Although Ulysses does pay some attention to female
breasts as sites of sexual arousal, it more often refers to
them as sources of milk, using unexciting words like "paps"
and "bubs." In their opening chapters, both Stephen and Bloom
unflatteringly associate women's mammary organs with those of
animals, suggesting a resolutely biological approach to this
feature of the mammalian body. Molly does not think in these
barnyard terms, but she has a host of practical thoughts about
breasts that seem never to occur to men.
In Telemachus Stephen watches the milkwoman measure
out milk that is "not hers. Old shrunken paps,”
and he imagines her sitting beside a patient cow at daybreak,
"her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs." In Calypso
Bloom stands beside Molly's bed, looking “calmly
down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping
within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder.” Circe
recalls the goat's udders when Bello taunts Bloom for trying
on Molly's clothes, displaying "behind closedrawn blinds your
unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in
various poses of surrender."
Interestingly, Bloom seems to have associated Molly's breasts
with goats' udders at a moment of high sexual excitement when
he was quite aware of them as young and enticing. He recalls
the scene in Lestrygonians: "She lay still.
A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat
walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened
under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her,
kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman's
breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples
upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was
kissed." The Howth goat returns in Circe, its teats
mirroring Molly's full breasts: "High on Ben Howth through
rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, plumpuddered,
buttytailed, dropping currants."
In Penelope Molly passes quickly from thinking
about the pleasure men get from sucking on nipples (and women
from having them sucked) to the question of whether breasts
are beautiful, to their clear biological purpose, and to the
general grotesquerie of sexual organs: "yes I think he made
them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me
thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one
anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him
to keep that up and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala
fatten them out for him what are all those veins and things
curious the way its made 2 the same in case of twins
theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there
like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to
hide it with her hand are they so beautiful of course
compared with what a man looks like with his two bags
full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking
up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a
cabbageleaf."
Boylan's sucking makes her think of many things besides
sexual pleasure: the pain men infict ("theres the mark of his
teeth still where he tried to bite the nipple I had to scream
out arent they fearful trying to hurt you"), the pain of
lactation ("I had a great breast of milk with Milly enough for
two," "I had to get him to suck them they were so hard," "hurt
me they used to weaning her till he got doctor Brady to give
me the belladonna prescription"), the taste of human milk ("he
said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to
milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything"), its value
in the marketplace ("he said I could have got a pound a week
as a wet nurse"), men's annoying desire to gaze on strange
women's breasts ("that delicate looking student that stopped
in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose nearly caught me washing
through the window only for I snapped up the towel to my
face"), and their urge to become sucking babies again ("much
an hour he was at them Im sure by the clock like some kind of
a big infant I had at me").
