Phoenix Park enters this passage as the setting of an alleged sexual scandal involving HCE, but it is heard through a washerwoman’s scurrilous, unstable account rather than established by an objective narration. The park’s comic renaming as the “Fiendish park” folds a real Dublin landmark into the book’s fractured language of accusation, public talk, and uncertain memory.

The Park in the Accusation

The washerwoman recalls what people tried to make out that HCE had done in the park. Her account does not give a settled description of the act: the accusation is referred to indirectly, and its details are obscured by puns, insinuation, and the speaker’s hostile interruptions. Phoenix Park is thus marked less by a verifiable incident than by the place’s role in the story circulating about HCE.

Gossip, Evidence, and Public Exposure

The speech connects the park allegation to the washing of HCE’s linen. The speaker complains that his dirt has blackened her water and that she has repeatedly scrubbed his private clothing, turning domestic labor into a public airing of the scandal. The stained shirt and the “mouldaw stains” serve as supposed material traces, but they do not clarify what happened; instead, they bind bodily residue, rumor, and the labor of washing into one charged image.

The washerwoman invokes news reports, witnesses, and officials, then rapidly swerves into mocking names, uncertain origins, and questions about HCE’s marriage. Such shifts make the accusation both widely circulated and difficult to pin down. The park becomes the imagined center of a case assembled from hearsay, scraps of apparent evidence, and comic verbal transformations.

Narrative Significance

The place-name’s transformation into “Fiendish park” captures the passage’s broader method: an identifiable location is made to carry conflicting associations without resolving them into a stable report. The scene does not confirm the accusation or furnish an independent account of the park; it shows how HCE’s alleged conduct is retold, embellished, and made public through the washerwoman’s voice. Phoenix Park consequently functions as a focal point for the novel’s recurring entanglement of place, scandal, and unreliable testimony.