Curating the Colony: Museums in Ulysses

On national dress and the problem of authenticity inUlysses

“…Julia Panko notes that in the mid-nineteenth century Dublin jewelers began selling reproductions of Celtic ornaments, including the Tara Brooch. 95 Moreover, as she points out, the National Museum's entanglement in commodity culture becomes explicit in "Circe", with its "plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses" among which are "Commerce, […] Publicity, [and] Manufacture". 96 The Tara Brooch, for Molly Ivors a symbol of her devotion to the nationalist movement, was also worn onstage as costume by some of the keenest promoters of Irish culture.…”