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The wayfaring stranger: a non-critical comparison of Odysseus and Leopold Bloom as the appear in the the "Odyssey" by Homer and "Ulysses" by James Joyce

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The wayfaring stranger: a non-critical comparison of Odysseus and Leopold Bloom as the appear in the the "Odyssey" by Homer and "Ulysses" by James Joyce

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Content THE WAYFARING STRANGER: A NON-CRITICAL COMPARISON
OF ODYSSEUS AND LEOPOLD BLOOM AS THEY APPEAR IN
THE ODYSSEY BY HOMER AND ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE
by
Anita Ragnhild Shaw
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(Drama)
June 1976
UMI Number: EP55135
All rights reserved
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D
’76
S57>H
This thesis, w ritten by
........... AniAa..RagBJMl.d.jSka5 K...........
under the direction of h&x.....Thesis Comm ittee,
and approved by a ll its members, has been p re
sented to and accepted by the D ean of The
G raduate School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of the
requirements fo r the degree of
.MA£.I£iL..QE..A£.TS..
Dean
IS G0MMITT
Chairman
DEDICATION
To Dr. James Harmon Butler,
Chairman Emeritus,
Department of Drama,
University of Southern California—
A good person, a good friend, a great teacher
I've put in so many enigmas
and puzzles that it will keep
the professors arguing for
centuries over what I meant,
and that's the only way of
insuring one's immortality.
— James Joyce
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION .......................................... 1
Statement of the Problem
Limitations of the Study
Review of Literature
Chapter
I. THE HOMELANDS, ITHACA AND DUBLIN: THE WORLDS
OF ODYSSEUS AND LEOPOLD BLOOM ............. 12
Ithaca
Dublin
PREFACE TO CHAPTER II: TEN YEARS BEFORE THE ODYSSEY 23
II. STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: THE WANDERINGS
OF ODYSSEUS AND LEOPOLD BLOOM ............. 26
The Odyssey of Leopold Bloom
The "Odyssey" of Odysseus
III. THE WANDERER'S RETURN: THE HOMECOMING OF
ODYSSEUS AND LEOPOLD BLOOM, AND THE WOMEN
WHO MAKE THEIR RETURN POSSIBLE........... 61
The Women of The Odyssey
The Women of Ulysses
IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS...................... 134
APPENDIX............................................... 147
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 153
iv
INTRODUCTION
Any critical reading of this study requires— demands
— a working knowledge of both The Odyssey and Ulysses.
James Joyce expected his readers to know The Odyssey and be
able to recognize both the similarities and the disparities.
Ulysses is not a slavish imitation of The Odyssey; it is
unique, sui generis. However, the fundamental idea of a
modern Odysseus, struggling against dark, near overwhelming
forces to discover and achieve his heart's desire is taken
directly from the earlier work. The greatest similarity
comes through Joyce's use of three underlying themes of The
Odyssey; the loneliness of the hero; the importance of the
female characters of The Odyssey and the manner in which
they reflect and reveal the character of the hero; and the
positing of Moral Order and the restoration of Moral Order
as The Good towards which the hero must struggle before he
can come to terms with himself, his world, his gods, and
find peace.
The limitations of this study are those, outlined
above, which were imposed by the authors themselves upon
their respective works. Odysseus in his hubris creates for
himself a world of chaos, irrationality, and moral disorder;
he must work his way through this chaos in order to achieve
1
that goal which he most desires--to return home. Leopold
Bloom, a gentle, rational man, also finds himself in a
world of chaos and moral disorder which he himself has
helped to create; he also must find the courage to take his
place as a man among men and return to that for which he
most deeply yearns: his home.
The loneliness of the hero is an ageless and uni
versal theme; there is nothing unique in its use as a basis
for characterization. It is the manner in which each au
thor causes his hero to create his own world of despair,
plunges him into a nightmare of chaos, and then allows him
to find within himself the ability to make the decision
which will end his loneliness that makes each novel and
each hero unique.
The "human world" is a civilized and disciplined
i
world. As such, man is at his best when he is most civil
ized, most disciplined. Civilization is man's contribution
to man, and society is the superstructure which confines
and defines all man's activities. Those who defy the laws
of their society not only debase themselves as human beings
but contribute to the degradation of all society through
their actions, in that such actions weaken the foundation
of society within which— and without which— man qua man
cannot exist. To exist in society, man must discipline his
actions; when he does not, chaos results. T. S. Eliot has
stated that "natural man is man in the shadow of an insti-
2.
tution,"^ that institution being a genuine society with man
disciplined by and committed to the laws and traditions of
that society. Therefore these two lonely men— Odysseus and
Leopold Bloom— must first realize that they are outcasts,
recognize that through self discipline they can return to
the society which now spurns them, and then act upon that
recognition. Once the lonely hero realizes that he is
lonely it is only a matter of time before he returns to the
worlds, the human society, for which he longs.
Both authors state, albeit as an undercurrent, rather
than a tidal wave, that this return of the hero equates
with a restoration of moral order, and that moral order is
the highest good. Without morality, there is no order;
without order, there is no society; without the society of
his own kind, man is truly.alone. The realization of the
need for moral order, and not only need of moral order but
discernible desire for it, is the denouement of each hero's
odyssey; once that recognition has been accepted, "The Wan
derer's Return" is a matter of time only.
The manner in which each of the manly authors of
manly works treats the women each hero encounters is fasci
nating. The male companions or "peers" of Odysseus and
Leopold Bloom exist only to serve a purpose in the exposi
tion of the hero's situation; they reflect light cast by a
^T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 11.
3
facet of the hero's personality rather than sparkling with
their own fire. The women, however, are completely charac
terized, and it is for this reason that these relationships
have been heavily dwelt upon in the body of this work. It
is the woman as womb who gives birth; as wife, maintains
the home, representative of moral order; and, as half of a
sexual unit, when joined with man, makes man whole; and
this whole is human, and it is human beings who comprise
the society which moral order, once imposed, not only dis
ciplines but through that discipline makes creativity pos
sible, and the spiritual— divine.
Scholars have dwelt at length, if not ad nauseum, on
the "parallels" between The Odyssey and Ulysses. v This is
very misleading. Unfortunately, it is probably Joyce's own
fault for giving the pedantic Stuart Gilbert too much in
formation much, much too seriously. One wonders whether
Joyce intended Gilbert to swallow all that information
whole or, just possibly, if he had his tongue in his cheek
. . . it would not be unlike him. At any rate, Gilbert's
2
James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study was available in the United
States prior to the great Supreme Court decision which per
mitted publication of the work itself; and for a period of
time the Gilbert Study was the only "authorized" reference
which students of Joyce could utilize. The result was a
2
First American edition published January, 1930, by
Alfred Knopf.
4
perversion of the study of Ulysses.
To a novice, the Gilbert Study is absolutely ter
rifying. Possibly it frightened away more readers than it
encouraged. At any rate, very few were brave enough to
bypass Gilbert and go directly to the source itself. Those
who did so discovered that Ulysses is not only not particu
larly complicated but is also a warm and tender love story.
Gilbert, however noble his intentions, obscures
rather than enlightens; his Study, unfortunately, is more
difficult than the work it is intended to clarify. The
notion that Ulysses is "difficult" has endured despite the
delightful and enlightening scholarship of such Joyceans as
3
Richard Kain.
The result has been that writers concerned with
critical studies of Ulysses have gone to Gilbert as the
"acknowledged authority" for his analysis of the "Homeric
Parallels" (which, in the main, are not parallels at all
but reversals), rather than to the original, and therefore,
the most proper source: The Odyssey itself.
No one is absolutely sure who wrote The Odyssey; but,
as there is no Sir Francis Bacon circa 1000 BC to pin it
on, one may choose to go along with the theory that a blind
poet named Homer, a bit of a whiz with a lyre and lyric
created The Illiad and The Odyssey out of the myths and
3
Richard Kain, Fabulous Voyager: James Joyce's
Ulysses (New York: Viking Press, 1959).
5
legends of the deeds of his ancestors, in the same manner
that William Shakespeare adapted material from Holingshead's
Chronicles and, because he was also a master of the spoken
word, created from hand-me-down history dramatic literature
that will live for all time.
Ulyssee is not only a masterpiece which has inspired
or influenced the writing styles of major authors of our
time, but also a seminal literary work which is and will
remain a classic. Of Ulysses, Kain writes: "It is hardly
necessary to prove Ulysses a masterpiece of modern litera
ture. It has been savagely attacked and . . . extravagantly
admired. It cannot be overlooked . . . Ulysses is a world
4
book, a monument to modern culture."
As to The Odyssey, Gilbert Highet, in his introduc
tion to the Butcher and Lang translation (the one used by
Joyce and therefore the one used for the purposes of this
study), states that it and The Illiad comprise
the oldest complete books in the Western World. No one
knows for certain who wrote them . . . suddenly they
gush out of the earth like living water from a sub
terranean source, far back beyond the beginning of
recorded history, and like strong rivers they have
continued to flow with incomparable force and vitality
through nearly three thousand years and over half a
planet.5
So: both are masterpieces, milestones of literature.
The problem is not to dispute their positions as works of
4
Kain, p. 2 et seq.
5
S. H. Butcher, and Lang, A., The Odyssey of Homer
(New York: Random House, 1950), p. v.
6
art, but of finding a basis for comparison which is neither
a literary or a critical one. Too many critics have bogged
down in their attempts to compare Ulysses and The Odyssey
as wholes, literal wholes, which forces them to either
stretch one or shrink the other to make their criticism
work. This study intends to avoid that quicksand.
Although chapters of Ulysses do relate to specific
episodes of The Odyssey, they do not follow the chronologi
cal order of Homer's work.^ Joyce himself removed the
chapter headings before his work was published; it is
through the good offices of Stuart Gilbert that we have the
original chapter headings. At any rate, there are parts of
The Odyssey with which Joyce does not deal at all, and
there are many incidents in Ulysses which have no Homeric
equivalent. (It is interesting to note that the central
chapter of Ulysses--"The Wandering Rocks"— is barely men
tioned in The Odyssey. Given a choice of two ways to steer
his course, Odysseus takes the alternate route, the hazard
ous passage between the cave of the monstrous Scylla and
the dark cliffs which loom over the sucking maw of Charyb-
dis, rather than risk his ship and his crew playing dodge-em
through the uncertain perils of the Wandering Rocks.)
The truth is that what started out as "Ulysses in
Dublin"— a great Homeric spoof— ended up as the greatest
6
See Appendix for a comparison of the order of the
episodes in each book.
7
literary work of this time. In the course of ten years, as
7
related by the author's good friend, Frank Budgen, Joyce
wrote and rewrote, tore up and wrote again, tossing things
out and putting them back in, enlarging in scope and sub
ject matter, rewriting whole chapters to suit the evolving
pattern of the work, all the while fighting incipient alco
holism, failing eyesight, and the tragedy of his daughter's
mental illness, to say nothing of constant family poverty.
And what emerged is neither copy nor caricature, but a work
in its own right with depth, and style, and while it cannot
help but invite comparison to The Odyssey, it does not need
to lean upon that work to hold its place on the shelf of
great literature.
The greatness of both books— the greatness they
share— is their universality. Truly the proper study of
mankind is man, and each author has created a unique indi
vidual and, by the manner in which they have placed these
individuals in perspective, not only to their peers but to
the worlds in which they find themselves, each author has
transcended literature and created a work of art.
And it is as individuals that Odysseus and Leopold
Bloom allow comparison. The true parallels of Ulysses and
The Odyssey are not in the relationship of the episodes or
likeness of the surrounding characters but the relationship
7
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses
(New York: Midland Books, 1960).
8
of The Hero— Odysseus— and Everyman— Leopold Bloom.
And to each individual the loneliness of the hero as
thematic is equally applicable— man's loneliness, his alien
ation from his fellows, his recognition of that alienation
and the desire to mitigate the emptiness he feels by re
turning home. And "home" means not merely a specific place
but reunification with Woman, the other half of the whole
of mankind, and in this union coming as close as he pos
sibly can to the womb, the true home of all life, from
which life itself springs: the place where man and woman
together create the true beginning of all things.
James Joyce asked Frank Budgen, "do you know of any
complete all-round character presented by any author?" and
answered his own question, "Ulysses . . . is son to Laertes,
husband to Penelope, father to Telemachus, lover of Calypso,
companion in arms of the Greek warriors, and king of Ithaca.
He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and cour-
8
age, he came through them all ..."
Emile Gebhardt's description of Odysseus applies
equally to Leopold Bloom: "a man, loving his country, his
wife, father and friends, noted for sympathy and benevo-
9
lence, not free of human frailty."
0
Budgen, pp. 15, 16.
9
Quoted in Kain, p. 87.
Statement of the Problem
The problem of this study is to make a comparison of
Odysseus and Leopold Bloom as individuals; their relation
ships to the worlds in which they find themselves; their
relationships with the women of those worlds; and their
personal problems and the manner in which they solve them.
The problem is not that of a literary comparison/analysis
of The Odyssey and Ulysses, but rather one of the two char
acters upon whom each work is built: Odysseus and Leopold
Bloom.
Limitations of the Study
The limitations of the study are subjection of this
comparison to the great parallels which the two heroes do
share. Each man is a wanderer in a strange land, alone
against the gods and capricious fate; each, having set the
conditions, of his isolation, becomes increasingly aware of
this separation and yearns achingly to return to the place
where he may set down his staff and rest; where he may find
in his wife the nourishment his soul craves; where he may
once again take his place, feet planted firmly on the
ground, as a man among men.
Review of Literature
The literature studied in the course of this work is,
first and foremost, the sources themselves: The Odyssey of
Homer and Ulysses, by James Joyce. For the background of
10
Achaea and the Achaeans at the time of the Trojan War, Will
Durant's The Life of Greece was used. It gives a clear and
lovely look at the life style prevalent in the Peloponnesus
during the Age of Bronze. Charles H. Taylor's excellent
compilation, Essays on the Odyssey, which brings together
in one volume several differing points of view and criti
cism of that work, has also been extensively used."^
Richard Kain's Fabulous Voyager: James Joyce's
Ulysses and Frank Budgen's James Joyce and the Making of
Ulysses have been drawn upon at length; Kain's book is the
best possible introduction to Ulysses now available, and as
Frank Budgen actually knew Joyce at the time he was writing
Ulysses, his comments are invaluable.
"^Charles H. Taylor, ed., Essays on The Odyssey
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963).
11
CHAPTER I
THE HOMELANDS, ITHACA AND DUBLIN: THE WORLDS
OF ODYSSEUS AND LEOPOLD BLOOM
Ithaca
Odysseus, husband of Penelope> father of Telemachus,
son of Laertes, "fosterling of Zeus," was king of the island
of Ithaca, located on the West Coast of the Peloponnesian
penninsula. Although the armies which sacked Troy are usu
ally lumped together as "Greeks," they were in fact not a
nation of Greeks but a coalition of the denizens of a num
ber of city/states or individual kingdoms— possibly racially
related, known variously as Achaeans, Argives, Danaans— who
inhabited Attica, the Peloponnesus, and the nearby islands.
Each ruler was supreme in his tiny kingdom— Agamemnon of
Mycaena— Menelaus of Sparta— Odysseus of Ithaca.
This was the Age of Bronze— although iron was known,
it was not yet in general use. It was a world not of coun
tries or nations but of clans and tribes, wild, fierce,
barbaric— a world in which there were truly "giants in the
earth," as well as nymphs, monsters, witches, sea demons,
sorceresses, all sorts of fabulous and fantastical beings
whose existence was fatalistically accepted. One propi-
12
tiated the gods for protection from these beings, but sac
rifice— however suitable— was no guarantee of safe passage.
Indeed, the power of the gods, not its limitations, was the
axis of Achaean religion. The gods and goddesses who con
trolled man's fate frequently descended from Mount Olympus
to meddle in the affairs of men— these were not lofty dei
ties, but rather close to mankind in character, and were
not above jealousy, desire, revenge, caprice, favoritism,
even passion, nor beyond stooping to deceit if it should
suit their purposes (such as Zeus finding an outlet for his
desire for the virtuous Alcmene by visiting her in the form
of her husband, Amphytrion). The gods of the Achaeans were
near to them in nature in that their character possessed
many of the same frailties as human nature, and were often
directly related to them by blood through their intercourse
with mortals (perhaps it was the very human need to associ
ate ourselves with something divine, to find in ourselves
something of the immortal, that caused so many of the
Achaeans to believe themselves to be directly related to
Zeus).
The only qualities possessed by the gods and not by
men were omniscience, omnipotence, and the ability to ren
der themselves invisible. It was not unusual for a man
such as Odysseus to discover the residents of Olympus "go
ing to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it"
— or to experience direct, personal confrontations with his
13
patron deities. A man's commerce with his gods was on a
very personal level, and more often than not, the success
or failure of a given venture depended upon the interven
tion of a specific deity.
Will Durant describes the Mediterranean as "the
fairest of all waters . . . "^ The Aegean Islands, tops of
mountains long since sunk into the sea, were the "jewels"
of the Peloponnesian penninsula. The sun shone down on
Ithaca (on the Western, or Mediterranean shore of the
Peloponnesus), melting the fog, brightening the "changing
colors of those shadowed hills that rose like temples out
12
of the reflecting sea."
The Achaeans were a Greek tribe that multiplied and
naturally spilled over from Thessaly down the penninsula.
However, Will Durant mentions the theory that the Achaeans
were originally blonde Celts, Central Europeans who spread
through Thessaly as well as in a westerly direction from
circa 2000 BC onwards . . . and it is interesting to specu
late that the ancient antecedents of Leopold Bloom and
13
Odysseus just might have been related.
The Achaeans were a graceful and handsome people,
extremely physical— the body was a source of joy in life,
and they had a zestful appreciation for its pleasures, both
^^Will Durant, The Life of Greece (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1939), p. 3.
12 13
Durant, p. 4. Durant, p. 37.
14
in their recreation, which was likely to take the form of
"games" which we sedentary folk would call sport--javelin
throwing, discus hurling, etc.— and also in their daily
activities. A "lord" such as Odysseus worked side by side
with his bondsmen, tilling the soil, threshing the grain,
taking pride in plowing a straight furrow. Even a king was
skilled in the art of carpentry (Odysseus' reaction to
Penelope's statement that their bed had been moved— the bed
he had built with his own hands to last a hundred years— is
one of the strongest indications to her that the "stranger"
in her halls is indeed her husband returned at last), as
well as ship-building, leather-working, etc.
The land on that mountaintop was not easy to farm—
much of it was hilly, swampy, or woody, and beasts abounded
— the hunt was a necessity before it became a sport. The
lords of the manor raised herds of cattle and swine, their
staple liquid was wine from their own grapes, their meals
were comprised of honey, meat and wheaten cakes. While the
men labored in the fields, the lady of the house also had
chores— as chatelaine, she oversaw the work of the servants,
but she also wove the linens, spun the yarn, helped with the
wash and prepared the food, in addition to bearing children.
14
Society is "lawless, primitive, and local," with
the welfare of the "lower classes" greatly dependent upon
the whim of the lord who rules them (much as the welfare of
14
Durant, p. 47.
15
the lord who rules them is dependent upon the whim of the
deities who rule him). Odysseus, however, is described as
typical of the hardy and subtle people to whom he belonged,
. -a devoted husband, loving father, a just ruler in
his own kingdom, who wrought no wrong in word or deed to
any man in the land."^
The typical Achaean male is described as usually
reasonable, a devoted parent, willing to listen to his wife
— and the position of the wife in the household is highly
honorable. She moves freely among the men, petitioning
their will, taking part in their discussions. "The Homeric
wife is as faithful as her husband is not."^^ The family
unit is self-sustaining and usually happy. It is completely
understandable that the beautiful and desirable Penelope
would remain chaste and faithful to her husband Odysseus,
even for twenty years, for Odysseus was "... with a form
like unto the immortals, steadfast heart, and wisdom like
unto the gods' . . . a man of iron in body and mind, yet
17
human, and therefore forgivable."
Dublin
Leopold Bloom, husband of Marion (Molly), father of
Milly and Rudolph (the latter died just 11 days after birth),
son of Rudolph Virag (who committed suicide), is not king
■^Durant, p. 49. "^Durant, p. 51.
"^Durant, p. 49.
16
of anything, and least of all master in his own home. Home
— for the time being— is #7 Eccles Street, Dublin, Ireland,
an island located in the Atlantic on the West Coast of
Great Britain. Although his father was a Hungarian Jew who
changed his name to Bloom upon emigrating to Ireland, his
mother Ellen was a descendent of the Celts who, after making
their first appearance in "the second millenium BC, spread
rapidly over Europe, crossing into the British Isles
18
. . As with Homer's "Greeks," the citizens of Great
Britain and the adjacent islands are related by racial her
itage; but the Irish— not to mention the Scots— do not con
sider themselves "English," although they are nominally
ruled by the monarch of England. The blood of the Celts,
the Piets, the Saxons, the Gauls and the Norse is mixed and
mingled in these people. But national pride is fierce.
Bloom, when asked what nation he belongs to states, "Ire-
19
land. I was born here. Ireland." A man's birthplace is
that man's nation; and in the British Isles we have what
could be considered a "coalition of city-states" to compare
with those of Homer's Achaeans; and in Dublin, a homeland
for Leopold Bloom as Ithaca is home to Odysseus.
Ulysses is set in the year 19 04--the twentieth cen
tury, but just barely. Dublin at the turn of the century
■ * " ^Durant, p. 23.
19
James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House,
1950), p. 325.
17
was a center of fashion, culture and taste, the focal point
of a cultural and political revival, a "birthplace of pa-
20
tnots and poets ..." After 100 years of provincial
obscurity, Dublin was evolving into the setting for a lit
erary revival and the staging of a war for independence.
It was "known for a way of life at once humane and cruel,
21
trivial and profound . . ." Its poets and patriots pos
sessed genius in abundance, inexhaustible imagination and
energy— what they lacked was natural resources. In the
previous century, when famine scoured the land, thousands
of cattle had been sent to England while the Irish populace
starved. And that population, halved by that great famine,
had yet to recover completely. Dublin's intellectual aris
tocracy was unable to cope with the "Achilles heel" of any
society— poverty. The slums of Dublin were notoriously the
worst in Europe. Famine, restrictive legislation and the
lack of raw materials had brought Dublin's poor to the
barest level of subsistence: "squalor was the rule rather
than the exception, and the death rate of the Dublin slums
22
was three times that of any other European city."
The level of existence for Poldy and Molly Bloom was
a bit above that of bare necessity; enough so that Bloom
can purchase cream for Molly's tea and feel pity for the
20
Richard Kaia, Dublin m the Age of William Butler
Yeats and James Joyce (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1962), p. ix.
21Ibid., p. ix. 22Ibid., p. 11.
18
numerous Dedalus children who subsist on "marge and pota-
2 3
toes, potatoes and marge ..." As a "commercial travel
ler" (travelling salesman), Bloom lives on commission; he
has no land to call his own, let alone servants to till it.
Molly is a concert singer; the money she earns performing
helps to keep the Bloom family's head above water. Dublin
in 1904 was a hive of activity, but that activity was men
tal rather than physical. Politics was the topic of the
day but the Irish Renaissance included lyricists and musi
cians who made the city echo with music and laughter; street
corner polemicists whose pronouncements were as witty as
they were provocative. The city rang with conversation--
who can out-talk an Irishman? And the richness of the
dialogue was matched only by the natural rhythm of the
Irish tongue— the lilt and the laughter and the brilliant,
basic mother wit. Dublin was poor and her people penniless,
but her ability to rise above her condition— and then wink
at it over her shoulder— was a precious antidote to the
debasing tedium of poverty.
Dublin could laugh— and in her laughter was all the
agility on a mental level of the physically active Achaeans.
