Although James Joyce`s literary universe is populated by multivarious personas and even more diverse personality traits, it is inarguable that his characters display a certain distinct set of common denominators when it comes to the question of the rural versus the city. That is, just as Joyce`s central male characters are predominantly aligned to the thematic/topological pole of city and urbanity in general, so too, on the other end of the spectrum, his female characters lean toward the rural and natural: starting with the Galway-born Gretta Conroy and the avowedly Eurocentric, cosmopolitan Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead," the moon/earth-compared heroines of Exiles and Ulysses vis a vis their urbane, well-informed male companions, all the way to ALP and HCE of Finnegans Wake, whose dual signification primarily revolves around the river Liffey and the city of Dublin respectively. Yet it is not as if this apparent dualism recognizable in Joyce`s writings is without seismic fault line, or lack its own strand of tensional nodes where the aforesaid gendered allegorical functions reach their torsional limit. Whence the need to reread the Mullingar episode of Stephen Hero, which marks the rare textual instance in Joyce by choosing to confront and depict the real-existing countryside. There we find not only variegated female residents of the rural province but also a group of male peasants whose visage remarkably resembles that of the exotically Oriental. After excising that fascinating narrative account from the revised text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce never went on to grapple with the subject of the rural in a formally realist manner. The question then raised by Joyce`s manifestly modernist/urban writing is, could we afford to do likewise in this late age of globalization?