For many centuries people were buried in a winding sheet,
also known as a shroud or cerement. This was a long piece of
cloth that could either be wrapped around the body or tied at
both ends and sewed up along the middle. In Hades
Bloom thinks of women laying out corpses and making up beds,
two activities that both involve arranging a sheet.
When Mr. Deasy says in Nestor that "Old England is
dying," Stephen recalls two lines from William Blake's Auguries of
Innocence: "The Harlot's cry from street to street
/ Shall weave Old England's winding sheet." The lines return
in Circe, altered to read "Old Ireland's
windingsheet." In both cases, the focus is on the
political and cultural forces that may undermine or destroy an
entire nation.
Bloom too thinks of these burial cloths, with the same
Joycean compound spelling but with a much more personal focus.
As he ponders the readying of Paddy Dignam's body for burial,
no doubt thinking back to similar preparations for his infant
son Rudy, he associates these rituals with the everyday
business of making a bed: "Then getting it ready. Laying it
out. Molly and Mrs Fleming making the bed. Pull it more to
your side. Our windingsheet. Never know who will touch
you dead. Wash and shampoo." The details at the beginning and
end of this passage describe the work of "laying out" a
corpse, but in the middle Bloom thinks of Molly and the charwoman making the bed in
the morning. The two chores meet in the shared detail of
arranging a sheet just so. It is very characteristic of the
practical and irreverent Bloom to make the connection.
Bloom wraps himself up in a bedsheet every night. By
imagining it as his shroud he performs a small memento
mori: best to stay clean,
because you "Never know who will touch you dead." This
matter-of-fact little meditation allies him with the far more
dramatic and far more religious John Donne, who as he lay
dying had himself sewn up in his shroud and sketched by an
artist, so that in his final hours he could contemplate his
coming demise.
