Ashplant
Reading, Smashing, and Playing Ulysses
Sicker, Philip. "Unveiling Desire: Pleasure, Power and Masquerade in Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa’ Episode." Joyce Studies Annual 14, no. 1 (2003): 92–131.
Related topics:
Bodies
Narration
Obedience and Rebellion
Reproduction
Sexuality
Touch and Feeling
The Unspoken
Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/unveiling-desire-pleasure-power-and-masquerade-in-joyces-nausicaa-episode/oclc/726822280&referer=brief_results
Link to full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/joyce_studies_annual/v014/14.1sicker.pdf
Sicker builds off the work of Jen Shelton and Jules David Law to revisit Gerty MacDowell and label her as an agent of her own sexual desire, rather than a passive, "culturally circumscribed, impervious, and self deceiving" object (96). Sicker uses Havelock Ellis' treatise on autoeroticism to reframe the power dynamics at play in Gerty and Bloom's exhibitionist/voyeuristic interaction in the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses (U 13). While Ellis' treatise involved a description of a woman unaware of her erotic exhibit and at the mercy of the male voyeur, Sicker challenges us to reimagine Gerty as possessing "exhibitionistic agency and visual pleasure" (94), taking control of her image and manipulating Bloom for her own sexual desire. Unnoticed, the male gaze is penetrating and objectifying, reinforcing the patriarchy, but Gerty's acknowledgement and repossession of the gaze for her own pleasure indicates her agency. This pleasure lies both "in her power to tantalize Bloom through veiled bodily disclosure and in her own carefully concealed detection of his aroused, responsive physical presence" (95).
The lines between voyeur and exhibitionist become blurred as Gerty masters the roles of both "spectacle and gazing subject" (102), exercising power therein. Gerty's power, Sicker argues, lies in her "subtle and covert" (109) deception of Bloom. She knowingly manipulates her image, not only by hiding her lameness and refusing to acknowledge Bloom's gaze, but also by putting on a "seductive performance" (104). Sicker compares Gerty's meticulous incremental exposure of her legs (by uncovering layers of her dress) to a scene from Oscar Wilde's Salome, in which Salome seduces Herod with a sultry dance and removal of veils. He then discusses the lack of female gaze in cinematic scholarship to warn us against this "bleakly reductive approach to women's desire and pleasure" (116). Her enjoyment, rather, "scrambles longstanding assumptions about gendered forms of sexual gratification," complicating rather than duplicating the notion of the (male) gaze (124). Sicker ultimately concludes that in the Gerty scenario, Joyce "reveals not the limitations of erotic self-awareness but its inexpressible plentitude, not the contours of sexual identity but its unbounded complexity" (128).
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