Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ulysses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Alienation and the Quest for Belonging
Literature, Meaning, and Perspective
Love and Sex
Fate vs. Free Will
Religion, Atheism, and Philosophy
Irish Identity and Nationalism
Summary
Analysis
Written in the form of a play script, this long episode of the novel mixes reality and fantasy into a kind of continuous nightmare. The stage directions explain that the scene opens in “nighttown,” Dublin’s red light district. The tram’s “skeleton tracks” stretch past “stunted” people who cluster around, eating coal-colored ice cream under faint gas lights. Anonymous lovers call out for one another and children frighten “a deafmute idiot” by suddenly restraining him. A man sleeps by a dustbin, a stunted man (or “gnome”) picks through the trash, and there are screaming, crashing, and murmuring sounds in the background.
In the Odyssey, the sorceress Circe transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs. Odysseus manages to rescue them with the help of a magic herb from the god Hermes, but in the process, he goes mad and falls in love with Circe. The parallels to this episode should be clear: Bloom goes into nighttown to rescue Stephen, who has been transformed by drunkenness and despair. Bloom has a close call with a prostitute, but narrowly manages to escape. “Circe” is without a doubt the central episode in Ulysses. It picks out every character, theme, and idea mentioned in the novel so far, then remixes them into a nightmare. It also builds up to the long-awaited moment in which Stephen and Bloom truly (if briefly) reunite in the new roles of father and son. Still, the plot of “Circe” really only takes up a small portion of the episode. The rest consists of a series of wild visions (which could also be considered fantasies, hallucinations, or nightmares). These visions dig up and explore Bloom’s deepest fears and desires. In a way, then, “Circe” is like Ulysses’s unconscious. The novel’s other episodes focus on introspection in order to expose characters’ thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. But in “Circe,” Bloom’s repressed feelings and inner demons take human form and literally confront him. In order to get at this unconscious material, Joyce takes an entirely different approach to narrative and perspective: he writes “Circe” as a play. It’s set in Manto (“nighttown”), an extremely poor Dublin neighborhood that also served as Europe’s biggest red light district. According to the obscure, dystopian imagery in this opening scene, nighttown is more than just Dublin’s seedy underbelly: it’s a kind of horrific alternate reality full of death, despair, and cruelty. But it’s often extremely difficult to identify the line that separates reality from fantasy in this episode. In short, how literally should readers take Circe? Does Bloom really see the hallucinations, or are they just metaphors for his inner turmoil? (It’s worth remembering that at the end of the last episode Stephen drank absinthe, which causes hallucinations, but Bloom did not.) Most importantly, what is the relationship between “Circe” and the rest of the novel? Whose perspective does it take? The play-within-a-play has long been used as a plot device, but there’s no window dressing in “Circe”— Joyce gives his readers no context or instructions for interpreting this lengthy script. While most plays are written to be acted out and viewed by an audience, this one clearly isn’t. Is it a real view into Bloom’s journey through nighttown, or is it a deliberately-inflated performance based on a loose interpretation of events? Joyce’s novel has been full of unreliable narrators so far (like the debt collector in “Cyclops” and Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa”). So the reader has little reason to believe that the playwright behind “Circe” is more reliable just because they don’t speak in their own voice. These important questions about voice and perspective don’t get resolved, but they do add another layer of mystery to this complex episode.
Themes
Cissy Caffrey’s voice sings a lewd song, and two drunk British soldiers, Private Carr and Private Compton, laugh and insult her while they march through the lane. They point at “the parson,” Stephen Dedalus, who is walking with Lynch and chanting the Latin mass. An elderly bawd calls them over, but they ignore her. Edy Boardman crouches in the street, narrating an argument with another woman. Stephen tells Lynch about his latest theory: gestures are a “universal language” that can reveal “the structural rhythm” of things.
It’s unclear why Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, Gerty MacDowell’s friends from “Nausicaa,” are hanging around in nighttown. This is just one of the numerous mysteries in “Circe” that blur the line between reality and fantasy: there’s no reason for these young women to be around, but other characters who definitely are present seem to be interacting with them. There’s a good historical reason for British soldiers to be wandering around nighttown: they were stationed nearby, so they were the neighborhood’s main clientele. (In a pretty apt metaphor for the sins of British colonialism, English rule was basically responsible for building the brothel district.) Stephen and Lynch open the episode with a parody of the mass, just like Buck Mulligan did with the very beginning of the book. Meanwhile, Stephen’s drunken theory gives the reader a clue for how to interpret this episode: language is only an indirect expression of the true nature of things (which is better comprehensible through actions). Of course, if true, this would pose a real challenge to Stephen’s attempts to capture absolute truth and beauty through poetry.
Themes
Stephen asks Lynch to hold his ashplant and explains that they’re looking for Georgina Johnson. Lynch refuses to hold Stephen’s stick and passes it straight back to him. Meanwhile, the twins Tommy and Jacky Caffrey climb a nearby lamppost, and a navvy (laborer) leans against it, struggling to walk. Suddenly, the navvy uproots the lamp and walks away with it.
Georgina Johnson is Stephen’s favorite prostitute: evidently, he plans on blowing the rest of his paycheck by visiting her. Stephen has had his ash-wood cane all day, but it only becomes significant in this episode. It’s simultaneously a crutch, a weapon for self-defense, and (Stephen thinks) a source of magical powers. Of course, Stephen gives it credit for the navvy’s unlikely recovery and sudden burst of strength.
Themes
In the distance, Bloom appears through the fog, hiding bread and chocolate in his pocket. He sees different versions of himself in different windows and mirrors. Panting and exhausted, he buys something in the pork butcher Olhausen’s shop. Then, he notices a huge fire nearby. While crossing the street, he almost gets hit by a pair of cyclists and then a trolley. He reminds himself that he needs to start exercising and wonders if the tram driver responsible for this incident was the same one who once ran over his shoe, or who blocked his view of the woman in the carriage that morning.
As usual, Bloom’s sympathy drives him to take on a new altruistic quest—and he’s bringing snacks. The mirrors foreshadow the rest of this episode, in which Bloom will see innumerable different sides of himself and dark corners of his soul reflected back at him. Although the cyclists and trolley only present Bloom with a mild frustration, they signal the dangers ahead (and suggest that Bloom might not be fully prepared for them).
Themes
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Overcome with “brainfogfag,” Bloom chats in Spanish with “a sinister figure” wearing a sombrero, who turns out to be a spy for the nationalist Gaelic League sent by the citizen. A “sackshouldered ragman” blocks Bloom’s path, and then Jacky and Tommy Caffrey barge into him. Bloom checks his pockets and warns himself to be prepared for these dangers. He passes a series of suspicious figures.
Other figures pop out of the fog to taunt and frustrate Bloom. They are expressions of different thoughts and moments from Bloom’s day, which shows how this episode is based on the same kind of associative logic as dreams. For instance, the “sinister figure” merges the citizen’s crusade with Molly’s Spanish mother and a man who wore a Mexican sombrero in an execution scene during “Cyclops.” Of course, there might be a man in the corner, and Bloom might really walk into someone holding a sack—but nighttown’s sinister atmosphere leads Bloom to interpret this scene in a suspicious, paranoid way.
Themes
Bloom hears the voice of his father, who criticizes him for wasting money on drinks, then touches his face to identify him. A scene from the past replays: Bloom’s father reprimanding him for running with his friends and falling in the mud, and then Bloom’s mother suddenly materializes to express shock at her son’s appearance.
Bloom’s visions of his family members make up the first of the major fantasy sequences in “Circe.” His memories primarily revolve around unresolved guilt—just like Stephen, Bloom still regrets his mistakes in the past and hasn’t forgiven himself. In particular, he feels he can’t make amends because both of his parents are now dead.
Themes
Next, Molly appears, wearing a Turkish costume. There’s a gold coin on her forehead, and an obedient camel picks her a mango from a tree. When Bloom starts proclaiming how he can serve Molly, she calls him “a poor old stick in the mud.” He deferentially promises that he will still get Molly’s lotion tomorrow—his bar of soap rises in place of the sun, and the pharmacist shows up to collect a payment. Disdainful, Molly starts humming “Là ci darem” and walks away.
In Bloom’s fantasy, Molly is associated with all the ornaments of the exotic East—which is both a reference to her Andalusian Spanish ancestry and a metaphor for Bloom’s passionate attraction to her. She reduces Bloom to a bumbling fool, and his promises suggest that his generous favors to her are part of a strategy to win back her love. Clearly, she expects more: when she hums “Là ci darem,” the seduction duet from Don Giovanni, she’s suggesting that she’s going to choose Blazes Boylan over her husband.
Themes
Before Bloom can run after Molly, the elderly bawd grabs him and offers him a tryst with Bridie Kelly for ten shillings. A man chases after Bridie, who runs off into the darkness. Gerty MacDowell shows up and tells Bloom that she hates him—but Bloom denies knowing her. The bawd sends Gerty off, but before she goes, Gerty tells Bloom that she loves him for what he did.
