Against Essentialism: Joyce's Representation of Subjectivity and Desire in ＂Nausicaa＂

Abstract

This paper focuses on the way in which James Joyce represents male/female desire and subjectivity in the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses (1922). At a glance, Gerty MacDowell, a heroine of the episode, looks like a sex-object to satisfy Leopold Bloom's sexual desire. But what Joyce attempts to reveal through Gerty's willing self-objectification is the gender role of patriarchal culture by which the "sacrifice" of a woman in a sexual relationship is legitimized. Joyce's parody of the Gerty-Bloom erotic fantasy reveals how "fake" and "fabricated" male/female subjectivity and sexuality can be, and how the sexual mechanisms between man and woman are socially constructed. In so doing, Joyce refuses to essentialize human desire on the basis of the sexual subject-object paradigm. In order to foreground Joyce's different approach to male/female desire, I will compare in the later part of the paper Joyce's parody of the Gerty-Bloom erotic fantasy with Luce Irigaray's feminist reading of woman's sexuality where she pays attention to the female touch in contrast to the male gaze.