Forms

Geld, Gelded, Gelding

Explication

Gelding and the state of being Gelded relates to a pervasive male anxiety that has cultural and political connotations, but especially relates to the character of Leopold Bloom, his status as a cuckold, his fruitless relationships with women, and his strange, uneasy presence in male environments. Odysseus, Bloom’s Homeric analogue, is defined by his violent phallic and penetrative power, evidenced by such actions as the blinding of Polyphemus with a stake, Odysseus’ rape of Circe and the destruction of her wand, and, almost comically, Odysseus’ signature feat of shooting an arrow through the heads of a dozen axes. While attempting to map Homer’s Odyssey directly onto Ulysses may not be a universally productive strategy, the dissonance in this aspect of Bloom’s relationship to Odysseus is pointed. Bloom may be, in some ways, reductively figured as a gelded Odysseus.

Of particular interest are the animalistic connotations of the word; it refers with equal ease to male humans and male animals, blurring the boundary between the two. This aspect of gelding becomes particularly relevant in Circe, where, in a hallucinatory sequence, Blazes Boylan, entering Bloom’s home for his rendezvous with Molly, “hangs his hat smartly on a peg of  Bloom’s antlered head.” (15.3763-3764) Bloom, bearing the cuckold’s antlers, assists in his wife’s adultery. While the antlers mark him as cuckold, they also introduce an animalistic quality to his humiliation and abasement. Moreover, Circe sees Bloom dominated by Bella/Bello Cohen, and in the course of this Bloom is referred to by feminine pronouns. In the midst of all of this, Bloom submissively refers to Bella/Bello as “Master! Mistress! Mantamer!” (15.3062) Thus, the act of gelding, advocated for use upon Bloom by Mrs Bellingham earlier in the episode, and its figurative echos of humiliation and domination, blurs and perhaps collapses the boundaries between man and animal, as well as male and female identities.

A final aspect of geld that never occurs explicitly in Ulysses, but lurks pertinently in the background is that of geld as gold, as a historical reference to money, especially taxes, in an Anglo-Saxon context. The issue of money haunts Bloom and others’ perception of him; a key incident in Episode XII involves bar patrons speculating that Bloom has won a significant sum in the Gold Cup race. This exchange circles back to the fears of castration induced by the word geld: the Gold Cup is won not by the phallic stallion, Sceptre, but a filly, Throwaway, who is aligned in several places with Bloom himself.

Definitions and Examples

I. Gelded, adj. (OED 1.a) Of a person or animal: Castrated.

“A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.” (Ulysses 3.116-119)

II. Geld, v. (OED 1.a) To deprive (a male) of generative power or virility, to castrate or emasculate.

“MRS BELLINGHAM: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.” (Ulysses 15.1112-1115 )

III. Gelding, n. (OED 2) A gelded or castrated animal, especially a horse.

“When countrybound velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).” (Ulysses 17.1575-1578)

IV. Geld, n. (OED a) A tax paid to the crown by English landholders before the Conquest, and continued under the Norman kings.