For the first decade after its publication, Ulysses was the subject of an international scandal: because he dared to describe sex in realistic detail, Joyce saw his novel banned and censored around the world. While Joyce’s treatment of sex is far less transgressive by 21st century standards, its frankness and vulgarity can still be surprising to many readers. Ironically, however, the sex in Ulysses isn’t particularly passionate, erotic, or meaningful to the characters who engage in it—rather, Joyce places far more significance on love. Although Molly Bloom’s affair with Blazes Boylan is central to the plot, Bloom knows about it and doesn’t try to stop them. Moreover, when Molly speaks in the novel’s final episode, she makes it clear that she has no serious feelings for Boylan, but she ends up passionately proclaiming her love for her husband. Meanwhile, Bloom’s most sympathetic trait as a character is his profound sense of love and sympathy, which extends not only to Molly, but also to animals, the poor, and even those who attack and ostracize him. Although he struggles to say it without sounding cliched and sentimental, Bloom thinks of love as the key to maintaining peace and preventing conflict in society. Joyce values both sex and love for different reasons, and while he understands that they’re generally connected, he suggests that they don’t always have to be. He views sex as the height of human pleasure and a sacred reproductive ritual, while he sees love as the essential force that sustains and nourishes human life.
Joyce takes a remarkably positive and accepting view of sex, which he depicts in far more detail than most early 20th century writers. In fact, Joyce was famously obsessive about getting all his details right, down to Bloom’s specific sexual fantasies and Boylan’s penis size. But this doesn’t mean that his writing about sex is overly precise or boring. Rather, he actually uses euphemism and metaphor to narrate the novel’s most important sex scenes: Molly’s tryst with Blazes Boylan in “Sirens” and Bloom’s masturbation scene in “Nausciaa.” In these scenes, he presents the characters’ pleasure without guilt—even though Bloom has clearly crossed a line in “Nausicaa,” by masturbating to Gerty MacDowell on the public beach. In “Circe,” Bloom rightly feels guilty about sexually harassing various women and masturbating in public—but when it comes to consensual sex, Joyce pretty much only has positive things to say. Most notably, Molly Bloom talks often and openly about sex, pleasure, and fertility in “Penelope.” She suggests that it’s healthier to embrace sexuality than repress it. Indeed, Joyce is extremely open about and accepting of sex in part because he wants to fight conservative Ireland’s intense secrecy and shame about sex. He illustrates this from time to time in the novel, like during a brief scene in “Wandering Rocks” where the priest Father Conmee catches Lynch and his girlfriend coming out of the bushes after having sex. In fact, Joyce thinks the Catholic Church has it all backwards: sex isn’t sinful and impure; it’s sacred. In “Oxen of the Sun,” Joyce repeatedly links sex to the wonder of pregnancy and childbirth, which he in turn connects to the divine act of creation. Thus, Joyce praises sex as a kind of holy act, the nexus between pleasure and reproduction. But first, he wants to simply demystify it, so that his readers can start to abandon their shame and see its beauty.
In addition to his complex view of sex, however, Joyce also has plenty to say about love: he essentially argues that love makes life worth living and maintains peace in human society. While he admits that this theory is cliched and unoriginal by making fun of it in “Cyclops,” he clearly still views it as an important truth. In fact, love provides the novel’s ultimate resolution in “Penelope”—in her final lines, Molly reaffirms her enduring love for Bloom, which implies that Bloom’s love has won out over Blazes Boylan’s sex. Similarly, Bloom thinks about his profound love for Molly throughout the novel, even while he also agonizes about her having sex with Boylan. And when Bloom returns home in “Ithaca,” he decides that he’ll forgive her—he muses that her adultery is not too serious because it doesn’t threaten her love for him. This shows that Joyce views love as an enduring, binding force that helps people overcome obstacles and divisions. He also implies that it can absolutely be separated from sex, if necessary. Finally, Bloom also gives love a significant political meaning during his argument with the citizen in “Cyclops.” Thinking about his Jewish community, Bloom declares that different groups have always persecuted each other throughout history, but the solution to their political conflicts is love. The other men laugh him off, but he’s being sincere: he thinks that loving one’s enemies is the only way to heal enduring wounds. On a mass scale, this kind of love can pave the way for a peaceful, tolerant, and prosperous society. Fittingly, Bloom’s most heroic trait is arguably his sense of love, or his empathy and affection for others—especially animals, his daughter Milly, and Stephen Dedalus (who also yearns for love throughout the novel, in order to replace the love he’s lost after his mother’s death). If sex is holy for Joyce, then love is heroic.
Joyce’s critics were right to portray his novel as, in some fundamental way, a story about sex. But they also proved his point by censoring it: shame and secrecy about sex actually prevent people from understanding love, because it wrongly encourages them to think that sex is always an expression of romantic love, while true romantic love always requires sex. Joyce moves past this narrow-eyed view by first rejecting the stigma around sex and secondly showing how it’s possible to separate (or combine) sex and love while still enjoying the benefits of each.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love and Sex ThemeTracker
Love and Sex Quotes in Ulysses
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.
White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner, galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for a nun.
—Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.
A dwarf’s face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was. Dwarf’s body, weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant nothing. Mistake of nature. If it’s healthy it’s from the mother. If not from the man. Better luck next time.
—Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It’s well out of it.
The carriage climbed more slowly the hill of Rutland square. Rattle his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.
—In the midst of life, Martin Cunningham said.
—But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own life.
Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
—I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.
—Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
[…]
—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
Yes, it was her he was looking at, and there was meaning in his look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through and through, read her very soul. Wonderful eyes they were, superbly expressive, but could you trust them? People were so queer. […] Here was that of which she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him, her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him.
And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher […] it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee […] O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!
BLOOM: (mumbles) Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen,…
BELLO: (with a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice) Hound of dishonour!
BLOOM: (infatuated) Empress!
BELLO: (his heavy cheekchops sagging) Adorer of the adulterous rump!
BLOOM: (plaintively) Hugeness!
BELLO: Dungdevourer!
BLOOM: (with sinews semiflexed) Magmagnificence!
BELLO: Down! (he taps her on the shoulder with his fan) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down!
BLOOM: (her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing, yaps) Truffles!
(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet: then lies, shamming dead, with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.)
STEPHEN: (eagerly) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.
STEPHEN: Non serviam!
[…]
(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)
(Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM: (wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
RUDY: (gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)
What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at their destination?
He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations.
As in what ways?
From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.
He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.
Supposing I risked having another not off him though still if he was married Im sure hed have a fine strong child but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes thatd be awfully jolly
I thought to myself afterwards it must be real love if a man gives up his life for her that way for nothing I suppose there are a few men like that left its hard to believe in it though unless it really happened to me the majority of them with not a particle of love in their natures to find two people like that nowadays full up of each other that would feel the same way as you do theyre usually a bit foolish in the head his father must have been a bit queer to go and poison himself after her still poor old man I suppose he felt lost
Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again 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 yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
