The text gives less obvious encouragement to reading symbolic
significance into Mulligan's "yellow dressinggown" than it
does with mirrors and razors,
but in Christian countries this color had long been associated
with heresy and treachery. In Circe these
associations settle on Bloom.
Quoting George Ferguson's Signs and Symbols in Christian
Art (1954), Gifford notes that "the traitor Judas is
frequently painted in a garment of dingy yellow. In the Middle
Ages heretics were obliged to wear yellow" (153). After the
Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, some countries forced Jews to
wear a yellow badge on their clothing. After the Albigensian
Crusade ended in 1229, the Papal Inquisition of Pope Gregory
IX decreed that all remaining Cathars would wear yellow
crosses on their clothing as a similar badge of shame. This
practice was part of a broad cultural effort to stigmatize
certain groups. (In some countries paupers who had received
relief from the parish were made to wear red or blue badges on
one shoulder, in order to make seeking such relief
unappealing.) Islamic countries with large Jewish and
Christian populations had done the same thing in earlier
centuries. In the 20th century, the Nazis in Germany revived
these medieval badges of shame, forcing Jews to sew yellow
stars of David on their clothes and making homosexuals wear
pink triangles.
Since Stephen associates Mulligan with heresy later in Telemachus,
the fact that Buck likes to wear yellow clothing is
very suggestive. Later in Telemachus we learn that
his waistcoat
too is "primrose" colored.
In Circe, Bloom is immolated by an Irish version
of the Inquisition after being given such clothes to wear.
Brother Buzz "Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with
embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat. He places
a bag of gunpowder round his neck and hands him over to the
civil power," saying, "Forgive him his trespasses." Of
course, it is Bloom rather than Mulligan that most Dubliners
would see as a heretic. Half-Jewish by ancestry (his father
converted before his marriage, but tried to instill Jewish
traditions in his son), half-Protestant by affiliation (raised
in the Church of Ireland and a Freemason later in life), and
fully atheistical by temperament (he disbelieves in the
incorporeal soul and a host of other Christian teachings),
Bloom is quite inevitably an object of suspicion to most of
the Catholic Irishmen he meets.