Bloom lost his virginity with Bridie Kelly, a prostitute, so in this passage he’s clearly confronting his sense of regret about putting his sexual attraction to other women before his wife Molly. Meanwhile, Gerty MacDowell’s appearance forces Bloom to confront his doubts about whether she really reciprocated his interest on the beach in “Nausicaa.” He will never know, so his conscience will always go back and forth between the two Gertys (the one who loves him and the one who hates him).
Themes
Next, Mrs. Breen materializes and asks what Bloom is doing in nighttown. Bloom tries to greet her politely and chat about the weather, but Breen threatens to tell Molly where she’s seen him. Bloom replies that Molly is also into “the exotic,” like Black men, and then he sees two figures who embody the racist stereotype of singing Black banjo-players. They sing a song and then dance away into the fog. Bloom proposes “a mixed marriage mingling” arrangement to Mrs. Breen. They start flirting and reminiscing about their romance, which began during a party at Georgina Simpson’s house, when Mrs. Breen was still the unmarried Josie Powell.
Mrs. Breen (or Josie Powell) is Bloom’s ex-girlfriend. In this passage, her appearance represents Bloom’s doubts about whether he made the right decision in marrying Molly, as well as his secret desire to have an affair. Of course, throughout the novel, he consistently chooses not to act on this desire—instead, he intentionally maintains a distance from the other women he fancies (like Martha Clifford and Gerty MacDowell). Over the course of their conversation, Bloom and Breen quickly reestablish their old rapport.
Themes
Bloom slips a ruby ring on Mrs. Breen’s finger, but says that he was dismayed that she married Denis Breen instead of him. Suddenly, Denis shuffles past as one of the Hely’s sandwichboard advertisers. Alf Bergan follows him, points, laughs, and says, “U. p: up.” Breen offers Bloom a kiss and asks if he’s brought her a present. Bloom says he’s brought a Kosher snack and claims that he was busy at the play Leah all evening.
As Bloom and Breen briefly reunite and act out the marriage they never had, Bloom slips from guilt into exhilaration. But when Denis Breen walks by, this reminds Bloom that Breen ended up with a pathetic and crazy man instead of him. The Hely’s advertisers make Breen look even more absurd, because Bloom also considers them pathetic (he thinks his ad proposals were far better).
Themes
Richie Goulding shows up with his heavy legal bag and starts selling the sausage, fish, and pills that are inside. The bald waiter Pat materializes with a plate of steak and kidneys. The lamp-carrying navvy runs by, and Richie yells out in pain, “Bright’s! Light’s!” Bloom warns that the navvy is a spy, and Mrs. Breen starts criticizing Bloom for his “humbugging and deluthering” (or deceptiveness).
In another flurry of dream-logic, one thing leads to another faster than the reader can quite make out—Bloom’s not-very-Kosher snack calls up Richie Goulding, who calls up Pat. The navvy’s lamp suggests that Breen is shining a light on Bloom’s true motivations by interrogating him about his snack.
Themes
While the old bawd heckles them, Bloom offers to tell Mrs. Breen a secret. Once again pleasant and agreeable, Josie Breen agrees. Bloom reminisces about going to the races with Josie, Molly, and some other friends. Bloom and Josie started to flirt in the carriage, but as they remember the scene, Mrs. Breen starts repeating, “yes, yes, yes,” then fades into nothingness.
The reader is left to speculate about what Bloom and Breen actually did in the carriage—perhaps even Bloom’s guilty conscience isn’t willing to go there. The first major fantasy ends with Breen’s “yes, yes, yes,” which foreshadows Molly’s final lines at the end of the novel. (Joyce strongly associated “yes” with femininity and the human ability to circle around to the past through memory.)
Themes
Now alone, Bloom trudges ahead through nighttown. He sees a group of loiterers: two armless men are wrestling, and another man talks about the time Bloom accidentally used a bucket of beer as a toilet, while the rest laugh. (Bloom is still embarrassed by this mistake.) Bloom passes a chattering chorus of disheveled prostitutes and sees the navvy fighting with Privates Compton and Carr outside a brothel. Wondering whether he’ll find Stephen at all, Bloom asks why he’s even looking for the young man. A piece of graffiti reminds him of Molly drawing on a frosted windowpane, and the smell of cigarettes reminds him of The Sweets of Sin.
Bloom continues to see reflections of his own guilt, shame, and embarrassment in his environment. This is tied to his sense that his entire quest might be pointless—Stephen doesn’t even know he’s coming (and probably doesn’t care). In a way, this scene suggests that Bloom is going after Stephen because he wants to cope with his unresolved guilt. (Of course, this means his sense of guilt about failing his family and, especially, losing his son Rudy.)
Themes
Bloom decides that his snacks were a waste of money and starts playing with a kind dog that has been following him. He reluctantly pulls out the pork he bought from the butcher and feeds it to the dog. Suddenly, two policemen approach Bloom, who insists that he’s “doing good to others.” Cake-munching seagulls fly past and drunk Bob Doran briefly materializes to pet the dog. Bloom explains that he’s good to animals, and a gaudily-dressed lion tamer starts discussing the painful punishments he uses to control his lions.
Bloom feeds animals throughout the novel (like his cat in “Calypso” and the birds in “Lestrygonians”). This imagery returns once again to represent his kindness and decency. But when the police approach Bloom, he gets stuck in a common kind of nightmare: no matter how hard he tries to do right, he ends up doing wrong and feeling guilty about it. While the police officers might be glancing in his direction in nighttown, their interrogation is the beginning of Bloom’s second extended fantasy.
Themes
When the policemen ask for Bloom’s name and address, Bloom claims to be the dentist with the same name, and then pretends to belong to the Legion of Honor. The white card falls out of his hat, identifying Bloom as Henry Flower, and then he pulls a flower out of his pocket and tries to explain that his name is a joke. Martha shows up and asks Bloom to “clear [her] name,” while Bloom tells the police that he’s innocent and merely being mistaken for someone else. He says he’s an innocent, respectable, but misunderstood man and notes that his father-in-law is the war hero Majorgeneral Tweedy. He claims to have fought for the British in the Boer War in South Africa.
Bloom lies compulsively, as though acting against his own will, and the world seems to be conspiring against him. Like when he fails to place Keyes’s ad in “Aeolus” and gets in the fight in “Cyclops,” Bloom’s good intentions actually get him in trouble, because the world is corrupt. He doesn’t belong because he’s a good person (not to mention a social and religious outsider). This is an important dimension of his personality throughout the book: tragically, his good intentions often lead him to make poor decisions and involve himself in sticky situations. He feels like he’s fighting against fate and doesn’t have control over his own destiny. But he’s also not willing to sell out and compromise his fundamental goodness.
Themes
The police ask for Bloom’s occupation, and he says he’s an “author-journalist.” Suddenly, Myles Crawford turns up with copies of the “Freeman’s Urinal” and the “Weekly Arsewipe.” Next, the prize-winning storywriter Philip Beaufoy materializes on a witness stand and declares that Bloom is a petty plagiarist who copied his stories. Bloom meekly criticizes Beaufoy’s story, while Beaufoy extravagantly mocks Bloom for never going to university and accuses him of “moral rottenness.”
Bloom’s lie about his job is almost automatic, or even inadvertent. He names the job he wants, not the one he has. (He just places ads; he’s really neither an author nor a journalist.) In fact, this refers back to this episode’s major theme: the inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Crawford’s toilet humor is a reference to Bloom wiping himself with Titbits magazine during the outhouse scene in “Calypso,” so it’s no coincidence that Beaufoy materializes next. (He’s the mediocre author of the Titbits story “Matcham’s Masterstroke.”) Clearly, Bloom is insecure about his lack of education. And ironically, Bloom’s deep fear of “moral rottenness” is a pretty clear indication that he’s actually a good person.
Themes
The police call the servant girl Mary Driscoll in their case, “The King versus Bloom.” While Bloom protests that he treated Driscoll well, giving her presents and defending her against accusations of pilfering, Driscoll explains that Bloom once approached her behind the house and tried to take advantage of her. The court announces that “the accused will now make a bogus statement,” and surely enough, Bloom goes on “a long unintelligible speech” about his childhood and his desire to live a peaceful life with his loving family. Everyone laughs at Bloom, who then gets cross-examined about the mess he made in the bucket of beer on Beaver Street.
Bloom’s courtroom fantasy turns from his lies about his identity and exaggerations about his social status to his misbehavior towards women. According to his former maid, he sexually harassed her on the job—and given the way he gawked at the neighbor’s serving-girl in “Calypso,” the reader can be pretty confident that he’s guilty. His extremely cliched “bogus statement” suggests that there’s no way he can truly make up for his behavior: the fact that he’s a good person in general doesn’t erase his specific criminal act. Of course, Stephen has repeatedly noted this same problem throughout the novel: no good action now can make up for his moral failures in the past (especially his failure to pray for his dying mother).
Themes
The lawyer J.J. O’Molloy defends Bloom, claiming that he’s merely an “errant mortal” and “poor foreign immigrant” trying to “turn an honest penny.” Bloom never wanted intimacy with Driscoll, O’Molloy claims, but rather was merely acting out the primitive desires hidden away in his foreign Mongol blood. Bloom starts babbling in an imitation of Chinese people struggling to speak English, and he gets laughed down again.
