Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Ulysses 253
wears a blue blouse, a hat with a blue ribbon under the brim, blue
garters, blue stockings, and blue underwear, which she wears “for luck”
(13:179). Blessed with the Virgin Mary’s disposition, Gerty is sensitive
and pure: “from everything in the least indelicate her finebred
nature instinctively recoiled” (13:660–61). With a childlike innocence,
she daydreams about fairytale romances. She also thinks with disdain
about prostitutes and promiscuous women: “she loathed that sort of
person” (13: 61). While Bloom watches her, she fantasizes about being
his wife in an asexual marriage, a platonic romance in which she and
Bloom would be best friends rather than lovers. In her reverie, Gerty
thinks Bloom is probably a nice man and they could be “good friends
like a brother and sister without all that other” (13:665–66). This
childish romance plays out in her mind while Bloom lusts after her,
“eying her as a snake eyes its prey” (13:517). Here, Joyce compares
romantic, childish fantasies with a more realistic portrayal of human
sexuality, one where the desire for physical gratification is natural.
Rather than an ideal of social purity and sexual naiveté, Gerty
is a mockery of that ideal and is described as being “womanly wise”
(13:223). She believes she knows what men want from a woman, and
she knows how to attract the male gaze. This knowledge has been
gained from women’s magazines and from gossiping with her friends.
Yet she is not merely a social construct or an object to be consumed by
men. From one perspective, the narrative frames Gerty as a tantalizing
seductress who reveals her body to Bloom. Gerty, in turn, derives
erotic pleasure of her own from the realization that she is arousing
Bloom’s libido. On one level, she is the erotic voyeur, one who, like a
man, gazes at pornography.
More than a seductress, however, Joyce presents her as a compassionate
Mary figure. Gerty is not angry or insulted by the fact that
Bloom is masturbating while he stares at her. Instead, she demonstrates
compassion for him as she notices that he is dressed in mourning and
wonders for whom he mourns (Bloom has attended a burial service
for his friend Paddy Dignam earlier in the day). Like Mary, Gerty is
a “comfortress of the afflicted” and a “refuge of sinners” (13:442). She
wants to understand Bloom and comfort him and distract him from
his mourning, yet she does so in a much more profane sense. Gerty is
a seductive Virgin Mary, one who comforts her followers, easing them
in times of sexual distress. In terms of her compassion and symbolic
connections to Mary, Joyce establishes Gerty as a goddess-like