In Finnegans Wake, Joyce amplifies the meditation on May Dedalus in Ulysses, presenting Anna Livia Plurabelle as an ethical agent, a figure (sometimes quite literally, as when she becomes a geometrical figure) through whom ethical relations might be understood and engaged. In suggesting this capacity, Joyce differs from a traditional and even patriarchal equation of maternity with moral rectitude, an equation exemplified in his time by the extremely conservative roles assigned to women as moral exemplars within the domestic sphere. ALP does not always act in accord with the standard moral codes of her culture or her time. Rather, she presents in her own interactions and in the habitat she provides for her children, an ethical understanding formed by her assumption that oppositional categories are interdependent though never interchangeable.