We could talk about the role of sex in the first half of “Circe” for an entire class and still barely scratch the surface, given how central it is in the episode, so for this post I’d like to talk about one specific aspect of how sexuality manifests in this section of Ulysses. Particularly through Bloom’s thoughts and hallucinations, we see in this episode a fixation on sexual guilt, sinfulness, and virginity.
In contrast to Bloom’s comparatively brazen act of masturbation in “Nausicaa,” the action of “Circe” is so broken up by Bloom’s hallucinatory bursts of sexual guilt that at times many pages pass between lines of dialogue or basic actions as we descend into Bloom’s thoughts of persecution. Despite Bloom’s own ambiguous religious status, the only redemption from the punishment/pleasure of these fantasies comes in his “stump speech” hallucination, when he imagines himself declared leader by a variety of bishops who declare “God save Leopold the First!”(15.1472-1473). While I’m not entirely sure how to articulate the religious aspect of Bloom’s sense of shame, I hope to mention it in my full blog post. Perhaps the most explicit merging of religion and sex comes later in the episode, when Zoe mentions a priest who purchased her services at some point in the past, and tried “to do his bit of business with his coat buttoned up”(15.2541-2542) to hide his priest’s collar.
In particular, the theme of (female) virginity comes up several times in this section. Nagging at Bloom as he enters the red light district is “The Bawd” who offers him “ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched. Fifteen”(15.359), evoking a memory of the similarly youthful Gerty MacDowell, who seems to accuse Bloom of taking her virginity, torn between saying “You did that. I hate you.”(15.375-376) one second and “I love you for doing that to me”(15.385) the next. Later, we see, in a vulgar retelling of Christ’s birth, an echo of an earlier joke about Ben Dollard’s voice bursting an eardrum: “Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. [..] Messiah! He burst her tympanum”(15.2599-2602).
