I found Circe’s play format really interesting and relevant to the different kinds of performances I thought were taking place in the book’s first half. Since I had trouble keeping track of what was going on, I tried to keep track of the different costume changes, especially Bloom’s. Costumes in Circe seem to be used to caricature or typify a person, which made the people around Bloom–who, unlike Bloom, have limited appearances in their given costume–seem like stock characters. Bloom’s mother “pantomime[s]” in her “dame’s stringed mobcap” (438); likewise Bloom’s father Rudolph is a Jewish caricature in “the long caftan of an elder in Zion” (437). Tom and Sam, the black men, wear “Sambo chokers” and do a minstrel routine (443). I was especially interested in Molly’s fetishized “Turkish costume” (439), which reminded me of Araby, and the way the protagonist projects exoticism onto the bazaar as a way to understand his own desires. It seemed like likewise Bloom’s hallucinating Molly in costume as a way of making his guilt and desire manifest.

I thought this guilt and desire was also projected into costume by the ways women appear in the section: they’re all menacing, accusatory, or repulsive in some way. Gerty is “bloodied” and “slobbering” (442), the bawd has “wolfeyes” (442), a woman “pisses cowily” near what Bloom thinks of as “hellsgates” (450, 449); otherwise they’re overwhelmingly powerful, like the trio of “honourable” women who accuse Bloom of unwanted advances (468). It seems like the only instances in which Bloom is comfortable or happy with female presences is when they’re so overcome by him they commit “enthusiastic” suicide (492); he’s also at ease with sex that’s disconnected from ideas of femaleness, like the harmless disembodied “kisses” that flutter around him (474).

Bloom’s costume, though, is ceaselessly shifting in response to other claims on his identity: to Molly’s friend he’s a “squire of dames” (445), to his mother he appears in “youth’s smart blue Oxford suit” (448); to his accusers he’s a foreigner with a pidgin accent in “lascar’s vest and trousers” (463). Instead of portraying these changes as positive indications of Bloom’s open-mindedness, however, I was surprised to find they seemed to indicate Bloom’s visceral, frenetic anxiety about himself–who he wants to be and who others demand him to be, and the extent to which his identity is constructed by the names other characters assign him.