A Dream of Well-Filled Hose: Joyce’s Gerty
“…women know perfectly well that the loftiest and most
poetic love depends not on moral qualities but on physical closeness and on the
way of doing up one’s hair, one’s complexion, the cut of a gown.”
Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
“Think of her virtues; how she works, how true she is
to her vocation [husband-hunting], how little there is of self-indulgence, or
of idleness. I think she will go to a kind of third class heaven in which she
will always be getting third class husbands.”
Anthony Trollope on his character Arabella Trefoil in The
American Senator
Like an insect embedded in a piece of amber, Gerty is relic
from another era. We can still see her there, captured in the golden glow
of the setting sun, pale and winsome, her love of a hat perched captivatingly
on her nutbrown tresses. No longer a girl, she is womanly-wise, yet still
innocent. Gerty is a late Victorian figure in a modern landscape—why did
Joyce create such an elaborate portrait of this girl instead of, for example,
Martha Clifford, a woman who has escaped the Victorian marriage machine to
become a typist? Or how about the frumpy woman on the bicycle riding after
the poet A.E., a disciple following her mentor? Joyce eschews the New Woman for Gerty, whose vocation is
neither independence nor intellectual stimulation, but finding a husband.
Throughout Ulysses, Joyce frequently explores character in
terms of consumerism, rhetoric, and desire, but the portrait of Gerty calls for
renewed scrutiny of the means by which an author defines a character. In
“Nausicaa,” Gerty serves not only as a locus for these elements, but also for
the rituals of authorship Joyce employs to fashion an unconventional portrait
of a conventional girl.
The Beauty Ritual
In his essay “In Praise of Cosmetics,” Baudelaire wrote
“Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of
duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has
to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order
to be adored.” Gerty takes her role as idol seriously, filling her days with
beauty rites: applying “lemonjuice and queen of ointments” (286) to keep her
hands white, developing a deft hand with the eyebrowleine, and learning how to
cure blushing scientifically. Time-honored formulas—really
superstitions—dictate her observances for personal hygiene: “She had cut [her
hair] that very morning on account of the new moon … and pared her nails too,
Thursday for wealth” (286).
At the center of Gerty’s beauty rituals is her clothing,
which, like a priest’s vestments, is simple but appropriate to the
circumstances. Her vocation calls for her to be dressed fashionably in well-cut
garments that subtly show off her figure. She would never wear a tight skirt,
awkward high heels, or a cheap blouse like Cissy Caffrey. (Of Edy Boardman’s
clothing we learn almost nothing, as if her short-sightedness is transmitted to
the reader as an indistinct view of the girl herself.)
As “a votary of Dame Fashion” (287), Gerty attends the
department store, what Zola called in his 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The
Ladies’ Paradise) “a chapel built for the worship of woman’s beauty and grace”
and is subject to its corruptions. A socio-economic force, the department store
concept originated in the 1850s with Paris’s Bon Marché. Offering all sorts of
clothing and specialty wear under one roof, the department store welcomed
women, offering them a place for socializing, fantasizing, and buying. As Zola
showed, while the department store created employment for men and women with
relatively few skills, it also fostered an environment of loose morals,
materialism, and vindictiveness.
With the department store came advertising, in which “a
fantasy [was] dangled before the consumer [of] the fulfillment of the
democratic dream, at first politically and now materially,” according to Lori
Anne Loeb in Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women. Stimulated
by advertising to acquire what Loeb describes as “‘paraphernalia of
gentility,’” women rushed to acquire goods and clothing in search of the social
ideal, furnishing themselves and their homes with objects that had formerly
been available only to the rich.
Being of modest means, Gerty achieves with diligence what
she cannot have in abundance. At Clery’s, she is rewarded after an afternoon’s
assiduous hunting by finding just the right chenille, albeit “slightly
shopsoiled” (287), to trim her hat. Having established not only Gerty’s
fastidious appearance but also her punctilious temperament, Joyce compromises
the impression he has worked so hard to create with this innocuous piece of
cloth. Gerty has attained a certain value as a commodity in a literary and
historical context, but her willingness to accept shopworn merchandise implies
that she herself is slightly soiled, “Gerty’s status as a ‘marked down’ virgin
allows Joyce to explore the full range of marketing and consumer strategies in
the sexual marketplace,” as Garry Leonard in Advertising and Commodity Culture
in Joyce describes it.
