'CIRCE' AND 'ULYSSES'



In keeping with the Homeric framework of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the chapter set in Nighttown is loosely based on the ‘Circe’ chapter of The Odyssey. In Homer’s epic, Circe is a beautiful enchantress, daughter of the Sun, granddaughter of the Ocean, and sister of a wizard, and she dwells in luxury upon an island. Odysseus’s sole remaining ship lands upon this island, and, after seeing the smoke from her fireplace, he sends a search party to her castle seeking succour. Encouraged by her beautiful singing voice, the men beseech entry. Circe is more than happy to welcome them into her home, and all but one, who fears trickery, enter. Once she has them inside, Circe herself prepares a delicious meal for them, adding to it a potion to cause them to forget their homeland. Once they have partaken, she strikes them with her magic wand, causing them to be transformed into swine, which she then locks into sties and feeds acorns and other pig food. The men retain their human minds and are conscious of their changed forms but powerless to speak or do anything about the situation. Meanwhile, the one member of the search party who did not enter Circe’s castle becomes alarmed when his companions do not return, so he rushes back to Odysseus to report. Odysseus immediately sets off sword in hand for Circe’s castle to try and retrieve his men. On his way there he is intercepted by the god Hermes (or Mercury) who warns him of Circe’s magic and gives Odysseus a herbal antidote to her potion. Hermes advises Odysseus to draw his sword [phallic weapon] and threaten Circe’s life when she tries to transform him with her wand. This will terrify Circe into submission [satisfying the patriarchal hierarchy], at which point Odysseus must extract a promise from her to do him no harm before agreeing to lie with her; without such a promise, Hermes warns him he will end up naked and vulnerable in Circe’s bed [masculine fear and distrust of the ‘other’]. Odysseus follows instructions, and Circe becomes enamoured of the one man able to resist her spells and charms. Odysseus convinces her to restore his men to human form, and he and his entire crew spend a full year banqueting as Circe’s pampered guests. At the end of a year, Odysseus’s men force him to leave this comfortable existence, at which point Circe gives him advice, provisions, and help to see him safely on his way.

By setting the ‘Circe’ chapter in Nighttown, the part of Dublin wherein the whorehouses are concentrated, Joyce is explicitly conflating the witch with the prostitute. Nor is this the first time Joyce made such a blatant connection between witch and harlot; as Henke points out, "in his 1904 essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, Joyce uses similar phrases in masochistic invocation of a phantasmal prostitute [bold type mine] from the red light district of Dublin: ‘Beneficent one!…Thou camest timely, as a witch [bold type mine] to the agony of the self devourer, an envoy from the fair courts of life’" (Henke, 1997, p. 135). Circe’s island in Homer is paralleled to Dublin’s red light district in Joyce’s Ulysses. Circe’s ability to turn men into swine is thereby more easily seen as a metaphor for how women can use their sexuality to make men behave in a bestial fashion. Men’s sexual desire for women can be exploited by women for monetary gain, reducing men to an animalistic level in the process. Joyce throws in frequent porcine language in this chapter of Ulysses to emphasise the Circean parallel and to highlight the degrading extent to which men will go for sex: pig crubeen (p. 566), weak hams (p. 568), cloven hoof (p. 571), pigsticky (p. 580), pigfoot (p. 589), pork kidney (pp. 590, 606), pigdog (p. 594), pig’s feet, snout (p. 597), swine fat (p. 600), pork sausages (p. 607), hambones (p. 612), hog (pp. 616, 619), bogoak pig (p. 618), wallow (p. 630), pig’s whisper (p. 631), porker (p. 632), swine (p. 634), Pig God (p. 636), truffles, grunting, snuffling, rooting (p. 644), fat ham rashers, sucking pig (p. 645), boar (p. 649), whole hog (p. 650), perfect pig (p. 660), piglings, hogs, swine (p. 680), sow (p. 692), and butcher’s shop (p. 693). The Circean parallel is also emphasised by references to Mercury (pp. 567, 583, 681) and acorns (p. 661).

Bloom, Stephen, and Lynch are wallowing in the mire, like Odysseus’s men as pigs in Circe’s sties, when they enter the stew or brothel of Bella/Bello Cohen. Their physical desire for sexual contact with females has reduced them to this level. Intellectually, like Odysseus’s men, they know this degrading environment should be beneath them, and yet they end up there nonetheless. Socially, they have descended as far as it is possible to do in Dublin by entering the prostitution district, just as Odysseus’s men have fallen from castle to sty under Circe’s spell.

I feel that by connecting a powerful female archetype, the witch or enchantress, with prostitution, and by recasting prostitutes as the exploiters rather than the exploited, Joyce is betraying an obvious misogyny. His parallel between Odysseus’s transformed crew and male patrons of brothels implies that the blame for men’s degraded status belongs to external female sources (such as a witch or prostitute) rather than an internal male one (such as lack of self-control or lack of respect for females and their right to human dignity). As Kimberly J. Devlin says in ‘"I saw that picture somewhere": Tracking the Symptom of the Sisters of Lazarus’, "The ‘Circe’ episode reveals many of the unconscious thoughts that lie behind Bloom’s latent visions and associations" (Devlin, 1998, p. 196). Bloom’s unconscious is Joyce’s conscious mind, and Joyce’s perspective as revealed in Ulysses conforms to traditional patriarchal views of open female sexuality as dangerous, nefarious, and corruptive of men. Joyce’s view is actually at the most misogynistic end of the patriarchal scale, as he has removed the steps between temptress and whore, making them one and the same by putting Circe in a whorehouse. In this chauvinistic viewpoint, delineated in ancient texts such as the Bible all the way through modern literature such as Joyce’s Ulysses, men are the innocent victims of evil female influence and pernicious feminine sexual manipulation.

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