Forms<\/b><\/p>\n
Geld, Gelded, Gelding<\/p>\n
Explication<\/b><\/p>\n
Gelding <\/b>and the state of being Gelded<\/b> relates to a pervasive male anxiety that has cultural and political connotations, but especially relates to the character of Leopold Bloom, his status as a cuckold, his fruitless relationships with women, and his strange, uneasy presence in male environments. Odysseus, Bloom\u2019s Homeric analogue, is defined by his violent phallic and penetrative power, evidenced by such actions as the blinding of Polyphemus with a stake, Odysseus\u2019 rape of Circe and the destruction of her wand, and, almost comically, Odysseus\u2019 signature feat of shooting an arrow through the heads of a dozen axes. While attempting to map Homer\u2019s Odyssey <\/i>directly onto Ulysses <\/i>may not be a universally productive strategy, the dissonance in this aspect of Bloom\u2019s relationship to Odysseus is pointed. Bloom may be, in some ways, reductively figured as a gelded<\/b> Odysseus.<\/p>\n
Of particular interest are the animalistic connotations of the word; it refers with equal ease to male humans and male animals, blurring the boundary between the two. This aspect of gelding<\/b> becomes particularly relevant in Circe<\/i>, where, in a hallucinatory sequence, Blazes Boylan, entering Bloom\u2019s home for his rendezvous with Molly, \u201changs his hat smartly on a peg of \u00a0Bloom\u2019s antlered head<\/i>.\u201d (15.3763-3764) Bloom, bearing the cuckold\u2019s antlers, assists in his wife\u2019s adultery. While the antlers mark him as cuckold, they also introduce an animalistic quality to his humiliation and abasement. Moreover, Circe<\/i> sees Bloom dominated by Bella\/Bello Cohen, and in the course of this Bloom is referred to by feminine pronouns. In the midst of all of this, Bloom submissively refers to Bella\/Bello as \u201cMaster! Mistress! Mantamer!\u201d (15.3062) Thus, the act of gelding<\/b>, advocated for use upon Bloom by Mrs Bellingham earlier in the episode, and its figurative echos of humiliation and domination, blurs and perhaps collapses the boundaries between man and animal, as well as male and female identities.<\/p>\n
Definitions and Examples<\/b><\/p>\n \u201cA choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded<\/b>, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.\u201d (Ulysses<\/i> 3.116-119)<\/p>\n \u201c<\/b>MRS BELLINGHAM: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.)<\/i> Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.\u201d <\/b>(Ulysses <\/i>15.1112-1115 )<\/p>\n III. Gelding, n. <\/b>A gelded person, a eunuch. Obs.<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cWhen countrybound velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).\u201d (Ulysses <\/i>17.1575-1578)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Forms Geld, Gelded, Gelding Explication Gelding and the state of being Gelded relates to a pervasive male anxiety that has cultural and political connotations, but especially relates to the character of Leopold Bloom, his status as a cuckold, his fruitless relationships with women, and his strange, uneasy presence in male environments. Odysseus, Bloom\u2019s Homeric analogue, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524","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\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":525,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions\/525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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