One may hurl a spear; the other, toss a quip. Who can
judge which is the better "quality"? Aesthetically speak
ing, they are viable.
23
Joyce, Ulysses, p. 150.
19
Religion to the Dubliner was as intimate and per
sonal to him in 1904 as it was to the Achaeans of 1000 BC.
His personal pantheon consisted of God the Father; God the
Son; God the Holy Ghost; Mary, Ever Virgin, Blessed Mother
of God; and Saint Patrick, along with a host of other
saints of greater and lesser degrees of power, and various
portions of the anatomy set aside for purposes of special
veneration such as the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immacu
late Heart of Mary, etc.
The ringing of church bells in Dublin woke the citi
zenry in the morning; told them the time during the day;
and tolled them to sleep at night. Religion to the poor of
Dublin was both panacaea and way of life. To those with
nothing, it offered something in the way of comfort, and a
better life hereafter; and it gave their lives order. As
the Achaeans offered special sacrifices to propitiate their
deities, so the Dubliners lit symbolic candles or put a
penny more than they could afford into the collection plate.
Although Bloom could hardly expect to meet Jesus
walking down the street, "Christ's Vicars on Earth," the
priests, were everywhere, despite the Anglican persecution
of the Catholic Church. The priests tended the living,
succored the dying; their church was a vital part of life
in Dublin. It never occurred to the Achaeans to renounce
their Pantheon; they knew the dreadful fates in store for
those who defied the gods. To the faithful of Dublin, their
20
Pantheon was as active and vital part of life as was that
of the Achaeans. They petitioned heaven for special inten
tions, propitiated the gods with sacrifices, cursed the
gods for their lot and blessed them for favors granted. It
was always possible that a miracle might happen. (With
names and identities slightly changed, religion hasn't
changed much in 3,000 years.)
Dublin, then, has its own hierarchy of gods and men
— and women and children and cats and dogs. It is an island
city, facing the sea— a city verging on modernity, with
some of the benefits of progress and a great many of the
disadvantages— a city in which God is Catholic, politics
are personal, and sanitation is primitive. Perhaps a bit
shabby and down at the heels compared with Ithaca, that
island with its vines for grapes, pasturage for its herds
and timber for dark-prowed ships; yet Dublin has a setting
that other, grander cities could well envy. The ever
changing skies bathe city and country in a magical aura, an
aura in which leprechauns and pixies take their place among
the lesser deities, brownies sip the milk left by the door
for them at night, and fairy rings are discovered in the
dew of morning. Intermittent sunshine, diffused by masses
of clouds, touches gray rock and green meadow with patches
of color. "Patterns of light and shadow, blowing softly on
the salt sea wind can create an almost Mediterranean atmo
sphere . . . an atmosphere in which legend almost seems
21
more real than history, and history quickly turns to legend
,,24
• • •
Thus Dublin's likeness to sea girt Ithaca, also
green and mountainous, washed in soft mist, becomes appar
ent, and with it some of the reasons why James Joyce could
create a setting in which a pathetic and rather ridiculous
little advertising agent might unwittingly walk in the
shoes of the mighty Odysseus.
And so we have the settings for two tales; two sea
washed islands, each in its own way a center of civiliza
tion, unique and standing alone, yet also a part of a larger
whole— Dublin of Ireland and Ithaca of the Pelopponesus.
24
Kain, Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats
and James Joyce, p. 13.
22
PREFACE TO CHAPTER II:
TEN YEARS BEFORE THE ODYSSEY
The story of The Odyssey properly begins where it
ends— at home, in Ithaca. However one learns the true
beginnings of The Odyssey in The Illiad, a book considered
by most critics to have preceded The Odyssey. There are
even arguments over authorship of the two books. However,
to understand The Odyssey one must know something of its
beginnings in The Illiad.
Odysseus, king of Ithaca, is a happy man. His beau
tiful wife has just presented him with a son; the estates
are prospering but they need looking after, and he would
rather not follow Agamemnon and Menelaus on their expedi
tion to Illium after heedless, high spirited Helen, wife of
Menelaus, who has run away with Paris, Prince of Troy.
(When we meet Helen in The Odyssey, twenty years later, she
is a mature woman with bitter memories; the flighty girl
whose beauty "launched a thousand ships" has become a sad
queen whose mockery of a marriage is made bearable only by
the nepenthe she sips.) When the Achaean princes prevail
upon Odysseus to fulfill his obligation to them— a pledge
23
25
made some years previously — Odysseus goes to the extent
of feigning madness to get out of it. But his ruse fails
and, however regretfully, he adds his ships to those com
prising the armada which will lay seige to Troy.
There follow ten years of battle and bloodshed with
the tide of victory flowing first one way, then the other,
with the gods of Olympus interfering at every opportunity
until Odysseus invents the first tahk. Although it is
known to history as the Trojan Horse, it was actually an
Achaean invention, to fool the Trojans into opening the
gates of Troy, dragging the gigantic horse (full of Argive
troops) inside the walls, and celebrating the battle they
had "won." Once inside, the Achaeans waited until the
Trojans were drunk with festivity, then poured forth from
the great horse and beat the Trojans in hand to hand combat.
What follows is rape, slaughter, and all the refinements
thereof which are inevitably visited upon the conquered by
the victors. In the grip of blood lust, "Wily Odysseus"
makes an incredible mistake; he sacks the Trojan temple of
his Patron Goddess Athena, who rules over Wisdom and the
Domestic Arts as well as the arts of warfare; this Goddess
25
Their daughter Helen (her true father was Zeus)
was so beautiful and sought after that Tyndarus and Leda
made all of her suitors pledge to support whichever one of
them she chose. She married Menelaus of Sparta, probably
because her sister Clytemnestra was already wed to Agamem
non, his brother, and these scions of the House of Atreus
were the true overlords of the Peloponnesus. By inference,
Odysseus had been one of Helen's suitors.
24
had previously showered gifts upon Odysseus and especially
watched over his mortal fate. To Odysseus now befalls one
of the worst of fates; bereft of her protection he is left
to make his way home, without divine intercession.
Odysseus, "wise even unto the wisdom of the immortal
Gods," overstepped his bounds; he raped, sacked, pillaged,
desecrated a sacred temple, descended to the level of
beasts. Brute lust drove out common sense and passion
ruled his reason; and it is in the impassioned and irra
tional world that he is doomed to wander for the next ten
years, an elemental and inhuman world in which the only
other mortal beings— his shipmates and crew— fall gradually
by the wayside until finally, alone, with no counsel or
guidance save that of his native intelligence, Odysseus
faces his fate, his hubris, and falls on his knees to plead
for mercy.
25
CHAPTER II
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: THE WANDERINGS OF
ODYSSEUS AND LEOPOLD BLOOM
The Odyssey of Leopold Bloom
Leopold Bloom's story also begins some ten years
prior to the opening of Joyce's novel— with the birth and
death of Bloom's only son, Rudy, whose pitiful life lasted
only eleven days. The death of Rudy brought about the
physical estrangement of Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly;
although sharing the same bed, they have not lived together
as man and wife for ten years. Molly flagrantly takes
lover after lover; Poldy, considerate and unobtrusive, re
alizing that his wife irrationally blames him for their
son's death, patiently waits, indulging in nothing more
lustful than the sin of Onan.
The ILLIAD of Leopold Bloom's life is that ten-year
period during which he and Molly have been emotionally
separated; his ODYSSEY, condensed in time and space, is
that day on which he makes his way back to her— June 16,
1904— that day on which he goes through ten years' worth of
agony, soul-searching and debasement until, finally, he
discovers in himself the courage and the wisdom to return
26
home— and slowly comes to realize that Molly has been wait
ing for him all the time.
The loneliness of the hero is one of those universal
themes which span literature, space and time. In point of
fact, before the beginning of recorded literature there ex
isted in oral tradition the story of the hero who goes
forth, is subjected to many trials, "dies" or descends into
hell, and returns again to earth purer and stronger than he
was before. The tale is older than religion, although many
religions from before recorded time have tapped it as a
source for their ideological foundations. Certainly it was
not new when Homer was young. However, Homer effectively
incorporated variations into this theme in order not only
to make it an exciting adventure story but to point a moral
without "moralizing." Homer isolates his hero not only
physically but spiritually, and even among his shipmates he
is "alone in a crowd."
Equally alone is James Joyce's anti-hero, Leopold
Bloom, a Jew wandering through the streets of Catholic
Dublin. Bloom has also been deserted by his common sense,
has turned his back on wisdom and wanders in spiritual iso
lation through a world populated by monsters of the imagina
tion. Bigotry, selfishness and race hatred are only a few
of the monsters he encounters and must conquer in the
course of his day. There is also the anthropophagic source
of his mortal agony: indifference. Poldy Bloom, most
27
unwisely, has allowed his errant wife to go her own way
without any remonstrance from him; his peers despise him as
something less than a man and, after ten years of catering
to Molly's self-indulgence, he has the status in his own
home of something even less than a servant. Held in thrall
by his love for Molly, he has allowed her passion to rule
his reason until he finds himself in the position of a
visitor in his own home, a fetcher of breakfasts, an errand
boy, a looker-on as his conjugal rights are as carefully
kept from him as they are carelessly distributed to others.
In his mind, Poldy knows Molly is unfaithful to him;
in his heart, he has not been able to confront her with it,
resulting in a situation in which he tacitly consents to
her adultery; he knows, and she knows that he knows, and he
knows that she knows that he knows. In consequence, Molly
becomes more and more flagrant in her abuse of her marital
vows, almost as though to try to goad Poldy into asserting
himself and becoming once again master of his own house, a
man among men. The monsters of this man's odyssey exist
because he allows them to exist. And the most chthonic of
these monsters, corresponding to Poseidon's irrational pur
suit of Odysseus, is the indifference with which he is
treated by his "peers." He has allowed himself to become a
subject of ridicule, and when the joke has been done to
death, he is no longer even a source of amusement, but a
pathetic creature, ignored whenever possible, addressed—
28
when he must be spoken to— by his last name. He is not
even on a first name basis with those men of Dublin who
have known him since his courtship of the voluptuous Marion
Tweedy. It is this indifference which makes him the lone
liest man in Dublin; barring Molly and their daughter Mil-
licent, there is no one to care if he lives or dies. And
it is this indifference to him as a man, an individual, a
human being, against which he finally revolts. When at
long last he faces the facts of his debasement in a phan-
tasmagorical series of visions, they vanish as nightmares
vanish in the comforting rays of dawn, and after the ruckus
in Nighttown, it is Bloom who takes command.
Bloom's common sense has been enslaved by the emo
tional tumult within him, as he desires his wife the more
she turns from him and yet is seemingly incapable of making
a move to breach the gap between them and bring her back to
him. Molly's adultery is all the more inexcusable and in
sulting compared with his own relative chastity— his only
sexual gratification is through acts of masturbation, each
of which debases him even further as it becomes habitual, a
relief as devoid of sexuality as the casual coupling of
dogs.
This is the state of things when, on the morning of
June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom, having served his wife break
fast in bed, brings in the mail, which contains a billet-
doux from her current lover, Blazes Boylan, who is also her
29
concert manager. He realizes that his wife will share
their bed with another man that afternoon# and he also re
alizes that he will do nothing about it; this is the level
to which he has sunk, as he considers the kind of man
Boylan is: congenial backslapper, loafer, a "good old boy"
who never shirks his turn to stand a round at one of the
pubs which the male population of Dublin consider suitable
gathering places. Boylan, all things considered, is a big
stupid stud. Bloom is disgusted by Molly's taste, and can
not understand what she sees in such a man; it is double
ignominy. He considers staying home that day; but he has
a social obligation to fulfill, the funeral of a former
acquaintance, Paddy Dignam. He does not have to go; he
will not be particularly welcome among the other mourners;
but Bloom is basically a good person, who knows his duty
when he sees it. Also, as usual, he is low on funds, and
must go about the business of attempting to earn enough
money to afford the little luxuries Molly enjoys. Poldy
Bloom on this morning is that loneliest of men, a cuckold
who knows he is a cuckold, and who also knows that his
peers know he is a cuckold, and that they ridicule him for
it behind his back. His Odyssey is a searching journey
through his own mind and soul to find within himself the
strength to solve his own problems and emerge from this pit
of spiritual enslavement.
As the day progresses, Bloom's peers fall by the
30
wayside as do the companions of Odysseus; although more
brightly characterized— indeed, a separate study could be
made on the vivacious townsfolk who people Joyce's book—
the purpose of each, from the sodden Si Dedalus to the
nameless debt collector who narrates the "Cyclops" episode,
is to illuminate a facet of the personality of Leopold
Bloom. Once that purpose is served, the individual disap
pears from view, to reappear only in vastly exaggerated
form as one of the visions in the "Circe" episode— the
phantasmagoria of Bella Cohen's brothel. Joyce's intention
in creating Leopold Bloom was to present us with the most
rounded character in literature, and he achieves this in
the purest way possible, without editorial apology; without
the intermediacy of interpretation by the author. Joyce
never comments, he merely presents. The surrounding char
acters, however, have a good deal to say about Leopold
Bloom and it is through their opinions of Bloom— and Bloom's
reflections on them— that in the course of one long day we
come to know that the Leopold Bloom who exists that day is
the sum of the parts of his previous thoughts and actions
on previous days. We know that for which he sorrows; and
that for which he yearns. Si Dedalus, whose money goes
more often for booze than food for his family, acerbicly
comments on the habits of his estranged son, Stephen; the
sight of Stephen causes Bloom painful recollections of the
death of his only son Rudy, eleven days after his birth.
31
The self-righteously Catholic Jack Power, whose indignation
at the mortal sin of suicide brings to Bloom's mind an
aching reminder of his father's death by poison, self-
inflicted; Blazes Boylan, epitome of Molly's infidelity, an
ambulatory castration symbol; Bella Cohen, his degradation
at his own hands; Gerty MacDowell, his physical loneliness;
Martin Cunningham, his well meaning but fumbling inability
to communicate; the violent anti-Semitism of The Citizen,
an active Sinn Feinner whose barroom cameraderie (in the
"Cyclops" episode) does not extend to Bloom, an Irishman of
Jewish descent. But it is in response to the Citizen's
drunken accusations that Bloom rises to his finest moment
(as Odysseus, calling out his name to the cyclops Polyphe
mus, son of Poseidon, God of the Sea, rises to the occasion
with pride but with the least possible sense); in response
to The Citizen's tirade Bloom calmly points out that "Men
delssohn was a Jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza.
And the Savior was a Jew and His Father was a Jew . . .
26
Your God was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like me." And he
gets chased out of Barney Kiernan's pub most ignominiously
for his pains, even as Odysseus was consequently pursued
all over the Mediterranean by the wrath of Poseidon. Each
of these individuals reflect back on Bloom some of his own
light, gradually revealing to us the heights and depths of
his nature and character; then they pass on, their places
2 6
Joyce, Ulysses, p. 336.
__________________32
to be taken by others who will reveal still another aspect
of the whole that is Leopold Bloom.
In this way also the author isolates his hero by
telling us nothing about him. We are presented with a
whole, and must for ourselves discover the pieces, and
where they fit. It is for this reason that the Ulysses of
James Joyce is as wide open for valid interpretation as a
field of grain. The painter will see color; the artist,
aesthetic dimension; the farmer will see fodder; the builder,
a well-placed plot of land; the quail, a likely corner for
her chicks; the crow, tasty tidbits; the passer-by, a pas
toral scene. It is the elephant of the three blind men-—
there is material here for the logician and the humanist,
the sensualist and the censor.
Some critics lean more heavily on the Father/Son
theme than on the Man/Woman skein. There are many reliable
Joyceans who will tell you that Ulysses is the story of a
man's search for his son. There is material enough for all;
each reader will find for himself logical threads with which
to weave the whole cloth of Leopold Bloom.
Bloom is a lonely man made lonelier because he is
intelligent enough to be aware of his isolation from his
fellows, and to contemplate the reasons for this. One, he
knows, is his Jewishness; another is his pragmatism. In
romantic Dublin, Leopold Bloom tends to be a bit of a
square. Also, he is abstemious in a land known for its
33
love for the "wine of the country"; and sober-sided in a
city that is witty rather than intellectual. Above all, he
is married to Molly (Marion Tweedy Bloom), who inherited
her sloe-eyed brunette beauty from her Spanish Jewess
mother, a woman whose voluptuous charms are readily admired
by the beaux about town, more than one of whom would gladly
steal Molly from her husband, were he able. The reversal
of faithful Penelope and the persistent suitors is obvious,
as it is known that Molly is careless with her favors and
Bloom either too blind to see it or helpless to stop it.
Molly's success as a concert singer makes Bloom's poor
business sense even more pathetic; he can't seem to make a
success of anything. But he buys Molly the lemon soap she
loves and the lotion that makes her dark eyes glow like
stars; she petulantly prefers the peaches and potted meat
proffered by Boylan during their afternoon assignation.
It is the crisis of 'his relationship with Molly with
which Bloom must come to terms. That he loves her is tac
itly inherent in his inability to discipline her; yet
through her coquetry she is robbing him of his manhood,
forcing him down to the level of the brute. And it is at
this beastly level that Bloom wanders until he faces the
true source of his agony and his torment. The monsters he
encounters are physical representations of his special hell;
until he conquers them he must live with them. No man can
triumph over another man's failures for him— this we can
34
only do ourselves. Leopold Bloom has become degraded, his
manhood torn away in bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam in
this disordered world. Only when he discovers order, and
schools himself for a battle to restore order, will he rise
above the mire of jealousy, suspicion, resentment and self
debasement. Until he attempts to change things, they will
stay as they are; unless he takes a stand, the outcome of
the fight is a foregone conclusion; if he does not make a
decision all else is meaningless. He must first come to
terms with himself and then with his world.
The burden of both "Odysseys" is that each man dis
covers the state of his soul only in isolation, comes by
this knowledge only through suffering and the lowering of
pride; only in the abyss of loneliness does man discover
his own mortality and the knowledge that despite the limita
tions of human nature, man can exist as man only in a world
of other men— a human world. In Bella Cohen's brothel
Bloom faces his demons and comes to terms with himself— the
confusion of the day passes, and the homeward path is
smoothed.
Both Odysseus and Leopold Bloom are complex and typ
ically human characters; their vicissitudes directly re
lated to their attitudes towards themselves, their fellows,
and their gods; the goal of return symbolizes the emergence
of order out of chaos and their discovery of that order
through suffering and error. They themselves have created
35
the conditions of their isolation; paradoxically it is only
in this state of isolation that they are able to discover
these conditions and take steps to mediate them, in this
way creating the circumstances which will make it possible
for them to return home.
Throughout the day, Leopold Bloom's thoughts are of
his home; his dead son; the wayward wife whom he loves with
a passionate intensity, an intensity simmered to concentra
tion through years of abnegation, an intensity which will
force a decision in the crucible of this day. He longs to
return home but he cannot make up his mind; quavering in
the agony of indecision he watches Blazes Boylan at the bar
of the Ormond Hotel, downing a quick one before setting off
for his [Boylan*s] rendezvous with Molly. Bloom's descent
from here to the perigee of his day is swift. Within four
hours he has once again committed the pathetic auto-eroti
cism which is a hollow mockery of the joyous union of the
act of sex; within four more he is in Nighttown, in the
House of Bella Cohen. It is here that his personal demol-
ishment is completed as, in a living dream, Madame Bella
becomes Bello, the Whoremaster and Bloom, symbolically cas
trated, becomes a female servant in this house of women who
exist for men's use, where the beauty of the act of love is
hardly hinted at in the cold exchange of flesh for coins.
It is here in the toils of practiced eroticism that
Bloom suffers the catharsis which purges the terrors that
36
inflame his confused mind and leaves him weak, shaky, but
able to think clearly and, for once, in control of the sit
uation. The fantasies diminish in size and potency as he
takes command of himself and the situation in which he
finds himself. The final vision of his phantasmagoria is
the most real and the most touching, the least monstrous
and the least beastly; he sees, softly through the night
mist, a child approaching-— a boy, eleven years old, looking
much as his son Rudy might have looked had he lived. Bloom
holds his breath; it is too much to be believed, all that
his heart can hold. Silently the child approaches, unsee
ing. Bloom, not knowing there are tears in his eyes, calls
out his son's name. There is no answer. The phantasm
passes slowly by, fading once again into disembodied clouds
of mist that might or might not have formed the body of his
son. Bloom searches the dark streets for a glimpse of what
might have been. Slow salt tears sift silently down his
face as beneath his breath he calls once more, brokenly,
helplessly, "Rudy . . . Rudy . . . Rudy ..."
It is only a dream. But this realization also in
cludes the germ of a thought which grows in shape and dimen
sion as he begins his journey home. He is not, after all,
so old (Bloom is thirty-eight, Molly thirty-two); it is not
too late for him and Molly to have other children, perhaps
another son. His catharsis has left him empty and void;
purged of the elements which held him in thrall he is able
37
to face his fate, to meet the fact of his mortality on his
own terms. He has been dredged to the depths of his soul;
he is not the same man who left #7 Eccles Street that morn
ing. Having been totally immersed in the whirlpool of
sensuality, having succumbed to his erotic fantasies and in
those fantasies come face to face with the loss of his man
hood, he knows that the only way to reclaim his manhood is
to return home and reclaim Molly, the only person who can
give it to him, even though he may have to do battle in
order to achieve this end. He is a man and ready to return
to the world of men, master of himself and of his condition.
And when, home at last, he joins Molly in their bed and re
quests that she bring him breakfast in bed the next morning,
rather than the other way "round, it is another step to
wards mastery in his own house; it is not much; but it is
a start.
Molly, probably a little surprised at Poldy"s self-
assertion, agrees. And, during the long interior monologue
which ends the novel she catalogues Poldy"s good points,
compares him not unfavorably to Boylan, and even contem
plates conceiving another child by him; and realizes that
this involves recognizing him as her husband and becoming
again more than a wife in name only— as Penelope, who at
first cannot recognize the stranger at her gates, slowly
but surely tests him, accepts him, and rejoices in his re
turn. The recurrent "yes . . . yes . . . yes . . ."of
38
_______
Molly's narrative is a rhythmic affirmation of Bloom's re
turn and the surety of their reconciliation; it represents,
for this story, a happy ending. As she drifts towards
sleep, Molly's thoughts are of her first sexual experience
with Bloom and within her the gentle stirring of desire de
notes more than sexuality; inherent is a specific note of
specific need for fulfillment, and the one person who can
provide that fulfillment is in her thoughts as well as in
bed beside her; and Bloom's Odyssey is complete as his wife
remembers:
After that long kiss I near lost my breath, yes, he
said I .was a flower of the mountain, yes, so are we
flowers all a woman's body, yes . . . and the sun
shines for you, he said, yes . . . and I asked him
with my eyes to ask me again to say yes to say yes my
mountain flower and first I put my arms around him so
he could feel my breasts all perfume and yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will
yes.26
The "Odyssey" of Odysseus
The story of the seige of Troy is not a pretty one.
It is savage, barbaric, passionate and elemental. It is an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, no quarter asked, none
given. The only romantic note is the flight of the young
lovers. (Some say Paris abducted Helen. Nonsense.) From
then on it is a bloody awful, pressing relentlessly forward
to an inescapable conclusion; the best youths of both sides
slain; the lofty towers of Illium burnt, toppled, empty
Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 767-768.
39
shells; the city sacked, its children murdered, its women
taken in bondage; and through this carnage, past the stiff
ening bodies of friend and foe alike walks Menelaus, lead
