After his scatalogical joke about "mother Grogan's tea and
water pot," Mulligan adopts a professorial tone, asking
Stephen whether the story comes from the Mabinogion or the
Upanishads. Declining the gambit, Stephen keeps the clowning
in the realm of urination by supposing that the old lady was
"a kinswoman of Mary Ann," and Mulligan belts out a song that
both men know: "For old Mary Ann / She doesn’t care a damn, /
But, hising up her petticoats..." The last line of the
quatrain is omitted, but it must be something close to "She
pisses like a man."
Gifford and Seidman describe "Mary Ann" as “An anonymous
bawdy Irish song.” They note that the only printed version
cleans up the story of Mary Anne—a young woman who is quite
charming “Though in build, and talk, and manner, like a man.”
A bawdy version located by Mabel Worthington, however,
concludes with a line that perfectly completes Mulligan’s
quatrain: "She pisses like a man." Slote, Mamigonian,
and Turner, with thanks to Vincent Deane, identify a closer
analogue in "a North English rhyme, first recorded in the
early nineteenth century": "Mary Anne she doesn't care a
damn, / She lifts up her petticoats and pittles
like a man." The ditty is preserved in Bill Griffiths' A
Dictionary of North-East Dialect (108). These
annotators observe that hoise, according to the OED,
can mean to lift something aloft, especially a sail, but that
the spelling hise is not attested in the dictionary.
The theme of women peeing like men enjoys an afterlife in the
novel. In Proteus Stephen recalls the third line of
Mulligan's quatrain just after urinating into a rising
tidepool. Under the surface of the moving water, he sees
"writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising
up their petticoats." And in Circe "a
standing woman, bent forward, her feet apart,
pisses cowily" in the street, her action echoing the
musical example of Mary Ann. In this episode Bloom also
imagines the reverse: how he once lifted "billowy flounces, on
the smoothworn throne," in the interests of "Science. To
compare the various joys we each enjoy. (Earnestly.)
And really it's better the position... because often I used to
wet..."