Even though he’s supposed to be defending Bloom, J.J. O’Molloy’s speech is full of exaggerated racist tropes about immigrants and Jewish people—evidently, he wants his Irish jury to feel pity for the racially inferior Bloom. In addition to letting Joyce mock Irish racists’ illogical arguments, this speech reveals that Bloom really does feel like an alienated racial outsider in Dublin (even though, during the day, he avoids self-pity while staying open and unashamed about his identity).
Themes
O’Molloy continues his defense, arguing that the respectable Bloom treated Driscoll like “his very own daughter” and would never “do anything ungentlemanly” to degrade a virtuous girl. In fact, O’Molloy now identifies Bloom as “the whitest man I know” and explains that he’s struggling financially, having mortgaged his Middle Eastern fruit fields. Moses Dlugacz mystically appears, holding oranges and pork kidneys. O’Molloy transforms into the sickly legal genius John F. Taylor and then the eloquent defender Seymour Bushe, who asks for Bloom to get “the sacred benefit of the doubt.”
By comparing Mary Driscoll to Milly Bloom and commenting on her age, O’Molloy is inadvertently making an ironic point—Bloom does degrade virtuous young women his daughter’s age, like Gerty MacDowell. Gerty and Mary are just two of the numerous women in this novel who represent the Virgin Mary, so Bloom’s sexual misdeeds are clearly tied with his apparently blasphemous rejection of Christianity. O’Molloy repeats the same pattern when he praises Bloom’s whiteness—he appeals to Irish people’s racism in order to defend a man from an ethnic minority group. Of course, he also directly contradicts everything he said earlier about Bloom’s pitiful inferiority and foreignness. So Bloom clearly doesn’t think he’s an actual legal genius.
Themes
Bloom presents a list of character references, but he accidentally starts lying about talking to the great astronomer Sir Robert Ball. In response, several respectable women stand to testify against Bloom. Mrs. Yelverton Barry reports that Bloom wrote her a letter praising her “peerless globes.” Mrs. Bellingham says he also wrote to her, complimenting her furs and legs before proposing she “commit adultery at the earliest possible opportunity” with him. Dressed as an Amazon and carrying a hunting crop, The Honourable Mrs. Mervyn Talboys calls Bloom a “plebian Don Juan” and accuses him of sending her a nude photograph of Molly and a letter requesting that she chastise and whip him.
It’s not apparent whether Bloom really committed the offenses that these women describe, or if he actually just thought about them. While the women’s refined language suggests their upper-class status, it also might be a reference to Bloom’s awkwardness and tendency to get tongue-tied when he talks to women (including his wife). And when Mrs. Talboys calls him a “plebian Don Juan,” she’s implicitly comparing him to the classier and more successful Blazes Boylan, who is busy singing a duet from Don Giovanni (Italian for “Don Juan”) with Molly Bloom.
Themes
These three women (and several others) hold up letters from Bloom. Mrs. Talboys threatens to “flay [Bloom] alive,” and Bloom squirms in delight and says he “love[s] the danger.” He asks for a mere spanking, but she promises to unleash her “dormant tigress” on him. Mrs. Bellingham and Mrs. Barry cheer her on, while Bloom begs for forgiveness. Mrs. Talboys names Bloom a “wellknown cuckold” and threatens to lower his trousers. As evidence, the newsboy Davy Stephen brings in a newspaper listing “all the cuckolds in Dublin,” Father O’Hanlon displays Father Conroy’s marble cuckoo clock, and the brass rings on Bloom’s bed start jingling.
Bloom evidently likes being punished and threatened by powerful women. This provides important context for an upcoming scene in the madame Bella Cohen’s brothel. Contrary to all his worrying during the day, he actually seems to even get some perverse pleasure out of knowing that Molly has been with another man. The newspapers suggest that everyone in Dublin really does know about Molly and Boylan—or at least Bloom imagines that they do (or wants them to). In case the reader had any doubt that the cuckoo clock and jingling bed were symbols of cuckoldry, Joyce makes it exceedingly obvious here by putting them out on display.
Themes
A cloud of fog lifts to show the trial’s jury, which comprises most of the men Bloom met throughout the day. The court crier officially lists Bloom’s crimes (planting bombs, forgery, bigamy, prostitution, cuckoldry, and public nuisance). Recorder Frederick Falkiner sentences Bloom to death by hanging, and Long John Fanning asks, “Who’ll hang Judas Iscariot?” The master barber H. Rumbold volunteers.
Numerous aspects of this courtroom scene foreshadow Stephen’s metaphorical crucifixion at the end of this episode. Of course, in this case, Bloom seems to be getting crucified, and is also specifically associated with the traitor Judas. At other moments, he’s also been associated with God, the prophet Elijah, and St. Paul. Rather than fixing one-to-one correspondences between characters and religious figures, the novel uses these figures as archetypes to illuminate the characters’ changing instincts and goals.
Themes
In a desperate attempt to save himself, Bloom starts rambling and asks to talk to Hynes. The policemen accuse Bloom of planting a bomb, which was really the pig’s foot he fed to the dog. The dog appears, expands to the size of a man, and reveals that it’s Paddy Dignam. Dignam confirms that Bloom was at his funeral. He speaks the Hamlet ghost’s words in Esau’s voice and claims to be undergoing metempsychosis. Dignam summarizes the story of his death, then John O’Connell and Father Coffey show up to reenact his funeral. Dog-Dignam crawls into a hole, followed by a hungry rat. Tom Rochford shows up with his machine, then looks for Reuben J. Dodd in a manhole.
Bloom’s sense of guilt transforms into utter terror at the idea of his own death. In this scene, he re-enacts a distorted version of Paddy Dignam’s funeral in order to confront that fear. Dignam-Hamlet-Esau’s comments about metempsychosis give Bloom an alternative to his scientific view of death: they suggest that it’s possible to become reincarnated as someone else. In fact, Dignam’s multiple voices suggest that people’s identities are always multiple, anyway. This leads Bloom’s fantasy to dissolve because it challenges the basis for his feelings of sinfulness: his sense that he is singular, guilty, and unable to change.
Themes
Bloom pushes through the fog and sees personified kisses flying around his head, with cutesy messages for him. He hears church music and meets Zoe Higgins, a young prostitute, who reports that Stephen and Lynch are inside Mrs. Cohen’s brothel. Zoe asks if Bloom is Stephen’s father—he says no—and then sticks her hand down his pants. She pulls out his lucky potato and decides to keep it. Charmed, Bloom hears “oriental music” and imagines an exoticized scene of the East, complete with gazelles, a white “womancity,” roses, and wine. The garlic-breathed Zoe bites on Bloom’s ear, and he sees kings’ gold and bones in place of the roses.
The long second fantasy ends, and Bloom lurches back into reality. Zoe understandably interprets Bloom searching for Stephen as a father looking for his son. When Zoe pulls Bloom’s lucky potato out of his pants, this is what makes him vulnerable to her charms. Like Odysseus’s magic herb, the potato protected Bloom against the prostitutes’ seductive magic. But without it, he immediately starts linking Zoe to the same Eastern imagery that he always associates with Molly. This is practically the first time in the novel that anyone actually wants Bloom around, so it’s no wonder that he gets a little entranced.
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Zoe asks for a cigarette, but Bloom explains that he doesn’t smoke. She invites him to “make a stump speech,” and he starts proudly talking about the dangers of tobacco. Another fantasy takes over. Church bells chime, and Bloom is declared the mayor of Dublin. He discusses building a tramline to bring cattle across the city, and the city’s nobility appears to celebrate him. The former mayor proposes distributing his brilliant speech in the papers and naming a street after him.
Many of the novel’s other characters aren’t interested in Bloom’s technical lectures or complicated political opinions. But Zoe welcomes them all—even if just because she wants him to pay for her services. Clearly, Zoe’s interest and appreciation are what launch Bloom into this third major fantasy, which shows off his grandiose plans to fix all the world’s problems. This is a natural response to the sense of political powerlessness and social alienation that he repeatedly feels throughout the day. Of course, Joyce is also poking fun at himself and his reader, since most people probably daydream occasionally about what they would do if they ruled the world.
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Bloom starts talking about the dangers of industrial machinery, and suddenly all of Dublin starts to celebrate in his honor. John Howard Parnell leads a parade that also includes numerous other political, religious, and economic leaders. Sitting on a white horse under an arch, Bloom is proclaimed “emperor-president and king-chairman,” and all of Dublin cries out, “God save Leopold the First!”
In this fantasy, Bloom suddenly resembles a traditional epic hero much more than the modernist everyman hero that he has embodied throughout Ulysses so far. He’s all powerful, which means the world can no longer prevent him from fulfilling his will. In short, fate no longer controls him: he controls fate. Joyce’s satire has multiple targets here, including Bloom’s grandiose fantasies, Irish nationalists’ inflated sense of self-importance, and European monarchies’ archaic customs.
