Ulysses

by James Joyce

  In the meantime, that imperfect androgyne, Leopold Bloom, begins his day. He prepares his wife’s breakfast, a deed much practised by the contemporary husband but, in the Dublin of 1904, liable to be cited in all-male pubs as a case of perversion. Moreover, although he serves his wife her breakfast in bed, he prefers to eat his own in the solitude of the kitchen. What we are witnessing here is the institution known in Ireland as ‘the silent marriage’, whereby two people manage to share a house but not a life. This was the ‘abominable spectre’ called ‘mutual tolerance’ which Joyce determined to ‘avoid as far as is humanly possible’ in his experiment in non-marital fidelity with Nora Barnacle. To her Joyce complained that there was no honesty in Irish sexuality: ‘people live together in the same houses all their lives and at the end they are as far apart as ever’. This is true of the Blooms, who dislike dressing together and manage, by a tacit compact, to spend most of the day apart.

  Even so early in the book, Leopold Bloom gives expression to a traditionally ‘feminine’ aspect of his personality, staying to straighten the bedspread or to flick an offending crumb off his wife’s bedsheet. He is, nonetheless, equally capable of gestures which might be seen as traditionally ‘masculine’. His first thought on entering the street is to walk behind a comely housemaid, taking pleasure in her ‘moving hams’. Yet even this impulse is inextricably linked with an urge to female impersonation, as he simulates her walk. From the outset of his day, Bloom shows himself fascinated not so much with women as with what it means to be born a woman. Gravely he ponders a life spent fitting pins into hair and clothing, or making adjustments to disorderly skirts under the protective coverage of a friend in the street. His fellow-feeling for woman in the momentous labour of childbirth is accompanied by a similar empathy with the woman suddenly taken short in a city whose lavatories, like its pubs, were notoriously built for men only. As he passes the statue of Tom Moore, he ponders: ‘They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for women. Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight …’ All through the day Bloom displays an admirable and rare capacity to see the world through the eyes and mind of others, to imagine, for example, how wine or cigarettes must have a heightened taste to a blind man. It is this, as much as anything, which Leneham salutes as the touch of the artist in Bloom.

  This empathy is nowhere more clear than in Bloom’s attitude to women who are caught in moments of disadvantage. Bloom’s obsession with the masterful type of woman arises less from feelings of sympathetic intimacy than from a sense of antagonistic remoteness. He appears to have a subconscious desire to be dominated. His wife’s demeanour at the morning breakfast is somewhat imperious; and he is described by the mourners at Glasnevin Cemetery as the nonentity who married Madam Marion Tweedy, the good-looking soprano. In his imagination he has fantasies of aristocratic ladies and horsey women who strut, drink and ride ‘like a man’. His thoughts are equally exercised by Mrs Bandman Palmer, the actress: ‘Hamlet she played last night. Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman …’ This was Mrs Palmer’s four-hundred-and-eighth performance of the role in which Shakespeare recreated that androgyny which links him to Bloom. ‘Man delights him not nor woman neither,’ recalls Stephen, but ‘in the economy of Heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.’

  Once again, in these lines, Stephen has an answer to his quest, but fails to recognize it, much as he fails to identify the androgynous angel who passes between himself and Mulligan in the National Library. Mulligan considers that Bloom harbours homosexual yearnings for Stephen. The latter’s mind is preoccupied with the recollection of a strange dream from the previous night, in the course of which a man held out a creamfruit melon in welcome. Already the erotic fantasies of the two men are intersecting, for it will later be shown that Bloom likes to caress Molly’s buttocks and to pretend that they are melons – a pleasure which he will later think of offering to Stephen. Sensing a new rival for Stephen’s friendship. Mulligan sneers at a man ‘Greeker than the Greeks’, but the implication of homosexuality misconstrues Bloom’s androgyny. At the emotional level, Bloom relives the life of Shakespeare as much as that of Odysseus. If everyone lived on the earth long ago, then surely he was Shakespeare, a frustrated father whose son dies and whose bossy wife cuckolds him. Stephen, whose instincts are even sharper than his mind, completes the parallel: ‘And why no other children born? And his first child a girl?’ It is no coincidence that a mournful Bloom listens to this disquisition in depressed silence or that his shocked sentences which follow should peter out into irresolution and inconsequence.

