Ulysses essay

Question: Write on ONE of the following themes in Joyce’s Ulysses: “keys”, “music”, “nationalism”, “religion”, “rhetoric”, “Jews”, “money”, “the family”, “the body”. (Or choose another specific theme from the text that interests you)




In my essay, I shall be discussing the theme of "the family" in James Joyce's "Ulysses". Thanks to Joyce's unique usage of interior monologue mixed with 3rd person narration, we get unprecedented access to the thoughts, feelings and motivations of the main protagonists. From this we can see that the theme of familial relations in this novel is a constant presence.
This is apparent from the outset in Stephen's guilt over his dead mother in Episode One/Telemarchus. Stephen, the same man who appeared in Joyce's earlier work "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" refused his dying mother's request to pray for her on her deathbed. The reasons for his refusal are somewhat unclear at first. Unlike most other novels, we are not given a literary description of Stephen when we are first introduced to him. For example, there is no passage in Ulysses that reads like- "Stephen, a pale, serious-looking youth who had recently returned from the Sorbonne.....was an atheist because..." Instead we find out about a character's background in a more organic way by piecing it together piece by piece throughout the course of the novel. Thus it is impossible to say with certainty why he refused to pray for her, but it appears that it is because he prides himself on being strongly anti-establishment (we see this clearly in Episode Fifteen/Circe in his drunken rant at a British policeman against priests and the King). When Stephen's mother asked him to pray for her, his loyalty to his family was pitted against his loyalty to his beliefs
The very academic nature of his thoughts and the language that he uses leads us to believe that Stephen is not a man who is particularly given over to agonising regret or high emotion, even within the privacy of his own head. For instance, he expresses his guilt by using various fusty terms for it, for example, the old religious term "agenbite of inwit", meaning "remorse of conscience". Despite this apparent distancing of himself from the event, he nevertheless seems haunted by her death.
Though obliquely expressed, he seems to believe that he somehow contributed to her demise. It is interesting to note that although Stephen calls himself an atheist, at some deeper level he must still believe in the power of prayer to save lives. (Another example of this contradiction is when he believes that the thunderstorm in "Oxen of the Sun" is a sign of God's anger) He also makes continual references to others about the ghost of Hamlet's father, ostensibly to get his new theory on Shakespeare published. We can interpret this in several different ways. Perhaps the ghost of Hamlet's father is meant to represent the ghost of Stephen's mother. Perhaps Stephen is referring to his own father, Simon Daedalus. He is still alive, but the bond between them is so weak that he may as well be a ghost. As we read through the novel, an unflattering portrait of Simon begins to emerge. He is feckless. When his young daughter Dilly asks him for some money to buy food, he gives her less than she suspects he has because he is on his way to the pub. He is also critical of his son. When Bloom points Stephen out to him on the road in Episode Six/Hades, Simon responds:
"Was that Mulligan cad with him? His fidus Achates!"
"No" Mr Bloom said. "He was alone"
"Down with his aunt Sally, I suppose," Mr Daedalus said, "the Goulding faction, the drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump of dung, the wise child that knows her own father...."
The feeling appears to be mutual. When Stephen is discussing his Hamlet theory in the library in "Scylla and Charybdis", he says that in his opinion, fathers are inconsequential. Paternity is unprovable and therefore insubstantial. Fathers, he says, are linked to their children only by a brief sexual act. He believes that "Amor Matris" (a mother's love for her child or a child's love for its mother) is more concrete because mother and child once shared the same body. The father/child relationship is much more fraught and tenuous.
Despite his assertion that fathers are unimportant, Stephen's relationship with Bloom suggests that he sees him as a sort of surrogate father. Bloom takes care of Stephen when he runs into trouble in a way that his own father never would. Furthermore, the age difference between them is such that they could be actual father and son- Stephen is 22 and Bloom is 38. Bloom also lost his son Rudy ten years ago, when Rudy was just a few days old. He still grieves very much for him. Bloom is usually an upbeat and optimistic character, but whenever a cloud passes over the sun, or his thoughts turn gloomy for whatever reason, he either thinks about Molly's infidelity or the death of Rudy.