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Bloom swears his oath and takes his throne, then immediately sends Molly away and marries “the princess Selene, the splendour of night.” John Howard Parnell names Bloom as his brother Charles’s rightful successor. Bloom receives the keys and charter to Dublin, then starts speaking of a great military victory and proclaiming the beginning of “a new era.” He will build “the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem.” A group of workmen immediately start building the new Bloomusalem, a huge kidney-shaped building. In the process, the workmen tear down much of Dublin, and several of them die dramatic deaths.
In his hilarious, exaggerated fantasy coronation, Bloom chooses the Irish lineage of the Parnell brothers over the English lineage of the monarchy. “The new Bloomusalem” is a reference to “the new Jerusalem,” the holy city that represents heaven on earth after the second coming. Therefore, Bloom isn’t just fantasizing about political power: he’s imagining himself as the Messiah, creating the world in his own image. In a way, then, this scene is similar to Stephen’s daydreams about revolutionizing literature, politics, and religion all at once through his art.
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Suddenly, the man in the brown macintosh emerges from a trapdoor and declares that Bloom is an impostor, and his real name is Higgins. Bloom orders the man shot, and he and most of Bloom’s enemies are killed. Bloom’s bodyguard gives out gifts and prizes, while a mob of women assembles to fight for Bloom’s attention. Bloom generously greets the people of Dublin, tickling babies, playing with children, and performing tricks for his audience. Even the citizen praises Bloom.
It makes sense that the man in the macintosh is the one to dissent against Bloom’s rule. His identity is unknown, so he represents the anonymous, faceless enemy who could be anybody or nobody at all. In this way, he’s a foil for Bloom, whom the novel will later call “Everyman or Noman.” Of course, if the man in the macintosh represents James Joyce himself, then this scene represents the author rebelling against his own work. The adoration that Bloom receives from the crowd expresses his underlying need for attention and affirmation. Interestingly, the man in the macintosh calls Bloom “Higgins” because that was his mother’s maiden name. It’s significant that he shares this name with the prostitute Zoe Higgins. Perhaps she represents a maternal figure because she gives him love and affection, or perhaps she represents Bloom’s secret fear of incest because she’s barely older than his daughter Milly.
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Bloom dispenses perfect financial, medical, astronomical, gardening, and parenting advice to a series of needy Dubliners. He orders a series of exaggerated public reforms, including “free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church.” He starts singing and telling jokes, and he’s declared “the funniest man on earth.” Attractive women start committing suicide because of their love for him.
At the same time as he wants power, affection, and respect, Bloom also genuinely fantasizes about helping people. Throughout the day, he thinks that his sense of moral good and his extensive knowledge about the world could be put to better use. He’s probably right. In this part of his vision, Bloom marries his fantasy of infinite power with this desire to help people through education, secularism, and progressive policies. Of course, Bloom is also more than a little vain, as demonstrated by his desire to be a comedian and heartthrob. Joyce definitely also wants his readers to consider how their own fantasies express their deepest desires.
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Suddenly, the preacher Alexander J. Dowie begins speaking out against Bloom, declaring him a debaucherous disgrace and hypocritical heretic. A lynch mob assembles and throws trash at him, and he responds by quoting Shakespeare and claiming that his brother, Henry, is guilty. The “sex specialist” Dr. Buck Mulligan appears and gives convoluted medical testimony about Bloom’s sexual problems. Doctors Madden, Crotthers, and Punch Costello agree, and Dr. Dixon explains that Bloom is an “example of the new womanly man.” Bloom then gives birth to eight boys, who instantly become respectable, well-educated gentlemen with prominent jobs.
Suddenly, the tables turn: Bloom switches back from grandiose pride to guilt and shame. These negative feelings center on sex, religion, and Bloom’s femininity compared to other men in Dublin. Alexander J. Dowie is the American Baptist preacher from the pamphlet in “Lestrygonians.” His objection represents religious tradition trying to stop modernization and change. Meanwhile, the doctors from “Oxen of the Sun” represent the opposite idea: Bloom is too modern, too rational and scientific. Therefore, he gives birth, violating the sacred tradition of women’s fertility. Again, it’s worth asking what Joyce is trying to do with the play in this scene. Bloom might actually be hallucinating or having these elaborate visions. However, “Circe” could also just represent Joyce’s answer to a difficult literary challenge: how can a stream of consciousness be captured through the form of a play? Whereas Joyce represented the stream of consciousness more literally in the other episodes, by narrating the protagonists’ thoughts and feelings, in this episode he has to turn those thoughts and feelings into characters and bring them to life.
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A mysterious voice declares that Bloom is the Messiah. Bloom performs a series of acrobatic miracles, then twists his face into those of famous historical figures. A representative of the Vatican recounts Bloom’s entire lineage, showing that he descends from Moses, and a hand appears to write “Bloom is a cod” on a wall.
The comparison between Bloom and the Messiah is now explicit, but it’s totally lighthearted. Even Bloom’s miracles are a wacky parody of Jesus’s. The pun between “God” and “cod” (the fish) has shown up a few times in the novel, most notably at the beginning of “Lestrygonians,” when Bloom compared a glowing crucifix to a glowing tin of codfish. Joyce is certainly mocking Bloom and the church, but he’s also mocking his own ambition for imagining that Ulysses will rise to the level of other great historical novels.
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A crab, a baby, and a hollybush accuse Bloom of doing something sinister in public. His head and arms are put in a pillory, and children dance in circles around him, singing degrading songs. Hornblower the porter announces that people will start throwing fake stones at Bloom and defiling him, and they do. Old friends mock him, and Reuben J. Dodd appears with his son’s corpse. The Dublin fire department sets fire to Bloom, who tells the “daughters of Erin [Ireland]” not to cry for him. Then, a choir of Erin’s daughters appears in black robes, with prayerbooks and candles, and asks for prayers from symbols representing the novel’s different episodes (like “Kidney of Bloom” and “Wandering Soap”). A much larger choir follows them and sings a chorus from Handel’s Messiah.
Bloom’s sin is clearly public masturbation (like in “Nausicaa”). But his punishment is whimsical and lighthearted, just like his miracles in the last section. Apparently, Bloom is repeating the stages of his earlier fantasy, but now as a farce. (Perhaps he’s realizing how exaggerated it is.) When Reuben J. Dodd shows up with his son’s corpse, Bloom’s fantasy appears to be mocking the fact that he’s still mourning for his own son, a decade after his death. And the chorus of the “daughters of Erin” mocks Joyce’s heavy-handed use of symbols throughout the novel. All in all, this punishment scene is very different from the earlier courtroom scene, because it shows Bloom recognizing that his problems may not be as serious as they seem.
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Zoe reappears and tells Bloom to “talk away till [he’s] black in the face.” Bloom briefly assumes the role of an Irish peasant longing to go home, and he gives a dramatic speech asking to leave. Zoe makes fun of him and criticizes his insincerity. Bloom calls her “a necessary evil” and starts feeling her nipples. She asks for ten shillings and offers to take Bloom inside. Bloom complains about Molly getting jealous and then starts to babble like an infant. But Zoe tempts him to go inside. He has a vision of “all the male brutes” who have been with her, and he trips on his way up the front steps. Inside, a man walks by like an ape and Bloom sniffs around like a dog as he follows Zoe to the music room.
Bloom comes back to reality. It turns out that no time has passed at all, because Zoe is continuing the same line she started before Bloom’s emperor fantasy (“Make a stump speech […] talk away till you’re black in the face”). Thus, the entire fantasy actually took place in a split second of real time. This shows how much Joyce distorts the timeline throughout this episode (and the novel as a whole). Bloom’s brief appearance as an Irish peasant (from one of the playwright Synge’s works) is a joke about both Irish identity and Bloom’s complicated relationship to it as the child of an immigrant. Specifically, Joyce is yet again mocking the nationalists who define rural peasants as the only “true” Irish people. Bloom’s attitude towards Zoe changes rapidly: she seems to encompass all the novel’s female characters. In one moment, he’s sexually interested in her, and in the next she becomes a mother figure for him. Finally, the animal imagery inside the brothel again ties this episode to the Odyssey (in which Circe turned Odysseus’s men into pigs).
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In the music room, Lynch is on the rug, keeping time with a wand. The prostitute Kitty Ricketts sits on the table, and Stephen prods at the pianola, playing perfect fifths. Florry Talbot, another prostitute, is laying on the couch. Stephen rants incomprehensibly about music, and Lynch’s hat mockingly challenges him to finish a coherent idea instead of just stringing together sophisticated-sounding nonsense. Stephen says that, because a perfect fifth is “the greatest possible interval,” it represents the furthest point that something (like “God, the sun, Shakespeare, [or] a commercial traveller”) can travel from its home before starting to make a homecoming.
When Bloom catches up with Stephen, half of “Circe” has already passed (although it has really just been a few minutes). As always, Stephen is busy philosophizing away. And like Bloom’s unnecessary scientific explanations, Stephen’s chatter annoys and alienates other people. (This parallel helps establish the father-son resemblance between them.) But actually, Stephen’s comments are an important metaphor for the novel’s plot, which is essentially a story of both Bloom and Stephen venturing out into the world and then returning home. Stephen lists some of the other versions this motif has taken throughout the novel. God voyaged to Earth in the form of Jesus and returned through the crucifixion. The sun travels to the highest point in the sky at noon, and then back down again. Shakespeare went to spend his career in London and then returned home to Stratford in old age. The “commercial traveller” is a clear allusion to Bloom, although it also foreshadows the sailor that Bloom and Stephen will meet in the next episode. Of course, Stephen is leaving out two essential voyagers: Odysseus going to the Trojan War and returning to Ithaca, and Stephen himself going to Paris and returning to Dublin. The “greatest possible interval,” or the farthest distance the hero ventures from home, is essentially the climax of their journey. Of course, this metaphor allows Joyce to frame this brothel scene, which contains the climax of the novel.
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Florry Talbot says that she read in the paper that the Antichrist is arriving soon, and newsboys run by, confirming the news. “Reuben J. Antichrist, wandering Jew” hobbles into view with his son’s body, which is hanging from a boat pole. Punch Costello appears in the form of a hobgoblin and tumbles around, yelling in French. Florry Talbot repeats that the world is indeed ending.
In Bloom’s last fantasy, he became the Messiah and acted out the Second Coming. Now, Florry Talbot proposes the opposite metaphor (even though she’s just commenting on a sensationalist article she saw in the newspapers). Reuben J. Dodd and Punch Costello are two of the most despised characters in the novel. Dodd has been the target of many Dubliners’ anti-Semitic scorn, and Bloom hated Costello for his vulgarity and disrespectfulness.
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A rocket explodes in the sky, releasing a white star, and a two-headed octopus starts twirling around and talking in a Scottish accent. The prophet Elijah starts speaking about the end of the world in a slick American accent and yelling at God (or “Mr. President”) about whether Florry, Zoe, and Kitty are devout enough. Each of the women reveals when they first had sex. Stephen’s drinking buddies appear, representing Jesus’s eight beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Then, the librarians Lyster, Best, and Eglinton pass by, dressed absurdly and arguing about the value of beauty versus truth. Finally, the Celtic God of the Underworld, Mananaun MacLir, materializes and starts talking about Hinduism.
This scene juxtaposes a number of different religious traditions and philosophical worldviews. The Christian visions seem to be fighting with the theosophical, mythical, and artistic ones over who is right about the end of the world. Thus, this scene represents the conflict between these different worldviews in Stephen’s mind and the modern world. The two-headed octopus is a complicated allusion to the poet George Russell, while the prophet Elijah represents the American preacher Alexander J. Dowie.
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Lynch tosses Zoe a cigarette, then starts lifting up her skirt. She’s not wearing any underwear, but he pretends that he’s not looking. Bloom is, and then he launches into another fantasy: his grandfather, Lipoti Virag, shoots through the chimney into the room, wearing a brown macintosh. He comments in detail on the three prostitutes. Zoe isn’t wearing any underwear and has an injection mark on her thigh. Kitty dresses carefully to hide her thin frame and is faking her sadness. Florry has impressive “protuberances” both at the chest and rear, but Bloom doesn’t like her stye (a kind of eye bump due to bacterial infection). Bloom and Virag discuss medical remedies for the stye.
This fantasy represents what’s happening in Bloom’s head while he looks at the three prostitutes and thinks about whether he wants to sleep with one of them. While his association with the man in the brown macintosh is a mystery, Virag represents Bloom’s obsession with sex and analytical scientific attitude. Although Virag is clearly interested in the women, he’s also totally unemotional and detached. This is similar to how Bloom thought about Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa.” Notably, it’s not at all the same part of Bloom’s mind that’s responsible for his love and attraction for Molly.
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Virag encourages Bloom to think harder. He mentions various medical procedures and Bloom’s forgotten ambitions, then he starts talking about the sex lives of insects and refers Bloom to his book, Fundamentals of Sexology. They compare aphrodisiac oysters to women’s bodies and think about animals drinking women’s breastmilk. Virag talks to the moth circling the lamp, and the moth talks back with a childish poem. Henry Flower, Bloom’s alter ego, appears as a handsome, well-dressed gentleman in a sombrero. Then all three versions of Bloom are together: “Virag truculent,” “Grave Bloom,” and “Henry gallant.”
With the introduction of gallant Henry Flower, this fantasy presents Bloom as a man of three minds. Virag represents his analytic side, Flower represents his sentimental side, and “Grave Bloom” represents his serious and practical side. Of course, Joyce is also making fun of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Bloom and Virag’s conversation about animals is yet another reference to the sorceress Circe turning Odysseus’s men into pigs in the Odyssey. Meanwhile, the moth circling the lamp is a metaphor for the way Bloom obsessively circles around women, without daring to actually approach them.
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Stephen mutters to himself about returning home. Florry asks him to sing “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” but he refuses, since he’s a “most finished artist.” Stephen imagines an argument between two personalities: “Philip Sober,” who tells him to settle his debts, and “Philip Drunk” who rants passionately about music and philosophy.
Stephen is still thinking about his homecoming, a motif that points to his two major conflicts at this point in the novel. First, where is he going to sleep tonight? And secondly, who is he and what is he going to do with his life? (His drunk personality encourages him to follow his passions, and his sober personality wants him to be practical.) “Love’s Old Sweet Song” is the famous ballad that Molly Bloom is rehearsing to sing on her tour. It’s about the enduring power of love, but Stephen’s refusal to sing it suggests that he has serious doubts about whether love can really be so powerful and long-lasting. (He’s probably thinking about his dead mother.) When he calls himself a “finished” artist, this is doublespeak. On the one hand, he is finished, or spent and burned out—he has no energy left to sing. On the other, he strives to be a finished artist in the sense of forming a complete and stable identity.
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Zoe reports that a priest came to visit her, and Lipoti Virag responds that this is a logical expression of the Christian belief in humankind’s original sin. He goes on to describe this original sin in colorful, vulgar detail. Zoe explains that the priest “couldn’t get a connection,” and Virag howls at the moon like a werewolf and declares that Jesus was a bastard and charlatan. Kitty mentions a colleague named Mary, whose child died of convulsions, and Lynch calls the three prostitutes “three wise virgins.” Virag accuses the Virgin Mary of adultery.
The priest who visits prostitutes and the concept of original sin are both indirect comments on Stephen’s dilemma. He’s dressed like a priest, and he used to want to be one. His guilt about failing to pray for his dying mother hangs over him just like original sin hangs over humanity in the Christian tradition. Thus, Virag suggests that Stephen is continuing to fall into sin because he cannot cope with his sins of the past. Of course, he’s also blasphemously rejecting the entire Christian tradition, which is understandable because he’s a man of science. By turning him into a werewolf, however, the novel both references the sorceress Circe and satirizes anti-Semitic depictions of Jews as animals like werewolves. Meanwhile, the “wise virgins” comment connects a number of women in the novel: the prostitutes, the Virgin Mary, Gerty MacDowell, the nurses from the maternity hospital, and the old virgins from Stephen’s Parable of the Plums.
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Ben Dollard appears as a strapping, hairy brute and starts to sing, which prompts the virgin nurses Callan and Quigley to burst in the room and jump at him. Holding a woman’s severed head, Henry Flower grooms himself and then leaves. Virag unscrews his own head and follows Flower out. As they chat about the clergy, Florry jokes that Stephen is “a spoiled priest,” and Lynch says that his father is a cardinal. Stephen appears as a Catholic cardinal, wearing a tattered uniform. Cardinal Dedalus cites a solemn verse, then sings a merry limerick, gets attacked by flies, and walks off into the distance singing a solemn song.
Dollard is a foil for Stephen: whereas Stephen cannot sing and sleeps with prostitutes, Dollard sings beautifully and attracts virgins. So is Cardinal Dedalus, who represents the sense of duty and intellectual seriousness that Stephen also aspires to. So even though they’re both total parodies, they represent the two futures that Stephen has to choose between. The woman’s head that Flower holds is probably Martha’s; it represents the way Bloom only gets to know her from a distance (through the mind, severed from the body).
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A man opens a door, leaves the brothel, and lingers on the stairs outside. Bloom instinctively offers Zoe some chocolate and starts wondering whether the man was Boylan. Bloom imagines himself in a fancy fur overcoat and pleads for the man to leave, which he does. Bloom wonders if the chocolate is an aphrodisiac and tells himself that, unlike the priest, he has to finish when he sleeps with Zoe.
Like a good, protective father, Bloom starts giving out snacks. He’s done this throughout the novel, mostly to animals. (His fancy fur coat references the Odyssey and connects this moment to those earlier instances by suggesting that he’s turning into an animal.) When he starts thinking about sex, he instinctively starts comparing himself to others (virile Boylan and the sterile priest). This shows that he’s clearly anxious about his ability—which makes sense, as he hasn’t actually had sex in years.
