. Dalloway in this novel, soon to become the centre of another novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925) resurrected again in Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours (1998) (Woolf’s original title), the film (2002) and opera (2022) of the same name.

---

There are so many stories about the sea that I have barely scratched the surface here so please share any suggestions for further reading and your thoughts on this quick overview.