  Earlier that morning, Bloom had marvelled at how Simon Dedalus was ‘full of his son’ and had decided that ‘he is right. Something to hand on’. Now, in the Ormond Hotel bar, he grows melancholy with song and wine, finding an almost unbearable poignancy in the words of The Croppy Boy: ‘Last of his name and race. I, too, last of my race … No son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still? … Soon I am old.’ If paternity is indeed a fiction, then this passage reinforces our sense of the marginality of all the males in the book, Simon Dedalus as much as Leopold Bloom. The latter may have no son, but the former has to ask for news of his from passing cadgers of drink. The woman is closer to the real source of power in her capacity to bear children, allied to her modern ability to live on male terms in the world of men. The very scope of traditional male power has proved self-defeating, for, since culture is largely a masculine creation, the increasing education of women has tended to reinforce the male element innate in females without a compensating extension in the sexual identity of males. So, the Misses Douce and Kennedy can cast a ‘feminine’ spell over the males of the Ormond bar, while at the same time sharing in the privileged ambience of ‘masculinity’ which pervades. In public, they can exercise their sexual power over Boylan, while privately judging him ‘the essence of vulgarity’. If women can do all that men can do and more besides, then nothing is intrinsically ‘masculine’ any more and the broken provincials at the bar know it.

  Bloom’s later fantasy in Circe of being pregnant is merely an attempt to heal that sense of disability. Circe is a midnight carnival; and, in classical mythology, at the carnival of androgynes, men become pregnant. Such wish-fulfilment is a widespread phenomenon, suggesting that many men wish for a more central role in child-rearing. (For example, under the couvade system, a father takes to his bed as a mother goes into labour, while in a recent British survey 57 per cent of males assessed reported mysterious symptoms when their partners were pregnant.) If women have taken over traditional male prerogatives, then Joyce – like his character Bloom – responded by assuming some of the attributes of wife and mother. The attempt was futile and, in truth, Joyce never expected it to be otherwise. His brother Stanislaus noted that he had early in life resigned himself to the marginality of the male, who did not expect to be the main purpose of a woman’s life, knowing that sooner or later children would take his place. In Ulysses he showed how that sense of increasing isolation, following the birth of children, is countered in the male by an attempt to reincarnate in himself those female elements which are disappearing from his life.

  It is these very elements which discredit Bloom in the eyes of the male boozers of Cyclops, who prefer (like Mulligan) to read in them the signs of an incipient homosexuality. Bloom is full of concern for the plight of Josie Breen, his old friend now married to a paranoid lunatic who is the laughing stock of the Dublin pubs. The callous dismissal of Bloom’s concern is couched in double entendres of sinister implication:

  —Still, says Bloom, on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife.

  —Pity about her, says the citizen. Or any other woman marries a half and half.

  —How half and half: says Bloom. Do you mean he …?

  —Half and half I mean, says the citizen. A pishogue, if you know what that is.

  Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And
Bloom explained he meant, on account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the old stuttering fool …

  As the conversation proceeds, the chauvinist citizen toys ever more closely with the raw nerves of Bloom, who must follow his simple explanation that love is the opposite of hatred with a hasty retreat. ‘That’s the New Messiah for Ireland’, says the citizen scornfully, little realizing that in mythology androgynes are customarily prophets (and vice-versa). Six weeks before his doomed son was born, Bloom was spotted buying a tin of baby-food in the south city markets – further proof to the denizens of the pub that he is not a real man. Worse still, he is believed to suffer phantom menstrual periods ‘once a month with a headache like a totty on her courses’.