When she reappears in “Circe” brandishing “her bloodied
clout” (361), the chenille soiled presumably with hymenal blood, her virginity
is transmuted into unclean worldly goods. The fact that she cannot even
properly recall the marriage vow (“with all my worldly goods I thee endow”)
further indicates that her value has been deeply discounted.
Read in terms of the women’s magazines on which she so
heavily relies, Gerty appears to be an apotheosis of womanhood, modest, clean-living,
dutiful. However, by surrounding her with strong currents of commercialism,
Joyce constructs her as part of an inventory, a “specimen” (286) made up of
assembled parts culled from the by-products of bargain bins and penny papers.
Bloom’s later remarks, “No reasonable offer refused….Out on spec probably”
(302), reinforce the notion that Gerty’s value is based on market fluctuations
and the theories of speculators.
Implicit in Gerty’s advertisement of herself is that on
which all ads rely: a lack or want. The hyperbole of her appearance belies the
paucity of her sexual experience. Her transparent stockings make her legs
shapely and unblemished—of stockings, Baudelaire praised the “abstract unity in
the color and texture which approximates the human being to the statue, that is
to something superior and divine”—yet they cannot conceal Gerty’s lameness (and
her vindictive nature is far from angelic). Gerty is also wanting in
worldliness, little imagining that her raised skirts and display of leg would
later translate in Bloom’s mind as the decidedly unladylike Capel street peep
shows and “a dream of well-filled hose” (301).
Joyce carries Gerty’s deficiency over into religion,
implying that her naïve enthusiasm has betrayed her into an all-too-human egotism.
He insinuates this with the passage in which Gerty slides effortlessly from her
capacity to convert a Protestant lover into a Catholic, to the lover’s
passionate embrace, to her view of Mass as if she were seeing it from her
vantage point as the object of worship, a statue of Mary, Star of the Sea
(433–449). Attired all in blue, “her own colour” (288) as well as that of the
Virgin Mary, Gerty combines the material and the spiritual, offering a secular
iconography for the color that threatens to displace its religious
connotations.
The Ritual of Rhetoric
In contrast to Bloom’s first-person monologue in the second
half of “Nausicaa,” Gerty’s thoughts in the first half of the episode are
resolutely third person. Joyce at once utilizes and breaks with conventional
literary tradition, employing a narrative style that appears to convey the
heroine’s innermost thoughts while at the same time distancing the reader and
undermining the character’s authenticity.
When Trollope, for example, relays the thoughts of the
scheming Arabella Trefoil in The American Senator, he uses a traditional form
of free indirect discourse: “[Arabella] had, no doubt, been driven to tell a
series of barefaced, impudent lies,—lies of such a nature that they almost made
her hair stand on end as she thought of them;—but they would matter nothing if
they succeeded….and some lies she must have told;—such had been the emergencies
of her position!”
Joyce, too, uses free indirect discourse, but with deliberate
variations in tone: “For an instant she was silent with rather sad downcast
eyes. She was about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue.
Inclination prompted her to speak out: dignity told her to be silent. The
pretty lips pouted awhile but then she glanced up and broke out into a joyous
little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May morning”
(286–287). Trollope retains the narrator’s tone even when inside the
character’s head. Joyce, on the other hand, employs that Hugh Kenner calls in
Joyce’s Voices the Uncle Charles Principle, where “the narrative idiom need not
be the narrator’s.” In this passage, Joyce’s narrator impersonates the
traditional omniscient narrator, giving us Gerty at her most impulsive and her
most trite, sounding suspiciously like an advice columnist or even an
advertising copywriter.
The difference applies even to punctuation: Trollope uses
the semi-colon and dash to connote spontaneity while maintaining controlled
syntax; whereas Joyce removes virtually all punctuation, flattening the line
and loosening his authorial grip to such a degree that an insidious instability
creeps in. The result is that the reader can trust neither Gerty nor the
narrator. The inconsistencies in tone also suggest psychological
inconsistencies in Gerty: “By revealing Gerty’s bitterness, Joyce shows the
partial failure of her textual inculcation: the reading of ‘appropriate’
didactic fictions cannot magically eliminate personal frustration” (“The
Romance Heroine Exposed: ‘Nausicaa’ and The Lamplighter,” Kimberly Devlin,
James Joyce Quarterly 22:4).
