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The Discourses of Social Purity Katherine Mullin. James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xi + 224 pp. $60.00
DESPITE ITS TITLE, this book does not focus primarily on sexuality. Nor, despite claims made in its jacket blurb, does it consistently treat the question of censorship. Rather, it studies Joyce's conscious engagement with the doctrines and discourses of social purity, as this engagement expresses itself in his fiction.
Mullin defines the social purity movement broadly yet clearly. As presented here, it operated primarily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It included people concerned with the dangers of potentially corrupting literature as well as of dubious new technologies like the mutoscope (an early means of creating moving pictures, sometimes deployed for pornographic purposes). Intriguingly, Mullin demonstrates that boys' adventure stories once aroused almost as much anxiety among self-appointed moral guardians as pornographic literature did. The idea that contact with adventure stories would lead young male readers into a life of armed robbery seems as naïve today as the belief that reading pornography would entice young female readers into prostitution, but both concerns appear to have been seriously and widely felt. Both concerns, moreover, avoided any real engagement with the economic factors that seem far more likely to contribute to social problems, an avoidance which Mullin could perhaps have critiqued in greater depth. The social purity movement also incorporated those attempting (sometimes with complex and self-contradictory motives) to close brothels and reform prostitutes. In its concern with sexual continence, Theosophy aligned itself closely with social purity. Even in predominantly Catholic Ireland, social purity was essentially a Protestant phenomenon. Mullin's research into these issues has been admirably thorough, and her construction of the cultural contexts they generate remains persuasive throughout her book.
That the values underpinning such endeavours often attracted satirical reactions from Joyce hardly comes as news, but Mullin demonstrates convincingly that his particular responses could be more wide-ranging, complex and subtle than has been noticed. She shows that Joyce's own transactions with the forces of social purity were surprisingly intricate and had a considerable ongoing effect in shaping his writing. Her claim that "Joyce was deliberately provoking and inciting the eventual vice society intervention into the publication of Ulysses...