“The pianola, with changing lights plays in waltz time the prelude of My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.”
Here begins the fantastic and audacious scene of the young-adult Stephen Dedalus in the middle of a whore house (living room?) ready to wildly dance with his hired girls, Zoe, Kitty, and Florry. His (friend?) Lynch, gets in on the action too as this musical instrument both figuratively and literally comes to life in Joyce’s maddening theatrical rendition of “Circe”.
The Pianola, capitalized because of its very real identity, is given speaking lines in this chapter. Some of its stage lines are mere lyrics to the song, My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl, that should only be playing instrumentally, in theory, and some that are more pointed and potentially hold more meaning like when (she?) says “My little shy lass has a waist”. This instrument – this object – stuck out because of the role it plays in both the chapter of Circe and the book as a whole, as it may represent a key aspect of Stephen’s life and failures.
Firstly, the Pianola and the music that it produces becomes the driving force that physically brings Stephen together with these girls in a strikingly more confident way than we’ve ever seen him before. Here, maybe because of the alcohol he’s consumed, (or maybe because it’s happening only in his imagination?), we see how “Stephen throws his ashplant on the table and seizes Zoe around the waist”, and eventually they “turn boldly with looser swing”.
This is a drastically different side of the young man who, in the beginning of the book, was sadly writing yearning poetry on an empty beach about how he’ll never find true love. This mix of fantasy and reality, symbolized through the speaking Pianola, signal to us the image of Stephen’s desires – this is the smooth, confident, girl-magnet version of himself that he’s always wanted to be.
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