Further, Joyce reveals Gerty’s dissatisfaction with herself
through the spiteful language she directs at the Caffrey twins. If Gerty
was invited to the beach to help Edy and Cissy watch the children, she is not
helpful at all, distancing herself from the group physically and mentally. She
becomes increasingly resentful of the twins: “Gerty wished to goodness they
would take their squalling baby home out of that and not get on her nerves, no
hour to be out, and the little brats of twins” (293) and “The exasperating
little brats of twins began to quarrel again and Jacky threw the ball out
towards the sea and they both ran after it. Little monkeys common as
ditchwater” (294). Her scorn is particularly nasty and hints at her frustration
at being unable to rise above her class simply by dressing well and “educating
herself” with high-toned magazines.
Devlin adds that Gerty’s response to the children
demonstrates her hostility to motherhood itself: “When the narrative moves
towards a more immediate representation of Gerty’s inner life, the reader
starts to hear her unspoken discontent, a discontent directed in part towards
the children, the traditional responsibility of women.” Sadly, Gerty can
express herself only in the spotty and unfulfilling language gleaned from
women’s magazines.
Having already recorded his opinion of newspaper journalism
through Stephen in “Aeolus,” Joyce indicts the mixed messages and
sentimentality of women’s journals through the character of Gerty. The
confessional nature of these magazines has led her to reveal things a true lady
never would, such as her laundry secrets, her reliance on cosmetics, and the
disclosures to the priest. Far from impersonating a tabloid heroine, Gerty is merely an immodest and rather
unremarkable young woman.
Still, she persists, congratulating herself on her many
lovely qualities as if a fairy tale mirror in her head were talking back: “If
ever there was undisguised admiration in a man’s passionate gaze it was here
plain to be seen on that man’s face. It is for you, Gertrude MacDowell, and you
know it” (296). Though Bloom’s admiring gaze affirms all this, the reader has
the impression that were he not there, Gerty would still find validation in her
inner reflection. Joyce gives Gerty different registers in which to speak, the
clichéd, sentimental tone of romantic prose, the slang of a young Dublin girl,
and the knowing interior voice—yet for all this evidence of character, the reader
feels distanced. We, like Gerty, are kept “aloof, apart, in another sphere”
(297), removed from identifying with a character who is prevented from
identifying with herself.
In a side note, Joyce utilizes a long-standing authorial
prerogative in drawing on his own experience for the character of Gerty.
Richard Ellmann cites the 1917 meeting of Joyce and Dr. Gertrude Kaempffer in
Locarno while the author was working on Ulysses. Attracted by her “delicate
features and somewhat subdued manner,” Joyce pursued Kaempffer by lending her A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and writing her provocative letters. She was put off by
Joyce’s suggestive manner and the affair went nowhere. “All that he had left
was a recollection of having been aroused by a woman named Gertrude,” notes
Ellmann. The fictional Gerty is thus a sort of rhetorical rebus, an amalgam of
signs and symbols from high and low literature, popular culture, the world of
commerce, and Joyce’s own memory.
The Rite of Onan
Joyce founds Gerty’s character squarely on the concept of
desire, as he declares with his query “But who was Gerty?” (285). In answer, he
establishes a cycle of Gerty’s thoughts, the Mass at Mary Star of the Sea
church, and the activities of the children on the beach. These elements
gradually run together, blending into each other, until the climactic passage
in which the fireworks explode and Gerty has what might be described as an
orthographic orgasm. As Gerty walks away from Bloom, she is unable to disguise
her lameness; characteristically, her defect is left unwritten (unspoken even
in her own mind), trailing off with an ellipsis. It is Bloom who completes the
sentence, just as he might have completed another form of communication, the
love-making scene on the beach, had either he or Gerty not been indulging in
some form of masturbation.
Masturbation was at the top of the list of Victorian
anxieties, generally attributed to the adjustments required by
industrialization and urbanization among nineteenth-century populations. As
Peter Gay notes in his Pleasure Wars, “The panic of divines, teachers,
physicians, and parents over the evils of ‘self-pollution’ was a
transcontinental epidemic of collective hysteria, as cajoling or bullying
anti-masturbation tracts were quickly reprinted and widely translated.” Ulysses
is full of masturbators: Stephen in “Proteus,” Bloom considering it
in “Lotus-Eaters,” Bloom doing it in “Nausicaa,” and Molly possibly doing it in
“Penelope.” Joyce places Gerty in a metaphorical masturbation in which her
self-love and self-regard act as a poor substitute for intimacy with another
person.
Gerty’s narcissism is depicted as a sort of lotus-eating, a
continual round of trashy magazines and retail therapy, drugging her into a
life of hollow bliss. Her beauty rituals stupefy her, much as Bloom imagines
Latin does for Catholics, into a pointless life of fantasy and
self-gratification. The iron jelloids are, in fact, nothing more than placebos.