  Although this seems like a slander, it turns out in the Nausicaa chapter to be no more than an elaboration of the truth. Gerty MacDowell waves her white handkerchief wadding to the dark stranger, but Bloom proves to be as immune to this romantic gesture as he was to the barmaids in the Ormond. Instead of warming to the fetish-maiden of male fantasy, he ponders the female experience in its own terms, wondering if the wadding means that Gerty is ‘near her monthlies’. His headache convinces him that he is near his: ‘feel it myself too’. (Joyce may here be reflecting the famous claim by Havelock Ellis that ‘men possess traces of a rudimentary sexual cycle, affecting the entire organism’.) Bloom begins to wonder if the meeting was fated: ‘When you feel like that you often meet what you feel.’ Once again Bloom tries to evaluate his own face through the eyes of a woman who is watching him. His ability to imagine himself as he appears to Gerty’s eyes causes acute self-doubt: ‘Didn’t let her see me in profile. Still, you never know. Pretty girls and ugly men marrying. Beauty and the beast. Besides I can’t be so if Molly …’ That has multiple poignancies, not the least being Molly’s later assessment of Leopold as still handsome – but it is clear that she never managed to tell him so, for he judges himself too ugly to interest women. Even more poignant is the reader’s awareness that Gerty has been beset by similar self-doubts in her attempt to attract Bloom, including the same remedy of tilting her hat romantically low over her eyes – something which Stephen and Bloom also do. All of which convinces us that the characters in Ulysses are recreating the lives not just of past heroes but of one another.

  Gerty is woefully misled as to the true nature of Bloom. She fancies him ‘a manly man’ who would strain her soft body; and she would present herself to him as ‘a womanly woman not like other nighty girls, unfeminine, he had known, those cyclists, showing off what they hadn’t got’. The scoffers in Kiernan’s pub could have told her that she was barking up the wrong tree, as indeed could Molly, who has often disapprovingly noted her husband’s interest in female cyclists. Since their encounter is wordless, its self-deceptions remain intact and Bloom can reach his lonely climax in a masturbatory variation on Mulligan’s bleak drama: ‘Everyman His Own Wife’. His subsequent and very uncharacteristic outbursts of misogyny are best explained as the outcome of a self-hatred consequent upon guilt. As if by instinct, his thoughts return to Molly and he recalls her earliest romantic experiences as if they were his own. If there is a feminine element in Bloom which takes pleasure in sharing Molly’s secrets, it rejoices even more in the male elements of her personality: ‘Dreamt last night … She had red slippers on. Turkish. Wore the breeches. Suppose she does. Would I like her in pyjamas? Damned hard to say …’ This fantasy of Molly in men’s clothing seems to intersect strangely with Stephen’s dream of an eastern gentleman, who held out the red carpet and the melon. In the androgyne, according to Ellemire Zolla, ‘the man’s female aspect will act like a mirror to women (as will the woman’s male aspect to men); but it will also assert its female charm on men themselves’. So Bloom’s fantasy of his wife seems a variant of Stephen’s premonitory dream of Bloom, and the borders between the sexes seem more ambiguous than ever.

  In the subsequent discussion at the maternity hospital on the future determination of gender in children, it is no surprise to find the respective positions outlined most succinctly by Bloom from Empedocles’s view that the right ovary is responsible for the birth of males, through the theory that spermatozoa or nemasperms are the differentiating factors, to the conventional embryologist’s opinion that ‘it is a mixture of both’. It is pretty clear by now that Bloom himself is a mixture of both genders, an exponent of the androgyny which Joyce saw as the sexuality of the future, a man who can share uniquely in the wonder and woe of woman’s labour.

