Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

254
James Joyce
character. However, he does not allow the reader to accept this image
at face value. There are a number of decisively human aspects to
Gerty as well. Her concern with fashion and attractiveness is worldly.
Further, Gerty is menstruating during this scene, another very human
element. Bringing Gerty down to earth from the status of a goddess,
Joyce reminds the reader that she is experiencing an explicitly human,
natural process. Yet Gerty in many ways remains an elusive character,
one who, like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Milton’s Eve, or Homer’s
Penelope, is complex and capable of being seen from diverse perspectives.
Thus, it is possible to see her as goddess and seductress, as angel
and whore, while also recognizing her as a representation of the sentimentalized
nineteenth-century woman.
Critics have contended that popular, sentimental fiction and
“Nausicaa” alike sexualize women. Kimberly Devlin interprets Gerty’s
character in relation to the sentimental literature of the day, focusing
on The Lamplighter, a sentimental romance novel contemporary to
Joyce that is referenced in the episode. Gerty has read this book,
and it is prominent in her consciousness throughout her presence in
the scene. In a sense Gerty is a representation of what young female
readers of books like The Lamplighter are not supposed to be and what
they are supposed to be protected from by reading didactic, moral
literature. Yet this very same literature, filled with advertisements and
purple prose, appeals to the feminine imagination.
Gerty’s self-awareness and her overdone romantic fantasies
combine to parody the ideal woman as presented in The Lamplighter.
Gerty dreams about the chaste Lamplighter heroine and desires to be
like her. Unlike Molly Bloom, who reads smutty novels by Paul de
Kock, Gerty seeks moral guidance in literature. Thus, it is ironic that
she ends up becoming aroused when thinking about the very moral
literature she seeks guidance from. Here Joyce takes a jab at those
who had and continued to try to censor him. While Gerty’s character
is seen as being a social or cultural construct, she is more of a parody
of her culture than its reflection. In this way, Joyce mocks Victorian
ideals of womanhood and sexual chastity through Gerty MacDowell,
a young woman trying to live up to feminine ideals while falling prey
to the “corrupting” influence of consumer culture.
The perception of Gerty as an impossibly romanticized ideal of
purity is compounded by the unmistakably mock-romantic tone with
which the episode begins: