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 "She pisses like a man," or something very close to that.

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..."

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