The first paragraph of Nausicaa describes views of
the sea and the Howth peninsula from the rocks along
Sandymount Strand, as well as a "quiet church whence there
streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer
to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the
stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea." The final
words obliquely identify the church: Mary's, Star of the Sea,
named for the Virgin's common
appellation Stella Maris. At the time
represented in the novel, this Roman Catholic church in
Sandymount was located very close to the shore.
Prayers are being addressed to the Virgin late on a Thursday
evening because a temperance retreat is being conducted in the
church. Joyce had represented such a retreat once before, in
"Grace," the next to last story of Dubliners. That
retreat took place in "the Jesuit
Church in Gardiner Street," in the north part of central
Dublin, but the Sandymount church holds significance for Mr.
Kernan, the alcoholic whose Catholic friends maneuver him into
attending that temperance retreat, and for his wife: "In her
days of courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant
figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a
wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled
with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of
the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a
jovial well-fed man who was dressed smartly in a frockcoat and
lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced
upon his other arm. After three weeks she had found a wife's
life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it
unbearable, she had become a mother."
Mrs. Kernan's association of the Star of the Sea with a
happier time of life, before eager anticipations of marriage
were supplanted by the brutal reality of living with an
alcoholic, no doubt has bearing on the associations
established in Nausicaa. This is the parish church
of Paddy Dignam, whose
home is likewise very close to the shore, and whose alcoholism
has just shepherded him to an early grave and left his family
confronting poverty. Gerty MacDowell, who sits on the shore
listening to the ceremony in the church, has grown up in a
home where her father's alcoholism sometimes led to domestic
violence. She passes her days dreaming of marriage to a prince
charming, but she is also well aware of men's capacity for
brutality, and by modeling herself so obsessively on the
Blessed Virgin she seems in part to be aspiring to a condition
of perpetual chastity.