In addition, Gerty’s self-referential fantasies are clothed in language from a
bygone time that also seems to exemplify what Keith M. Booker calls “the
nostalgia that Joyce identifies throughout his work as one of the major reasons
for the paralysis and sterility of his contemporary Dublin society (Ulysses,
Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce After the Cold War).
In addition to broader themes of lethargy or sterility, many
specific images from the “Lotus-Eaters” episode are repeated in “Nausicaa”:
Bloom writes to Martha Clifford under a pseudonym and later conjectures that Gerty
might be a “false name” (305); the importance of “caste” to women (60) and
Gerty’s lament that she was not born a gentlewoman with patrician suitors
(286); and Bloom’s thoughts about poisons, lovephiltres, laudanum, and sleeping
draughts (69) are reworked as Gerty’s pills and potions, the powders to cure
her father’s drunkenness, and the menthol for her mother’s headaches (286,
290–291).
Common in Ulysses, repetition often creates reinforcement or
shows images in new permutations; repetition in the context of masturbation
implies climax. In his portrait of Gerty, Joyce cycles through thematic motifs
such as those above, as well as the clichéd prose, the recurring pattern of
fantasy interrupted by the Caffrey twins, and the incantatory brand names and slogans
mixing indiscriminately with liturgical phrases. Even Bloom echoes Gerty’s
inner life with his musings on his headache, girls’ strange habits and
longings, and women’s menstrual cycles—perhaps he has read a few women’s
journals himself. It could be argued that the climax of Gerty’s portrait takes
place in the jump from her limited consciousness to the space inside Bloom’s
head (lines 741–753) where not only his empathy, but also his sympathy, and his
more complete self-awareness show his capacity for intimacy in a way that is
closed to Gerty.
“Narcissism, the fairy tale teaches, despite its seeming
attractiveness, is not a life of satisfactions, but no life at all” noted the
indispensable Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment. Joyce’s Tale of the
Beach Tableau does not teach this lesson so much as present the ambivalence of
a quality such as self-love in the human psyche. Based on a set of false
assumptions, Gerty is destined for frustration and impotence. Bloom, too, seems
restless after his self-pleasuring, feeling relief, exaltation, skepticism, and
exhaustion. Thus, Joyce seems to be implying that the “return” on masturbation
is doubtful, making the practice more of a denial of life experience rather
than an embrace of it.
“Returning not the same”
Joyce puts the finishing touch on Gerty’s portrait with a
sly linguistic twist. With his introduction of the palindrome in “Aeolus,”
where the sophomoric Lenehan announces “Madam, I’m Adam. And Able was I ere I
saw Elba” (113), Joyce demonstrates the inherent fragility of language and the
ease with which connections may be broken. The insertion of the contraction
“And” destroys the structure of the palindrome, breaks the mirror image, and
prevents the running back of the phrase. In “Nausicaa,” the palindrome returns
as one last bulletin from Gerty’s consciousness: “…Gerty MacDowell noticed the
time she was there because she was as quick as anything about a thing like
that, was Gerty MacDowell,…” (313). This phrase with its folksy locution epitomizes
the ritualized portrait that Joyce has crafted of Gerty as literary palindrome.
Dressed all in blue from head to toe, Gerty’s thoughts run back and forth along
the same well-worn track, emanating from and returning to only herself.
However, being lame, she can fulfill the running back of the palindrome neither
physically nor figuratively; further, her idiosyncratic syntax has crippled the
palindrome’s structure.
Joyce brings her back for one final recapitulation in
“Ithaca,” this time as Bloom’s ideal ad: “one sole unique advertisement to
cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous
accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not
exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern
life” (592). Under the Catechist’s cold gaze, her erotic exhibitionism is
reduced to a scientific equation: “Because the controlled contemplation of the
fluctuation of attraction produced, if desired, a fluctuation of pleasure”
(602).
Finally, she fades out altogether, omitted from Bloom’s
answers to Molly about how he spent his day. Despite Gerty’s late Victorian
qualities, Joyce paints her more as a poster child for modern life, embodying
its craze for novelty, its speed and changeableness, and, finally, its embrace
of obsolescence.
© 2009 Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.
Photo: Robert Henri, Girl Seated by the Sea
(1893), Collection of Margaret and Raymond Horowitz; National Gallery of
Art, Washington, DC
