Looking out across the sand flats toward the incoming tide in
Proteus, Stephen sees first a dog and then two human
beings to whom the dog belongs. He will
soon see the indistinct humans as "A woman and a man," then as
"Cocklepickers," then as "red Egyptians." But before he
can see clearly enough to resolve even their gender, he
imagines them as female figures from the Bible: "The two
maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes." He is
joining two very different biblical passages, and thereby
joining ideas of womanhood, birth, and death.
The "two maries" are "Mary Magdalene, and
Mary the mother of James and Joses" (Matthew 27:56). (Joses is
a shortened Greek form of Joseph, encountered often in the New
Testament.) The two women sit outside the rock cave in which
Jesus' body has been placed, and on the following morning they
come back to the sepulcher, Mark's gospel noting that they
have "brought sweet spices" to the tomb "that they might come
and anoint him." But the large stone sealing the tomb has been
rolled away, Jesus' body is gone, and an angel sitting at the
tomb tells them that he has risen from the dead. As the women
go to deliver this news to the disciples, Jesus appears (to
both women in Matthew, and only to Mary Magdalene in Mark)
telling them not to fear and to inform the disciples that they
will see him alive.
The reference to "bulrushes" alludes to the
story of Moses' infancy at the beginning of Exodus.
The Jews descended from Joseph and his brothers have
multiplied to an alarming extent, and a Pharaoh "which knew
not Joseph" gives orders that all male Jewish babies shall be
killed. In order to evade this command, Moses' mother hides
her son, "And when she could not longer hide him, she took for
him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with
pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags
by the river's brink" (2:3). The child is later discovered and
adopted by the Pharaoh's daughter.
Why should Stephen recall these two stories as he struggles
to make out who is walking toward him on the strand? There
would seem to be a connection with the two women who earlier
descended "the steps from Leahy's terrace," since he imagined
one of them as a midwife carrying "A misbirth with a trailing navelcord." These
two new figures, like the midwives, have to do with both birth
and death.
The cultural role of women as caretakers both at the start of
life and at its end makes other appearances in the novel. At
the beginning of Hades, Bloom sees an old woman
peering through her window at the funeral carriages and thinks
of the tradition of women preparing the bodies of corpses. He
makes a connection to childbirth: "Extraordinary the interest
they take in a corpse. Glad to see us go we give them such
trouble coming." In Oxen of the Sun, the two old
women on the beach return in one of Stephen's monologues: "The
aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport,
clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend.
First, saved from water of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed
of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain."
