Part I: Ulysses and Adultery: Wandering

Abstract

While others might not imagine this to be the most important thing about Ulysses, for me it is the crux of the novel: what would compel a man to facilitate his wife’s affair? I claim that Bloom does so as a recognition of Molly’s alterity, her otherness as a desiring self. It is her capacity for desire that makes her who she is, and it is his desire for her that leads him both to mourn the loss of their world and to present her with an opportunity to pursue erotic fulfillment outside of that world. He does it not to further reduce her desire to an instrument of his own fulfillment—through voyeurism, say, or masochistic fantasy—but to affirm and acknowledge her as a desiring self. He accepts the struggle, the ambivalence, the anger that such a recognition entails, and does it anyway, even as he pursues halfheartedly and to pathetic effect his own extramarital dalliances, not because of an impulse toward self-abnegation, but as a way to affirm selfhood in the marriage, breaking apart of the fiction of we, only to reconstruct it in an entirely new ethical form, through empathy and love. Joyce is positing, through Bloom, the radical acceptance of love. Finally, his gesture—his gift—is what permits a new version of intimacy, of the potential of erotic fulfillment within marriage.

He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.

—Marquez 112