Faubourg Saint Patrice - ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

3. "He walked unheeded. . .": Bloom on the Margin
In his hallucinatory state in "Circe," Leopold Bloom, the newly ordained "lord
mayor of Dublin" proclaims his utopian goals for the "new Bloomusalum":
I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten
commandments. New world for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and
gentile. . . No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. .
Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.
(15.1685-93)
After professing these heterodoxical goals, Bloom, with obvious messianic overtones, is
quickly attacked by Father Farley, the priest who ostensibly banned Molly from the
church choir because of Bloom's Freemasonry: "He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an
anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith" (15.1711-2, 18.381-2). Other
Dubliners, including Dante Riordan and the mythical Mother Grogan20, emerge from
Bloom's consciousness degrading him as a "beast," a "bad man," and an "abominable
person" (15.1714-7). The evangelical preacher, Alexander J. Dowie, resurrected from
the revival leaflet that Bloom had earlier cast into the Liffey, rallies his parochial forces
against Bloom: "Fellow christians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the
roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men" (8.8.13; 15.1753-4). Although fabrications of
Bloom's imagination, these attacks parallel, and evolve from, numerous other verbal
assaults directed against Bloom by his fellow Dubliners throughout the day--assaults
which clearly demonstrate Bloom's alienation from the Catholic culture into which he has
attempted to assimilate. He is the Outsider, the personification of "Throwaway," the
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