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The “massive whoremistress” Bella Cohen enters the room, wearing an elegant gown and holding a large handheld fan. She stares at Bloom, who imagines that her fan starts talking to him. The fan notes that Bloom is married, declares that they already know each other from his dreams, and promises that Bella will dominate him. Bloom enthusiastically asks to be dominated. The fan insists that Bloom tie Bella’s bootlaces—an old fantasy of his—and he does it with relish. The hoof of Bella’s boot taunts and threatens Bloom, whose face starts sagging like a dog’s.
Bella Cohen is Joyce’s Circe. She immediately stands in stark contrast to Kitty, Florry, and Zoe. The other prostitutes are young, poor, and slight, while Bella is old, rich, and enormous. Like Circe, she entrances Bloom and turns him into a (metaphorical) animal. And she gives Bloom a new place to project the domination fantasies that he first mentioned in his earlier visions, when the three noblewomen accused him of harassment.
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Bella demands Bloom’s praise, then forces him to walk on all fours like an animal. (For several pages, the novel refers to Bella as “Bello” and uses male pronouns for her, while using the conventionally female pronouns she/her/hers for Bloom.) Bella grinds her heel into Bloom’s neck, then uses him as a footstool and demands his obedience. After promising to obey, Bloom hides under the sofa out of fear. Bella sweetly coaxes Bloom out, then drags him across the floor by his hair and starts promising to cruelly punish him. Bella twists Bloom’s arm, slaps him in the face, and sits on top of him while smoking a cigar and talking about stock prices.
By switching Bella and Bloom’s pronouns, the novel suggests that Bloom’s desire to be dominated makes him less of a man. Although he’s using this technique for comic and rhetorical effect, Joyce clearly associates power with the male role and weakness with the female one. But despite this notable pronoun shift, Bloom resembles a pathetic dog more than anything else during this section of his fantasy. More than anything else, this fantasy is an expression of Bloom’s shame at his sexual perversions, his failure to father a son, and his inability to give Molly everything she needs.
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Bella rides Bloom like a horse, and he mutters, “not man […] woman.” She comments that he’s getting what he always wanted, and she orders him to change into women’s silk clothing. Bella promises to treat Bloom like any other prostitute, making him wear makeup, perfume, and a tight corset. Bella reminds Bloom of when he tried on Molly’s clothes and posed in Miriam Dandrade's underwear, and a chorus of voices called “the sins of the past” appears to reveal Bloom’s most egregious fantasies. Bella asks Bloom to reveal his worst fantasy of all, but he can’t get the words out. Bella tells Bloom he will have to clean up after the other ladies at the brothel, in addition to working as a prostitute. She auctions off Bloom’s virginity, and an unknown buyer offers one hundred pounds.
In Bloom’s vision, he turns from a dog into a woman, and then he gets sexually objectified as one of Bella’s prostitutes. He obviously enjoys the whole process, which apparently isn’t even his most extreme sexual fantasy. In fact, Bloom simultaneously acts out his fantasy and confronts his guilt about the same fantasy (as well as his “sins of the past”). Arguably, this vision’s purpose is to help him separate his desire from his guilt and shame.
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Bella starts taunting Bloom by reminding him that “a man of brawn” (Blazes Boylan) has taken his place as Molly’s lover. Bloom pleads for forgiveness from Molly, but Bella says it’s too late. Bloom has a vision of Molly as a young girl, but he soon realizes that it’s really Milly, his daughter. Bella points out that Bloom chased other women while ignoring his wife, so it’s no surprise that other men are now taking his place in his bed. She tells him to die and leave her everything he owns in his will. Bloom weeps while a crowd of Jewish men prays for him.
Bella forces Bloom to confront more and more of his inner demons. Evidently, he blames himself for Boylan’s affair with Molly, and he yearns for a youth that he and Molly can never recover. He feels like he’s forfeited his right to preside over his home because of these misdeeds. In short, he blames himself for his own exclusion and alienation. But his distress in this section shows that he genuinely yearns to repair his relationship with Molly and become the better husband that she demands.
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A nymph appears out of a funeral pyre and tells Bloom to stop crying. She says that he found her “in evil company” and reveals that she comes from a photo in a pornographic magazine, which Bloom tore out and framed on his and Molly’s bedroom wall. Bloom kisses the nymph and praises her body, but she reminds him about all the vile things that she has seen in his bedroom, like the soiled clothes and the broken commode.
In his fantasy, Bloom seems to have died and become some kind of immortal spirit being through metempsychosis. (Or maybe he’s just hallucinating within his hallucination.) The pornographic photo with the nymph was briefly mentioned in “Calypso.” Bloom’s desire for the nymph represents his sexual straying and his failure to put Molly first. Meanwhile, the nymph has seen his intimate life up close—including his perversions, filth, and failure to provide enough for Molly. The nymph knows how Bloom has defiled his own home, so it’s unsurprising that Blazes Boylan has usurped it.
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Bloom hears the sound of the Poulaphouca Waterfall, which he visited on a field trip in high school. Adolescent Bloom appears and the yew trees accuse him of doing something profane underneath them. Bloom struggles to justify his behavior, remembering his crush on Lotty Clarke and insisting that nobody saw him. Besides, all the girls found him too ugly. Bloom remembers a goat bleating on Howth Hill and imagines a dummy of himself rolling off a cliff.
This field trip seems to be an important early sexual experience for Bloom. Specifically, it appears to have been the first time he masturbated in public. Therefore, it represents the moment when his sexual perversions began. Meanwhile, Howth Hill is the place where he proposed to Molly—this scene is significant becuase it recurs in her soliloquy at the end of the novel.
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Arching her body seductively, the nymph proclaims that immortals are “stonecold and pure,” and Bloom confesses more sins. Meanwhile, Kitty, Florry, Lynch, and Zoe comment that one of the cushions is hot, after someone sat on it. Bloom finds this warmth exciting, but the nymph—now dressed as a nun—insists that desire is wrong. Bloom’s pants button flies off, and he tells the nymph and the yew trees that he has won. Sure enough, the trees get wet and a huge stain appears on the nymph’s robe. The nymph curses and attacks Bloom, who grows more confident, then cracks open and lets out “a cloud of stench.” Next, Bloom turns to Bella and insults her viciously. (Among other things, he points out her double chin and suggests that she hasn’t cleaned up from her last client yet.)
Bloom returns to the opposition between real and ideal beauty from “Lestrygonians.” The nymph promises “stoneocld and pure” eternal beauty, while the warm seat cushions represent the exciting (but changing and temporary) beauty of living, breathing people. Bloom defeats this binary by proving that the nymph isn’t actually eternal—she’s made of liquids and stenches like any other living being. Bloom’s victory builds up his sense of masculinity and power, which he then asserts against Bella to free himself from this nightmare.
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Bloom takes his potato back from Zoe, who has been hiding it in her stocking. Bella approaches Stephen at the pianola, and with excessive deference and politeness, he repeatedly pays her the wrong amount, leaving enough for the men to see all three of the women. Bloom insists on paying for himself and returning Stephen his extra money. A matchbox tumbles out of the neglectful Stephen’s pocket, and Bloom offers to watch Stephen’s cash so that he doesn’t lose it all. Stephen nonchalantly hands over his money, then he struggles to light a cigarette as he muses about Georgina Johnson getting “dead and married.” Zoe and Florry explain that her husband is a Londoner named Mr. Lambe. Stephen drops his cigarette and tells himself that he has to fix his glasses, which he broke yesterday. Bloom tosses Stephen’s cigarette away and proposes that he stop smoking and eat something instead.
Bloom’s extended sexual fantasy ends when he gets back his potato (which is a defensive talisman against Bella’s magic). Stephen’s bumbling incompetence with money is ironic, given that he’s essentially a genius at everything else. It’s probably due to a combination of his drunkenness, his depression, and his inability to see through his broken glasses. Luckily, responsible Leopold Bloom saves the day. Stephen’s match is also extremely significant—as he explained in “Aeolus,” the match is a metaphor for irreversible decisions (probably because it can’t be un-burned). His broken glasses are also a metaphor, and they explain why he hasn’t been able to see very much throughout the day. Finally, Stephen’s comments about Georgina Johnson help explain his despair: she’s married (which, to him, is practically like being dead). He's lost the only other woman who truly matters to him, besides his mother. Mr. Lambe’s name is yet another reference to Jesus, the Lamb of God, who has saved Georgina from her sins (prostitution). Stephen is still waiting for salvation—which will come from Leopold Bloom, whether he realizes it or not.
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Zoe reads Stephen’s palm and concludes that he’s courageous, but Lynch thinks that Zoe clearly isn’t any good at reading palms. Suddenly, Father Conmee and Stephen’s old schoolmaster Father Dolan spring out of the pianola and briefly reenact a scene from Stephen’s childhood: Dolan accuses Stephen of pretending to break his glasses, but Conmee believes that it was really an accident. Zoe tells Stephen that he has a woman’s hand, and that he’ll meet “influential friends” because he was born on a Thursday. She also sees some bad omens in his palm, but she doesn’t tell him what they are.