ing his hapless queen, Helen, her clothing stained with the
blood of her fallen lover, her head held high, too stunned
to cry or even feel the beginnings of shame.
It is possible that the epic might have ended here.
But, although their original cause was just, the triumph of
the Achaeans was a violent and savage one. Our sympathies
are not with the righteous conquerors but with their Trojan
victims; Priam and Hecuba somehow deserved better than this.
The story, as a story, cannot end satisfactorily until the
Achaeans have suffered in kind for the grief they have
brought to these proud people, for the ruin of windy Troy.
And truly they do— Agamemnon, reaching Mycenae only
to be slain by his wife and her paramour; Menelaus at
Sparta, who must live with a sad-eyed wife and the memory
of the men who died that he might reclaim her. However, we
learn of these things not in The Illiad but in The Odyssey;
Homer continues his tale with the adventures of Odysseus,
not one of the Commanders in Chief before the walls of Troy
but certainly one of the most respected of the Achaean gen
erals, and the one whose tactics finally turned the seige
into a rout.
One might wonder why, of all the heroes who fought
at Troy, Odysseus, who hadn't wanted to go there in the
40
first place, was the one whose homeward journey was selected
to be celebrated in epic prose. There are many answers:
one is that it provides for the storyteller and his audi
ence satisfaction through emotional catharsis leading to a
happy ending. The story of the seige of Troy does not end
with the fall of that great city. It is too abrupt, too
bloody, and too brutal. It is tragedy and tragedy, although
the greatest dramatic formula and certainly the most diffi
cult to bring off, does not always contain the most satis
fying story. The saga of Odysseus' homeward journey, while
it certainly does contain those elements which another
Greek some years later was to set down as the definitive
elements of great dramatic tragedy— pity, terror, and ca
tharsis— also, and most importantly to the storyteller,
contains the elements most enjoyed by the audience he seeks
to please: a whacking good adventure story coupled with a
happy ending. A sigh of relief and a gently breathed "wow"
as the final page is turned have sold and will continue to
sell more stories than any sanguine tale of woe ever will.
The Odyssey is a romance, and this is why it has always been
more popular than The Illiad. It is thrilling and satisfy
ing, and these are the greatest audience builders in the
world.
On a more scholarly level, The Odyssey contains an
abundance of the elements which make for epic tragedy. The
story of Odysseus' return, his privations and sufferings,
41
his alienation and loneliness arouse our pity for him. Our
pity for him is by inference conferred in The Odyssey upon
his companions in arms from The Illiad; Menelaus and Helen
with their nepenthe at Sparta; Agamemnon and Achilles in
Hades— are pitiful ones. Through our empathy for Odysseus,
our horror at the outrages of the sack of Troy is assuaged;
his sufferings mitigate and redeem the savagery of the rape
of Illium. In The Odyssey, one individual suffers for the
sins of his brothers and through his suffering arouses our
pity; this pity, through transference, redeems them all.
(The implication of a religious parallel is deliberate.
E. V. Rieu, in his introduction to his translation of The
Illiad states, "Homer believes in his gods . . . moreover,
the Greeks accepted him as their first theologian and the
27
creator of the Olympian religion.") The saga of Odysseus'
wanderings is needed to round out the epic; the plight of
one man pitted against the elements balances the spectacle
of the barbaric Achaeans ravishing Troy. It creates a
comprehensive whole, satisfying and complete. It is also
complete aesthetically, with terror purged by pity and,
through the catharsis of one man alone, the hero, catharsis
and thereby redemption for all the terror that was Troy.
The Odyssey is a lonely journey. Odysseus, in the
grip of excess, has committed a sacrilege— and for that
27
E. V. Rieu, trans., The Illiad (Suffolk, England:
Penguin Classics, 1950), p. xvii.
42
sacrilege is doomed to ten years' exile, abandoned by his
gods, bereft of companionship, desiring only to return home
and unable to understand why fate has decreed otherwise.
In addition to his offense to Athena, Odysseus, who
has not yet come to the realization that she has abandoned
him to "work out his own salvation with diligence," greatly
offends the god Poseidon through the injury done to Posei
don's monstrous son, Polyphemous. It makes no difference
that Polyphemous is slow witted, coarse, sub-human and
above all anthropophagous; Odysseus and all of his men
would have perished if Odysseus had not thought up the
scheme of blinding the cyclops" one eye, thereby allowing
himself and most of his crew to escape.
Poseidon is the most chthonic of the Olympian dei
ties; that is, the one still closest to the gods of the
earth, of the infernal regions, of the trees and of the
rocks, those non-human "deities" who were worshipped before
man created God in his own image. Even among the denizens
of Olympus, there is not one who is above descending to
Earth to meddle in human concerns; they are very "human"
gods, excepting their godlike powers which cause veneration.
The transition period between the worshippers of
trees, sun, moon, ocean, and worshippers of a pantheon of
gods and goddesses has been a slow one, and cannot be said
to have been completed in our own "Atomic Age." Many peo
ples were slow to give up worshipping their favorite rock
43
in favor of a "Lord of the Rocks" who dwelt on Olympus; at
the time of the Bronze Age human sacrifice was still in
vogue, as we see in Agamemnon's willingness to sacrifice
his daughter Iphegenia in order to propitiate the god of
the winds, that they might have smooth sailing to Troy.
Poseidon, Lord of the Sea, the womb of time, the un
conscious, the irrational, managed the transition from
chthonic deity to Olympian "god" with relative ease. It
was simple enough for people who had long needed the "good
will" of the waters of the earth to keep on worshipping and
propitiating the God of the Sea, whatever he was called.
And of the Olympian deities, Poseidon is the one who has
changed least in character from pre-Olympian times. He is
moody, irrational, violent, unreliable, selfish, persistent
in his hatreds, the least civilized, the most brutish.
Poseidon, the "Earth Shaker," has no emotional control
whatsoever. His temper flares, and that is that; there is
no stopping him. Even after Zeus has given the order for
Odysseus to be allowed to return to Ithaca, Poseidon pur
sues him.
It is Athena who binds up the winds to smooth the
waves, not Poseidon who calms the waters. It is interest
ing to note that Athena sets Odysseus free from Ogygia when
Poseidon is busy in another part of the world; even she,
sprung full grown from the head of Zeus the Almighty, does
not want to risk a quarrel with her brother. Only great
44
Zeus has any control over Poseidon; otherwise, the Lord of
the Sea does as he pleases, without thinking.
If he had thought, he would have realized that Odys
seus 1 treatment of Polyphemus was the only course he could
take to save himself; but Poseidon is chthonic, brute pas
sion, and his reasoning is slow and dull. In Hades, the
renowned Seer Tiresias informs Odysseus that the only way
to be free of the persecution of Poseidon is to make par
ticular sacrifice to him in a land that does not know the
sea; that is, to bring the worship of the sea god inland,
so that farmers and tillers of the soil who know nothing of
the ocean will offer in their turn sacrifice to the great
Poseidon.
Poseidon is the last of the "passionate" deities;
passionate in the sense that reason is entirely divorced
from emotion. Poseidon knows emotion only, not reason, and
grudgingly accepts the "reason" of others only when it is
forced upon him.
First Odysseus almost fatally offends the Goddess of
Wisdom— who, at least, can see reason; then he injures the
son of the Lord of the Irrational, Poseidon, and for this
is pursued unceasingly until at last, with the aid of ,
Athena, he reaches home. Athena is content to let Odysseus
learn the error of his ways in his own time; she does not
persecute him. Passionate Poseidon requires immediate ven
geance. He does not care that his son is a cannibal; his
45
son has been injured, Odysseus did it, and Odysseus will
suffer for it. Thus in his hubris, Odysseus' shouting out
his name to Polyphemus is just as bad if not worse than his
attack on Athena's temple. Both are acts in which passion
rules reason; in his senses, Odysseus would have known
better. But he has lost his senses; his passions have
overcome him, and as Aristotle himself would have said, the
impassioned man is the unreasoning man.
In the ten years of Odysseus' wanderings, he encoun
ters no "human" beings. His adventures all involve fantas
tical creatures, mythical beasts, sensuous sorceresses,
nubile nymphs, demi-gods and monsters. His only "true"
human relationships are with the men of his company; and,
as noted earlier, his comrades are people with names only,
lightly characterized, bringing little if any influence to
bear upon the decisions of their commander. The world in
which he wanders is a world without reason. Odysseus, hav
ing of his own volition reduced himself to the level of the
beast, is tossed about in that world, threatened on all
sides by creatures larger than life, his pride slowly but
surely negated as he meets situation after situation which
involves him totally in a bitter struggle for his survival
as an individual. His human companions, less vivid and
more vulnerable than he, inevitably fall victim to the
forces at work in this outlandish place. As his ships and
men are destroyed, Odysseus becomes more and more isolated
46
from the "real world" to which he desires to return. In a
passionate and irrational world, he alone is human and ra
tional; his isolation is emphasized as those at every side
desire to engulf him in the turgid stream which feeds them.
The spectres he encounters are dredged up from the realm of
the unconscious, where fear takes fantastic shapes. It is
entirely possible that each of the beings he encounters
/
represents a different level or aspect of the subconscious
human psyche; it is certain that each presents a viable
threat to his totality, the survival of Odysseus qua
Odysseus.
The most prevalent threat is that of the sea over
which he must travel to reach his destination. The shift
ing, uncertain, wayward sea; now calm, now tossed by whirl
winds; now friendly, now treacherous, now seemingly safe
then suddenly stormy, sucking at the timbers of Odysseus'
red-prowed ships as though it needed those fibres for sur
vival; as quixotic and capricious as a beautiful woman dis
tributing favors to her suitors as her whimsy takes her.
The sea (that great womb) is the unknown quantity which
ultimately decides Odysseus' fate— whether or not he will
ever reach the shores of Ithaca— and it is significant that
the worst part of Odysseus' wanderings begins after he in
jures the cyclops Polyphemus, giant deformed but beloved
son of Poseidon, Lord of the Sea. Once the wrath of Posei
don is aroused, he pursues Odysseus relentlessly, and it
47
finally requires the intervention of Athena on the hero's
behalf before Odysseus is able to complete his journey to
Ithaca.
The sea, with its hidden, fathomless depths, symbol
izes the unconscious and its turbulent, constantly chaotic
state. The Odyssey is a journey out of chaos towards order,
out of the formless barbaric world of the mysterious to
wards the less exciting, but infinitely safer, world of the
known. The unconscious is Protean; the conscious, the
known, has established form and shape and order. It is
this order which Odysseus must discover before he can leave
the demonic world which holds him in thrall; before he can
re-enter the world of men he must humble himself and admit
his own mortality. It is this decision towards which Odys
seus struggles— acknowledgement of moral order, acceptance
of his mortal fate. From the apogee at which he hurled
defiance at the gods, he is flung to the perigee of captiv
ity on the isle of Ogygia, from which, on his knees and
weeping, he must apply to the gods for succor.
Another constant threat to Odysseus' survival is
that of extinction by consumption— being eaten alive. This
is probably the most horrible fate man can imagine. In
three separate encounters with cannibalistic beings— liter
ally, man-eaters— Odysseus is almost at the mercy of those
who would feast upon his flesh. This is one of the most
primitive fears of the subconscious, reaching back to those
48
aeons before the beginning of time when men found their
brothers to be the most reliable source of sustenance.
Then, when survival of the race was perilous, cannibalism
became taboo except in ritual form; and human sacrifice
allowed only to propitiate the gods in time of greatest
need.
The threat of being devoured is first met with on
the isle of the Laestrygonians, from which Odysseus manages
to extricate himself and most of his followers; later, he
passes through the straits between Scylla and Charybdis,
knowing that the she-beast Charybdis will manage to select
several of his followers to feast upon, and he takes this
chance knowing that it is necessary for the survival of the
majority. The most direct threat to Odysseus personally
occurs in the cave of Polyphemus. It is not only a threat
to his life but to his entire being, not merely to be slain
but to be absorbed, consumed, merged with the being that
took his life— total annihilation of the individual.
And it is in his triumph over Polyphemus that Odys
seus commits the grievous error of judgment which brings
the wrath of Poseidon down upon him; his pride not suffi
ciently humbled, and against all reason, he calls out his
name to the monstrous creature he has blinded, in full
knowledge of the cyclops' divine sire, once again hurling
defiance at the gods.
It is Odysseus1 name alone which is offered up, and
49
it is Odysseus alone upon.whom the wrath of Poseidon falls.
His companions are incidental; as their ships are lost, it
is only a question of Poseidon coming closer and closer to
the object of his ire. It is as though he were chopping
through the underbrush to get to a clearing in the woods.
It is Odysseus against the gods, in total isolation.
Our attention is focused upon the hero alone; our
sympathies are drawn to this one man struggling against ob
stacles which are beyond human understanding. Our emotion
flows towards Odysseus, at the terrible mercy of the Lord
of the Sea. This isolation is intentional; Homer does not
let us lose sight of the fact that his hero is the focal
point of the tale and that the vicissitudes he endures are
his trials and his alone. His companions are shadows cast
by his stature.
Odysseus also encounters the threat of seduction of
his mental faculties in the land of the lotus eaters. One
thinks of the land of the lotus eaters as a great blue-green
marsh pond, shrouded in warm, scented mists, edged with
fern fronds and matted swamp grass. On floating lily pads
lie the listless lotus eaters, lazily nibbling the luscious
fruit which is never out of reach. The lotus eaters are a
pale, soft, hairless people with blank, heavy-lidded eyes;
they have no natural functions, as the lotus leaves no
waste, and no desires, as the lotus fills their every need.
Gently they drift and dream under the narcotic influence of
50
the aromatic fruit, bestirring themselves only to pluck
another leaf.
This is the closest Odysseus comes to obliteration
of his mental resources, and it is the danger from which he
escapes most easily, because he is so completely vital.
The languor of the lotus eaters holds no temptation for him.
He is a man, virile, and it is his fierce virility which
protects him in a land of forgotten memories, unwished
hopes, a place that is passionless, neuter, and sterile.
He cannot be seduced by tfte pallid people who are dependent
upon the bloodless, limp, drooping leaf of the lotus.
A seduction of a sort more tempting to his nature is
offered by the sorceress Circe, sister to the wizard Aeetes
(and thereby aunt to Medea), and daughter of Helios, the
sun. Circe, on her isle of Aeaea, is a powerful witch god
dess whose misty island has been the last landing place of
many a lusty youth, easy victims to her cool, practiced
arts. But here, unaccountably, Odysseus is aided by the
messenger of the gods, Hermes, who provides him with the
herb moly, which will act as an antidote to her poisons.
"Unaccountably," because this is the first notice that the
Olympians (other than Poseidon) have taken of Odysseus; and
it is definitely a protective measure. Homer does not say
at whose behest Hermes approaches Odysseus. Perhaps Athena,
however offended, has kept an eye out for Odysseus; and
knowing that Circe has the power to completely enslave
51
Odysseus sends Hermes with a token to render her charms
harmless, so that at least the goddess and the hero will
meet on equal terms. At any rate, armed with the herb moly,
Odysseus approaches the palace of the sorceress who has
already turned half of his company into swine; and when her
spells have no effect, Circe cries out that he must be
Odysseus, whom the messenger god had told her would "come
2 8
hither, on his way from Troy, with his swift black ship."
Odysseus, forewarned by Hermes, does not capitulate
to the charms of the goddess until he has exacted from her
a promise that she will not make him "a dastard and un-
29
manned, when she has him naked." But "the god of the
golden wand" had also bidden Odysseus not to scorn the bed
of the goddess; and, the lusts of the flesh being what they
are, Odysseus is more than willing to obey this command.
Once he has exacted a promise from the luscious witch that
she will do him no harm, he takes her to bed and keeps her
there, more or less, for the better part of a year; in be
tween times he manages to force her to restore to human
form those members of his company whom she had previously
enchanted.
This is the longest he has willingly stayed in any
place on his journey homeward, and we are told that it is
with regret that he acceeds to the urgings of his companions
2 8
Butcher and Lang, p. 154.
29
Ibid.
to launch their ships again. Indeed, who would not want to
stay on an enchanted isle in the soft and willing arms of
an enticing goddess, whose knowledge of the arts of Eros is
skilled, certain and sensuous? The lures of the flesh
cloud Odysseus' mind more than the oblivion offered by the
lotus eaters ever could; Odysseus, mighty warrior, although
not actually enchanted, is quite under the spell of Circe.
The very virility which saved him from the lures of the
lotus is here his own worst enemy. If the land of the
lotus eaters represents an eternally limp penis, the mis
tress of Aeaea represents the possibility of eternal erec
tion; desire and coupling and orgasm, the infinite expres
sion of man's most pleasurable experience. Odysseus, who
escaped the mighty Polyphemus, is enslaved by his own senses
in the cave of the goddess Circe.
In his wanderings, Odysseus is confronted with every
possible threat to his manhood, his individuality, his
animus, every enticement to which, had he fallen prey,
would have resulted in his destruction. Man's oldest fear,
of being eaten, total annihilation of the individual through
absorption into the being of another; his most unconscious
fear, total dependency, return to the womb; his worst fear,
his inability to procreate; his most human fear, enslave
ment by the lusts of the flesh; his most prevalent fear,
that of "losing his mind," literally drowning in the uncon
scious of the psyche. He is also surrounded by physical
53
threats to his existence. His journey to Hades represents
the "descent into Hell" which is part of the mythology of
every hero figure from Osiris to Jesus Christ; his return
from the infernal regions represents triumph over death it
self, and for Odysseus a special triumph in that while in
Hades he has received the counsel of the great Theban seer,
Tiresias, who tells him of the obstacles yet remaining on
his journey, and that
even though thou shalt thyself escape, late shall thou
return in evil plight, with the loss of all thy com
pany, on board the ship of strangers, and thou shalt
find sorrows in thy house, even proud men that devour
thy living . . . yet I tell thee, on thy coming thou
shalt avenge their violence . . . 30
Through his descent into hell, Odysseus receives
knowledge of the future which prepares him to face the re
alities of existence to which he longs to return. The
knowledge, as in most cases where the future is made known,
does him precious little good; for his own men do the dam
age which undoes any good the foreknowledge granted by
Tiresias might have done.
Aeolus represents unavoidable fate; as the winds
blow, so does fortune sway. The breeze brings sweet scents
of summer or blows swift fall freshets; so does Lady For
tune smile, or turn her head away. The kindness of the
King of the Winds is undone by the petty jealousies of
Odysseus' companions, who cannot believe that the "treasure"
30
Butcher and Lang, p. 165.
54
bestowed upon their leader is not in dividable form; when
they open the pouch and set loose the ill winds which King
Aeolus had graciously bound up for Odysseus, they let loose
their own fate; and when stormy winds return their ship to
Aeolus' isle, the king refuses further aid to one so obvi
ously not a favorite of the gods. If Odysseus had thought
to confide in his companions, he might have avoided this
fate; but Odysseus, "wise like unto the mighty gods," is
still proud and arrogant and keeps the knowledge of the
king's gift to himself. He is undone by his own pride.
The greedy companions reap the whirlwind; and the hubris of
Odysseus gets another thumping whack.
The Sirens represent all "the sins that flesh is
heir to"; all the temptations of human nature. The Sirens'
song calls out to all that is elemental and base in human
nature. Odysseus has to have himself securely bound to the
mast of his ship in order to listen to their song; and it
is significant that in his pride he must hear it, although
he takes steps to prevent his companions from being lured
to their downfall. Gluttony, sloth, indolence, avarice,
greed, all call to Odysseus as flesh to flesh; the most
animal part of his nature is lured by the Sirens' song.
Odysseus strains at the ropes which bind him; the call is
that of gland to gland, and the shrewd sacker of cities
knows the sound and smell of lust, the urge to rape, the
racking red throb of passion heat, impatient and breathless.
55
it is a call to all that is dark and of the earth in man;
as such, it is most representative of the world in which he
finds himself, the other side of the sun, equally hot, but
with a light that absorbs rather than radiates; the unin
telligible corner of the universe where insatiable formless
creatures grope mindlessly, knowing only want and repletion.
It is the world of the instinctual as opposed to that of
the intellectual. Odysseus is exposed to all the instinc
tual lures of the flesh; his mind must govern these in
stincts and place them in their proper order before he can
return to the sweetly reasonable world in which his wife
waits for him.
It is Odysseus' companions, the shadows of his re
flection, who defy the gods by feasting upon the Oxen of
the Sun. The Sacred Kine of Helios represent the sacred
preserves of the gods, where men may not stray; by violat
ing them, Odysseus' men violate the sanctuaries of the gods.
It is a repetition of the sack of the Temple of Athena at
Troy, and brings sure and swift vengeance, as Odysseus' de
fiance is cracked into prisms, each of which reflects the
folly of his act. In the ensuing storm (sent by Zeus upon
the request of Helios), all his company are lost; only
Odysseus manages to survive, as he himself did not partake
of the flesh of the Oxen of the Sun. He is totally alone,
bereft of human companionship, in moral isolation. Rock-
battered, salt-encrusted, he is washed up upon the sandy
56
beach of Ogygia, home of "Calypso of the braided tresses."
Calypso likes what she sees, takes the hero as her lover,
and uses her powers of enchantment to throw a cloud around
her floating demi-paradise so that no one, god or mortal,
will discover the whereabouts of the mighty Odysseus.
And there he remains for seven years. But he quickly
tires of Calypso's physical lures and, although she offers
him eternal youth if he will stay by her side, Odysseus
cannot be persuaded. As soon as his physical needs are
assuaged, he remains on Ogygia under duress: "unwilling
31
lover by a willing lady." After three years of being
battered about in a nightmare world, he has lost his loot,
his companions, his ships, everything but his soul and his
sensibilities. Calypso's magic mist hides him from the
eyes of the gods as well as mortal men; his presence is as
effectively wiped from the face of the earth as if he had
perished with his crew. After three turbulent years come
seven during which he has time to repent, to think about
and to reason out the "why" of his exile. Day after day
he wakes to wander on the shore, scanning the skyline for
sight of home; he weeps longingly to be united with his
wife and family; he searches his soul for comfort and finds
none there. Finally, in desolation, he cries out to the
gods for aid; and finally, when mortal Odysseus humbles his
pride and asks for help, begging for nothing more than
31
Butcher and Lang, p. 75.
57
to release him from the spells which hold him and return
him to the world of mortals in which he rightfully belongs
— it is then that Athena takes up his cause once again, and
pleads with Zeus to intercede on his behalf.
One by one his companions— alter egos or shadows—
have fallen prey to the monstrous representations of the
human facets of Odysseus' nature, for The Odyssey is also
the story of one man's struggle to maintain his individual
ity in the face of overwhelming temptations to surrender it.
The threats he faces are to the survival of his identity,
manifestations of the forces at work in man's natural en
vironment— the realms of nature and instinct— and the
strength of his opponents is rooted in either the external
natural world or the non-rational elements of human nature.
The specific threats to Odysseus suggest symbolic magnetic
attraction to that which is beastly in the subconscious
realm of the human psyche— as the sea is an ancient emblem
of the womb, the sub-rational, and death by drowning a re
turn to that elemental depth. Odysseus' struggle for the
survival of his individual consciousness against the primi
tive powers which seek to absorb him (even Circe and Ca
lypso, in their own fashion, seek to "absorb" him) is fun
damental to the story of the lonely hero who fights his way
to self-realization and awareness. His final success makes
him not less human but more completely human, a rational
man in command of his own resources, reconciled to and even
58
glad of his own mortality.
The Odyssey begins in chaos, continues in turmoil,
and ends only when Odysseus, having admitted his mortality
and thrown himself upon the mercy of the gods, returns home
and through his own resources restores order in his own
home. His final success is not accidental but founded upon
the subjection of passion to reason; the spiritual evolu
tion of Odysseus as a man represents the evolution from the
age of brutes to an age in which reason is possible.
Throughout these marvelous and exciting adventures, even
