Ashplant

Freedman, Ariela. "Skindeep Ulysses." James Joyce Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2009): 455–68.

Related topics:

Blackness and Blackface
Bodies
Medicine
Touch and Feeling
Union and Division

Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/skindeep-iulyssesi/oclc/4639802460&referer=brief_results

Link to full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/james_joyce_quarterly/v046/46.3-4.freedman.html

This article examines the different conceptions of skin, touch, and feeling, in Ulysses, positioning Joyce as an "epidermist" who uses skin as the "contact zone" on which opposition and division are mediated (456-57). Freedman examines an early essay Joyce wrote on the literary history of the Renaissance, in which Joyce, echoing critic William Thayer, critiques modern literary realism for substituting surface observations and "frenetic sensationalism" for the spiritual depth of Renaissance literature, rendering the author a mere "epidermist." However, Freedman argues that just as the the modernist Ulysses employs a complicated, contradictory realism to explore more universal themes, so too does its focus on skin reveal the complex and contradictory relationship between sensation and perception, self and other, and how we merge and divide through the porosity of contact.

Freedman begins by tracing the birth of dermatology in the nineteenth century, which stirred controversy in the medical field between advocates, who saw skin as a diagnostic surface onto which the inner condition of the body was projected, and skeptics, who questioned that the outer boundary which encloses and protects the body could also offer a view inside it. Dermatology was closely linked to a rising obsession with hygiene and cosmetics, which equated outer beauty with health. Freedman moves to the focus on female skin in the novel, which is constantly being manipulated and inscribed by perfumes, lotions, and the like. Even Gertie's blush, which Bloom sees as an involuntary reaction to girlish shame, is actually her own calculated, artificial signal of sexual arousal (U 13). The tattooed skin of the mysterious Skin-the-Goat—homoeroticized, if not explicitly feminized—likewise serves to underscore the role of storytelling in appearance, and how the performativity of skin can make surface interpretations unreliable (U 16). In these situations, skin does not offer access to an "unmediated private self"; it shows no depth but that which is "deliberately projected" on a surface (462). The article also addresses involuntary skin-signification, such as racial identity, which is often an interpretation of skin color as an external indication of some essential, internal difference. Per Freedman's analysis, in focusing on skin as the medium of perception and contact, Joyce emphasizes how touch is a contradictory sensation which implies intimacy but also the threat of difference, of the "vast otherness...the world presents to the fragile and tentatively bounded self" (465). Skin is thus a site where the lines between subject and object blur, where division between self and other is both temporarily dissolved and necessarily emphasized.

Citations and Related Sources