Aggressively caricaturing Stephen's expectation of sympathy
in Telemachus, Mulligan charges that "you sulk with me
because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's."
In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, professional mourners
called mutes were hired to stand around the home, church, or
cemetery, looking somber, sad, and sympathetic, and wearing
certain prescribed forms of formal black dress. Lalouette’s was
a Dublin mortuary whose rental services included mutes.
Mutes also served as pallbearers. In Hades, they
carry Paddy Dignam's coffin from the carriage at curbside: "The
mutes shouldered the coffin and bore it in through the
gates." Slightly later, they bear it "into
the chapel."
The word "mute" appears fairly often in Ulysses, in
various forms. In most cases it simply means "unspeaking," but
on at least one occasion it seems as if Joyce may be punning
on the functions of funerary mutes. As the carriages approach
Prospect Cemetery, the men inside catch glimpses of the many
white stone sculptures adorning graves: "Forms more
frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms
and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures
on the air." Perhaps other uses of the word contain
some remnant echoes of these stylized gesturings: the
apparition of Stephen's mother, for instance, "that
had bent upon him, mute, reproachful."