the occasional erotic episodes, the hero's goal is to be
reunited with other men; to end his loneliness and return
home. The turning point in Odysseus' wanderings marks the
escape from the fabulous world in which he has been travel
ing and his return to the real, down to earth, human world.
The order for his release is given by Zeus, but it has its
very human counterpart in Odysseus' independent and emphatic
choice to leave the side of the nymph Calypso— and by in
ference the eternal youth she offers him— and return to the
world of mortals and the fate of growing old at the side of
his wife. Odysseus chooses the human condition and earthly
cares. He rejects paradise and summons the courage to com
mit himself to a journey back to the world of men— and of
time, and age, and failures, and error, and cares. He de
sires only to live in harmony with the world of men. When
pensive Calypso entreats him to stay with her, Odysseus
59
pays tribute to her beauty but -gently reminds her that time
does not know her face, while that of his wife is all too
mortal; and pays a moving tribute to the passing beauty of
Penelope in comparison with that of the nymph: "... yet
even so, I wish and long day and night to fare homeward and
32
see the day of my returning ..."
And when at last Odysseus is washed up upon the
shores of Phaecia, he offers supplications to the gods in
the name of wanderers, who are sacred to Zeus; the waves
grow still; he wades ashore and kisses the earth beneath
his feet. From this point on, he encounters only human
foes and human temptations. Exhausted by his struggle with
the sea, he falls asleep upon the shores of Phaecia; and
when he awakens, it is to a world of human values. In this
moment he is reunited with the world of men. He is mortal,
and no longer alone.
32
Butcher and Lang, p. 77.
60
CHAPTER III
THE WANDERER'S RETURN: THE HOMECOMING OF
ODYSSEUS AND LEOPOLD BLOOM, AND THE WOMEN
WHO MAKE THEIR RETURN POSSIBLE
The Women of The Odyssey
It is a truth, albeit an unexplored one, that both
Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, in the course of their wander
ings, have their most meaningful relationships with members
of the opposite sex. This aspect of Leopold Bloom's per
sonality (his attractiveness to women) has passed unnoticed
by Joycean critics (all male); yet Joyce himself stated
33
that he wanted to create an "all-'round person." But if
one is to look for similarities in the thematic structure
of The Odyssey and Ulysses, this— their relationships with
the women they encounter— is undoubtedly the strongest.
To both men, the male creatures whom they meet are
enemies who seek to obliviate them, personally and individ
ually. These creatures are one-dimensional and, for the
most part, flat; except for their one particular moment of
glorified participation they move silently through the
background, shadow creatures. The women, on the other hand,
^Budgen, p. 17.
61
are rounded, three dimensional, sympathetic creatures with
emotions, motivations, and compassion for or at least un
derstanding of the hero. It is stated elsewhere that the
Joycean/Homeric "parallels" are more often than not actually
reversals, or opposites. Odysseus is a hero, Leopold Bloom
a very ordinary sort of man; Odysseus, King of Ithaca,
Poldy Bloom not even master in his own home; Odysseus is
rich, Bloom, poor; Odysseus" epithet is "of many devices,"
whereas poor Poldy Bloom's ideas for inventions never get
past the thinking stage. Odysseus does battle with incred
ible creatures; Bloom's dragons are ordinary men without
supernatural powers— it is his own feelings of inferiority
which allow them to buffet him about so. Nowhere is this
"reversal" more apparent than in Joyce's treatment of the
goddesses and noble women who comprise Odysseus' feminine
counterparts in The Odyssey. What Joyce did was to take
the framework of the epic poem and reduce it to street
level, putting "the hero" within reach, making him human
and understandable— and this despite the unusual and revo
lutionary style with which he wrote, which, unhappily, has
Put Ulysses beyond the reach of many who have read and en
joyed The Odyssey.
Each man sets out on a journey he does not truly wish
to take. Each man longs to return home but is prevented
from doing so by a series of "accidents of circumstance"
which he himself, directly or indirectly, has set up; each
62
man, finally, in isolation, is scoured to the depths of his
soul and in a crucible of torment comes face to face with
himself and finds there, within himself, the strength to do
what he must do to achieve his goal— reconciliation to his
condition and his return home.
Odysseus" relationships with men in The Odyssey are
light and fleeting. He has no "best buddy" to share his
doubts, decisions, fears. He is alone against the gods,
his adventures comprise a series of encounters with magical
beings; all have greater strength than he, or fantastical
powers. In the course of his wanderings his shipmates all
fall prey, in one way Or another, to these beings; he alone
survives.
Odysseus and Menelaus were the only Achaeans who
34
took no female concubines during the seige of Troy. And
there is no mention in The Odyssey of female captives
aboard any of Odysseus" ships. True, this might mean noth
ing more than a veteran sea captain's knowledge of the
ocean and his men, a wise decision that the presence of
women on board would present a distraction or even the sub
ject of quarrels during the long voyage home. Or it might
be that Odysseus set free his quota of the captured women,
as they were shared out along with other spoils of war,
gently and gallantly, to return to their ruined city and
34 i ,
W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study xn the
Adaptability of a Traditional Hero" in Taylor, ed. Essays
on The Odyssey, p. 14.
63
mourn their dead. Fathers, sons and lovers lost, these
poor women were no threat to the victorious Achaeans; it
would have been a gentlemanly gesture and, in its way, a
tribute to the fallen men of Troy not to deepen the incred
ible humiliation of Priam's people by taking their women in
bondage. For whatever reason, there are no women on the
ships of Ithaca. And it would be nice to think that wily
Odysseus, whose creation caused their downfall, in victory
had the courage to be kind. But this is a romantic theory
which has no substantiation whatsoever, especially in view
of Odysseus' actions during the sack of Troy and his subse
quent unprovoked attack on the people of the Cicones.
Odysseus' most significant relationship, outside of
his most human relationship with Penelope, is with the god
dess Athena, who variously represents intellect, wisdom,
and mother wit, which are not at all the same thing. We
are told that of all mortals, Odysseus is the closest in
mental stature to Zeus the All Wise, father and chief among
the gods of Olympus. The phrase most frequently used
throughout The Odyssey to describe Odysseus is "Of Many De
vices"; whether it is this quality that attracts Athena to
him or through her grace that he attains this sagacity, the
goddess is his patron. When he sacks her temple at Troy—
symbolically the rape of reason by the slavering brute— he
earns her displeasure and forfeits her protection— and all
sorts of things begin to happen to him, over which he
64
slowly realizes he has no control. When he finally real
izes that she has abandoned him, and humbles himself, as he
does in no other portion of The Odyssey— his disguise as a
beggar in Ithaca is at the command of Athena— he regains
her good will and her divine intercession. It is Athena
who persuades Zeus to command Calypso to let Odysseus go.
Through her intervention and assistance he regains the
shores of Ithaca, triumphs over the suitors, sets his house
in order, and woos and wins again the love of Penelope.
In Athena, we have a symbolic combination of The
Mother who watches over us, guides us, pleads with the Pow
ers That Be on our behalf, and a personification of Moral
Order— sweet reason which, realizing that the process of
civilization cannot be achieved without rules, sets the
guidelines through which we as individuals are able to live
together in a reasonable, ordered world.
Civilization cannot exist without order. The pro
cess of maturation is the process by which the individual
becomes aware of the strictures and limitations of his ex
istence; socialization which enables man to live in a soci
ety of men. This is as true at the primitive level as at
any other; even so-called Stone Age societies which exist
in this "Atomic Age" have their own guidelines and patterns
of behavior within the group which allows the group qua
group to exist. "No" in its varied linguistic forms is
more often than "mama" the first word a child learns. A
65
child is confronted with Thou Shalt Nots at every turn;
through learning what he can't do he also discovers what is
allowable and praiseworthy. It is reason which creates
order and order which allows the existence of reason. The
two are interdependent and it is only through recognition
and acceptance of this interdependence that society as a
whole is able to exist and function. Acknowledgement that
the will of the individual is subject to guidelines set by
the group is the basis of society; the rebel or "outlaw"
places himself outside of the will of the group. By so
doing he makes himself liable to punishment by members of
that society for his actions, should he desire to return;
an example must be set so that others will see the unwisdom
of defying the law and order on which the existence of
their society rests.
The pivot on which The Odyssey turns is acceptance
of moral order and true sorrow for having exceeded these
limitations. Odysseus pillages the temple of the Goddess
of Wisdom; in so doing he wills the punishments which sub
sequently befall him. When Athena ceases to watch over him
he is left to the tender mercies of the unreasoning ele
ments, wandering through a world that makes no sense, popu
lated by sub- or non-human creatures, pursued by the wrath
of the Lord of the Sea— the God of the Unconscious, symbol
izing pre-social man, the primitive, pre-cognitive being
who existed at the instinctual level of the beast until an
66
order of things which made socialization and therefore
civilization possible. The Sea also represents the womb,
where the unconscious fetus grows until in the ninth month
(or in Odysseus' case, the ninth year) it is ready to be
born into a human world.
Odysseus' relationship with Athena is crucial as it
represents man's involvement with himself at the intellec
tual level. Odysseus had fallen into the habit of taking
the goddess for granted; as we accustom ourselves to the
inhibitions of the socializing process. When Odysseus
openly and purposely disobeys the law Athena, representa
tive of The Law, punishes him. His pride must be humbled
before he can be "re-born" and take his place in society
again. He must bend his will before the will of the whole
and accept an "order" of things which places strong empha
sis on the powers of the Olympian deities and the rules
they represent, and the manner in which these deities must
be propitiated in order to obtain the beneficent utiliza
tion of those powers on their society's behalf. As the
suitors are punished, once Odysseus has regained Athena's
good will, for it is they who have disobeyed the law by
throwing Laertes out of his own home, pestering Penelope in
a most undignified and unreasonable manner, and consuming
Odysseus' living.
And so Odysseus wanders, lonely and confused, in a
disordered world. The one curious moment is Odysseus'
67
visit by Hermes on the isle of Aeaea. There is no purpose
stated in The Odyssey for the intervention here of "The God
with the Golden Wand." He appears, presents Odysseus with
an herb which will protect him from Circe's incantations,
advises him not to scorn the bed of the goddess, and de
parts. Who sent the Messenger God, if Odysseus is in dis
favor with the Olympians?
One theory is that Athena, while divine, is also
female— divine, omniscient, and female. Circe is also a
goddess, but an earthbound one, confined to the isle of
Aeaea, amusing herself at the expense of such mortals as
enter her sphere of influence. Athena may be teaching Ody-
seus a lesson, but she knows that it is entirely possible
for Circe to keep him eternally spellbound.
Athena wants to punish Odysseus, and make an example
of him, but she does not want him to perish in the process.
She must save him from enslavement— but she cannot person
ally come to his assistance, as this might be taken as a
sign of forgiveness, and Odysseus has not yet suffered the
spiritual crisis which will make him humble and forgiveness
possible. Therefore she sends Hermes with the necessary
information to save Odysseus from enchantment, but no in
formation as to the true source of that information; and,
knowing that Circe is a sister-goddess who is not to be
totally offended, she makes it possible for Odysseus to re
sist her enchantments but not her desirability by having
68
Hermes also forewarn Girce that she is to expect a Hero to
arrive who is not subject to her spells. When Odysseus de
feats the sorceress' attempts to bewitch him, she recog
nizes him as the man whose arrival the gods had foretold.
Therefore, it is not as goddess and mortal that their rela
tionship develops, but as man and woman; and this relation
ship has fascinating aspects.
Once she realizes that her supernatural powers have
no effect upon Odysseus, Circe behaves much in the same way
that any beautiful woman, sure of her sexual skills, would
do; she attempts to seduce him. If she cannot enchant him
one way, she will another. Odysseus is strong and virile
and has been without the comforts that only a woman can
provide for no little time. Circe is ageless and alluring;
a mature woman with the intelligence to know how to handle
a man of Odysseus' temperament; if she can get him into bed,
she knows she can disarm his senses. But Odysseus has been
warned; he will not approach the soft couch of the goddess
until she has sworn that she will do him no harm when he is
naked and unarmed. When they meet, it is as woman and man,
and they couple and clasp at last, on equal terms.
Circe's enticements, even without the use of magic,
are enough to keep Odysseus dallying at her side for a year.
In the film that was made of The Odyssey, starring Kirk
Douglas, Circe and Penelope were portrayed by the same
actress (Silvana Mangano). It is both interesting and
69
valid that these two women be represented as opposite sides
of the same coin; the dark and the light of the female
principle. Circe represents all that is sensual— the pow
erful, provocative lusts of the flesh which have ever held
the power to cloud men's minds with their heady incense.
Her fascination as a woman for a man is intense; and Odys
seus, after all, is a man of flesh and blood. Once she has
restored the rest of his company to him in human form, he
is more than willing to stay by her side as she bids,
"... till your spirit shall return to you again, as it
35
was when first you left your own country ..."
Odysseus has been drenched by storms, tossed by fu
rious winds, seen his best men eaten alive by Polyphemus
and lost eleven of his twelve ships to the Laestrygonians.
He is bone weary, in need of rest and nourishment, and not
in the least adverse to sharing the bed of the daughter of
the sun; moreover, he has been divinely commanded to do so.
The opportunity for time to rest, repair his ship, lay in
stores and heal his wounds must have appealed to the prac
tical side of his nature; and his men, once past their
first fear of the goddess, are content to break their jour
ney also. After ten years' battle, Odysseus has faced and
overcome a series of crises which would have completely un
done a lesser man; he is exhausted and confused. The chance
for a pleasant rest at the side of a goddess must have
35
Butcher and Lang, p. 158.
70
seemed heaven-sent.
The dialogue between Circe and Odysseus— once she
has discovered his identity— is genuinely warm and under
standing, the words of a man and a woman who find one an
other attractive and desirable: "Myself, I know of all the
pains ye endured upon the teeming deep; and the great
despite done you by unkindly men upon the land. Nay, come,
eat ye meat and drink wine, till your spirit shall return
3 6
to you again ..." It is the compassionate woman in
Circe who understands what she sees before her and knows
instinctively what to do about it— as any woman confronted
with a voyager just come from the sea, sticky with brine,
dusty and scratched and bruised, and probably not having
had a decent meal in weeks, would do: wash him, dress his
wounds, rub his feet, feed him, and take him to bed. It is
an intuitive female reaction; it is exactly what Circe does;
and she makes him so comfortable that it is no wonder that
he desires to remain at her side.
The reason for lust is procreation; the purpose of
passion is fecundity. In her guise as Mother Earth— heal
ing, nourishing, sustaining— Circe represents a most potent
earth-bound power. Only Penelope rises above her among the
women of the story. The urge to give life is the most pow
erful of human nature and Gaea Tellus, the Earth Goddess or
Earth Mother, is the earliest known supernatural being.
*5 /■
Butcher and Lang, p. 15 9.
71
Warm and fertile, loving and giving, mother and fosterer,
the earth needs two things to sustain life— light and water.
Circe is the daughter of Helios, the Sun, and Perse, a sea
nymph, daughter of Oceanus, source of the oceans and rivers
of the earth. Thus she combines both qualities in female
form. It might be considered that Odysseus' encounter with
Circe is necessary to the rest of his voyage; a chance to
replenish his energies at the source of energy. It is a
vital meeting of the male and female polarities— man the
destroyer and woman the restorer, who combine forces to
create life.
Athena represents man's higher intellectual capaci
ties; Circe, his gut reaction, raw instinct and refined
emotion. Odysseus slakes his passion at Circe's side; he
is also physically replenished so that when, at the end of
a year, his company suggest that they take up their journey
again, he is ready and willing to do so. He reminds her
gently of her promise, going up to her fair bed, bending to
her side, clasping her about the knees. The goddess does
not plead with him to stay. She recognizes that the time
for parting has come. A woman wise and proud, she knows a
hero has no use for weakness; and rather than weeping, she
gives him excellent advice as the the manner in which to
continue his journey, suggesting that he go first to Hades
to seek the counsel of the great seer Tiresias, "for even in
37
Butcher and Lang, p. 159.
’ 72
37
death his wits abide steadfast." She warns him of the
temptations of The Sirens, gives him a choice of steering
his course between The Wandering Rocks or Scylla and Cha-
rybdis; and warns him not to injure the Kine of Helios on
the isle of Thrinacia, prophesying, "if thou hurtest them I
foreshow ruin for thy ship and for thy men, and even though
thou shouldst thyself escape, late shall thou return in
38
evil plight, with the loss of all thy men." Then the
goddess bids the hero farewell, and Odysseus once again
ventures forth.
The encounter between Odysseus and Circe has been
variously described. Joyce took one incident— the trans
formation of men into swine— as the basis for the phantas-
magorical brothel episode in Ulysses. But Circe is not a
whore; there is nothing coarse or gross about her. She and
Odysseus come to terms as man and woman. Circe is the ideal
mistress, knowing that the hero is hers but for a while,
and doing her best to provide essentials for his needs,
diversions for his amusement, and herself for his pleasure.
And he remembers her kindly, for in his recounting of the
tale he says no word against her but speaks of her tenderly
and with respect, saying only that she is fair and beauti
ful. Few women could ask for more than the warmth and ad
miration Odysseus bestows upon the memory of his stay on
Aeaea.
37 38
Butcher and Lang, p. 159. ibid.
73
Of rather a different nature is Odysseus' lengthy
sojourn on the isle of Ogygia. Where Circe is a woman
grown, sure of her powers and wise enough to know when an
affair has reached its end, Calypso is girlish, lovely,
sexy, and not particularly bright. Finding the storm-
wracked hero tossed up upon the shores of her floating is
land, her reaction is immediate; no paradise is complete
without a male population. Calypso, like most stupid women,
is capable of a tenacious and unreasoning stubborness.
Odysseus quickly tires of her body, which, it would seem,
is the only thing she knows how to use to best advantage.
She does not have the wiles of a Circe, who knows how to
divert a man between bed time and time for bed again. Circe
kept Odysseus interested for a year; Calypso keeps him by
force for seven. When he wearies of her physical gymnas
tics, she uses her magical powers to shroud the island in
an enchanted cloud, effectively holding him there by keep
ing his presence concealed from prying eyes.
It is probably in Odysseus' best interests that he
spends the last of his supernatural adventures with a woman
who bores him. At first he is glad enough to submit to her
ministrations, recouping his strength at the side of a
supple immortelle. But, when he is well and anxious to
continue his journey, she petulantly refuses to let him go,
offering him eternal youth if he will stay forever by her
side; and when he declines, casts the spell which will hold
74
him for the next seven years.
To a mortal man, for whom aging is a frightening
prospect, such an offer must have given pause. The pros
pect of eternal youth, spent in nothing more strenuous than
romps in the hay with a beguiling numph, surely gave Odys
seus something to think about— it would not be human to
reject such an eternity out of hand. And it is just this
prospect which begins Odysseus' true voyage home— his voy
age of self-discovery.
Up to this time, Odysseus has been fairly self-
reliant. With the exception of the appearance of Hermes
upon Aeaea, he has been without divine assistance as, pur
sued by Poseidon, he made his way across the wine-dark sea.
He has had no one but himself to fall back upon; and he has
run into practically nothing but trouble. His adventures
have been of two sorts; encounters with supernatural beings,
demi-gods or monsters, and the perils brought upon him by
the wrath of the Lord of the Sea. Whenever Poseidon turns
his eye upon Odysseus, the hero suffers proportionately. He
is constantly immersed in the ocean, symbol of the subcon
scious; at the mercy of the salt sea which no man can regu
late, which knows no order except its own ebb and flow. He
is an object for the use of the irrational forces on the
other side of nature; reason abandoned, he wallows in chaos.
The creatures he encounters he meets only in confrontation;
that is, the situation in which he finds himself is immedi
75
ately critical, from the Lotophagi to the Kine of Helios.
Each confrontation is an attack on his individuality, an
urge to merge or rather submerge into the warm undulating
darkness of pre-conscious existence, where reason does not
exist; Odysseus' battle is a struggle to maintain his per
sonal integrity in the face of unprecedented persuasions to
relinquish it.
The only encounters which display and reflect char
acter are with the goddess Athena, Circe, and Calypso, and
with the mortal Nausicaa and Penelope. The Sirens, and
Scylla and Charybdis, although nominally female, are grouped
with the monsters, in that their alleged femininity is rep
resented at its most base; for the latter, the life-giving
womb becomes a cavernous maw searching eyelessly for bloody
sacrifice; for the former, the carnal lusts given human
form are no less instinctual, their wild song a cry luring
the most upright of men to hurl himself to crashing death
upon an altar of bleached bone and jagged rock.
The demi-gods and monsters are only touched on by
Odysseus in his recounting of the tale: I met a monster, he
attacked me, I escaped at great peril.
These confrontations are almost impersonal; with the
exception of the hubris with which Odysseus names himself
to Polyphemus, thereby earning the wrath of Poseidon, we
learn nothing about the man in the course of these adven
tures. We discover Odysseus as a human being in his rela-
76
tionships with women; it is only within the man-woman
framework that his personality and character emerge.
Calypso offers him not just immortality but the
priceless gift of eternal youth. Odysseus would have been
foolish not to at least consider the prospect; and it was
this act of consideration, the comparison of eternal youth
or growing old at Penelope's side, that must have caused
him to consider the causes that brought him to this pass,
to reject this gift, to yearn for home, to spend his days
weeping for what he surely must have thought lost.
It is a dreadful thing to be alone; worse, to believe
that one has been abandoned to one's fate. Odysseus be
lieves himself at the mercy of Calypso; a tender mercy to
be sure, but not the proper fate for a king and a hero. If
Circe represents Gaea Tellus, Calypso represents mindless
delight, casual indulgence of the senses, fleeting as this
tledown or a Chinese dinner. She offers an eternity of
satisfaction without sacrifice. Ogygia is the Never-Never
Land for which all men yearn, at one time or another: a
place where time has stopped and all that we may desire is
immediately at our fingertips. Calypso is a frivol, easily
taken and easily discarded; there is a difference between
satisfaction and satiety, and over-indulgence quickly leads
from boredom to active distaste. ("What is the matter with
Mary Jane? / She's perfectly well and she hasn't a pain /
And it's lovely rice pudding for dinner again 1 / What ij3
77
39
the matter with Mary Jane?")
Given the choice between eternity in a scented bower
and mortality, aging, cares, and death, Odysseus chooses
the latter.
And it is this decision which leads to his release.
Odysseus is mortal and fallible; of his own volition he
chooses mortality and fallibility. No divinity assists him
here. It is not until after the decision is made that
Athena comes to his aid. It is his decision alone, and it
is in the process of making the decision that he discovers
that he is alone. He recognizes what this decision means
and accepts his mortal fate. Odysseus no longer hurls de
fiance at the gods. He desires neither eternal youth nor
privileged status; he asks for nothing more than to be al
lowed to go home and to sleep at the side of his wife.
Odysseus spends his days on Ogygia pacing the beach, heart
sick, weeping, in an agony of loneliness. The pleasures
that Calypso offers cannot compensate for the loss of his
birthright— his manhood, his place as a man among men.
Here it is that he faces himself, his hubris, and
his gods. He is bereft of divine protection and denied the
comfort of human companionship. His fellows are dead, his
ships are smashed, he alone has survived the storm which
took the lives of the last of his shipmates. In despera-
39
A. A. Milne, from the poem "Rice Pudding," m When
We Were Very Young (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939), p. 51.
78
tion, he falls on his knees in the wet shore sands, flings
his arms skyward and, sobbing, cries out for forgiveness
and aid. Only the divinities dwelling upon Olympus can
discover his suffering and see his humiliation. He does
not demand assistance from the immortal gods; he is no
longer the defiant sacker of cities but a poor man help
