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Reading, Smashing, and Playing Ulysses
Related topics:
Animals
Doubles
Judaism
Native and Foreign
Sports and Competition
Union and Division
Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/semicolonial-joyce/oclc/42649678&referer=brief_results
Centering on Ulysses' "Cyclops" episode (U 12), Valente asserts that James Joyce displays the "double-bind of Irish manhood" through the interaction between Leopold Bloom and the Citizen (107). This double-bind arises within the context of Victorian manhood, in which each gender offers what the other lacks, establishing two complementary parts. While masculinity demands virile domination, femininity is understood as the restraint of sexual desire. According to Valente, Irish manhood has two central aspects—"symbolic capital" and "symbolic mandate" (100). Symbolic capital is a descriptive aspect that creates a narrow and ill-defined type of male Irish subject, and symbolic mandate is a prescriptive aspect that allows the hierarchies inherent within male privilege to extend to class, race, and colonial rule. As a colonized country, Ireland finds itself inhabiting both sides of Victorian manhood—through the masculine discourse of simianization and the feminizing discourse of Celticism—and each serves as justification of British rule. The concurrency of these competing discourses creates a double-bind, wherein the feminized discourse creates a passive Irishman, willing to be ruled, and the masculine discourse creates a violent, irrational Irishman, lacking the self-regulatory qualities necessary for freedom. In attempting to meet the assimilative demands of colonial rule, colonial subjects further establish their distance from this cultural norm. This process shares a structural relationship with Homi Bhabha's concept of mimicry.
Within the "Cyclops" episode, Bloom and the Citizen inhabit either side of the colonial double-bind. Throughout the episode, Bloom demonstrates feminized self-control through his calm temper and his refusal to drink with the group. On the other hand, through his violent temper and the bestial language used to describe him, the Citizen represents a hypermasculinized colonial subject. Since Bloom is Jewish, the juxtapositioning of Bloom versus the Citizen also invokes the difference in "gender status centered on stock preconceptions of the ethnic differences between Jewishness and Irishness" (110). This racial tension fleshes out a representation of the "vicious semicolonial circle" that results in the "self-aggression" of the colonized (115). Such a cycle inevitably results in a fractured colonial state, symbolized by the rift between Bloom and the Citizen/his barmates, a national body torn between feminized submissiveness and masculinized aggression.
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