What do Joyce’s Women Want?

What do Joyce’s Women Want?

Freud’s failure in defining what makes a woman, woman left many gloomy points in the unconscious of the female subjects and various unanswered questions including what women want. Shifting the definition of sexual differences from biological perspective to the structure of the speaking subject’s unconscious and her/his position in language, Lacan endeavored to clarify the dark spots of woman’s unconscious. He, however, was unable in unraveling the objects of desire for women, concluding that they themselves do not know what they want. Lacan rationalizes that women look at their own unconscious through the lens of men and in relation to them, so they can never internalize what they want. This research focuses on the fact that maybe women do not know what they want but at least they do not want what men think they do. In the novella The Dead by James Joyce Gabriel the central, most prominent male character of the story as a typical male member of society has preconceptions about women. Throughout the story three women, Lily the caretaker, Miss Ivors an intellectual friend and Gretta his wife prove him that he was not only wrong about his assumptions concerning what women want but he was also wrong about his own position in relation to them.

Freud’s failure in defining what makes a woman, woman left many gloomy points in the unconscious of the female subjects and various unanswered questions including what women want. Shifting the definition of sexual differences from biological perspective to the structure of the speaking subject’s unconscious and her/his position in language, Lacan endeavored to clarify the dark spots of woman’s unconscious. He, however, was unable in unraveling the objects of desire for women, concluding that they themselves do not know what they want. Lacan rationalizes that women look at their own unconscious through the lens of men and in relation to them, so they can never internalize what they want. This research focuses on the fact that maybe women do not know what they want but at least they do not want what men think they do. In the novella The Dead by James Joyce Gabriel the central, most prominent male character of the story as a typical male member of society has preconceptions about women. Throughout the story three women, Lily the caretaker, Miss Ivors an intellectual friend and Gretta his wife prove him that he was not only wrong about his assumptions concerning what women want but he was also wrong about his own position in relation to them.