Clearly, the emptiness of Irish Catholicism and the desperate lack of clear ideals and leaders are joined with Joyce's depiction of the futility of the Irish Renaissance, a literary movement which turned for inspiration and subject matter to the country's roots, here personified in the arid old milkwoman. The old lady is a parody of the Shan van Vocht, the Poor Old Lady of Irish lore, who will turn into a beautiful young queen when Ireland begins to take her place among the nations of the world. Her most prominent appearance in Irish Renaissance literature is in Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which she arrives to inspire a young man to take up arms against the British during the Rebellion of 1798.
Joyce's symbolic Shan van Vocht, however, has little ability to inspire anyone. She delivers milk but, in her, the milk of life has dried up; she arrives late; she prefers the loud, posturing medicine man, Mulligan, to the withdrawn intellectual, Stephen. She is not bothered very much by the fact that an Englishman, Haines, can speak Gaelic while she cannot, and although she admits that she is ashamed of her deficiency, she accepts the judgment of those who can speak the tongue that Irish is a "grand language." By picturing the old milkwoman as a "witch on her toadstool," Joyce is excoriating the folklore excavations of such writers as Yeats and Lady Gregory, who went from cottage to cottage recording the tales of western Irelanders. Joyce, who looked to Europe for artistic inspiration, thought such renderings to be empty exercises, products of senile minds, inventing a false past to evade present responsibilities. This escapism is seen in the wretched life of Mary Dedalus, another victim of rote acceptance of the status quo, and Stephen cannot help but see the similarities between the old crone and his own mother.
In one sense, then, "Telemachus" asks the question: "Who will hold the key to Ireland's future?" Will it be Mulligan, who at the end of the chapter has the large key to the Martello Tower, using it to press down his clothing? Or will it be Bloom, who spends the entirety of the novel trying to negotiate an advertisement with the House of Keyes and who neglects, on the morning of June 16, to bring with him his own key to his house at 7 Eccles Street and must, in "Ithaca," find another way to get into his own home (like Homer's Odysseus)? Is the key to Ulysses to be found in the brash physicality of Mulligan, the solipsistic intellectuality of Stephen, or the passivity and humanitarianism of Bloom? Although Joyce never does answer these questions, the novel depicts and suggests many possibilities.