lessly petitioning release from bondage. He has brought
this fate upon himself; he admits it, and asks to be re
leased from it. His self-abasement purges him of any last
shred of pride. Daily he kneels in supplication and daily
his prayer goes unanswered until, in an abyss of agony, his
cry becomes a De Profundis:
Out of the Depths I cry to You, 0 Lord; Lord, hear my
prayer, Out of the Depths I cry to You, O Lord, hear
my voice: have mercy on me 0 God in your goodness,
the greatness of your compassion blot out my sinfulness
. . . for I acknowledge my sinfulness and my guilt is
always before me . . . turn away your face from my sins
and blot out my iniquities . . . free me from the guilt
of blood . . . Out of the Depths I cry to you, 0 Lord;
Lord, hear my prayer.40
And at last, his catharsis complete, Athena turns
her face to him, and hears his cry; and petitions almighty
Zeus for his release.
At the order of Zeus, Hermes speeds to Ogygia with
the command for Calypso to set her mortal lover free; he
has admitted his hubris and welcomes mortality as the best
of fates. Calypso, unwillingly, obeys; and Odysseus once
40
From the text of the Roman Catholic Mass for the
Dead.
79
again sets forth, steering as forever sailors have set
their course, by the North Star.
Poseidon, unaware that Odysseus has been pardoned by
Zeus, spies his raft and sends another great storm, "gath
ering the clouds and troubling the deep, grasping the tri
dent in his hands; and he roused all manner of winds and
shrouded in clouds the land and the sea; and down sped
41
night from heaven."
Odysseus is tempest-tossed until Athena discovers
Poseidon's mischief and binds up the winds again; and he
drifts within sight of land. Joyously he swims for shore
and, at the mouth of a river, where the river joins the sea,
he petitions the god of the river:
Hear me 0 king, Whosoever Thou art; unto thee am I
come as to one to whom prayer is made; while I flee
the rebukes of Poseidon from the deep. Yea, reverend
even to the deathless gods is that man who comes as a
wanderer . . . nay, pity me, for I avow myself thy
suppliant . . .^2
Forthwith the waves ebb, and the stream is made smooth and
calm. Odysseus wades ashore, falls upon the reeds and
kisses the earth beneath him; then creeps beneath a. low
spreading olive tree, exhausted, as Athena mercifully sheds
"sleep upon his eyes, that it might soon release him from
43
his weary travail."
This is the island kingdom of Phaecia, and it is
here that Odysseus encounters the first mortal damsel of
41
Butcher and Lang, p. 79.
42jbid., p. 84. 5^Ibid., p. 85.
8Q
his journey; the Princess Nausicaa, daughter of King Al-
cinous and Queen Arete. Nausicaa and her handmaidens, hav
ing washed the household linen and spread it in the sun to
dry, are playing at ball; their pealing laughter awakens
Odysseus and, as the ball rolls down to where he lies, he
stumbles from his improvised bed, carefully holding an
olive branch in front of him to cover his nakedness from
the young girl's eyes.
What does the young princess see? A man, sweaty and
grimy, yet undoubtedly of noble bearing; of medium height,
broad shouldered and muscular; not handsome, but with
rugged good looks, not in his first youth but none the less
attractive for that. All in all, Nausicaa is not displeased
by the naked stranger she discovers on the beach; and, to
the royal manner born, she graciously offers him the hospi
tality of her home.
It is interesting to contrast Calypso and Nausicaa.
They are of an age; but the charms of the nymph goddess are
equalled if not surpassed by the radiant health of the mor
tal princess. Calypso is neither bright nor clever. Her
only drawing card is her physical beauty, of which she is
well aware. Nausicaa on the other hand is the well-bred
daughter of royalty; pampered and indulged, nevertheless
she has learned the housewifely arts at her mother's side,
and knows the niceties of gentle conversation. She has had
such schooling as befits her station as princess and future
81
queen. The mortal girl has no wiles, yet her very naivete
is more charming to Odysseus than all the practiced arts of
Calypso. Nausicaa is vibrantly alive, clear eyed, with
sunny hair, translucent skin, and a willowy body that is
athletic without being mannish. Odysseus, impervious to
the nymph's intricate skills, cannot help falling a bit
under the spell cast by the rosy innocence of the princess.
He is more than twice her age, toughened by his perils to
prime physical condition; sophisticated, worldly, the bed
partner of goddesses and no stranger to desire. His emo
tions are stirred by the lissome princess; and she, for her
part, is so impressed by the handsome stranger that she
bubbles over in praise of his charms: ". . . he is like
the gods that keep the wide heaven I Would that such an one
might be called my husband, dwelling here, and that it
44
might please him here to abide I"
The relationship between Odysseus and Nausicaa is
touching and bittersweet; the older, world weary man and
the vibrantly innocent girl. A lesser man than Odysseus
might have played upon her innocence. But the hero is un-
flaggingly courteous, never patronizing and, most impor
tantly, never taking advantage of Nausicaa's flirtatious
mood. Odysseus is at the height of his powers; he easily
proves this in the "games" at the Phaecian court. And he
is not oblivious to the fact that Nausicaa is attracted to
44
Butcher and Lang, p. 93.
82
him. He awakens her desires; she has never known passion,
yet possesses that extra sense which women have that tells
them when a man is attracted to them— a feeling like that
of a cool and unexpected breeze rushing over your body on a
warm still day, leaving little prickles on your skin.
Odysseus manages to convey his admiration for Nau
sicaa without overstepping the bounds of propriety. After
the sensuality of Circe and the skills of Calypso, this
touch-me-not affair with Nausicaa is a gentle welcome to
the mortal world, a soothing postlude to the passions of
the past; a quiet interval in which to rest his emotions
before the storms to come. Odysseus has a wife at home to
whom he wishes to return at the earliest possible moment;
but, just for this brief period of time, it is pleasant to
walk by the side of a laughing girl whose sun-warmed skin
needs no artificial scent to enhance it; whose slim hand
perhaps touches, fleetingly, his sea roughened, hard muscled
arm. It is a poignant interval which gives Odysseus time
for the spiritual replenishment he so desperately needs.
Nausicaa represents youth and innocence; to Odysseus,
a time of innocence long past, a youth lost laying seige to
Troy. The princess is all that is beautiful and desirable,
but Odysseus does not violate her trust. After he is gone,
her memories of him will not be marred by shame. In this,
the relationship reveals another facet of his character;
Odysseus is one of the first gentlemen in history.
83
Before the assembled court of Phaecia, Odysseus re
veals his true identity, and tells the tale of his long
journey, the saga of his many adventures, the creatures he
has encountered, the loss of his companions, and his desire
to return. Nausicaa, even armed with the knowledge that he
is married, does not want him to leave; but her breeding
prevents her from bidding him anything but a gracious fare
well. The Phaecians provide him with a ship and crew to
take him to Ithaca; there are no further adventures; he is
safely landed.
And here on the shores of Ithaca, Odysseus is vis
ited by Athena for the first time since he sailed from Troy.
She advises him of the trials of his wife, and of the suit
ors for her hand who have invaded his palace, beseeching
the Lady Penelope to select one of them as his successor.
Athena bids Odysseus to be patient for just a bit longer;
to abide with the swineherd Eumaeus while she makes ready
for his triumphant return. With her aid, he returns to the
palace disguised as an aged beggar, awaiting the proper
moment to reveal himself and take back his own.
Odysseus' love of home is his dominant desire
throughout The Odyssey. Homer emphasizes this again and
again. A romanticist would equate love of home with love
of Penelope; Penelope stands at .the center of Odysseus'
attentions not only as wife and mother but as the physical
representation of all that is Ithaca— hearth, home, normalcy;
84
all the things he never wanted to leave in the first place.
Odysseus' reunion with Penelope is at once the pur
pose and the culmination of his journey. Homer stresses
the fact that the halts in his hero's wanderings are ex
actly that, no more. The desire to return to the normalcy
of Ithaca is the driving urge that gets him going again and
again when an ordinary man's courage would have failed him.
Odysseus loves his wife and no matter how much time he has
spent in dalliance, it is to his wife and his home that he
desires to return. He tries to explain this to Calypso,
and again at the Phaecian court; for him, there is no para
dise to compare with one's own hearth.
Penelope, in her brief appearance in The Odyssey, is
far and away the most important "other" character, second
only to Odysseus in significance and stature. We meet her
in Ithaca, beleaguered by over 100 suitors who have moved
in on her and are slowly devouring her stores and destroying
Telemachus' inheritance: her ruse with the woven shroud has
been discovered and the princes and kinglets who have set
tled into Odysseus’ palace like so many rats into a barn
are demanding that she select a bridegroom from their number
to rule at her side.
What makes— or keeps— Penelope chaste and faithful
through twenty long and doubt-filled years? For the first
ten years, of course, it was easier, knowing at least that
her husband was engaged in the seige of Troy. But the
85
second decade has been a long and frequently agonizing wait
for news of some kind, any kind; she could almost wish for
certain knowledge of his death than continue in this agony
of suspense. She is Queen of Ithaca and, in Odysseus' ab
sence, head of the house; she has had to direct the ser
vants as well as the farm workers, and cope with the diffi
cult adolescense of her son. Seven years after the fall of
Troy, the suitors begin to arrive. Surely after seventeen
years of loneliness, a woman would have welcomed the oppor
tunity of having a man around the house again, if not sim
ply to take over the masculine tasks of leadership, then to
hold her in his arms and dull the aching of her heart?
This is probably what an ordinary woman would have
done, if not immediately, then certainly when the wooers
became obstreperous and there was no news of Odysseus'
whereabouts; to choose the strongest among them to throw
the others out would have been the line of least resistance.
But Penelope is no ordinary woman. She is the wife of
Odysseus and mother of his son; replacing her husband as
King of Ithaca would probably also mean the destruction of
her son's patrimony and also place Telemachus in direct
personal danger.
She has also undoubtedly heard of the events at
Mycaena upon Agamemnon's return. There will be no man to
plot the murder of Odysseus, should he return. Penelope is
that rarity, a woman who was happy with her man, and desires
86
no other. Of the principal Achaean wives, she alone is
chaste. Unhappiness breeds restlessness and restlessness
breeds mischief? look at Helen and Clytaemnestra. Odysseus
was to Penelope husband and lover, partner and friend.
They shared unbridled passion and also an easy companion
ship. Penelope had the intelligence wily Odysseus "of many
devices" would require in a woman; she was his equal, not
his chattel. She will honor his memory and do tribute to
his reputation by remaining chaste, taking no replacement
to husband her. The joy she and Odysseus shared was so
complete that even after nineteen and some odd years of
waiting, she has no more to give another— almost twenty
years of waiting, not knowing, her heart pounding at the
sight of any ship for fear it brings news of his death,
hoping beyond hope for his return, hating Helen as much as
she can hate anyone and forbidding the word "IIlium" to be
44
spoken in her house. (This last is another very strong
indication of the strength of Penelope's position as head
of the household in Odysseus' absence.)
Penelope also represents the sum total of Woman qua
Woman, and as such is the perfect crystal in whose rainbow
prisms each of the major feminine characters of The Odyssey
is reflected. Calypso, beautiful but flighty, held him
captive by force; life on her island is voluptuous sloth,
and her mistake was to think that a man like Odysseus could
44
Butcher and Lang, p. 3,1.
87
ever be permanently happy among the violets and vines of
Ogygia. Actually, she didn't think at all; she never sized
up Odysseus as a man, only as a male. Thus the memory of
his wife's calm beauty enslaves the hero's mind more effec
tively than any of the nymph's enchantments. Capricious,
petulant Calypso, holding Odysseus captive through magic,
is the antithesis of constant Penelope, who needs neither
potions nor propinquity to hold her husband's love. Where
the nymph is superficial, Penelope is deep as a well; where
Calypso's overabundance cloys, Penelope's reticence is a
tribute to her good breeding. (Penelope, daughter of Ica-
rius, is at her first appearance in The Odyssey referred to
4 6
as "wise Penelope.") But she has enough female quiddity
to test her husband before hurling herself into his arms,
giving him an example of the manner in which she has re
ceived the suitors— at arm's length. Moreover, she does
not ask the question directly, although she must have been
dying to do so; she makes a casual comment to a servant and
then waits, lashes lowered, for his reaction— which, of
course, is all that could be desired. Calypso's wantonness
turns Odysseus from her; Penelope's chastity and reticence
make her all the more desirable and worthy of her husband's
constant longing.
As Homer saw it, Penelope was at the center of Odysseus'
affections partly because of her own personal qualities
but partly also because she stood for the whole texture
46
Butcher and Lang, p. 11.
88
of Odysseus' normal life in Ithaca, the life he had
been unwilling to leave when the call came to join the
expedition against Troy. It would be . . . guesswork
to mark a clear division between Odysseus' love for
Penelope and his love for his home and his kingdom.4^
Odysseus' attitude towards Nausicaa tells a great
deal about what his early relationship with the young Penel
ope must have been like. Penelope, at sixteen, was also
the daughter of royalty, not an earth-bound goddess to be
tumbled to the ground but a young woman of gentle breeding,
to be treated with deference and respect. The Princess of
Phaecia possibly reminded him of his wife as she was when
he first met her; virginal, yet flushed with hidden fires,
needing only to be stirred by a breeze to burst into full
blaze. The spontaneity, warmth and charm of Nausicaa mirror
the personality of the Penelope of twenty years ago; it is
easy to understand why there is no question in Odysseus'
mind regarding Penelope's faithfulness during his long ab
sence. Chaste, gently bred, enchantingly innocent, intelli
gent and intuitive, a quiet creature on the brink of woman
hood to be softly wooed and slowly taught the delights of
the nuptial couch. Odysseus' courtly attentions to Nausicaa
are in subtle contrast to the manner in which he has swiftly
brought to bed the goddesses of his narrative. He speaks
to her with a wish that must have come from the heart of a
man separated for so long from his own wife: "And may the
47
W. B. Stanford in Taylor, Essays on The Odyssey,
19.
89
gods grant thee all thy heart's desire: a husband and a
home, and a mind at one with his . . . for there is nothing
mightier and nobler than when man and wife are of one heart
and mind, in a house . . . [with] great joy, that their own
hearts know best."^
Penelope must have been glad indeed to have chosen
such a man for a husband; even knowing that he had been one
of many young men suing for the affections of Helen, daugh
ter of Tyndarus, it is entirely probable that Penelope
would not have thought of herself as a "second choice." It
was very "in" at the time to court Helen, the most beauti
ful woman in the Peloponnesus; but at a time when parents
had a good deal to say about whom their children married,
the fact that her sister Clytaemnestra was already wed to
Agamemnon, the most powerful of the Achaean kings, might
have made Helen's marriage to Agamemnon's brother a politi
cally wise choice, and therefore almost a foregone conclu
sion. Penelope's memories of her husband are gentle ones;
one can assume that his courtship was ardent to the point
of passion and at the same time restrained.
The development of such a relationship into a part
nership would indeed have inspired a faithfulness such as
Penelope's. In Nausicaa we see the young Penelope; and can
only admire the restraint the older hero shows in his atten
tion to the romantic minded princess who has the Homeric
48
Butcher and Lang, p. 92.
90
equivalent of a crush on him.
The female principle which we first encounter in
Circe is brought to a lofty summit in Penelope. Circe is
the perfect mistress— Penelope the perfect wife, combining
the joy of sexual union and the ultimate goal of that union
— fruition. If Circe in her capacities of lover and healer
represents the primal earth goddess, Penelope is the human
personification thereof, embodying the qualities of wife
and mother. Circe is the dark, orgasmic bedroot of ecstasy;
Penelope combines the peak of pleasure with its quiet after-
math, gently cradling her spent husband's head against her
breast, soothing, nurturing, sustaining as within her seed
meets seed and warmly, darkly life begins. Circe is barren;
Penelope gives life. Circe is pleasure for its own sake,
without reason and therefore sterile. Penelope combines
the pleasure of sexual union with its raison d'etre; fecun
dity. Circe's caves are grottos of eroticism; the palace
at Ithaca is home and womb, and Penelope is the wellspring
of existence and the flowing fountain that sustains life.
Odysseus, literally, is not one without her and therefore
cannot truly "live" without her; his desire to return home
is the impetus of his Odyssey. And Penelope ijs Ithaca.
Throughout The Odyssey, Homer insists that Odysseus'
love of home is his dominant motivation, and that his love
for Penelope is the root of that desire. In The Illiad, in
a speech calculated to re-unite the quarrelling Achaeans,
91
who are ready to depart for home, Odysseus says that no
wonder there is dissatisfaction among them, " . . . for any
man who stays away even one month from his wife is grieved
49
. . . and we have been away for nine years." Penelope
represents home, normalcy, order, and it is clear that to
Homer these virtues represent "The Good." In this sense,
The Odyssey is a morality play as well as an adventure.
*
Never does Homer place any value higher than love of home:
"So surely is there naught sweeter than a man's own country,
and his parents, even though he dwell far off in a rich
home, in a strange land, away from them that begat him."^9
Penelope is the axis around which Odysseus' world
revolves. It is to Penelope and Ithaca that he longs to
return, and Homer's narrative moves inwards and homewards,
out of the exotic towards normalcy. Circe is an exotic,
erotic temptress; Penelope is ordinary (in the nicest sense
of the word), with ordinary passions, ordinary beauty, and
ordinary problems. And it is this ordinary, orderly world
to which Odysseus longs to return.
In this way "Wise Penelope" also represents the mor
tal embodiment of the goddess Athena in her role as estab-
lisher and keeper of moral order. Penelope is moral and
chaste. It is no accident that Odysseus' return to the
mortal world coincides with Penelope's greatest need of him,
49E. V. Rieu, pp. 47-48.
50
Butcher and Lang, p. 127.
92
when the order of his household is most sorely threatened.
His desire for reconciliation cannot be achieved until he
has set his house in order, and the goddess of wisdom and
moral order assists him. The suitors debauching in his
halls represent lechery, avarice, greed, sloth, and plain
old fashioned immorality. They are plotting Telemachus'
murder; not one of them is kind, not one of them is Penel
ope's friend. To the man, they deserve death. They col
lectively represent the brute level from which Odysseus at
last has managed to emerge. This is the only justification
for their violent massacre. If they were reasonable beings,
Odysseus could very simply land, announce his homecoming,
resume rulership of his kingdom and request that the suit
ors kindly clear out. But Odysseus is one man alone; his
ships are wrecked, his comrades dead. One against 100 is
long odds, especially since the suitors by their very pres
ence have assumed the long-ago death of Odysseus and prob
ably, however irrationally, would look upon his return as
a usurpation of their prerogatives. Their destruction is
necessary for two reasons: one, they represent mortal dan
ger to Odysseus and are already plotting to murder his son;
two, they represent the bestial side of human nature and
must be purged so that order may be restored.
Athena assists Odysseus in this purge; it is she who
advises him of the situation and prepares him to deal with
it. It is as necessary to make a violent gesture of mastery
in Ithaca as it is necessary to clean out the usurpers who
have defiled his home. It is a purge; a catharsis of dis
order; once order— moral order— is reestablished, it will
be maintained.
W. B. Stanford speaks of the apparent inconsisten
cies between Odysseus' love for Penelope and his relation
ships with women during his wanderings. He says also:
This involves problems of fundamental importance for
the development of the whole tradition . . . it will
be well to consider them in the full Homeric perspec
tive . . . Odysseus' liaisons with Circe and Calypso
should . . . be viewed in the light of the customs of
the time. On the one hand the Heroic age was strictly
monogamous; and Homer generally portrays the relation
ships between husbands and wives as affectionate,
honorable, and equal . . . a wife had to be wooed and
won by generous gifts . . .5- L
He goes on to state that the women in The Odyssey are pre
sented as more perceptive and intelligent than the men.
Although concubinage was permitted, Homer implies that hap
pily married men did not follow this custom. It has been
noted that Odysseus and Menelaus took no concubines at Troy.
If Odysseus' affection for Penelope merged with his desire
to preserve the unity of his home, his faithfulness was
52
"doubly secure." How then to reconcile the Cxrce and
Calypso episodes with his fidelity to Penelope? Again,
W. B. Stanford:
The reason why Homer, Penelope, and the moralists of
the later tradition did not think ill of Odysseus for
51
W. B. Stanford, in Taylor, ed., Essays on The Odys
sey, p. 13.
^Ibid., p. 14 .
94
these infidelities was primarily because in both cases
Odysseus was not acting voluntarily. Both Circe and
Calypso were demi-goddesses endowed with power to com
pel their will . . . Penelope would well know in those
god-frequented times [that] to reject the advances of
divinities was dangerous indeed. She would hardly have
preferred him to be turned into a tree like Daphne
. . . just what else Penelope thought in her heart,
Homer does not suggest.5 3
If Homer does not, perhaps another woman can.
The last twenty years have not been easy for Penel
ope. It is hardly surprising that when Odysseus returns in
the twentieth year of her ordeal he finds her nerves frayed
and her heart almost frozen with despair. There are two
major confrontations between husband and wife. In the
first, Odysseus is disguised as a beggar through the help
of Athena, and Penelope allegedly does not recognize him.
But there may have been a hint, a familiar movement, a turn
of phrase, something about the eyes that reminded her of
someone she once knew; it is possible that if she does not
recognize him outright, there is the beginning of a suspi
cion . . .
Penelope, "Wise Penelope," has waited twenty years
for her husband to come home. This implies not only deep
love for her husband, but implicit faith that he will re
turn. The softer, easier path of taking a lover or part-
time husband has not entered her mind, or, if it has, it
has been weighed and considered and found wanting. The
53
W. B. Stanford, in Taylor, ed., Essays on The
Odyssey, p. 20.
95
decision to wait for Odysseus having been made, Penelope
has never swayed from it, to the extent of thinking up the
ruse of weaving a shroud for Laertes, announcing that when
it is done she will choose a husband, then undoing her
handwork each evening, turning the weaving into a perpetual
effort. This keeps the suitors, if not happy, at least
with some sort of "statement of intent" from Penelope; and
they are thus content, lazy slobs, to while away the day in
games and sport and feasting, and dallying with Penelope's
female house servants.
Telemachus, nearing twenty, attempts to assert him
self and get the suitors out of his father's house; he is a
boy, and they taunt him with laughter. Penelope must not
only keep the suitors in hand, she must also deal with the
emotions of a boy on the brink of manhood who has no memory
of his father, and knows Odysseus only through what Penelope
has told him. When Penelope's ruse is discovered, and the
suitors clamor for her to make a choice, Telemachus goes in
search of news of his father; Penelope stays at home to
protect what she can.
When the beggar appears at the palace door, it is
Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, who commands that he be given
food and drink and a place to rest. The suitors, although
treating the beggar rudely and with disrespect, still have
enough respect for Penelope to comply with her wishes.
Penelope believes that Odysseus will return. It has
96
always been the custom of the hou^e to give shelter to
wanderers; this is pleasing to Zeus, special protector of
Wanderers. She reminds the suitors of this. Odysseus
watches from a corner as the suitors fat and sleek, the
epitome of gluttony and sloth, wax increasingly drunk.
Perhaps Penelope suspects that Zeus has sent this wanderer
to her at this time for a specific purpose. There is a
familiarity about this beggar she cannot place . . . some
thing in the way he moves that belies the gray hair and the
aged face . . . something in the way he watches and waits
• • •
If Penelope does not immediately recognize the beg
gar as Odysseus, she does recognize that he has been sent
to her by the gods at a moment in which she stands in great
peril and great need. Perhaps she has sacrificed and
prayed to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and Odysseus' patroness,
to help her. Athena has revealed nothing to Penelope, and
wisely so. Her emotions at such a time might easily have
given way and betrayed Odysseus to the suitors before the
time. But "Wise Penelope," with her woman's intuition,
knows that something is up; she watches and waits. And
when in that triumphant moment that the "beggar" throws off
his cloak, strings the bow of the mighty Odysseus, sends
the arrows flying first at the target and then at the suit
ors, Penelope is not present; she waits quietly in her room,
above. "Wise Penelope" does not rush into her husband's
97
arms. After all, Zeus visited Alcmene in the form of her
husband Amphytrion; this could be a ruse of the almighty
gods. It also gives Homer the chance to build a beautiful,
wonderfully romantic climax for the ending of his story.
The old nurse Eurycleia is bidden to announce to
