In addition to its anality,
another peculiar feature of Bloom's sexuality is a tendency to
masochistic self-abasement. These fantasies will not become
fully manifest until they are enacted in Circe, most
decisively in actions inspired by the writer who lent his name
to the phenomenon, Leopold von Sacher Masoch.
But their presence is announced early in Calypso
when Bloom thinks about his cat, "Cruel. Her nature. Curious
mice never squeal. Seem to like it." These sentences appear to
show Bloom projecting onto the mice his own proclivity to take
pleasure in pain.
It can hardly be an accident of Joyce's writing that the cat
is female and that her vocalizations ("Mkgnao!," "Mrkgnao!," "Mrkrgnao!")
resemble those of the half-conscious Mrs. Bloom ("Mn").
Bloom's reflection on his cat's cruelty, and his
uncharacteristically unrealistic thought that her victims too
may be deriving pleasure from her claws, suggest that he is
constructing Molly in fantasy (though perhaps unconsciously)
as a dominatrix and himself as a passive but willing sub. Many
details of the novel support this impression, leading up to
the extravagant hallucinatory events in Circe.
As Calypso continues, more of Bloom's thoughts and
actions suggest that he does derive a certain pleasure from
submission. As he waits in the butchershop, eyeing the servant
girl in front of him, he remembers in strongly suggestive
terms the way he has seen her beat a rug in the garden:
"Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline.
She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings
at each whack." Two paragraphs later, the pleasure he takes in
watching her vigorous beating is juxtaposed against his
passive sense of subjection: "He held the page aslant
patiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft
subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging, whack by
whack by whack." Several paragraphs later still,
his voyeuristic leering in the butchershop, and the girl's
disinterest, give him further occasion to become aroused by
abasement: "they never understand. . . . The sting of
disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast."
Bloom's tendency to become a servant in his wife's
presence—bustling about to anticipate her desires and execute
her bossy orders,
identifying with Mozart's Leporello—is
another aspect of this submissiveness. So too is the
helplessness that he feels with respect to her adultery. In
the face of both Molly's infidelity and Milly's sexual
maturation, he experiences physical sensations that sound
sickly but also vaguely erotic: "A soft qualm, regret, flowed
down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes. Prevent.
Useless: can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen too.
He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move
now. Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman's lips."
The letter in Lotus Eaters shows that Martha
Clifford is well aware of Bloom's submissive tendencies,
and willing to play along: "I do wish I could punish you for
that....Please write me a long letter and tell me more.
Remember if you do not I will punish you. So now you know what
I will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not write." When
Bloom writes back to Martha in Sirens, he thinks
again about the servant girl beating the carpet: "How
will you pun? You punish me? Crooked skirt swinging, whack
by. Tell me I want to. Know."
Bloom's sexual passivity and self-abasement are laid out
quite unmistakably in the novel, but it is possible that his
thoughts about mice in Calypso result from observation
as much as projection. Mice will sometimes play dead (or
become paralyzed by fear?) when trapped by a cat, and
sometimes they may be positively drawn toward felines. In a
personal communication, Brad Harbaugh points out that in
recent decades researchers at Stanford University and Imperial
College London have been investigating how a common fungal
parasite called Toxoplasma gondii hijacks the neural
circuitry of rats. Toxoplasmosis infections activate a part of
the rat’s brain responsible for sexual attraction, overcoming
the animal's natural tendency to freeze in fear of a cat by
making the smell of cat urine arousing. Joyce would have known
nothing of this, but he liked cats and wrote about them
repeatedly (Calypso, Lotus Eaters, Ithaca, The Cats of
Copenhagen, Finnegans Wake). It is conceivable that he
may have watched mice acting as if they were drawn to cats
rather than fleeing them and connected that odd behavior to
his protagonist's equally odd uxorious masochism.
