The Anti-Erasure of Lucia Joyce

This chapter shows how Joyce’s final novel creates a recuperative and productive space that returns agency to fictional and non-fictional mentally disabled women who were otherwise at the mercy of neurotypical patriarchal systems of oppression. Marchisotto argues Finnegans Wake challenges understandings of madness in literary, social, and clinical settings through a haunting network of association. Joyce adapts his daughter Lucia’s experiences alongside other historical figures and characters including Hamlet’s Ophelia to productively reintegrate previously silenced voices as part of a newly liberated literary history. Through synthesizing fictional and non-fictional histories of mental disability, Joyce generates an open system of identification that encourages readers to play with meaning and challenge normative conceptions of consciousness, elevating understandings of the complex relationship between mental disability, gender, and culture in contemporary contexts. Previously, scholars have contested the ethicality of engaging with Lucia’s history, a question that has often been taken up as a part of mad studies more broadly. Analysis of Lucia’s influence have primarily focused on the Wake from a genetic perspective. Through a synthesis of disability and mad studies alongside Joyce’s biographical writing, the author expands this analysis to position Finnegans Wake and Lucia’s influence on it as part of a socio-political history extending beyond the development of a single text. She claims the Wake’s plurality of meaning allows readers to engage with Lucia’s experience in new contexts without the same stigma or fear that characterized her in life, ultimately reinventing understandings of what it means to be mentally disabled.