Penelope that Odysseus has returned and triumphed. Penel
ope doubts the old woman's words and upbraids her for hav
ing lost her wits. But Eurycleia prevails upon her to come
to the hall and see for herself. Odysseus is filthy and
blood-stained; Penelope asks that they be left alone to
gether, for "if in truth this be Odysseus, and he has in
deed come home, verily we shall be ware of each other more
surely, for we have tokens that we twain know, secret from
all others . . .
Odysseus agrees, asking only that he first be allowed
to bathe and change his clothing. When again he confronts
Penelope, Athena has shed grace upon him, so that "forth
55
from the bath he came, in form like to the Immortals."
He accuses Penelope of being hard-hearted; she re
torts that she knows very well what sort of a man Odysseus
was when he left Ithaca so very long ago. She summons the
nurse to "spread for him the good bedstead outside the es-
56
tablished bridal chamber that he built himself ..." It
is a trap, and in the trap is Penelope's victory. Odysseus
54
Butcher and Lang, p. 357.
55Ibid., p. 359. 56Ibid.
98
in righteous indignation gets his dander up and demands to
know who has dared to move the bed he built with his own
hands out of the trunk of an olive tree; the man would have
had to saw through the trunk of the tree to move the bed
from its rightful place. Penelope's victory is in Odys
seus' indignation; "Odysseus of many devices" has been
tricked by his own wife. No one has moved the bed; but no
one other than the man who made it would be so upset at the
suggestion that in his absence it had been moved. Homer
shows us that Penelope is indeed worthy of Odysseus; the
two are well matched in quick perception, intelligence,
caution, endurance, subtlety, affection and deep emotion.
And her great moral triumph accomplished, instead of making
Odysseus admit that she has been cleverer than he— this
most feminine of women simply yields. "Her final submis
sion to Odysseus is not a defeat. It is a triumph of self-
• • „57
giving."
At this point, Penelope, who has endured so much,
knows that it is truly her husband who has returned to her;
the structure of the bed is a secret they share only with
the old nurse. At the height of his indignation, she fi
nally lets her tears fall; and mighty Odysseus weeps also,
holding tightly in his arms the woman who cannot seem to
let him go. Wise Athena holds back the dawn, so that
57
W. B. Stanford, in Taylor, ed., Essays on The
Odyssey, p. 28.
99
___________
husband and wife may "go gladly to the rites of their bed
5 8
as of old . . . and take their fill of sweet love."
There is one ordeal left for them, Odysseus tells
his wife, foretold by the seer Tiresias; a matter of sacri
fice to Poseidon in expiation for the injury done his son.
Penelope wisely answers that if this is necessary to insure
their future happiness, she will gladly endure his absence
for one more, mercifully brief, period of time. Their
youth is gone; "if indeed the gods will bring about for
59
thee a happier old age at last, then there is hope ..."
And knowing there are trials left to face, but re
joicing in the knowledge that they will face them together,
Penelope leads Odysseus to their bridal chamber.
The Women of Ulysses
One of the major correlations between The Odyssey
and Ulysses is the manner in which the authors treat the
women in their heroes' lives and the revelatory nature of
the heroes' relationships with them. Odysseus meets none
of the suspicion and distrust of his male associates among
the women who know him well. Odysseus' civilized gentle
ness, his intuitive intelligence and his quiet self posses
sion are qualities which any sensible woman cannot help but
value. Also his versatility, which clashes with the more
5 8
Butcher and Lang, p. 362.
100
rigid standards of the typical hero— the power of changing
his manner to suit the occasion— broadens his appeal to
include women of every sort.
The same applies to Leopold Bloom. The latter's
relationships with the men of Dublin are after the way of
being confrontations with enemy or alien beings. Bloom's
male peer group considers him "different" in a world in
which "different" is a derogatory term. The men Bloom con
fronts in the course of his day are almost without excep
tion ill-mannered, boorish, functionally illiterate and
lacking the refinement of sensibility which is characteris
tic of good breeding. The niceties of "polite" behavior
are beyond them; anyone behaving with any sort of gentility
is considered to be "putting on airs" (vide Simon Dedalus'
sneers at his son and convent-educated daughters). Conse
quently, Bloom's education and refinement of manner make
him an object not only of suspicion but derision.
It is axiomatic that the low man on the totem pole
needs someone to look down on. To the men of his sphere,
Bloom is that "someone." Their ignorance makes them suspi
cious of his education; their coarseness, of his refinement
(note the sideways sneer of the nameless debt collector):
. . . and then he starts with his jawbreakers about
phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the
other phenomenon . . . I declare to my antimacassar
if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if
you said to Bloom: "Look at, Bloom. Do you see that
straw? That's a straw." Declare to my aunt he'd talk
101
about it for an hour or so he would and talk s t e a d y .60
Bloom's gentle nature makes him easy prey to look
down upon, easy to feel smugly superior. Bloom is patron
ized; at best tolerated; at worst, verbally and physically
abused. Bloom to them is a thing, an object; as he makes
his way through the streets of Dublin he is either insulted
or ignored. In this way, Bloom's condition corresponds
with that of Odysseus in The Odyssey: he is a stranger in
a world which is not of his own making, encountering mon
sters of ignorance (irrationality); crudeness (brutishness);
and bigotry (suspicion) which are almost overwhelmingly
more powerful than he. Bloom earns their sneers on several
accounts; although an Irishman born and bred, he is of
Jewish descent; he is abstemious in a country where drink
ing is a way of life; he is educated, yet through strait
ened circumstances reduced to the society of a group which
by and by large considers all but the most basic of formal
educations a waste of time; and he is genteel among men who
appreciate French post card humor.
Leopold Bloom, intelligent, sensitive, refined,
above all, a gentle person, is an easy butt for those of
coarser nature. The monsters of Poldy Bloom's Dublin are
every bit as menacing as those of The Odyssey; in bringing
the epic within reach, James Joyce confronted his hero with
monsters ordinary people can understand: hate, bigotry,
^Joyce, p. 311.
102
and ignorance. It is the inhumanity of these monsters
which Joyce contrasts so vividly with the goodness of his
hero's soul.
As in The Odyssey, it is in Bloom's relationships
with women that his character becomes three-dimensional.
It is important here to take a moment to comment upon Leo
pold Bloom's physical appearance. Through the appearance
of Zero Mostel in the leading role in "Ulysses in Night-
town," and more recently Milo^ O'Shea in Joseph Strick's
film "Ulysses," it has become accepted that Bloom is aging,
pop-eyed, fat and physically unattractive. This is not
substantiated by book evidence. In Ulysses, the only per
son who makes deprecatory comments about his physical ap
pearance is Bloom himself; his concern for his "Jewish"
nose and worry that he is getting a bit "softy" around the
middle. As a matter of fact, on Thursday, June 16, 1904,
Leopold Bloom is thirty-eight years old, of average height,
slightly overweight, and handsome enough that Gerty MacDowell
compares him favorably to her favorite matinee idol. He
has the black hair, dark eyes and full sensuous mouth of his
Semitic forebears, and a largish nose which seems to bother
him more than any one else.
It is also important to remember that Molly (Marion
Tweedy) Bloom selected this man over all her other suitors.
The daughter of Major Brian Tweedy and the beautiful Span
iard Lunita Laredo was considered something of a marital
103
prize; she inherited her mother's brunette good looks,
glossy black hair, glowing dark eyes and voluptuous figure.
At sixteen, she was ripe and ready for love; some people
were undoubtedly surprised when she picked sober-serious
Leopold Bloom over her "more eligible" suitors. Bloom was
twenty-two when he wooed and won this buxom beauty with the
lilting soprano voice. He must have had that "something"
which made him especially attractive to this precocious
teen-ager. He courted her gently but ardently and, sixteen
years later, although she occasionally regrets her choice
(and rare is the married woman who does not), all in all
she still considers her husband to be the best of the lot.
It has become usual to think of Bloom as potty, ill-
favored, and past his prime. "His face is pallid, he is
flat-footed; his body gives the repulsive effect of being
61
sinewless and wobbly and all that." At thirty-eight,
granted, a bit heavier than he should be, Bloom is still an
attractive man approaching the best years of his life; his
easy relationships with women reveal not only the innate
courtesy of the man but also the fact that he is physically
attractive to them.
Before launching into a discussion of the major fe
male characters of Ulysses, one might take a moment to pon
der the enigma of "Martha Clifford"— Bloom's post restante
61
S. Foster Damon, "The Odyssey in Dublin," in Seon
Givens, ed., James Joyce; Two Decades of Criticism (New
York: Vanguard Press, 1948), p. 228.
104
pen pal with whom he has been carrying on a clandestine and
pseudonymous correspondence. Who is Martha Clifford? With
what character in The Odyssey does she correspond?
According to Stuart Gilbert and the Joyceans who
have followed after, the fourth chapter of Ulysses corre
sponds with the fifth chapter of The Odyssey, the "Calypso"
episode, equating Calypso with Molly Bloom. His substanti
ation of this theory includes the gloom of the Bloom bed
room, corresponding to the shadowy caves of Ogygia; Molly's
exclamation "0 rocks!" when Bloom attempts to explain a
word she doesn't understand; Molly's indolence, as she
lolls in bed waiting for Bloom to fetch her morning tea;
and the framed picture of the nymph which hangs on the wall
above their bed.
We don't know how long Martha Clifford and "Henry
Flower" (Bloom's nom de plume) have been writing to one an
other; but it is long enough for such familiarity as Bloom's
use of "naughty" words in his letters to her and for her
letters to him (if the one given in the book is any example)
to become cloyingly intimate. Martha means "lady"; Clif
ford, "of the Cliffs"; could it be that the Lady of the
Cliffs correlates to the mistress of the caves of the cliffs
of Ogygia, thus equating Calypso with Martha Clifford? The
use of the name "Flower" recalls the blossomy bowers of
Calypso, and there is the pressed flower that Martha in
cludes in her letter to "Henry"; there is a mention of
105
perfume, and Homer's epithet for Ogygia is "sweetly scented";
also the relationship between the two is by mail only, and
not only is Ogygia a floating island but the name "Calypso"
means "secret," and the correspondence between Henry Flower
and Martha Clifford has been a secret one. It is also
clear from her grammar and spelling that Miss Clifford is
not the world's cleverest lady; and implicit in Bloom's
attitude towards this latest missive is the fact that he is
tiring of the relationship and is considering breaking it
off. The letter might also represent the visit by Hermes
to Ogygia at the command of Zeus, commanding the Lady of
the Secret Island to release Odysseus from bondage. Accord
ing to traditionalists this may be farfetched; but no one
yet has explained Martha Clifford, and this is at least an
attempt to place her within the Homeric frame of reference.
And, as Joyce himself said, "I've put in so many enigmas
and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for cen
turies arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way
6 2
of insuring one's immortality."
The most poignant and pathetically touching moment
of Bloom's odyssey occurs on the beach at Sandymount, during
his wordless encounter with Gerty MacDowell. Bloom has had
a long, physically tiring, emotionally exhausting day. It
is now the beginning of evening, the sun falling more
c . 2
Richard Ellman, James Joyce (New York; Oxford
University Press, 1959), p. 535.
106
{
swiftly towards the edge of the world, sending out softer,
gold-edged rays; night, blinking and yawning, slowly
spreading out her arms to embrace the sky. Bloom has been
strolling along the shore, going no place; not being able
to go home, he has no place to go. He pauses, leaning
against an outcropping of rock, to watch three girls at
play; or rather two, tossing a ball back and forth between
themselves and two children, as the third girl remains
seated on a rock. The girls are Cissy Caffrey, Edy Board-
man, and Gerty MacDowell; the children are the Caffrey
twins, Jacky and Tommy. It is a still evening, sullen,
hinting at rain. Bloom's attention almost immediately fo
cuses on the girl on the rock— Gerty MacDowell. She is
sixteen, possibly seventeen, no more, and possessing a pre
cocious sexuality. Her looks are common but her youth gives
her a radiant kind of splendor; she has lovely shining
abundant hair, truly her crowning glory. Poets have long
praised as the most sexually desirable the budding girl-
woman on the brink of maturity; knowing the sweet smell of
sensuality, but not the aphrodisiac glow of its fruition.
Gerty, aware that Bloom is watching her, romati-
cizes about the handsome stranger who is eyeing her; there
are few things more flattering to a school girl than the
admiration of an older man. It is in Gerty's revelatory
thoughts of Bloom that we discover the extent of his physi
cal attractiveness; no one as floridly romantic as Gerty
107
would carry on at such rapturous lengths over a man who was
in any way physically repugnant to her. One of the chil
dren misses the ball; it rolls to Gerty's feet. She lifts
her skirts a little higher than is absolutely necessary,
exposing a shapely ankle and rounded calf, and kicks the
ball swiftly to Bloom's feet. There is a flash of eye con
tact between them; and each is aware of intense physical
attraction.
The contrast between the "Nausicaa" portion of The
Odyssey and Bloom's erotic adventure on the sea shore is,
with the "Cyclops" episode, the most nearly perfect of
Joyce's attempts to parallel Homer by reversing the nature
of the characters and the situation and at the same time
maintaining the same underlying theme. Nausicaa and Odys
seus meet at the edge of the sea in the full light of morn
ing; Gerty and Bloom watch each other from a distance during
the sensual dusk of a sultry summer evening. Nausicaa is
the daughter of royalty; Gerty's pedigree is, to say the
least, unextraordinary. Nausicaa is pure; Gerty is sexually
knowledgeable; Nausicaa naive, Gerty worldly-wise. Odys
seus the gentleman covers his nakedness before the innocent
eyes of the chaste young princess; Bloom, aroused by Gerty's
deliberate exhibitionism, hidden in the shadows of the
rocks, masturbates to orgasm. Nausicaa, having brought the
family linen to the shore, has washed it and spread it to
dry; Gerty MacDowell, as she watches the fireworks which
108
highlight the evening, leans back against the rocks, clasp
ing one leg around the knee, and allows her skirt to fall
back to her hips, exposing for Bloom's benefit her "linen";
the transparent silk, which tightly covers her thighs, and
the sheer material beyond. Gerty knows exactly what she is
doing:
He was eyeing her as a snake eyes its prey . . . her
woman's instinct told her she had raised the devil in
him and at the thought a burning scarlet swept from
throat to brow . . . it was getting darker but she
could see he was looking . . . his dark eyes fixed
themselves on her, drinking in her every contour,
literally worshipping at her shrine. If ever there
was undisguised admiration in a man's passionate gaze
it was there plain to see on that man's face . . . ^3
As the fireworks begin, Cissy and Edy run to a higher
vantage point, while Gerty remains where she is, spreading
her legs on the rocks, leaning back even further to expose
the light linen that covers the flesh above her thighs.
Bloom's breath comes in gasps which Gerty can hear across
the stretch of sand which separates them:
She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and
a light broke in upon her; white hot passion was in
that face and she could hear the panting of his heart
and his coarse breathing . . . and he could see the
other things too and she let him look and he had a
full view high above her knee and he kept on looking,
looking, looking, and then sprang and bang shot blind
and 01 the Roman Candle burst and 01 and it was like
a sigh of 0! and everyone cried in raptures and it
gushed out like a stream of rain gold hair threads
and ah! they were all green dewy stars falling with
golden 0 so lovely 0 so soft, sweet, soft . . . ^4
Bloom the gentle and patient, who has managed to
^Joyce, p. 355. ^Joyce, p. 360.
109
hold himself in check throughout the day, has found this
girl on the beach too much for him; unable to restrain him
self he commits an act of auto-eroticism and knows that the
girl is aware of what he is doing and also that she herself
is aroused by his arousal and is deliberately provoking him.
In the darkness, only these two are aware of the intensity
of the physical act which, although separated by dark space,
they commit together. Gerty glories in her power over the
dark stranger who watches her. This lusty, erotic and
highly physical interlude is both hot and cheap; yet,
through Joyce's skill as a writer, it also becomes the most
touching episode in the novel, and it is this poignancy
which brings it so very, very close to the greatness of
Homer's epic.
Leopold Bloom is a lonely man, patronized by his
peers, casually cuckolded by his wife. Gerty MacDowell is
half his age, at the peak of her prettiness. His ego is
soothed by her notice of him and even exhilarated by the
obvious way in which she bridles at his attention. It is
this brief moment of attraction and desire between a young
girl and an older, married man that truly parallels Homer;
not the sordid sexuality in the twilight on the beach but
the tender undertones that reflect dual awareness of a love
that can never be. Gerty dreams romantic schoolgirl dreams
of a rich handsome husband, luxuries, a place in society,
the envy of other women— fantasies common to all romantic
110
young females, be they royal bom or cut from the common
mold. But Nausicaa's future is assured; Gerty's dreams
will never come true. The most Gerty can look forward to
is a job in a shop and a bitter old age. For Nausicaa is
not only a princess but physically perfect; and Gerty,
daughter of the lower classes, is a cripple. It is diffi
cult to blame her for her actions on the beach; crudely,
she does what she can to attract and hold the attentions of
a darkly handsome older man. Her ability to arouse Bloom
is Gerty's triumph— in that moment she is supremely assured
of the stuff of her daydreams— that she is an attractive
woman. Surely, some marriageable man will find her attrac
tive, too. But Bloom has only seen her seated on the rocks;
it is not until, urged by her girlfriends she reluctantly
leaves the beach that Bloom notices that she limps.
Bloom, a habitual masturbator, has been denied the
joy of shared sex for ten years; Gerty's deliberate display
provokes him beyond endurance, but he is also aroused by
the knowledge that this display is just for him; it is a
kind of vindication for this man who has been barely toler
ated and scorned for the better part of the day. His ego
has been bruised, he has been physically attacked and ver
bally abused. Gerty is a balm to his spirit. The self-
consciousness they share— Gerty's gladness that she chanced
to wear her sheerest underpinnings, Bloom's care not to let
her see him in profile— even the acts of exhibitionism and
111
masturbation are secondary to the pathetic confrontation
between two frustrated, sexually potent, very lonely and,
for different reasons, socially outcast people (Bloom's
Jewishness, Gerty's physical handicap) who discover in one
another an attraction that is strong enough to stimulate
both erotically. However furtive (contrast the openness of
Odysseus' encounter with Nausicaa), the act gives each sat
isfaction. Through Gerty, the extent of Bloom's loneliness
is revealed; the girl on the beach exposes not only herself
but the extent of Bloom's desperate need for love, compan
ionship, the need to share, and the tense state of his
inner self, taut as a violin string wound too tightly and
about to snap, which allows him to be so fully aroused by
this common little tart's display.
Secondarily, considering the scheme of Joyce's plot,
it is necessary for the climactic confrontation in the
brothel, which most critics consider the "climax" of the
novel, that Bloom achieve orgasm and the consequent relaxa
tion of his sexual tensions before he reaches Nighttown.
The catharsis he experiences there is of the spirit rather
than the flesh, although the flesh is amply represented,
physically and psychologically? Bloom could not withstand
the temptations of the flesh with which he will shortly be
confronted if he had not at some prior time found release
for the sexual energies which have been seething inside him,
building to pitch point as the day lengthens. It is neces
112
sary that a person as highly charged as Bloom release that
sexual energy before he enters a place of skilled and prac
ticed eroticism; otherwise, it would be almost inevitable
that he fall prey to the stimulating atmosphere of Bella
Cohen's House of Whores. He needs to have his wits about
him. The draining of his sexual charge will leave him, if
not totally impervious to the blandishments of the whores,
at least not at a point at which he desperately desires
their services. His fantasies, while sexual in nature, are
mental; he does not participate in the physical act of sex.
In a way, by allowing Bloom to reach orgasm in the star
splashed shadows on the beach at Sandymount, Joyce gives
him the psychological equivalent of the herb moly which
protects Odysseus from Circe's spells when he first sets
foot on Aeaea. He has also given his hero a physical equiv
alent— a black and shrivelled potato. Relieved of immediate
physical desire, he is comparatively immune to the attrac
tions of Bella's girls, and better able to withstand and
combat the monstrous illusions which attack him in that
perversely titillating atmosphere.
On two sea shores, some space apart in time, a man
and a girl confront one another. There is no question as
to the electric attraction between both pairs. But on
Phaecia, the girl takes the man home with her and introduces
him to her parents; at Sandymount, they do not even speak.
At Phaecia, the girl is royal and the man a hero; at Sandy-
113
mount, the girl is common and the man a failure. At Phae
cia, the girl falls innocently in love with the handsome
stranger; at Sandymount, Gerty knowledgeably provokes the
man's physical desires. No two confrontations could seem
so outwardly disparate; yet in each there is the quietly
inevitable bittersweet tang touching the attraction between
a married man and a girl half his age. One is lofty, one
is soiled; both are genuine and both are profound. On
Phaecia, Nausicaa bids Odysseus a moving goodbye: "Fare
well, stranger, and even in thine own country bethink of
65
me upon a time . . ." Odysseus gently answers, "May Zeus
the Thunderer . . . grant me to reach my home; . . . so
would I, even there do thee worship as a god, all my days
6 6
forever more." Odysseus is not given to inflated flat
tery and high flown phrases. He is a simple and straight
forward person; it is unlikely that he would have spoken so
extravagantly to a young girl unless he meant at least a
bit of it. The memory of the beautiful and innocent Prin
cess Nausicaa will always have a small, but precious, place
in his heart.
Gerty MacDowell, as she limps slowly across the sand,
waves her perfumed handkerchief in the air; it is allegedly
a signal to her companions, but in reality, it is her fare
well to Bloom. The scent will not reach him until her
6 5
Butcher and Lang, p. 122.
6 6 ,.,
Ibid.
114
awkward figure has disappeared in the darkness. After she
has left, Bloom’s monologue as he stands quietly on the
dark empty beach reveals the affect which the nameless girl
has had upon him:
Didn't look back when she was going down the strand.
Wouldn't give that satisfaction . . . still she was
game. Lord am I wet . . . transparent stockings,
stretched to the breaking point . . . that's her per
fume. Why she waved her hand. I leave you this to
think of me when I'm far away on the pillow. What
scent is it? Roses I think. She'd like that kind of
scent. Sweet and cheap: soon sour. . . . Here's this
nobleman passed before. Blown in from the bay . . .
looks mangled out; had a good tuck in. Enjoying nature
now . . . I am a fool perhaps . . . tired I feel now.
Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out
of me, little wretch . . . my youth. Never again.
Only once it comes . . . Chance. We'll never meet
again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks.
Made me feel so young.67
The erotic exchange had made it an experience never
to be forgotten; but in mature reflection he knows it will
never be repeated. The excitement is past; the girl is
gone.
The importance of the episode between Gerty MacDowell
and Leopold Bloom lies in the fact that it reveals the vast
void in Bloom's life, between dream and reality. Bloom
loves his wife; yet he will not force himself upon her.
His nature is such that he prefers masturbation to actively
seeking female companionship; even his correspondence with
Martha Clifford is by mail only, and under an assumed name.
His encounter on the beach provides him the opportunity to
6 7
Joyce, p. 365 et seq.
115
indulge himself; but note that he does not approach the
girl. He makes no attempt to converse with her. The flir
tation, as with Martha Clifford, is anonymous and distant.
Bloom is a married man and faithful to his wife, after his
own fashion. He is patient, he waits, but while he waits,
his needs go unanswered, and the strain thus placed on a
healthy young Irishman is great. His response to the stim
uli of the day is triggered by the strain on his hard-
pressed sex drive; and the eroticism which censors origi
nally found so objectionable in Ulysses is largely account
able for by the emptiness, physical and spiritual, which
the episode on the beach lays bare.
After he pulls himself together, Bloom makes his way
to a lying-in hospital to inquire after an acquaintance who
has been in hard labor for several days. While there, he
espies young Stephen Dedalus, carousing with several young
interns. Stephen is obviously somewhat the worse for drink,
and when the group adjourns to Burke's pub, Bloom solicit
ously follows. This episode is Joyce's equivalent of
Homer's "Oxen of the Sun"; forbidden by Circe to partake of
the flesh of the Kine of Helios, Odysseus' companions ig
nore her warning and thus are doomed by the wrath of Helios.
Odysseus does not partake of the flesh of the Oxen and so
alone is saved. In Ulysses, the counterpart of the Kine of
Helios is the "wine of the country"; Stephen and his friends
become hopelessly, helplessly drunk, while Bloom, abstemious
116
as always, remains sober. When "Time!" is called, Stephen
