Nuvoletta and the “Dantellising Peaches”: Dante, Femininity, and the Poetic Intertexts of Issy in Finnegans Wake

When critics discuss the feminine in Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle tends to receive most of the attention. She is the most dominant, demanding, and persistent of the book’s many manifestations of the feminine, the ‘‘total . . . female presence,’’ as David Hayman puts it, the maternal archetype whose existence is felt in ‘‘the noncoherence of every page of the Wake.’’1 She is everywhere and she is unavoidable, her centrality within Finnegans Wake arguably rivaled only by HCE himself.2 Given this centrality, and the close connections that have been drawn between her and other dominant manifestations of the feminine within Joyce’s work (such as Molly Bloom), it is not surprising that most critics studying the feminine within the Wake have focused their attention upon ALP, to the detriment of her daughter Issy.3 This is not to claim, of course, that Issy has been entirely overlooked or ignored by scholars—far from it; rather, I am suggesting that she has primarily been viewed through her relation to her parents, and rarely given sufficient scrutiny as a character herself. Indeed, whether addressing her orientation toward the male figures of the family within the context of the narrative and the textual dynamics of incest, or examining her relationship with ALP through the narrow lens of Freudian maternal anxiety, the critical fascination with Issy’s relation to her parents has led to her being seen primarily as ALP’s daughter. Such a view risks missing the complex and troubling portrait of femininity that Joyce drew independently in the youngest member of the Wake’s central family.4 One possible way to redress this ALP-centric attitude, and to redirect critical attention toward the figure of Issy herself as an embodiment of