There are many instances where Bloom displays a protective paternal instinct towards Stephen, for instance; when he rescues the drunken Stephen from the ugly scene that was about to unfold in the brothel, when he buys Steven food in the cabman's shelter after Stephen’s altercation with the policeman, and when he takes Stephen, locked out of his own house, home with him and makes him cocoa. Bloom also displays a kind of paternal pride in Steven's singing abilities, and a kind a paternal concern when he notices that his boots are scruffy and that he drinks too much with the wrong crowd (i.e. Mulligan). It is as if Bloom sees in Stephen the young version of himself. Indeed there are many similarities between them. Although Stephen is a poet and Bloom is inclined more towards science and the practical sides of things, as a character once remarked, "There is something of the artist about Bloom". Therefore Bloom can appreciate Stephen's artistic sensibilities in a way that Simon Daedalus does not. It has been said that Stephen and Bloom click because they share three important qualities - Energy in thought, passivity in act, and tenacity in conviction. In Bloom, Stephen finds a more level headed, balanced and wiser version of himself that he can look up to as a role model.
Both of them therefore fulfil a need in each other for a close father/son relationship. However, it must be said that theirs is not a perfect match. They disagree on politics. At times Bloom can be hypocritical, and nag Steven too much. Bloom also seems more enthusiastic about continuing the friendship than Stephen. There is an intimate moment of "father/son" bonding when Bloom speaks Hebrew to Stephen, and Stephen Irish to Bloom. While this is happening, Stephen looks at Bloom feels respect for him because he represents the past, and Bloom likewise respects Stephen because he represents the future. However, immediately following this scene, Stephen tells Bloom a story involving a Jew's daughter beheading a Christian which has anti-Semitic overtones. Whether it was intentional or not, Bloom feels slightly offended. After a moment of closeness together, they are soon reminded of their differences. Was Joyce trying to say that we can never feel truly close to people? Perhaps it was inevitable. After all, there is no such thing as complete understanding and togetherness because we are all different. To get along we must learn to respect our differences and the fact that we are all individuals. But Joyce also shows us that we can still empathise with others, like Bloom does, and our differences do not prevent us from forming close bonds with other people.
This scene with Leopold and Steven closes with them going out to urinate in the back garden together. Looking up into the night sky, they see a shooting star. Shooting stars are referred to several times in Ulysses, and we are told that they always seem to occur when a momentous event is taking place, for example the birth of Shakespeare. The reason Joyce included the shooting star at the end was undoubtedly to indicate that a positive event was taking place.
Another thing that Bloom and Stephen have in common is that Bloom also feels the lack of his father. Bloom's father committed suicide several years before-"Poor Papa! Poor man! I'm glad. I didn't go into the room to look at his face....". He still keeps his suicide note in a bedroom drawer. Bloom likewise feels guilt following his parent's death. He feels guilty for not following the kosher rules of his Jewish father (the surprising thing is though, that his Hungarian father converted to Christianity when he moved to Ireland). In Episode Six/Hades, a group of men including Bloom are travelling to Dignam's funeral in a carriage. The conversation turns to suicide. Bloom stays silent while most of the other men condemn suicide as it goes against their religious beliefs. Cunningham, who knows about Bloom's father, is the only one who pleads for compassion. Like Stephen before him, Bloom is caught up in the struggle between family loyalties versus people’s religious beliefs.
So far, I have yet to address the main family issue in Ulysses. That is, of course, the relationship between Molly and Leopold Bloom. This issue is a complex one. Bloom heavily suspects (correctly) that Molly is having an affair with her music teacher, Blazes Boylan. He also thinks Boylan is just the latest in a long string of lovers, erroneously believing that she has had 25! Molly in turn (not so correctly) suspects Bloom of having affairs with numerous women. This scenario, like something out of a soap opera, is suddenly rendered poignant by the revelation that Molly and Leopold haven't had sex in ten years following the death of their infant son Rudy. It is believed by many psychologists that when a couple suddenly stop having sex following a miscarriage or the death of a baby, it is because sub-consciously neither the man nor the woman want the woman to get pregnant again as they fear they might have to go through the whole trauma of losing another child.
