These last two episodes – “Nausicaa” most obviously, though it is far from the only example in the book – provide a lot of excellent examples to talk about the ways in which Ulysses connects sexuality and womanhood with male spectatorship.
“Nausicaa,” as an episode, centers around a sex scene that takes place entirely through the relationship of watcher/watched, in which both parties’ gratification is inextricably linked to their roles in that particular dyad. Throughout the first half of the episode, for example, we see Gerty drawing sexual gratification from moments when she is less closely under the observation of Cissy and Edy and focuses instead on Bloom’s gaze. Take, for example, this passage:
“She could almost see the swift answering flash of admiration in his eyes that set her tingling in every nerve. She put on her had so that she could see from underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eyeing her as a snake eyes its prey”(13.513-517).
The repetition of “eye” and “see” in this passage, and throughout the episode as Gerty increasingly performs a sort of not-quite-striptease for Bloom, creates a version of female sexuality that is created through the act of being on display, that can only be brought into existence through the voyeur’s gaze. Curiously, the episode seems to stress that it is not just the presence of this masculine voyeur but the absence of feminine oversight that produces this sexuality: the episode’s moment of extended orgasm begins at the moment when Gerty realizes that Cissy and Edy have gone on without her, that “at last they were left alone without the others to pry and pass remarks”(13.692-693).
In the second half of the episode, as Bloom’s perspective enters the narrative, we see the flipside of this equation. Shortly after Bloom’s perspective first appears – with Gerty’s moment of orgasm forming a kind of dividing line through the episode – he thinks the following: “No. She’s lame! O! […] Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show”(13.771-776). The masculine eye serves a regulatory function here, judging Gerty for her perceived disability and implicitly for its concealment even when she was “on show”. Later, he thinks about Gerty’s observation of him, briefly inverting the voyeur-object relationship: “Fine eyes she had, clear. It’s the white of the eye brings that out not so much the pupil. Did she know what I? Course”(13.906-908). Bloom’s realization that Gerty most likely saw and noticed him masturbating occurs only after the deed is done, however – a perhaps significant detail.
“Nausicaa,” however, is far from the only episode of Ulysses in which we see the connection between observation and sexuality. The moment between Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce at the start of Episode 11, for example (which we already discussed in class), or the way that men talk about women when they are vs. aren’t in the room in “Oxen of the Sun” , all seem to illustrate different aspects of an interrelationship between spectatorship, (homo)sociality, and sexuality at play throughout Ulysses.