and two equally drunken companions head for Nighttown, Dub
lin's Red Light district; again, Bloom follows, in an at
tempt to save the sodden young man from being "taken" (or
"eaten") by the inhabitants of Dublin's Aeaea, where men
are turned into swine.
It is late— nearly 11:00 pm, and Bloom has been up
and going since 7:00 or 8:00 am. Not only has it been a
long day, but an emotionally exhausting one: Bloom, con
stantly confronted with the image of his wife in another
man's arms, has had to struggle to keep himself emotionally
\
in check. The men with whom he has associated— or attempted
to associate— have done everything they can to rob him of
his masculinity, from the insults of newspaper editor Myles
Crawford ("Kiss My Royal Irish Arse!") to the physical at
tack upon him by The Citizen (Polyphemus) at Barney Kier-
nan's. He has absorbed insults, abuse and indignities. As
he approaches Nighttown, he is in a state of spiritual ex
haustion also--weary, confused.
At one time or another, everyone reaches their point
of no return— that point at which hurts and indignities
they have patiently endured for months or even years finally
reach a pressure point powerful enough to crack the most
carefully constructed defenses. Bloom at the entrance to
Nighttown has reached that point of no return. He has
carefully maintained the fiction of his marriage, endured
117
the sneers and snickers of his wife's admirers, borne the
not always subtle jibes at his ancestry, his father's sui
cide, and the death of his son. He has dreamed dreams
which have turned to ash in the cold light of day; hoped
hopes that have vaporized; wished for the impossible and
come to the dispirited realization that his wishes are
fruitless and forlorn. Bloom in Nighttown is at the end of
his rope; his resources are exhausted. It is at this point
that the indignities of the day take shadow form and rush
in upon him; all his fears, futile hopes, conscious and un
conscious desires take fantastic shapes and, like a medium's
ectoplasm, materialize to donfront him.
Odysseus invents the "Trojan Horse" to carry the
Achaeans inside the walls of Troy where they will kill,
rape, rob, pillage, wreck havoc and destroy Priam's city;
they will indeed burn the topless towers of Illium. Leo
pold Bloom would not have ventured into Nighttown on his
own; Stephen Dedalus is the "Trojan Horse" who carries him
inside the walls of his Windy Troy, into this chaotic,
fantastic world of cold, practiced eroticism.
The "Circe" episode of Ulysses— presented Off-Broad-
way and recently revived as "Ulysses in Nighttown"— is
written in dramatic form with a cast of characters number
ing in the hundreds. The atmosphere is unremittingly sen
sual, but it is a hard, cold, expert sensuality, sordid and
perverse. Joyce in his stage directions skillfully creates
118
a satanical circumambiance:
The Mabbot Street entrance of Nighttown, before which
stretches an uncobbled tram-siding set with skeleton
tracks, red and green will-o-the-wisps and danger
signals. Rows of flimsy houses with gaping doors.
Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans . . . stunted men
and women squabble. They grab wafers between which
are wedged lumps of coal and copper snow. Sucking,
they scatter slowly . . . a deafmute with goggle eyes,
his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken with
St. Vitus' dance . . . a pigmy woman swings on a rope
sling between the railings, counting. A form sprawled
against a dustbin and muffled by its arm and hat moves,
groans, grinding growling teeth, and snores again. On
a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to
shoulder a sack of rags and bones . . . a drunken navvy
grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching
heavily . . . a woman screams; a child wails. Oaths
of a man roar, mutter, cease. Figures wander, lurk,
peer from warrens. In a room lit by a candle stuck in
a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair
of a scrofulous child . . .68
The atmosphere thus created is intended to revolt
rather than to arouse; it is foul, as attractive as a reek
ing stagnant pond.
Bloom's entrance to Nighttown signals the beginnings
of a series of visitations by phantasms which culminate in
his self-confrontation in the mire that is Bella Cohen's.
His first vision is that of his dead parents; this is fol
lowed by one of Molly dressed in harem costume. There fol
lows a series of encounters of the imagination until he
finally reaches the door of Bella Cohen's and hears Stephen
inside. It is important to remember that these visions,
while each covers several pages of text, actually flash
^Joyce, p. 422.
119
through Bloom's mind as his senses are stirred by the
sights and sounds of Nighttown; each occurs in only a few
seconds of "actual elapsed time." These images are ar
ranged in such a way as to build a stage picture of the in
side of Bloom's mind. Each phantasm, although presented in
detail, is a figment of Bloom's imagination and these vivid
glimpses into his soul chase each other across Bloom's mind
like catspaws scudding across the ocean on a moon-dark,
windswept night. The action moves back and forth between
the real and the unreal with no apparent cause or indica
tion as to which is which. Although Bloom does not reach
Mrs. Cohen's until after forty-four pages of dialogue, the
trip actually takes him less than five minutes. Every
thought or feeling that Bloom has thought or repressed takes
misshapen form at one point or another in the course of this
episode. In this way it is possible to encapsulate Odys
seus' voyage, the monsters he meets and the unrelenting
wrath of Poseidon. Poseidon, Lord of the Sea, represents
the ruler of the unconscious; and it is in this world of
the elemental self that Bloom now roams.
The question of Athena must be raised sooner or
later, and it might be well to touch upon it here. Athena,
who is so important to Odysseus— does she have a Joycean
equivalent? It is fact that Odysseus' defiance of Athena
caused his troubles on his journey home. There is no fe
male to equate with Athena in Ulysses— unless we take into
120
consideration Athena's divine functions as Goddess of Wis
dom and Morality, Patroness of Arts and Crafts, Spinning
and Weaving, and her womanly qualities of mercy and gener
osity. Critic George deF. Lord States unequivocably that
"Homer stresses Athena's role as patroness of the domestic
arts" and that Penelope is also under her particular pro
tection. ^
If one follows this road to a Joycean conclusion,
Athena can only be represented by Molly Bloom who symbol
izes The Arts by virtue of her beautiful singing voice;
spinning and weaving (her maiden name, "Tweedy"), her asso
ciation with battle (her father was an Army officer) and
domesticity (her status as wife and mother). It is Molly/
Athena whom Bloom has offended; it is Molly/Penelope to
whom he desires to return. He is unable to achieve recon
ciliation with Molly/Penelope until he has come to grips
with Molly/Athena, recognizing the fact that he himself is
the cause and source of his greatest problems.
Ten years ago, their infant son died; Molly, perhaps
unreasonably, assigned the blame for their son's death to
Leopold, and ceased sexual relations with him. Rather than
force himself upon his reluctant wife— as opposed to Odys
seus' attack on Athena's temple— Bloom resigned himself to
patiently waiting for her to come 'round; he is still
69
George deF. Lord, "The Odyssey and the Western
World," Sewanee Review, LXII (Summer, 1954), 49.
121
waiting, chastely and patiently, taking Penelope's role as
opposed to Molly's careless immorality, leading that famous
life of quiet desperation, as Molly flaunts the flouting of
her marital vows. Molly has taken lovers; yet she remains
in the home, Bloom's wife, and even when their fortunes hit
their lowest ebb, she takes a job singing in a cafe to sup
port the family, rather than leaving him as she might eas
ily have done. Again, it is a reversal rather than a par
allel; Molly takes lovers, Bloom remains chaste. Bloom's
offense to Molly/Athena could be considered to actually be
Molly's offense, through her refusal to accept the proper
moral order of things by resuming sexual relations with her
husband. It remains for Bloom to storm her doors, throw
the suitors out, and assert himself as master in his own
home.
Here Joyce's convolutions on the "Ulysses" theme
take their neatest twist; Bloom, gentle and considerate,
believes that his wife no longer desires him and is obedi
ent to her wishes; typified in the novel as a whole by his
staying away all day when he has nothing, really, to keep
him away except for the knowledge of Molly's assignation
with Blazes Boylan that afternoon. Molly, even in the arms
of her lover, longs for her husband, wishes he would for
heaven's sake do something, take a stand, be a man. Athena
must humble proud Odysseus to her precepts; Molly must goad
Poldy into taking action. Odysseus must chastise his pride;
122
Bloom must find his. Bloom is symbolically castrated; it
is this castration with which he comes directly to grips
while immersed in the most powerful of the illusions he
experiences in Nighttown.
Bloom locates Stephen Dedalus, drunk as a coot, in
the parlor of Bella Cohen1s house, in the company of two
young friends of his, Lynch and Lenehan, and three of Mrs.
Cohen's girls— Zoe, Kitty, and Florry. Note that in The
Odyssey, Telemachus goes nowhere near Aeaea. Bloom, by far
the soberest of the group, takes charge of Stephen's money;
the latter is too far gone to care. Bella Cohen enters.
Far from resembling the beautiful Circe, Bella more resem
bles a creature from Hell, large and thick-set, a dark and
hairy woman, very masculine in manner and appearance. It
is this virile, masculine quality which triggers Bloom's
descent into a mental quagmire of humiliation, which
reaches its culmination in the slow self-realization which
brings him, step by clumsy step, back to command of himself
and the situation.
In Bloom's "Moment of Truth," Bella becomes trans
formed into Bello, the Whoremaster, and Bloom envisions
himself as a female servant in the brothel. All his mas
ochistic tendencies are revealed as Bello, with boot and
whip, threatens him with every conceivable degradation, from
flagellation to eating excrement. Bloom's tendresse for
female undergarments is exposed, as is the deep and guilty
123
secret that Bloom derives some comfort from the fact that
his wife is so sought after by other men. His habitual
masturbation is mocked; in this castigation of his soul he
is subject to the most inclusive list of perversions this
side of deSade. At the end of this phantasm, having in a
few seconds gone through centuries of subjugation, abomina
tion and foulness, Bloom is confronted with the seemingly
innocent figure of a nymph, and confesses his shame: "I
have paid homage on that living altar where the back changes
name. (WITH SUDDEN FERVOR.) For why should the dainty
70
scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules . . .?" The
nymph becomes a nun, symbol of chastity. "No more desire.
71
Only the ethereal ..." Bloom starts to regain his
senses: "You have broken the spell . . . the last straw
72
. . ." He rises from hxs prone positron; the abject
creature who has been grovelling on the ground-now stands
erect. The Nymph/Nun pulls a pruning knife from the folds
of her habit and strikes at Bloom's loins. He grapples with
her, tearing her veil, and wrests the knife from her hands.
The nymph, made of plaster, cracks, and Bloom calls after
the fleeing figure, "I have sixteen years of black slave
labour behind me. And would a jury give me five shillings
73
alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool somebody else, not me."
70
Joyce, p. 35 8.
71
Joyce, p. 539.
72
Joyce, p. 540.
73
Joyce, p. 540.
124
In the moment in which Bloom not only asserts him
self but actually attacks, he becomes himself again. He
has faced and overcome his most intimate, shameful, hidden
fear; the apparitions fade. Bloom, facing Bella Cohen, is
no longer apologetic but assertive. Bloom's next fantasy—
a vision of Blazes Boylan and Molly making love— is con
trastingly brief and lacks the stinging force of his self
confrontation; it is more of a self-chastisement, an indul
gence in his (admitted) voyeuristic tendencies: he watches
the action through a keyhole. At this point he is aware of
his limitations and the fact that in his weariness he is
succumbing to temptations he has previously had the strength
to resist. Now Stephen becomes obstreperous, and his ac
tions result in the abrupt departure of the group from the
brothel. Stephen becomes involved in a street brawl; his
companions disappear and Bloom handles the situation man
fully. Kneeling by the body of Stephen, who has been
knocked cold, Bloom experiences his final, most agonizing
vision; the sight of a boy of eleven, Rudy Bloom, had he
lived. The child passes with unseeing eyes; horribly,
Bloom realizes that the vision is transparent and as the
child fades he pathetically calls after it, tears streaming
74
down his face: "Rudy . . . Rudy ..."
The important aspect of the adventure at Bella
Cohen's is Bloom's voyage into himself. Wearied by the
74
Joyce, p. 5 93.
125
events of the day and emotionally at point non plus, Bloom
is wide open for the invasion of his psyche by the demons
of his subconscious. Although the atmosphere of Nighttown
is exotic and the visions which Bloom experiences are ex
pressive of his condition, none is so revealing as his con
frontation with Bella/Bello. In The Odyssey, Odysseus and
Circe fulfill their male and female roles to perfection; in
Ulysses, the polarities are once again reversed. Bloom the
female servant is debased and degraded by Bello— truly
turned into swine, as Odysseus was not— in a culmination of
all the torments and all the men who have tormented him
that day, until the actual physical threat of castration
forces him to act. And it may also be noted here that it
is the nymph who attacks Bloom incognito, in a nun's habit;
as the nymph Calypso, whose name means "secret," secretly
attacks Odysseus the man by hiding him from the eyes of the
worlds of god and of men through her magic; another sym
bolic castration as Odysseus' manhood cannot be restored
until he is seen and heard by the gods and aided by them.
The decision of Bloom qua Bloom— to defend himself against
the nymph/nun going for his groin with a carving knife— em
bodies the decision to defend himself against the symbolic
castration he has experienced every time another man has
possessed his wife. His reaction, however instinctive, is
vital and right and true, and at this point he becomes the
aggressor rather than the victim, as Odysseus, once he has
126
thrown himself upon the mercy of the gods, is released from
bondage. When Bella the masculine woman confronts Bloom
the emasculated man a double reversal occurs which starts
Bloom, however little he may realize it at the time, on the
road home.
The paradoxes of the "Circe" episode of Ulysses in
comparison to that of The Odyssey are many and varied. It
is Odysseus' men who are turned into swine, but Bloom alone
grovels in filth at the brothel; Odysseus and Circe live
together harmoniously for a year, Bloom departs the brothel
precipitously. Odysseus' stay on Aeaea is pleasant, Bloom's
brief visit to the brothel quite the opposite. Yet it is
in this pit that Bloom experiences the crisis of spirit
which will allow him to return home; therefore, this epi
sode is the core and heart of Joyce's novel.
The "parallels" between The Odyssey and Ulysses are
not so exact as some would have you suppose, and where they
do exist they are not nearly so obvious as the "reversals"
are. Bloom suffers his crisis of spirit at the brothel;
Odysseus on the isle of Ogygia. But the underlying and
true parallel is not between the two pieces of writing both
referred to as "The Circe Episode"; it is the crisis of
spirit which must be experienced before the hero may begin
his journey home.
The Homeric threads with which Joyce weaves his tale
become more visible if one posits that the major females in
127
Homer's epic are blended by Joyce into the character of
Molly Bloom. She has, as has been cited, the qualities
credited to Athena by Homer; she is Penelope; and it is
much easier to account for Circe if we equate the sensuous
attractions of the daughter of the sun with the voluptuous
charms of Molly Bloom. The point is at least worth dis
cussing.
The three faces of Marion Bloom are as diverse as
the characters she represents. It may seem impertinent to
compare Molly Bloom with celestial Athena, but two points
are inescapable: Molly has turned her back on Poldy and
left him to his own devices for ten years; Athena lets
Odysseus go his own way for ten years; Athena among her
many attributes is the goddess of domesticity and patron of
the arts; Molly is wife and mother and a singer of note.
In the long talk with herself that closes the novel, Molly
considers having another child by her husband, a forgive
ness that equates with Athena's forgiveness of Odysseus and
her aid on his return home. Molly will not allow herself
to conceive by another man, she states this clearly, as she
considers the methods of "birth control" she utilizes.
Molly/Athena also outstandingly corresponds with instinc
tual, infinite female wisdom; woman's intuition. Athena is
the goddess who governs this trait, Molly the very mortal
female who is imbued with it. Molly is proud of Poldy1s
intellect, as Athena favors Odysseus for his. Molly-Lie-A-
128
Bed is hard to equate with the patron of the domestic arts;
but the Molly who mends her husband's clothes, knits her
children's wearing apparel, ekes out an existence on her
husband's insubstantial salary and goes to work to support
the family when her husband cannot, deserves some consider
ation as an earthly relative of Olympian Athena.
It is far easier to discern the resemblances, re
versals and parallels between Molly and Circe. Circe is
barren, Molly has born children; yet Molly is known for her
voluptuous beauty, which is easier to relate to that of the
goddess than the mannish ugliness of Bella Cohen. Molly's
physical charms have only appreciated in the sixteen years
since her marriage; at thirty-two, she is mature enough to
know how to use her charms, still young enough to be only
approaching her prime; still young enough to conceive. The
men she turns to swine are the suitors who crowd her halls,
whom she uses as she pleases, then casually discards.
Molly has her mother's brunette coloring; Circe, daughter
of the sun and the sea must have been just as brilliantly
fair, with translucent ivory skin and long fine pale gold
hair. The shine on Molly's raven locks is a point of pride
with her; Circe is referred to as being of "fair braided
tresses." Again, consider Molly's maiden name, Tweedy, and
the singing voice which is fine enough to place her in the
first ranks of the Dublin artistes; Circe is spoken of as
"singing in a sweet voice, as she fared to and fro before
129
the great web imperishable, such as is the handiwork of
75
goddesses." Molly's singing voice ties her to Circe; the
name Tweedy seems to indicate the combination of the three
major female characters, Athena, patroness of weaving;
Circe at her golden loom; and Penelope, patiently weaving
a winding sheet for her father-in-law.
It is Molly/Penelope who ties the pieces into a
whole. Molly who at sixteen chose Bloom over all her other
suitors, as Penelope chose Odysseus; both have borne their
husband's sons, though one lived, and one died; both enter
tain suitors in their husband's home during their spouse's
absence; both are desired by their husbands to the extent
that both men endure a long and arduous journey home, beset
with difficulties, scattered with temptations, with fre
quent opportunities for diversions, and side trips which
might have permanently detained a man with less love of
wife and home.
At first glance, the resemblance between Molly and
Penelope is another series of reversals; Penelope is "Wise,"
Molly the shrewd but uneducated daughter of an Army Major
and a beautiful Spanish Jewess of uncertain reputation;
Penelope is chaste, Molly is chased; Penelope desperately
desires her husband's return but despairs of it; Molly de
liberately sends her husband out into the world so that she
can conduct her affairs in private, and it is only at the
75
Butcher and Lang, p. 151.
130
end of the day that she realizes that his return is that
"good" which she has truly desired all along.
Throughout the day, we have had only one personal
glimpse of Molly— in bed, in the morning— all else we know
of her is through Bloom's thoughts of her, which are in the
forefront of his mind throughout the day, and his reactions
to the various stimuli that remind him not only of his wife
but of his wife's activities. At the close of the book, we
hear, in one of the most beautifully written and succinct
soliloquies of all literature, "Molly's side of it"— her
thoughts of herself, her husband, and their relationship—
and in this soliloquy, it is Molly/Penelope who brings
Ulysses to a Commencement— an end and a beginning.
First there is her indignation at her husband's late
return, the righteous indignation of any wife whose husband
wanders in during the early hours of the morning with no
good explanation; her wonderment at the effontery of his
request that she arise and fix him his breakfast in bed for
a change— he has been in the habit of bringing her hers for
so long. She catalogues his good points: "Still, I like
that in him, polite to old women like that and waiters and
7 6
beggars too ..." And his bad: "Yes and he came some
where I'm sure by his appetite anyway love it's not or he'd
77
be off his feed ..." And continues for forty-five pages
in a similar vein, reviewing her afternoon with Boylan,
^^Joyce, -. 723. ^Joyce, p. 727
131
gradually devoting more and more time to thoughts of her
husband. The thought of Boylan's male member spouting
sperm makes her think of pregnancy, and she clearly states
that she is considering resuming sexual relations with her
husband: "Supposing I risked having another, not off him
[Boylan] though I'm sure if he were married he'd have a
fine child, but I don't know, Poldy has more spunk in him,
yes, that'd be awfully jolly . . ."78 she recalls her hus
band's handsome face when they were courting, realizing
that he is still attractive to other women: "The women are
always egging him on to that putting it on thick when he's
there to look at him the kind he is what spoils him I don't
wonder in the least because he was very handsome at that
time trying to look like Lord Byron I said I liked though I
he was too beautiful for a man . . ."79 And so on, until a
clear picture is formed of their romance, their life to
gether, and their love.
The reunion between Odysseus and Penelope is accom
plished slowly and by stages. So is the gradual coming
together of Poldy and Molly, after ten years of physical
strangeness. Penelope tells the "beggar" who brings news
to her halls that she is undecided whether to continue to
wait for Odysseus or to take another husband; Molly must
decide whether to continue her relationship with Boylan or
return to her husband. Penelope, on that day, has received
omens that Odysseus is not only alive but returning; in her
no 79
Joyce, p. 734. Joyce, p. 738.
132
revery, Molly brings out indication after indication of her
husband's intent to re-establish himself as master in his
own home, lover as well as provider. She recognizes and
accepts it, but the recognition remains largely on the sub
conscious level; the surest indication is the repeated "yes
. . . yes . . . yes ..." which accentuates the narrative,
building to a final paean of affirmation:
Well they're not going to get my husband again into
their clutches if I can help it making fun of him be
hind his back because he has sense enough not to squan
der every penny piece he earns and to look after his
wife and family . . . I can't help it if I'm young still
can I it's a wonder I'm not old and shrivelled before
my time living with him so cold never embracing me ex
cept sometimes when he's asleep, nobody understands his
crackbrained ideas but me of course a woman wants to be
embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look younger
to be in love or loved by somebody . . . the sun shines
for you he said the day we were lying among the rho
dodendrons on Howth head the day I got him to propose to
me yes first I gave him a bit of seedcake out of my
mouth and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my
God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he
said I was a flower . . . and then I asked him again
with my eyes to ask again to say yes and then he asked
me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first
I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so
he could feel my breasts all perfume and yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will I
said yes.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus returns, at last, to Penel
ope, who slowly but surely recognizes him and weeps for joy;
in Ulysses, Poldy's return (physical self-assertion) is
balanced by Molly's gradual recognition of her need for her
husband and her evolving awareness that she desires to be
reconciled with him. It will be slow, it may be fumbling,
it will not happen all at once; but it will be.
^Joyce, p. 765 et seq.
133
CHAPTER IV
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
It has been posited that both The Odyssey and Ulysses
are romances. On a second level, both authors reveal in
their works a need to define "The Good." As a romantic
epic, The Odyssey has no peer; the romance of Ulysses has
been bypassed by many honest Joyceans in their earnest en
deavors to explain the book to the "lay reader." Unfortu
nately, much of the fun and the spirit of Ulysses is lost
in such a translation. And, because Joyce allegedly aban
doned the church of his childhood, the spiritual aspects of
Ulysses have also been negated. This is even more unfortu
nate, because the story of Poldy Bloom is a deeply moral
tale.
It is easy to dwell upon the sensational aspects of
Ulysses. In the historic court battle which led to the
Supreme Court decision to allow the publication of Ulysses
in this country in 1934, the parts of the book dealing with
human functions and fantasies in a naturalistic way were
extravagantly sensationalized. It was not Joyce's language
that was found extreme, but his naturalism; to all but the
morbidly prurient, this realism follows a natural, almost
134
cinematic approach to the unfolding of the tale. Nearly
half a century later, it is difficult to understand what
was so shocking, or why it took so long for a "New Criti
cism" of Ulysses to spring up which dealt not with the
book's morbid aspects but with its joy. "Ulysses is fun to
read," says Richard Kain, and with those words a door is
opened to us. The World of Poldy Bloom on June 16, 1904 is
not, after all, entirely composed of muck and mire; Ulysses
turns out to be the simple story of an ordinary man who, on
V.
this day, chooses a different path to follow, and whose
life is decisively changed by that choice.
The Odyssey is a romantic novel as well as an epic
saga; it has all the elements of a real old-fashioned ad
venture story and at the same time all the ingredients of
those literary works usually referred to as "women's books."
The hero, a man of the world— handsome, intelligent, brave,
sensitive; a supernatural world in which the hero must pit
his puny strength against almost overwhelming odds; sundry
sensuous women strewn like rose petals across his path; the
One Woman who patiently waits, to whom the hero is ulti