Zoe’s palm-reading adds to the important symbolism of Stephen’s broken glasses. In a nutshell, Zoe promises to provide the vision that Stephen lacks. While her predictions are vague, it’s fair to think that Stephen’s “influential friend” might be Bloom. The scene when Stephen broke his glasses at school was significant in Joyce’s earlier novel about Stephen, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this scene, Stephen got caught in an unjust situation that he could not control, and he had to appeal to the powers that be (Conmee) for justice. In Ulysses, with nowhere to sleep and nobody to love, he feels like he’s in a similar situation—but he has nobody to ask for help.
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Next, Zoe reads the skeptical Bloom’s palm. At first, she says that he’ll travel and marry rich, but he says that’s wrong. Then, she sees his little finger and concludes that he’s a “henpicked husband.” A giant hen pops up from the void and cluck-cluck-clucks, and then Bloom admits that he cut his hand twenty-two years before, at age sixteen. Stephen points out that he is twenty-two, and he also had an accident sixteen years ago.
The hen (who originally appeared in a children’s story in “Cyclops”) further associates Bella Cohen’s brothel with Circe’s palace from the Odyssey. The correspondence between Bloom and Stephen’s ages and accidents implies that their life histories are somehow synchronized. Again, fate seems to be bringing them together.
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While Zoe and Florry whisper in secret, Bloom imagines Lenehan and Blazes Boylan passing by in a carriage while the Ormond Hotel barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy watch them from a distance. Boylan declares that he was “plucking a turkey” and has Lenehan sniff his finger (which smells of “lobster and mayonnaise”). Boylan jumps out of the carriage, uses Bloom’s “antlered head” as a hat-stand, and tosses Bloom some change so that he can buy himself a drink. Bloom obediently lets Boylan go upstairs for his “private business” with Molly, who invites him to visit her in the bath. Molly and Boylan agree to let Bloom watch them have sex through the bathroom keyhole. Mina Kennedy and Lydia Douce comment on Molly and Boylan’s technique while the couple yells out in pleasure and Bloom cheers them on.
Bloom’s exclusion from Zoe and Florry’s conversation leads him to think about Lenehan and Boylan chattering privately. This leads him to Boylan and Molly’s private afternoon together, which also excluded him. While his thoughts have frequently drifted back to Molly and Boylan throughout the day, Bloom hasn’t yet fully acknowledged their adultery. Therefore, this scene allows Bloom to confront his feelings of exclusion, betrayal, and humiliation. This is similar to how he confronted his feelings of mediocrity and powerlessness through his domination fantasy with Bella Cohen.
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Lynch randomly comments, “the mirror up to nature,” quoting Hamlet. Stephen and Bloom look into the mirror and see William Shakespeare looking back at them and talking incoherently. Bloom asks the three prostitutes what they’re privately giggling about, but they don’t want to tell. Then, Bloom has a vision of Mrs. Dignam running by with her children, wearing her late husband’s trousers and carrying his insurance policy. Shakespeare’s face transforms into Martin Cunningham’s. Cunningham’s wife appears next to him and starts singing and twirling around, drunk. Stephen starts talking about Noah getting drunk on the ark, and Bella tells him to stop. Lynch clarifies that he has just come back from Paris. Impressed, Zoe asks Stephen for “some parleyvoo.” Stephen starts ranting about Parisian sexual adventures, imagining a series of absurd fetishes. The women find this hilarious.
Hamlet’s comment about holding “the mirror up to nature” is a reference to the purpose of theater, which he argued has to be revealing the truth about the world. This is partially a reference to Bloom’s explicit fantasy. But it's also a reference to Joyce’s stylistic experiments with theater in “Circe.” The analogy between Stephen, Bloom, and Shakespeare is based on the fact that all of them were cuckolded. Then, Bloom imagines other unhappy couples, as though to remind himself that things could be far worse with Molly. Meanwhile, Stephen’s blasphemous comments transform into hilarious jokes when they’re associated with the French. This illustrates how conservative Ireland’s moral and sexual norms still were—even in a brothel!
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Stephen recalls his dream from the night before, in which an unfamiliar man offered him melons and led him through a “street of harlots” covered with red carpet. Bloom tells Stephen to look around, but Stephen ignores him and, instead, cries out “Pater! [Father!] Free!” His father Simon Dedalus flies around above him like a buzzard, yelling that he must preserve the bloodline. A group of men with hounds hunts down the fox that has just finished burying its grandmother. A crowd yells out betting odds during a horserace, where a dark horse without a jockey pulls out way in front. Meanwhile, the ridiculously-dressed Mr. Deasy rides Cock of the North, the horse that was supposed to be the favorite.
When Stephen narrates his dream, Bloom points out that he’s already living it out. He’s in a “street of harlots” with an unfamiliar man (Bloom), who, as the reader will later learn, loves “melons” (his wife’s bottom). Again, by presenting their meeting as the fulfillment of a mystical dream, the novel suggests that fate has drawn Stephen and Bloom together. Although Stephen isn’t referring to Bloom as his father, his cry still shows how he and Bloom become a symbolic son and father in this passage. After this cry, several of the metaphors that usually only apply to Bloom or Stephen merge and apply to them both. This shows that their identities and concerns are mixing together. For instance, Stephen’s vision of his actual father focuses on the bloodline, which Bloom is usually worried about (not Stephen). Similarly, the horserace metaphor usually refers to the underdog Bloom’s competition with the favorite Blazes Boylan over Molly. But now, it also refers to Stephen and Mr. Deasy.
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Private Carr, Private Compton, and Cissy Caffrey pass in the street, singing the song “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.” The Yorkshire-born Zoe sticks two pennies in the pianola, which starts playing the same tune. The elderly Professor Goodwin staggers over to the piano, and Stephen and Zoe start to waltz. Dressed in pastel colors, Denis Maginni dances in and starts talking fancifully about his own talent. He choreographs a dance involving the different hours of the day, then yells the names of dance steps at Stephen in French. Stephen changes Zoe for Florry, then Florry for Kitty, and finally pairs Kitty with Lynch so that he can dance all alone with his ashplant.
The passing singers are actually a kind of divine symbol to Stephen, who defined God as “a shout in the street” during the “Nestor” episode. Stephen’s solo dance with his ashplant adds to the religious imagery in this scene, because Stephen believes that it has magical powers. Therefore, the dance seems to be a kind of religious trance or ecstasy for Stephen. Moreover, the dance of the hours is a reference to the various events of Bloom and Stephen’s day. This dance appears to be the culmination of that day—and therefore the novel as a whole.
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Suddenly, Simon Dedalus’s voice calls out and tells Stephen to “think of your mother’s people!” Stephen responds, “dance of death,” and he keeps whirling around the center of the room with his eyes closed, thinking of a number of images from his childhood. Suddenly, he stops, and Stephen’s mother’s decaying corpse rises up into the room from the floor. She points her empty eye-sockets at him and mouths something to him. Buck Mulligan pops up and says that “she’s beastly dead.” Stephen’s mother announces that she is dead and Stephen will be one day, too. Horrified, Stephen admits that some people are holding him responsible for her death.
Stephen’s “dance of death” builds up to the last and most important hallucination in “Circe.” This is the same vision of his mother’s corpse that he repeatedly saw in the first few episodes of the novel. When he confronts her, he simultaneously confronts several inner demons. These include his grief for her, his guilt at failing to pray for her, the inevitability of his own death, and his doubt about whether her death has some deeper meaning or is just a “beastly” physical fact.
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Stephen’s mother remembers a line that Stephen sang to her from “Who goes with Fergus?” Stephen asks his mother to tell him “the word known to all men,” and she reminds him of acts of love and sacrifice she performed for his good. She asks him to repent for his sins, but he refuses, growing increasingly distraught. She shouts out that he must beware God, and Stephen angrily yells out, “Shite!” and “Non serviam!” (“I will not serve!”). His mother prays to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and begs God to “have mercy on Stephen,” as she fades back into the void. Stephen attacks the chandelier with his ashplant, shattering it and occasioning the end of all space and time.
“The word known to all men” is love. Stephen has felt unloved since his mother’s death, but he’s also felt that he does not deserve to love or be loved because of his guilt. He views failing to pray for her as a failure to reciprocate her lifelong love for him. But during this vision, Stephen finally owns up to his decision not to pray for his mother. In other words, by refusing her pleas, he decides that he wouldn’t change his decision even if he could go back in time. Joyce implies that this is the path towards healing his guilt and regret—the emotions that were tempting him to return to religion. “Non serviam!” is famously supposed to be Satan’s declaration that he will not serve God. Stephen’s rebellion is therefore linked to his need to define his own identity and take a final stand against religion. The chandelier likely represents the divine light that Stephen rejects when he chooses truth (atheism). In turn, when he metaphorically destroys space and time, it appears that he’s destroying the universe in order to create his own alternative world as an artist. Thus, God’s creation and artistic creation become one and the same.
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Lynch tries to contain Stephen, while Bella calls for the police. Stephen runs out the door, and Bella demands that Bloom pay ten shillings for the broken lamp. Bloom tries to negotiate the price. He points out that students like Stephen are regular customers and he implies that Stephen has connections to powerful people. He tosses Bella a shilling and runs out.
