Citation

Sultan, Stanley. “The Strand (Bloom).” Critical Essays on James Joyce’s Ulysses. By Bernard Benstock. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1989. N. pag. Print.

Annotation

Starting with a summary and deconstruction of the interaction between Bloom and Gerty MacDowell, and moving through analyses of Bloom’s relationship with Molly, Bloom’s masturbation and Gerty’s turgid, sentimental rhetoric, Stanley Sultan concludes that “Nausicaa” is representative of Bloom’s spiritual self-defeat and destruction in the wake of Molly’s affair with Boylan (168). Sultan first analyzes Bloom’s character and emotional state at the outset of “Nausicaa”, juxtaposing Bloom’s “undiminished ardor for Molly” with the knowledge of Molly’s affair (169); he concludes Bloom is passive, impotent, and reliant on masturbation as escape from his own impotence. Gerty MacDowell, Sultan argues, is no better: in fact she’s worse, brainwashed by syrupy novelettes into an escapist sentimentalism so fundamentally hypocritical it turns “black into white” (173).

Sultan moves to a broader social context by comparing “Nausicaa” to a popular novel he posits Joyce was directly parodying, The Lamplighter. Gerty, in this context, becomes “the ultimate popular development of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, the product of the degeneration of romantic idealism into sentimental wish-fulfillment and self-delusion” (174). Ultimately, Sultan claims, Bloom is saved by his own “frank analysis” after the fact (176): ashamed and exhausted, he nevertheless escapes the institution of sentimentalism by accepting the blame for his passivity, a fate not afforded to Gerty and her like-minded audience “blighted by self-deluding sentimentality” (174).

Related Topics

Thought and Action

Native and Foreign

Waste