A sexual aesthetic

Joyce's abandonment of the Church consisted, as we have seen, in a shift of ideas that both he and his brother described as a shift from belief in a God to a belief in the sexual instincts that make up the human spirit. It was a shift from the traditional authority of the Church account of humanity to the modern materialistic authorities of medicine and of rationalist morality. Wherever Joyce's reading took him (to Blake and Defoe; to the mystical fictions of W.B. Yeats; to his earliest and strongest authority, Ibsen; to the Bible, Aquinas and esoteric theology; or to Shakespeare and Homer in whom he invested the full imaginative energy of his mature years) he found a confirmation of his interest in sexuality and he shows his own preoccupation with each author's treatment of sex.

There is no better example than his reading of The Divine Comedy. His imagination flew straight to the Inferno and to the second circle where those who have died because of their erotic passions are forever whirled. It is from this section of the poem and in particular from the famous story of Francesca da Rimini that the piece of terza rima quoted in ‘Aeolus’ is drawn and, as Mary Reynolds's book estimates, it is this section of the Inferno that Joyce most often quoted or used in his work.