Evidently, Stephen’s assertion of total artistic independence requires him to violently break his bonds with other people. Fortunately, Bloom is still sober and practical. Even though he doesn’t come to an agreement with Bella, he does manage to do some damage control.
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On the street, Bloom sees Corny Kelleher get out of a carriage, then runs off in the direction that Stephen went. Bloom passes through the nighttown crowd like Haroun Al Raschid, carrying Stephen’s ashplant. He feels like dozens of the Dubliners he met during the day are pursuing him, and he hears them calling out his name.
Bloom finally fulfills Stephen’s prophetic dream in this passage. The comparison between Bloom and the great Islamic leader Haroun al Raschid is probably a reference to the fantasy in which Bloom became the emperor of Ireland.
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Bloom finds Stephen arguing with Private Carr and Private Compton about his advances toward Cissy Caffrey. Too drunk for his own good, Stephen mocks the soldiers as they threaten to bash in his face. Bloom calls Stephen “professor” to win him sympathy and tries to calm him down. When Stephen insults the King of England, Edward VII himself appears with a bucket and promises to fairly adjudicate Stephen’s fight with the soldiers.
As though Stephen’s misbehavior in the brothel weren’t enough, now he’s getting himself involved in a fistfight. His argument with the soldiers is a straightforward metaphor for Ireland’s struggle against its English occupiers. Importantly, Stephen only taunts the soldiers, who physically threaten him back. This reflects the imbalance in power between England and Ireland, and it also echoes Professor MacHugh’s idea in “Aeolus” that the English are a practical civilization obsessed with power, while the Irish are a cultural civilization obsessed with ideas and art.
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Bloom apologizes to the soldiers on Stephen’s behalf, explaining that “he’s a gentleman, a poet,” who just drank too much of the “greeneyed monster” (absinthe). Stephen makes a joke about John Bull (a figure who represents England) attacking a green rag like an angry bull. Then, he imagines Kevin Egan as a matador. Hearing Stephen’s joke, the old bawd angrily proclaims that red (England) is as good as green (Ireland). The citizen materializes to voice his opposition to the English, and the croppy boy pops up, only for the “demon barber” H. Rumbold to hang and disembowel him.
Bloom goes out of his way to try to save Stephen from his own foolishness. But Stephen seems to think that calling out the English occupiers is more important than his own safety. Cattle are a metaphor for fertility (as in “Oxen of the Sun”), while the green in the absinthe and the rag represents Ireland (the “emerald isle”). Therefore, Stephen is joking that England is chasing fruitlessly after Ireland (the green rag) in an attempt to fertilize (colonize) it. In turn, he’s also poking fun at the lusty English soldiers who are chasing fruitlessly after Irish women. Meanwhile, the old bawd supports the English, but only because she’s a sell-out: she prostitutes the young women of Ireland to English soldiers. The reader already knows that the citizen is virulently pro-Irish nationalist. Meanwhile, the croppy boy fought for his country under noble ideals, but he got betrayed and killed by the English. As the reader might remember from “Cyclops,” Rumbold is also a sellout: he’s happy to hang anyone for a few shillings.
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Private Carr is offended by Stephen’s comment, but Stephen announces that he doesn’t care and doesn’t have any more money to give away to the English. An Old Gummy Granny appears and starts wailing about Ireland’s ills, which makes Stephen realize that he can’t stand either side of the political debate. Pulling off his belt, Private Carr threatens to kill Stephen, and Bloom tries to make peace by pointing out that the English and Irish fought together in the Boer War. Major Tweedy and the citizen face off, shouting nationalist slogans at each other and comparing their war medals.
The Old Gummy Granny is a stereotypical figure of rural Ireland based on the milkmaid in “Telemachus.” Therefore, she’s the loyal counterpart to the treasonous old bawd. Bloom’s comment about the Boer War is slightly misplaced, because lots of Irishmen opposed the English in that war, too. During this political debate, Molly’s father (Major Tweedy) suddenly becomes relevant. He fought for the English, which helps explain Bloom’s tolerance and understanding for both sides of the conflict. Stephen ends up in a similar position: he’s indifferent between the two sides because he hates both of them.
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Bloom desperately shakes Cissy Caffrey and pleads with her to make peace between Stephen and the soldiers. But she clings to Private Carr and says that she’s on his side, then starts calling for the police. Stephen hears screams and sees an apocalyptic scene of fire, brimstone, and unspeakable violence take over Dublin. Cannons fire, birds of prey circle, and the sun gets blacked out. Tom Rochford jumps into a giant chasm that opens in the earth. Witches fly past and knights duel. Stephen imagines Buck Mulligan as a priest and Haines as Reverend Love, leading worship services while a naked Mina Purefoy serves as the Virgin Mary. Damned souls say backwards prayers to “Dooooooooooog!” (instead of God).
While Bloom tries to de-escalate the conflict, everyone else seems to be enjoying the drama. In particular, like the matador’s cloth that Stephen described, Cissy purposefully intensifies the situation. In the apocalypse scene, everything is turned around backwards, like in a satanic black mass. In reality, Tom Rochford helped someone escape from a sewer, and Buck and Haines are usurpers and nonbelievers. Meanwhile, Mrs. Purefoy is too respectable to be naked, but she has far too many children to be a virgin.
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Bloom tries to enlist Lynch’s help in getting Stephen away from Private Carr, but Lynch runs off with Kitty Ricketts instead, and Stephen compares him to Judas. The Old Gummy Granny tells Stephen to fight, while Cissy Caffrey tells Private Carr that she forgives Stephen for insulting her. Carr attacks Stephen anyway, punching him in the face and knocking him down in front of the heckling crowd. Two policemen appear and start to question the soldiers. Bloom explains that the soldiers attacked Stephen, while Compton tries to restrain Carr.
Having tempted fate, Cissy Caffrey can no longer stop Carr. And like Buck, Haines, and the rest of Stephen’s friends, Lynch abandons Stephen at his time of greatest need. By comparing Lynch to Judas, Stephen implicitly compares himself to Christ awaiting the crucifixion (Private Carr’s punch). Again, the English stand in for the Romans, drawing out the similarities between the two occupying empires. Bloom is much more assertive with the police officers in real life than he was in the fantasy sequence where they accused him of outlandish crimes.
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The undertaker Corny Kelleher joins the crowd while Bloom identifies Stephen to the police. Corny comments that Bloom won money on Throwaway at the races, and he convinces the police to go away by telling them that “boys will be boys.” Bloom politely bids the policemen goodbye. Corny pretends that he’s not really visiting nighttown, only driving a friend over, and Bloom promises that he’s just on his way home. Corny offers to give Stephen a ride to his home in Sandycove, but Stephen is still passed out on the ground, so Corny decides to get on with his night. He and Bloom say goodbye. While Corny jingles off in his carriage, the men communicate their pity for Stephen from a distance with hand gestures.
Corny Kelleher’s arrival suggests that Carr may have killed Stephen—at least symbolically, if not literally. Just as Christ’s death is a moment of salvation and redemption in the Christian tradition, Stephen’s attack marks a significant transition towards the more peaceful, reconciliatory tone of the last section of the novel. Corny Kelleher’s comments about the horse Throwaway and his jingly carriage clearly link him to Bloom’s detractors and suggests that he might have sinister motives. Corny and Bloom’s awkward conversation implies that they’re both in nighttown to visit prostitutes, but ironically enough, they both really do have other motives. Specifically, Corny Kelleher is a police informant (as revealed in “Wandering Rocks”), so he’s probably conducting some undercover business. Finally, his and Bloom’s hand gestures are a tongue-in-cheek reference to Stephen’s theory from the beginning of the episode: that true communication relies on gestures, not words.
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Bloom tries to shake Stephen awake, but doesn’t succeed until his fourth try. Confused and half-asleep, Stephen asks if Bloom is a black panther or a vampire, and he quotes incoherently from “Who goes with Fergus?” Bloom helps Stephen clean himself up, then notices that Stephen looks like his mother. As he stands protectively over Stephen with the ashplant, Bloom imagines his dead son Rudy as a handsome schoolboy.
These closing lines offer a rare moment of beauty, peace, and fulfillment in an otherwise chaotic and satirical episode of the novel. Through his mumbling, Stephen mixes together three symbols of this kind of vulnerability. The first is Haines’s nightmare about the black panther (which led him to lash out and shoot his gun in the middle of the night). The second is Stephen’s poem about a vampire, which he wrote on Sandymount Strand. And the last is the song “Who Goes With Fergus?” which he sang to his mother on her deathbed. Thus, while the reader doesn’t have a direct window into Stephen’s thoughts, it’s clear that he’s in a tender mood, too, and he needs the help. When Bloom lends Stephen a hand, he’s finally achieving his longtime fantasy of caring for a son. This is why he has a vision of his dead son Rudy: even if he’ll never get Rudy back, at least Stephen can serve as a kind of substitute. Finally, this moment is full of even more religious symbolism, as Bloom carries Stephen’s ashplant (the cross) and helps him rise (like Jesus’s resurrection).
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