In reading the first section of Circe, I was really interested in a desire of Bloom\u2019s that appears in the italicized\u2013and unspoken\u2013narration. Admittedly, many weird desires are given voice here, but I found Bloom\u2019s wish to \u201creturn to nature as a purely domestic animal\u201d (15.903) particularly striking in the context of this masochistic episode. Many of Bloom\u2019s fantasies revolve around the most extreme punishments, in which he is utterly powerless and made a spectacle in front of many.<\/p>\n
These punishment fantasies climax in the scene with Master Bello, in which Bloom imagines himself in two identities that have historically lacked power: as a slave and a woman. The point of this masochist fantasy is crystallized when the Sins of the Past \u201cspeak\u201d, a moment for me that clarified why Bloom is punishing himself; he feels enormously guilty for his sexual deviance. Yet the pleasure of this masochist fantasy comes from, quite obviously, the extreme punishment that Bloom imagines, but also from \u017di\u017eek\u2019s concept of the terror of \u201cradical agency\u201d and the paradoxical freedom that it allows Bloom, through the nature of punishment itself. This desire is never articulated by Bloom, but through these masochist fantasies that he enacts, we can see that his desire to \u201creturn to nature as a purely domestic animal\u201d (15.903) somewhat explains these extreme imagined punishments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In reading the first section of Circe, I was really interested in a desire of Bloom\u2019s that appears in the italicized\u2013and unspoken\u2013narration. Admittedly, many weird desires are given voice here, but I found Bloom\u2019s wish to \u201creturn to nature as a purely domestic animal\u201d (15.903) particularly striking in the context of this masochistic episode. Many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":429,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}