We only discover that the couple hadn't had sex for that extended period of time in Episode Seventeen/Ithaca, right near the end of the book. This is all part of Joyce's message about shifting perspectives. We are forced to re-evaluate Leopold’s and Molly’s actions in light of this new information. In Ulysses, we constantly have to keep re-evaluating our opinions about the characters. We are also told the fact in the cold, scientific Socratic Question style that this whole episode is written in. This was probably to avoid a maudlin, over-sentimental ending. Joyce was at pains to avoid this, as we saw from his treatment of the final scene with Bloom and Stephen.
In the same way, he doesn't allow us the moral satisfaction of being able to villianise either Leopold or Molly for the infidelity in their marriage. They are both to blame. Neither confronts the other about their supposed cheating, instead they both let their suspicions run wild.
Bloom on one hand, although he doesn't have actual intercourse with anyone else, has a secret erotic pen-pal, fantasises constantly about other women and even masturbates on Sandymount Strand whilst watching a young woman's shapely bare knees. However, all is not quite as it seems. His erotic letters to Martha under the pseudonym Henry Flowers are pretty harmless, he is very definite in his mind that he doesn't have any intention of meeting up with her. "Could meet one Sunday after the rosary? Thank you : not having any. Usual love scrimmage" In fact, he is actually beginning to get quite bored of the correspondence. On writing a reply to her letter, he thinks - "Bore this, Bored bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting fingers on flat pad Pat brought...."
As for Gerty, the young woman he masturbated over on the beach, right after he orgasmed his thoughts turned to Molly once more, and the time they made love up on Howth Head. He had been thinking of her on and off through the course of the day. The knowledge of her impending liaison with Boyle was like a cloud which had settled on his brain. The touching thing was that, unbeknownst to each other, both he and Molly kept flashing back to the same scene of them together underneath the rhododendrons in Howth. It can be safely said that the only woman that Bloom actually loves is Molly, but their estrangement has left him sexually frustrated.
As for Bloom's feelings towards Molly's paramour, Blazes Boylan, understandably enough, he doesn't like him. He prefers not to confront him though. When he sees him through his carriage window on the way to Dignam's funeral, he suddenly becomes engrossed in his fingernails. Bloom avoids him when he sees him face to face but at the same time discreetly tries to follow him into the Ormond hotel, presuming that he is rendezvousing with Molly there. His attitude towards Boylan can probably be best described as angry, but not in a blind fury type of way, more in a sour way (like the way he grumpily wonders if Boylan has any STDs). He is intimidated (everyone else appears to like Boylan except him), but ultimately he is resigned and even forgiving towards Molly (he still remembers to buy her her special lotion, he makes her breakfast in bed, and he still thinks kindly of her....) Another aspect to the Boylan and Molly affair, is that in some way, Bloom is a little aroused by it. Everybody likes to feel that their partner is attractive, and for Bloom, the fact that so many men find Molly sexually attractive is a confirmation of her sexuality. As I am sure you have already noticed from the way he masturbated publicly on the strand, Bloom is fairly kinky. A trait both he and Molly share. At one point, he briefly fantasises about catching Molly and Boylan in bed and taking pictures of them through the keyhole.
So, do Molly and Leopold reconcile at the end? Does Molly give up her other lover and do they start having sex again? The ending is typically Joycean in that it is left open to interpretation. Nonetheless, the last line of the novel, as thought by Molly, is resoundingly upbeat and positive- featuring a breathless repetition of the word "yes".
"...he asked me would I say 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."
