Faubourg Saint Patrice - ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

acehorse who wins despite the odds stacked heavily against him (14.1128-33). His
Jewish heritage, his "womanly-man" attributes, his status as a cuckold, and his Masonic
ties are all characteristics which others use to place Bloom on the margin. Indeed, by
constructing Bloom as markedly different from other Dubliners, Joyce is able to use him
as a foil, thus revealing both the hypocrisies and myopia of Dublin culture. One salient
aspect of Bloom's character which causes his Otherness is his unorthodox and vocal
views on religion and its role in society. Thus, throughout his wanderings, Bloom's
interaction with his fellow Dubliners and his pragmatic and objective perspective on
cultural markers enable him to reveal those forces which Joyce felt led to the "hemiplegia
of the will" of Ireland.
Having been raised under an ambiguous composite of his father's abating Jewish
heritage and his mother's lenient version of Protestantism, Bloom's youthful religious
indoctrination pales against the rigidity of Stephen's Catholic dressage. Furthermore, as
an adult, Bloom converted to Catholicism in order to marry Molly, just as his father had
earlier converted from Judaism to Protestantism to wed Ellen Higgins (17.534-46).
Thus, Bloom's perspective on institutionalized religion appears more pragmatic than
spiritual. His marginalized position within Irish culture provides the reader with a unique
insight into the Catholic Church, because, like the "anti-hero" of modernist literature,
Bloom reveals the most damaging ambiguities of his culture. Describing this new hero in
his study "The Mind of Modernism," James McFarlane writes: "The wanderer, the loner,
the exile . . . were no longer the rejects of a self-confident society but rather those who,
because they stood outside, were uniquely placed in an age when subjectivity was truth
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