As others see us
“As he and others see me”: seeing himself in
the mirror held up by Mulligan, Stephen recalls two well-known
lines of the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-96). Burns
wrote, "O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as
ithers see us!" The thoughts that follow in Telemachus
("Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of
vermin") make clear that Stephen knows the whole
poem and is thinking about its message: objective
representation threatens subjective self-satisfaction, and the
body humbles the mind. Bloom knows the poem too, and thinks
about its crucial line in similar ways.
Cropped image of oil portrait of Robert Burns by Robert Naysmith, held in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Detail of mother picking head lice from a child
in Jan Siberechts' 1662 painting Cour de ferme, held in the
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Hamlet forcing his mother to compare the pictures of her two husbands, in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film. Source: thirdarchive.net.