Stephen's label for the statue of Horatio Nelson, "the
onehandled adulterer," refers to two details of the great
British admiral's biography: Nelson lost his right arm in
battle, and he conducted a very public affair with a married
woman. The second detail contributes to Stephen's curiously
sexualized story of two old maids gazing up at the statue, and
the first may play a part as well.
Nelson's aggressive leadership and personal courage caused
him several severe injuries, including a fatal one at
Trafalgar in 1805. The damage to his arm happened in 1797 at
the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, an unsuccessful
amphibious assault in the Canary Islands. After the landing
party's retreat, a surgeon amputated most of the arm. Slote
offers an explanation for Stephen's strange word "onehandled":
"The statue of Nelson atop the pillar depicted him with his
armless right sleeve tucked into the breast of his tunic, thus
forming a 'handle'." This seems plausible, though Nelson was
of course also onehanded (the statue showed his left
hand extended, grasping a sword), so perhaps, given the noun
that follows, Joyce meant for the word to additionally suggest
the crippled admiral handling things in a sexual sense.
The word "adulterer" refers to a scandal at the turn
of the 19th century. In 1793 Nelson met the British ambassador
to the King of Naples, William Hamilton, and his new wife
Emma, who had previously been the mistress of Hamilton's
nephew. In 1798 the admiral and Mrs. Hamilton began a sexual
relationship, and by 1800 they were living together openly.
Their daughter Horatia was born in 1801. The affair became
widely known, and Emma, who was devastated by Nelson's death,
was barred from attending his state funeral. England's rulers
too were devastated: King George III is reported to have said
of Nelson's great victory, "We have lost more than we have
gained." The reactions of Irish people were no doubt more
mixed, and in 1966 Nelson was finally blown off his pillar by
an IRA bomb. Stephen's phrase gives the idol feet of clay in
two senses: by calling attention to the missing arm, which
Nelson regarded with shame as a symbol of his failure at
Tenerife, and by reducing the hero to a philanderer, the Royal
Navy's counterpart of Blazes Boylan.
Stephen implies that, for the two old women of his story,
Nelson symbolizes more than just military conquest or imperial
domination. Standing behind the pillar's railings, "they pull
up their skirts..."––Myles Crawford interjects, "Easy all...
No poetic license. We're in the archdiocese here,"
recalling the current tense relations between the Archbishop
of Dublin, William Walsh, and the Freeman's Journal––"And
settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the
statue of the onehandled adulterer." Petticoats have already
been charged with sexual interest in the novel: in Telemachus
Mulligan sings about Mary Ann "hising up her petticoats" to piss like a
man, and in Proteus Stephen imagines the "coy
silver fronds" of seaweed as women, "hising up their
petticoats" in the sight of "lascivious men." In Aeolus
he imagines the women "wiping off with their handkerchiefs the
plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting the
plumstones slowly out between the railings." The image of
seeds spewing from the top of a phallic pillar rather vividly
suggests what thoughts the spinsters may be thinking about
England's hero.