  No prophet, least of all a sexual prophet, is accepted in his own country. In Circe, Bloom must pay the price for his advanced opinions and confront the deep-seated guilt which they arouse in him. So he is arraigned (in his imagination) by the society ladies of Dublin for his perverse and masochistic demands on them. Such deeds lead, however, to unexpected acclamation by the citizens, among whom is a feminist who ‘masculinely’ roars her approval. The mood swings back to hostility, however, as Dr Malachi Mulligan pronounces Bloom ‘bisexually abnormal’ with the symptoms of ‘ambidexterity’. Dr Dixon, a close friend of the accused, will have none of this, protesting that Bloom is merely an example of the androgyny of the fully-developed person, ‘the new womanly man’.

  Like Lawrence, Joyce derived from Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character the notion of Jews as womanly men; and he applied the phrase to Bloom. In The Study of Thomas Hardy, Lawrence had described the Jew as ‘the servant of his God, the female, passive’, one in whom the female predominated and whose own physique included the woman. ‘The secret, scrupulous voluptuousness of the Jew’, said Lawrence, ‘became almost self-voluptuousness, engaged in the consciousness of his own physique.’ Joyce shared Lawrence’s view of the Jews as victims of a new apocalypse and prophets of a new era. Circe is, therefore, devoted to the New Bloomu-salem, though Bloom’s apotheosis will cost him every last ounce of self-respect before he attains to prophecy.

  He is trapped in a painful dilemma. His androgyny allows him to heal his sense of alienation from the opposite sex, but only at the price of losing the respect of his own. The more successful he is in deepening his awareness of the intimate life of a woman, the more he fears himself unmanned. No sooner does he admit the female element in himself, than that woman cries out for proof that, despite appearances, he is still reassuringly male. Hence the intermittent sexism and miso-gnyny in the midst of his more liberated impulses.

  Although it can be an image of harmony, the androgyne can also be an epitome of lost power and manliness. Vedic texts have suggested to scholars that male pregnancy has been ritually associated with death. Wendy Doninger O’Flaherty has argued that the human problem of impotence became the myth of androgyny, with the result that there is ‘a deep substructure of shadow and terror inherent in the image’.

  Moreover, the ideal of androgyny may have arisen from the fear of freakish extremism. ‘Each sex tends to feel itself forever denned as freakish in relation to the other,’ comments Leslie Fiedler, on the grounds that the penis leaves the male a monstre par excés and its lack the female a monstre par défaut. He insists, however, that the ideal must never become real, since it is invariably ‘undercut by a profound fear of being unmanned or unwomaned, and by guilt for desiring such an event’. From this Fiedler concludes his book Freaks by contending that for Joyce androgyny came to represent ‘an ultimate horror rather than an idyllic vision’.

  This contention invests too much significance in a single chapter of Ulysses, misrepresenting the balance of the book. The self-recriminations of Circe are not ultimately more decisive than the massive endorsement of androgyny (by Joyce as well as Bloom) in most other chapters. What is dramatized in Circe is clear enough – the fact that it is easier to preach a new doctrine than to practise it, and the recognition that the harmonies of androgyny are hard-won. It must be understood that Bloom never feels himself to be freakish in relation to the opposite sex. On the contrary, his androgyny gives him a unique insight into womanhood, an insight lack
ing in most other males in Dublin, who treat Bloom in the same way as they treat a woman, that is, as a freak. These males are the real neurotics of Ulysses, because they behave as if the gender of their sexual object determined their own. Their ‘masculinity’ is an effect of social conditioning – to the effect that ‘men are in all things the opposite to women’ – rather than an expressive ensemble of the whole person. In their anxiety to repress the female within each man, they constitute a working majority in the Dublin of 1904; and so they can pass for normal and denounce Bloom as eccentric. But it is they who live out lives of freakish contortion and Bloom who has discovered that the alleged deviant is often just a man with a deeper than average apprehension of normality. For Bloom, androgyny is not an option (which might heal the sense of each gender that it is freakish in the eyes of the other) but a donné. He is androgynous to begin with. Partaking of male and female, he can never see either as freakish, for when he contemplates the bodies of women, he is looking at a fuller embodiment of an aspect of himself.