My obsession is performance, which worked really well with the voyeurism and roleplaying I saw in Book 13. The narration is over-refined and archly suggestive in the manner of romance novels or women’s magazines, combining gossipy confidentiality and a kind of gilded diction–a lot of alliterations and words like “whence” and “oft”. The descriptions of the young women likewise convey a kind of performance–they are created by the narration’s tone and consequently exist in this preordained girlish domesticity. The three have personas: Cissy the tomboy, Edy the “old maid”, and Gerty the beauty, and the way they interact and feel about one another seem filtered through these personas. Gerty in particular seems to have been created by products–“iron jelloids” and “eyebrowleine” among others (348, 349), and her clothes are likewise calculated to match the expectations of the “Lady’s Pictorial” (350). The effect of the product placements is to make Gerty’s emotions seem mediated through appearance–her eyebrow makeup is what gives “that haunting expression to the eyes” (349).
The performative domain changes and complicates the narration’s projected domesticity on the group. Weirdly, Cissy, the avowed tomboy, is the most genuinely maternal: Edy fakes domesticity, “pretending to nurse the baby” (360)while jabbing at Gerty’s romantic life, and Gerty harbors disgust for the “squalling baby” and “exasperating little brats of twins” (357, 359), despite the narration’s claims that she’s like a “second mother” in the house (355). In fact, Gerty’s dreamy self seems fundamentally at odds with the domesticity assigned to her, and this manifests in the impossibility of her desires–her idea of a “dreamhusband” is as unreal as her longing to “eat something poetical like violets or roses” (357, 352).
This impossibility gets confirmed after her encounter with Bloom, and the perspective switches to him: suddenly the romantic diction is gone, and Bloom remembers the event with coarse language and brutal imagery, comparing a cheating wife to “gumchewed gristle” off another man’s “cold plate” (370) and reminiscing about prostitutes he’d seen in the past. Near the end, he remembers the letter in his pocket and his mistress’ reluctance to use the word ‘brutal,’ calling him a “naughty boy” instead (381), which seems to encompass the impossibility of a reconciliation between a male perspective and a female perspective that’s unable to access that same brutality due to the way it’s constructed in women at a societal as well as an individual level.