mately true; and the essential elements of pity and terror
which provoke that catharsis of spirit through which the
hero sees the error of his ways and makes his peace with
fate. The Odyssey is a marvelous story— above all, it is
fun to read.
Both novels are romances having basically simple
135
plot lines— albeit with fantastic embellishments upon their
respective plots; both treat the reader to a sensational
denouement, after which each hero is suitably reunited with
the woman he loves and, we are led to believe, lives hap
pily ever after.
It is for this reason that the Home/Woman theme of
both novels is followed in this study rather than, as so
many critics have chosen, the Father-in-Search-of-a-Son
theme. In the first place, Odysseus has a son; and al
though in The IHiad he proudly refers to himself as "fa
ther of Telemachus," we do not hear much about Telemachus
in The Odyssey. In Ulysses, Poldy's infant son has been
dead for a decade; the birth and death of Rudy Bloom were
the ostensible cause of the physical estrangement of Molly
and Poldy. Bloom's thoughts of Rudy, therefore, are inex
tricably tied to his thoughts of Molly; whenever the dead
boy enters his mind, his wife soon follows. Perhaps it
needs a woman to find and emphasize the very obvious refer
ences in The Odyssey to Odysseus' love for Penelope and his
desire to return to her; in Ulysses, Molly is so constantly
in Poldy's thoughts that his overwhelming desire for her
should be obvious to all but the most careless reader.
Both Ulysses and The Odyssey can be considered
"studies in loneliness"; the great motivation of the hero
in both novels is the desperation caused by that loneliness,
resulting in the driving desire that unifies both works—
136
the desire to return home, to return to the world of man
kind. "The Good" in both novels is the restoration of
Moral Order; of reason out of chaos. Joyce's use of the
format of The Odyssey is a striking utilization of a manner
of giving order and form to emotion, and this is the pur
pose of all art. Joyce's discipline in structuring Ulysses
applies equally to the manner in which his hero discovers
that for him "The Good" is indeed moral order, an order
which he must establish first within himself and then within
his home; as Odysseus discovers the necessity for self-
discipline and then re-establishes discipline in his house
before he can find peace.
"Moral Order" or, if you prefer, an ethical frame
work for action is rather an outdated concept in this brave
new Aquarian Age. But without order there is anarchy, from
anarchy, revolution; from revolution, the establishment of
a pro tempore ruling junta, the purpose of which is to re
store order. Man qua man cannot live in a world of chaos.
We speak of children reaching the "age of reason"; at that
age, which society has established, the child becomes an
adult, capable of reasoning for himself. It is hoped that
by this time the child has learned to order his own life in
such a way as to be compatible with that of the society in
which he lives. If his life is not so ordered, if he has
not learned the difference between good and evil— or worse,
has learned the difference but has also been taught not to
137
care— the result is murder, arson, rape, robbery; a world
of chaos.
When Odysseus pillages the temple of Athena he dis
cards all that he has learned of moral, ethical behavior,
and is doomed to live in a world of anarchy until in abject
humility he pleads for order to be restored. Leopold Bloom
is a moral and ethical man, kind to women, children, and
animals; yet his house is in a state of anarchy which he
has chosen not to attempt to control until on one fabulous
day he descends into a world of chaos from which he cannot
escape until he affirms his status as a rational man and
takes steps to assure that order will be firmly restored in
his home. Odysseus' purge of the suitors is real and phys
ical; Bloom's decision to reassert his position as head of
the house and first in his wife's affections is more ab
stract in concept but nonetheless effective in its end re
sult. The tender scene between Odysseus and Penelope is
matched in Molly Bloom's monologue; as she drifts towards
sleep her last conscious thoughts are of making love to her
husband.
Moral/Ethical Order is equated with "The Good," and
"The Good" is equated with hearth and home, woman and child
bearing, Man and Woman together, halves of one whole,
without which each must live in loneliness until once again
they cleave together as one. No. 7 Eccles Street, Dublin
equates with the Palace at Ithaca; the grown Telemachus
138
with the dead Rudy; and Molly and Penelope, one wife with
another. There is not, after all, so very much difference
between them. Once order has been established, the future
can be prospected and there are pleasant sights— for Odys
seus, the prospect of growing mortally old in his own home,
reunited with his son and his wife; for Poldy Bloom, re
united with his wife, the prospect of conceiving a son to
carry on his heritage.
Some may find it odd that in this age of the liber
ated woman a woman is holding out for the old, traditional
values of marriage, home-making and child-bearing; but the
fact that these are traditional values does not make them
post hoc ergo procter hoc "The Bad." Man by himself— man
or woman— is the loneliest creature alive. An animal may
shift for itself but Man does not truly exist except in his
relationship to other people; a human being needs a compan
ion, one who shares needs, hopes, desires, dreams. Man
alone is neuter, sterile, fruitless and useless; Man shared
is useful, creative, fruitful and potent. To be enjoyed,
life must be shared.
Romanticism and classicism are not necessarily al
ternative disciplines. The confusion about having to take
one or the other results from the confusion about the so
ciety of which literature is a part. The Bronze Age which
provides the setting for The Odyssey is a romantic setting
for an epic saga; yet The Odyssey is a classic of literature
139
in the best possible sense. To approach it as a romance is
not to negate its classicism but to enrich all that is
found therein and therefore, hopefully, to draw more readers
to it; many who fear "the classics" have no trouble at all
picking up and enjoying a literary work enhanced by a ro
mantic reputation. It is a shame that well known authors
and critics have been forced to admit being driven to The
Odyssey for the first time by Joyce; and it is laudable
that the romance of Ulysses has finally found its way into
popular criticism, after having been stifled for so many
years under the stiff wrappings of classicism which made
Joyce's "pornography" palatable.
Joyce demands that his reader enjoy a thorough knowl
edge of The Odyssey. Perhaps by doing so he has introduced
more modern readers to that great work than any tenured
Professor of Literature. Of course, Ulysses can be read
without recourse to The Odyssey; read, yes, but hardly en
joyed. The ruffles and flourishes which constitute Joyce's
artistic embellishments to the main story line— a literary
"Look at Me!" exhibitionistic extravaganza— are simply
technical fireworks without substance unless Ulysses is
seen to be a reflection in mighty Homer's looking glass.
The Odyssey provides the background necessary for the enjoy
ment of the epic magnificence of Ulysses. Without The
Odyssey, Ulysses is simply the sadly common story of one
more travelling salesman with yet another adulterous wife.
140
Joyce’s original title for Ulysses was "Ulysses in Dublin";
the correspondence to The Odyssey is necessary and inescap
able. Without The Odyssey, Ulysses is tawdry. Unless
Leopold Bloom, in his own inimitable fashion, follows the
fabulous footpath of the mighty Odysseus, his story is no
saga but the tarnished tale of a small man with a dirty
mind, and the author has not written a classic contribution
to the art of literature but has simply pandered to those
who prefer their pornography on the exotic side. Joyce
does demand a great deal of his reader. He writes in par
odies of well known literary styles; embodies idiomatic
language contemporary in the Dublin of 1904; and expects
knowledge of Irish history, etymology, mythology, and the
rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet again, these are
pyrotechnics; it is enough that one recognize that Ulysses
is based upon The Odyssey and that many characters in Ulys
ses are based on characters in The Odyssey; and that the
main or title character, Leopold Bloom, is Ulysses in Dub
lin, trying to find his way home again.
It is entirely possible that the poet we call Homer
did not consciously create The Odyssey as a powerful justi
fication of Moral Order as "The Good." Probably the self-
proclaimed iconoclast James Joyce had nothing further from
his mind as he embarked upon the creation of Ulysses as a
monument to morality. The word morality offends many be
cause of immediate identification with ideology, theology,
141
the Ten Commandments and the Deadly Sins. The word "moral”
is used here within an ethical frame of reference, in the
sense of Kant's great ethical reworking of religion's
Golden Rule, his Categorical Imperative: So act always in
such a way as to treat your fellow man as an end in himself,
and never as a means. In this sense, Ulysses is highly
moral. The monsters of Leopold Bloom's world treat him as
a means to their various ends; when he asserts that he is
an end in himself he becomes master of his fate. In The
Odyssey Odysseus is used, abused, nearly consumed; when he
gives himself up to his end as a man he becomes himself
again.
To conclude that The Odyssey is essential to Ulysses
brings up the question of the Father/Son theme as the prime
motivation for the leading characters to act as they do.
This theory bypasses Molly/Penelope altogether, and ignores
the internal evidence that (a) Odysseus has a son and that
(b) Leopold Bloom throughout his odyssey mourns the loss of
his son Rudy and hopes, not for a surrogate, but for a son
who is flesh of his flesh sired by him on the body of his
wife. The desire to go home again— to Molly— is the fore
most thought in his mind throughout the day and his need
for Molly is the driving force which does indeed bring him
safely home. Telemachus appears twice in The Odyssey, in
the first four books which comprise the Telemachiad, and
then not again until he assists his father in the slaying
142
of the suitors. Stephen Dedalus, the alleged Telemachus of
Ulysses, wanders through Dublin on a strange odyssey of his
own, in the course of which his path frequently crosses
that of Leopold Bloom. But it is only when Bloom comes
across Stephen dead drunk and heading for a whorehouse that
the older man actively takes the younger one under his pro
tection. And it is while he holds Stephen's head in his
arms after the brawl in Nighttown that he sees the vision
of an eleven year old boy who might have been Rudy Bloom.
If he were holding this sought-for son in his lap— where
fore the vision? And Leopold Bloom follows the course of
his own odyssey— he does not pursue Stephen Dedalus through
the streets of Dublin. The first three chapters of Ulysses
deal with Stephen Dedalus and are usually referred to as
the "Telemachiad"; but the Telemachiad of Ulysses, as with
that of The Odyssey, serves as a prologue to the action of
the story. One can start reading Ulysses with Chapter Four,
and The Odyssey with Chapter Five; neither Telemachiad is
an essential introduction. Stephen Dedalus appears and
reappears in the course of Ulysses; but although Leopold
Bloom does bring Stephen home for cocoa after the Nighttown
episode, as soon as the younger man is reasonably sober he
departs and provides no further point of interest. Our
thoughts are centered upon Molly and her decision to resume
relations with her husband and possibly bear him another
child— the son Poldy searches for will be borne of Molly,
143
not taken from another man. Bloom's protective care of
Stephen is indicative of his gentle and generous nature as
illustrated throughout the novel; such action is natural to
him. Leopold Bloom is a humanitarian, and his heart's de
sire is not Stephen Dedalus but reunification with Marion
Tweedy Bloom, his wife and the mother of his children.
As with Molly, we meet Penelope only at the begin
ning and the end of The Qdyssey. The first epithet Homer
uses to describe Odysseus' wife is "Wise Penelope"; and we
learn from her actions in Book Seventeen that she is indeed
a wise woman, a worthy wife to wily Odysseus. The final
purpose of The Odyssey, and of Odysseus within it, is his
return and restoration as king of Ithaca. The final pur
pose of the last few books of The Odyssey is to show us
that Penelope as a woman, wife and queen is indeed the equal
of Odysseus; it is Penelope who plans the final test of
Odysseus' identity, the trial of the bed. Her final sub
mission to Odysseus is not a defeat, it is a paradoxical
triumph of self-giving, which Joyce imitates in Molly's
soliloquy with her repeated affirmative "Yes . . . Yes . . .
Yes ..."
In a study of Odysseus' personal relationships one
meets none of the suspicion and distrust of his male com
panions among the women who know him well. Their greater
sympathy and tolerance cannot be explained entirely as the
consequence of tenderer natures. It seems rather that
144
Homer intended to imply a closer temperamental affinity
between Odysseus and the women of the Heroic Age than be
tween him and the more conventional warrior-heroes who felt
distrustful and uneasy in his company. Not that there was
any specifically feminine element in Odysseus' nature, but
rather he shared certain qualities with women which were
not to be found in his associates. Odysseus' civilized
gentleness, his intuitive intelligence, and his innate sen
sitivity, in an age of violence and infidelity, were quali
ties that every sensible woman would value. And what other
more recent literary character does this description fit?
Mr. Leopold Bloom.
Odysseus has no doubts as to Penelope's fidelity; it
is getting back to her that is the problem. Leopold Bloom
has no doubts as to his wife's infidelity; the knowledge of
her afternoon assignation haunts him all day long. Both
men must take up arms to purge their households of unwanted
wooers; Odysseus swiftly and knowledgeably, Poldy a bit
more cautiously but nonethless self-assured.
And Molly must prove herself worthy of Poldy's de
sire, as Odysseus must prove himself worthy of Penelope's
faithfulness. In the long, revealing monologue which closes
Ulysses, Molly repents of her infidelity; admits she is
tiring of her lover and realizes that if she had to choose
between her husband and her lover, her husband is the bet
ter man in every way; she regrets the loss of her son and
145
wishes for another, very specifically the child of her hus
band; and admits that she is impressed by her husband's
unexpected self assertion and is not entirely displeased by
it. As she drifts closer and closer to sleep her thoughts
become more and more basic, intuitive, feminine and elemen
tal. She remembers the day Poldy proposed to her and she
gave herself to him, and her "YesI" is repeated again and
again as she builds towards that final, positive, affirma
tive "Yes!" that closes the novel.
Poldy/Odysseus, Molly/Penelope, the re-establishment
of Moral Order and the unification of the parts of the
whole; Ulysses and The Odyssey two romantic classics that
overshadow any comparison to one another. Penelope leads
Odysseus to the bridal bed; Molly cries "Yes!" and we know
that everything is going to be all right.
146
14 7
APPENDIX
BOOK SEQUENCE IN THE ODYSSEY
Books I through IV
"The Telemachiad"
Book V
At the command of Zeus,
Hermes orders the nymph
Calypso to set Odysseus
free.
Book VI
Odysseus, washed up on the
isle of Phaecia, is dis
covered by the Princess
Nausicaa, who takes him
home with her.
Book VII
Odysseus is received by
Nausicaa's parents, King
Alcinous and Queen Arete;
and begs the Queen to help
him reach his own country.
Book VIII
Odysseus takes part in the
games and sports of the
Phaecian court.
Book IX
Odysseus reveals his iden
tity and begins the tale of
his adventures— the sack of
the Cicones; the land of
the Lotus Eaters; and cap
ture by and escape from the
cyclops Polyphemus.
CHAPTER SEQUENCE IN ULYSSES
Chapters One through Three
"The Telemachiad"
Chapter Four
"Calypso"*
Leopold Bloom serves his
wife Molly breakfast in bed;
and brings in the mail
including a note to Molly
from her current lover.
Chapter Five
"The Lotus Eaters"
Bloom leaves home for the
day; picks up a letter from
his post restante pen pal,
MarthaClifford; and visits
the public baths.
Chapter Six
"Hades"
Bloom attends the funeral of
Paddy Dignam and is reminded
of his own father's death
by suicide.
Chapter Seven
"Aeolus"
Leopold Bloom visits a news
paper office, to arrange
for the publication of an
advertisement.
Chapter Eight
"The Lestrygonians"
Bloom visits a restaurant
for lunch but the sight of
people eating revolts him,
reminding him of a slaugh
terhouse .
*Indicates original chapter title given by Joyce to
show correlation with chapters in The Odyssey.
148
THE ODYSSEY ULYSSES
Book X
Odysseus continues his
story, his meeting with
Aeolus, King of the Winds;
the Lestrygonian cannibals;
and Hermes' visit to him
as he lands on the isle of
Aeaea, the home of Circe.
Book XI
At the direction of Circe,
Odysseus visits Hades to
hear the oracle of the
great Theban seer Tiresias.
He is warned not to eat the
flesh of the Oxen of the
Sun; the slaying of the
suitors is foretold, and
Tiresias prophesies that
before Odysseus can be at
peace with Poseidon Lord of
the Sea, he must make sacri
fice in restitution for the
maiming of Polyphemus.
Odysseus then greets his
mother, who has died during
his absence; she tells him
that Penelope is steadfast
and faithful.
Book XII
At the Court of Phaecia,
Odysseus continues his
tale; he tells of his re
turn to Aeaea, for Circe's
advice; and then of setting
forth once more and listen
ing to the Siren's Song; of
the Passage between Scylla
and Charybdis; of the sacri
lege of his crew who devour
the Oxen of the Sun; of the
wrath of Helios, who destroys
his ship and the remainder of
his crew; and how he alone is
washed up on the shores of
Ogygia.
Chapter Nine
"Scylla and Charybdis"
Bloom visits the public
library to look for a back
copy of the ad he wishes to
place in the "Freeman's
Journal."
Chapter Ten
"The Wandering Rocks"
Eighteen short scenes take
place in the streets of
Dublin between the hours of
3 pm and 4 pm; culminating
in the Viceregal Parade;
Bloom buys Molly a book en
titled "The Sweets of Sin."
Chapter Eleven
"The Sirens"
The Viceregal Parade passes
the Ormond Hotel, where
Bloom is having a late lunch
in the restaurant. In the
bar, Si Dedalus and others
are gathered around the
piano, singing and flirting
with the barmaids. Bloom
starts to write a letter to
Martha Clifford. Blazes
Boylan drops in for a drink
before his assignation with
Molly. Bloom sees him,
watches him leave; consid
ers following him, hesi
tates; decides against it.
Chapter Twelve
"The Cyclops"
Set in Barney Kiernan's pub,
this chapter is narrated by
a nameless Dublin debt col
lector. Bloom, waiting for
Martin Cunningham, is in
vited inside by The Citizen,
a.rabid Sinn Feiner, who
draws him into an argument.
149
THE ODYSSEY
Book XIII
Odysseus, having finished
his tale, takes leave of
the Phaecians, who take him
by ship to Ithaca, and leave
him sleeping on the shore.
On awakening he is greeted
by Athena, who counsels him,
and turns him into an old
and ragged beggar.
Book XIV
Odysseus, in the form of a
beggar, goes to dwell with
Eumaeus the swineherd, at
the direction of Athena.
Book XV
Athena goes to Sparta, bid
ding Telemachus to return
to Ithaca and to visit first
the home of the swineherd
Eumaeus.
Book XVI
Telemachus sends Eumaeus to
Penelope; Odysseus reveals
himself to his son.
Book XVII
Telemachus tells Penelope
of his visits to Pylos and
Sparta and what he learned
there; Odysseus, disguised
as a beggar, approaches the
gates of the palace at
Ithaca.
Book XVIII
The suitors taunt Odysseus;
he fights another beggar and
wins; Penelope appears before
the wooers, veil before her
face, and chastises them for
treating a beggar at her door,
in the name of Zeus, to whom
all wanderers and beggars
are sacred.
ULYSSES
Bloom claims he is an Irish
man; the Citizen calls him
a Jew. Bloom tells the
drunken Citizen that Christ
was a Jew. The Citizen
chases Bloom out of the pub,
throwing biscuit boxes
after him.
Chapter Thirteen
"Nausicaa”
It is dusk; Bloom is stroll
ing along the beach at
Sandymount. He notices a
young girl sitting on a
rock, who returns his atten
tion. She leans back
against the rock, displaying
her underclothing. The
evening darkens, there is a
fireworks display.
Chapter Fourteen
"The Oxen of the Sun"
Bloom visits the Lying-In
Hospital at Holies Street
to inquire after a friend.
He sees a group of medical
students carousing in the
commons, with them Stephen
Dedalus. He follows the
group to Burke's pub. When
"TimeI" is called at Burke'^
Stephen and two friends set
out for Nighttown; Bloom
follows.
Chapter Fifteen
"Circe"
As Bloom follows Stephen to
Bella Cohen's Whorehouse in
Nighttown, he is beset by a
series of erotic and mas
ochistic phantasms. At
Bella Cohen's, he undergoes
another series of phantasms,
overcomes them, and regains
mastery of himself. He
150
THE ODYSSEY ULYSSES
Book XIX
The suitors rest. Telema-
chus removes all the armor
from the great hall; Odys
seus speaks with Penelope,
but does not directly re
veal himself.
Book XX
Athena consults Odysseus
regarding the slaying of
the suitors.
Book XXI
Penelope brings forth the
bow of Odysseus, and says
she will wed the one of
the suitors who can bend
the bow of her mighty
warrior husband.
Book XXII
The suitors fail to draw
the bow. Odysseus takes
the bow, draws it and,
with the aid of Telemachus
and Athena, slays the
suitors.
Book XXIII
Odysseus reveals himself
to Penelope; she pretends
to doubt him, and puts him
to a test; when he proves
himself she falls weeping
into his arms, and leads
him upstairs to their bed;
Athena, obligingly, "holds
back the dawn" so that the
united couple may take their
fill of love.
Book XXIV
Epilogue
The bodies of the suitors
are buried by traitorous
Ithacans/ who are then
takes charge of Stephen's
money and settles things
with the Madame; Stephen
gets into a fight with the
Dublin constabulary. Bloom
settles the fight and cares
for Stephen, who has been
knocked cold. Alone with
the body of Stephen, Bloom
experiences one last vision.
Chapter Sixteen
"Eumaeus"
Bloom takes Stephen to a
cabman's shelter to recover.
He shows Stephen a picture
of Molly, and decides to
take Stephen home with him.
Chapter Seventeen
"Ithaca"
Bloom makes Stephen cocoa
with Molly's cream; Molly
awakens; Stephen decides to
leave; Bloom goes upstairs
to bed and falls asleep at
the side of his wife.
Chapter Eighteen
"Penelope"— Epilogue
Lying beside her sleeping
husband, Molly Bloom reviews
the events of her day; con
siders breaking off her
current affair and resuming
sexual relations with her
husband; remembers the death
of Rudy, and considers con
ceiving another child by her
husband; as she drifts off
to sleep she recalls the
day he proposed to her.
This monologue, which covers
the events of Molly's day as
thoroughly as the first 3/4
of the book have covered her
husband's, is accentuated by
151
THE ODYSSEY ULYSSES
themselves slain; Odysseus
makes himself known to his
father Laertes; and pre
pares for his last journey,
that which Tiresias has
foretold he must make in
order to placate Poseidon.
a repeated yes . . . yes
. . . yes . . . which
affirms a positive and up
lifting ending to this most
unusual day.
152
153
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses.
New York: Midland Press, 1960.
Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1965.
Butcher, S. H., and Lang, A. The Odyssey of Homer. New
York: Random House/Modern Library, 1950.
DeLord, George DeF. "The Odyssey and the Western World,"
The Sewanee Review, LXII (Summer, 1954), 49.
Durant, Will. The Life of Greece. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1939.
Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar,
Straus, & Cudahy, 1957.
Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1959.
Gifford, D. C., and Seideman, R. J. Notes for Joyce. New
York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1974.
Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study. New
York: Vintage Press, reprinted by arrangement with
Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.
Givens, Seon, ed. James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism.
New York: Vanguard Press, 1948.
Goldberg, S. L. James Joyce. New York: Grove Press, 1962.
Hamilton, Edith. The Greek Way. New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1964.
Hanley, Miles. A Word Index to James Joyce's Ulysses.
Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,
1965.
Joyce, James. Collected Poems. New York: Viking Press,
1957.
154
Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Viking Press, 1958.
_________. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New
York: Viking Press, 1964.
_________. Ulysses. New York: Random House/Modern
Library, 1950.
Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1958.
Kain, Richard. Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats
and James Joyce. Norman, Okla.: Universxty of
Oklahoma Press, 1962.
_________. Fabulous Voyager: A Study of James Joyce's
Ulysses. New York: Viking Press, 1959.
Kenner, Hugh. Dublin's Joyce. Boston, Masschusetts:
Beacon Press, 1962.
Kitto, H. D. F. The Greeks. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin
Books, 1951.
_________. Greek Tragedy. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1950.
Levin, Harry, James Joyce. Norfolk, Connecticut: New
Directions, 1941.
Litz, A. Walton. The Art of James Joyce. New York: Ox
ford University Press, 1964.
Magalaner, M., and Kain, R. Joyce: The Man, the Work, the
Reputation. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
Mason, E., and Ellman, R., eds. The Critical Writings of
James Joyce. New York: The Viking Press, 19 59.
Taylor, Charles H., Jr., ed. Essays on The Odyssey.
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1963.
Tindall, William York. James Joyce. New York: Grove
Press, 1960.
_________. A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. New York:
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Rieu, E. V. Homer: The Illiad. Suffolk, England: Pen
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155

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Asset Metadata

Creator Shaw, Anita Ragnhild (author)

Core Title The wayfaring stranger: a non-critical comparison of Odysseus and Leopold Bloom as the appear in the the "Odyssey" by Homer and "Ulysses" by James Joyce

School Graduate School

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Drama

Degree Conferral Date 1976-06

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comparative literature,literature, classical,literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format masters theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Blankenship, John Edward (committee chair), Butler, James H. (committee member), White, William C. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c24-247658

Unique identifier UC11276452

Identifier EP55135.pdf (filename),usctheses-c24-247658 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier EP55135.pdf

Dmrecord 247658

Document Type Thesis

Format masters theses (aat)

Rights Shaw, Anita Ragnhild

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

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