There is some ambiguity in this line as to whom she is referring to by "him". Immediately preceding these lines she is thinking briefly about a former lover, Colonel Mulvey, and recalling the time she kissed him under the Moorish wall in Gibraltar. However, this whole final passage is of her remembering Bloom's marriage proposal to her on top of Howth Head, therefore it is probably Bloom she is referring to.
Another reason to believe that Leopold and Molly have been brought closer together by the events of the day, or at least that we are meant to read it that way, is firstly the metaphor of the horserace. Earlier in the book, Leopold unwittingly gives a man a tip on a horse. The man misinterprets Leopold's remark that Leopold was going to "throw away" his newspaper, and thinks Leopold is telling him to bet on a horse called "Throwaway" in the race that day. We learn later that “Throwaway” is an outside contender running against the favourite "Sceptre", who most of the other men in the novel have betted on. Throwaway goes on to win the race. The loser, Sceptre, with its phallic connotations, can be seen as representing Boyle (who Molly tells us has a very big penis). Also, the fact that most of the other men favour Boyle over Bloom supports this. However, at the end of the day, it is Bloom who is going back to Molly's bed every night, who lives with her and cares for her. Therefore it is Bloom who has really won the race, in the competition for her heart.
Secondly, is the fact that Joyce's Ulysses is so closely tied to the original Greek "Odyssey" (Ulysses is the Latinised word for it). All of the episodes in Ulysses are named after a character or an incident in the Odyssey. Whatever happens in an episode in Ulysses always bears some relation to the corresponding episode in "The Odyssey". The Odyssey has a happy ending with the hero Odysseus returning home and dispatching the other suitors in his palace to be finally reunited with his wife. Thus, it is quite plausible, seeing as how the rest of "Ulysses" mirrors the plot of the "Odyssey", that they would both have a similar ending. A big indication of this is that in Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus spends ten years trying to get back home to his wife and "lay in their marital bed". Ten years is also the length of time Leopold and Molly haven't had sex for. Sex is tied up very strongly with marital contentment in Ulysses, and this is showed by Bloom's repetition in his head of an ad he's seen for Plumtree's potted meat. "What is home without / Plumtree’s Potted Meat? / Incomplete. / With it an abode of bliss". His frequent repetition of these lines can be seen as a sub-conscious reaction to his anxieties about Molly's infidelity. Potted Meat can be read as a crude metaphor for sex. The point is driven home when he finds crumbs of potted meat on his bed, which Molly and Boylan had been eating, evidence that they were together earlier.
In this way, I think that Ulysses is a book in which Bloom, after being in a marital wilderness for ten years, finds his way back home. The novel’s exploration of the family is not only limited to Molly and Leopold however, but in many of the other relationships we see this theme again and again- with Stephen Daedalus and Leopold, with Stephen and his father, etc. With its mixture of groundbreaking narrative and universal themes, Ulysses manages to chart new territory yet remain a timeless classic, one which has, like the Odyssey before it, left a monumental imprint on literary history.


























Bibliography:
1. James Joyce: The Poetry of Conscience: A Study of Ulysses. Contributors: Mary Parr - author. Publisher: Inland Press. Place of Publication: Milwaukee. Publication Year: 1961.
2. Approaches to Ulysses: Ten Essays. Contributors: Bernard Benstock - editor, Thomas F. Staley - editor. Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press. Place of Publication: Pittsburgh. Publication Year: 1970. Essays read were: (A) APPENDIX A Biography of Leopold Bloom (B) The Fictional Technique of Ulysses (C) The Allusive Method in Ulysses (D) Some Determinants of Molly Bloom
3. Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Contributors: Colleen Lamos - author. Publisher: Cambridge University Press. Place of Publication: Cambridge, England. Publication Year: 1998.
4. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Contributors: A. Walton Litz - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1961.
5. Letters of James Joyce. Contributors: Stuart Gilbert - editor, James Joyce - author. Publisher: Viking Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1957.