Mulligan says that he stole his shaving mirror from "the
skivvy's room" in his parents' house. A skivvy, in British
slang, is a female servant who does menial domestic labor like
housecleaning—not far from the role of dogsbody that Mulligan has
just assigned to Stephen. To the injury of stealing
possessions from this very poor woman, Mulligan adds an insult
about her looks and behavior: "The aunt always keeps
plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation.
And her name is Ursula." Ursula was a 3rd century
Christian martyr passionately devoted to virginity.
Thornton notes the relevant fact that Alban Butler's Lives
of the Saints (New York, 1846) proclaimed that Ursula
"is regarded as a model and patroness by those who undertake
to train up youth in the sentiments and practice of piety and
religion." Unsurprisingly, Mulligan would prefer not to be
trained up.
According to legend, the Cornish princess Ursula recruited
11,000 virgins to undertake a pilgrimage around Europe
promoting virginity; and, supposedly, the Huns slaughtered all
of them at Cologne. Scholars have speculated that, if the
legend was based on any history at all, the truly impressive
number of dispatched virgins probably derived from a
misreading, in the 9th century, of historical records from the
5th century that mentioned anywhere from two to eleven
martyrs. One possibility is that XI. M. V., referring to
eleven martyred virgins, was misread as eleven thousand
virgins, since M is the Roman symbol for 1,000. In Cyclops,
when Martin Cunningham's remark, "God bless all here is my
prayer," conjures up a hoard of "mitred abbots and priors and
guardians and monks and friars," the bloated procession
concludes with the appearance of "S. Ursula with
eleven thousand virgins."
