Reading the Disabled Woman: Gerty MacDowell and the Stigmaphilic Space of “Nausicaa”

As readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses, we first encounter Gerty MacDowell during ‘‘Wandering Rocks.’’ Joyce’s encyclopedic account of the activities of both major and minor characters on the afternoon of June 16, 1904 fleetingly presents a host of physical and cognitive differences. From the one-legged sailor patriotically singing on Eccles Street; to the blind stripling on his way to retrieve his tuning fork from the Ormond Bar; to the harried and eccentric figure of Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, who accidentally knocks the blind stripling down; to Gerty herself, carrying her father’s ‘‘lino letters’’ and walking too slowly to catch a glimpse of the vice regal cavalcade (U 10.1207), ‘‘Wandering Rocks’’ presents brief displays of difference matter-of-factly. Three episodes later, in ‘‘Nausicaa,’’ the state of physical difference with which Ulysses is heretofore peripatetically concerned finally becomes the object of more sustained engagement. Through Gerty’s brief relationship with Leopold Bloom, we begin to see that physical difference occupies a crucial position within the novel, helping to illuminate a space in which models of identity and social relations that rely on normative bodies can begin to be challenged and revised. While I am not suggesting that Joyce himself intended a radical critique of ableism, I believe that an examination of Gerty’s character reveals her crucial role in shoring up the novel’s implicit questioning of compulsory normativity. Far from being a conventional, sentimental heroine, Gerty MacDowell embodies a powerful resistance to eugenic ideologies of standardization that pervade the twentieth century, positing in their place an ethics of bodily particularity.