Tooth

Forms 

toothless, toothache, toothsome, gaptoothed, toothed, buckteeth

Related Terms

shell, dentist, chew, milk

Explication

Teeth are mentioned many times over the course of Ulysses. Most notably, Buck Mulligan frequently refers to Stephen as “toothless Kinch.” Stephen also muses on his poor dental hygiene in Episode III: “My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money?” (U 3.495-6)

Throughout the text, teeth serve as symbols of power and carnality. In Episode II, Stephen refers to stone lions as “toothless terrors” (U 2.429-30) When Bloom is disgusted by the meat-eating men in Laestrygonians, he observes how one man has “no teeth to chewchewchew it” (U 8.660). The ever-virile Blazes Boylan keeps a red rose “between his smiling teeth” (U 10.335).

Teeth are also frequently associated with animals throughout the text. In Episode 5 Bloom encounters a horse’s “gently champing teeth,” (U 5.214) and in Episode 4 he contemplates his cat’s “milkwhite teeth” (U 4.34).

Teeth also serve as indicators of health and hygiene (In Episode I, Buck Mulligan describes Ireland as a “country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts”).

Definitions and Examples

I. tooth, n (OED 1.a) “In plural, the hard processes within the mouth, attached (usually in sockets) in a row to each jaw in most vertebrates except birds (but also in some extinct birds), having points, edges, or grinding surfaces, and serving primarily for biting, tearing, or trituration of solid food, and secondarily as weapons of attack or defence, and for other purposes; in singular, each of these individually.”

“Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the red flower between his smiling teeth.” (U 10.335)

II. (OED 2.b) “Referring to biting or gnawing; hence denoting a hurtful, hostile, destructive, or devouring agency or quality.”

“Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail.” (U 8.701)

III. (OED 3.a) “As an artificial structure, in an implement, machine, etc.; e.g. one of the pointed projections of a comb, saw, file, rake, harrow, fork, etc.; a prong, tine; one of the series of projections on the edge of a wheel, pinion, etc., which engage with corresponding ones on another; a cog.”

“He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth.” (U 15.1781-2)

“Eeltraps, lobsterpots, fishingrods, hatchet, steelyard, grindstone, clodcrusher, swatheturner, carriagesack, telescope ladder, 10 tooth rake, washing clogs, haytedder, tumbling rake, billhook, paintpot, brush, hoe and so on.” (U 17.1564)

Related Topics

Bodies
Medicine
Science
Animals
Gender/masculinity