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Though the vexed issue of family identity is older than Oedipus, Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses faces a dual bind. Stephen must confront both his biological mother, now dead, and the symbolic mother produced by his anxious consciousness. Both figures lack subjecthood; in fact, as Hill contends, “Only by silencing and objectifying the mother can Stephen satisfy his infantile craving for oneness and his adult need for autonomy.” To expand the paradigm: Stephen must resolve the tension between the law of the father and the selfhood of the mother to create the potential for a new self.
As Nancy Chodorow, Jane Gallop, and others have noted, differentiation is based on perceived otherness. The death of Stephen's mother paradoxically precipitates a crisis by forcing Dedalus to accept the fact of her self, recreating her image through language and memory. Yet maternal images in Ulysses are often monstrous: the all-encompassing sea in the Telemachiad section, or the rotting corpse in the Circe episode. The creativity, fertility, and sex that she further represents are equally