Bloom's speculation about Mr. Woods goes straight to his
domestic arrangement: "Wife is oldish. New blood. No
followers allowed." By his suspicious logic, the
servant girl is not at 8 Eccles just to perform domestic
chores, but to provide a remedy to the problem of an aging
wife. "No followers" was a common Dublin employment condition
to keep maids from bringing distracting and possibly felonious
boyfriends or suitors to their place of work. Bloom imagines
Woods laying down this condition to establish a monopoly of
sexual access to his attractive young helper.
He is clearly extrapolating from personal experience. Circe
dramatizes the erotic interest he took in a "scullerymaid"
named Mary Driscoll, which may have led to a physical advance
on his part, and which may have emboldened Mary to steal some
oysters from the Blooms. Molly thinks about the events in Penelope,
remembering Mary "padding out her false bottom to excite him"
and stealing potatoes and oysters, and suspecting that Bloom's
complicity gave her some encouragement to act so outrageously.
Bloom's propensity for voyeurism combines with his
identification with a fellow employer to make the girl next
door an object of erotic longing: "Strong pair of arms.
Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by
George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack." Bloom
clearly has gazed into his neighbor's back yard when the
servant girl was working there. He may not have quite imagined
himself a carpet, but his appreciation of her aggressive vigor
implies some masochistic
interest in this young woman. Consistent with his marked
anality, he seems also to
have been particularly excited by the sight of her "vigorous
hips," which he is now staring at again.
Standing in a place where meat is sold, his admiration of the
woman's rump becomes translated into the language of
commodification and consumption: "Sound meat there: like a
stallfed heifer." Bloom remembers his days in the cattle
market, when the breeders would walk among the stock,
"slapping a palm on a ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime
one, unpeeled switches in their hands." He hopes that his
business will be concluded quickly enough "To catch up and
walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams."
The "Brown scapulars in
tatters" that the poor girl wears, "defending her both ways,"
testify to her vulnerability working for low wages in a home
far from her own, unprotected by male relatives. As if in
recognition of this fact, Bloom's fantasy concludes with the
thought that she is not really for Mr. Woods or for himself,
but "For another: a constable off duty cuddled her in
Eccles lane. They like them sizeable. Prime sausage. O
please, Mr Policeman, I'm lost
in the wood." Either Bloom has actually seen the girl
flirting with such a policeman in Eccles Lane, which runs
behind Eccles Street to the hospital, or he has imagined it.
Such a hero can rescue a damsel lost in the Woods, he wittily
supposes. This figure returns in fantasy in Circe: "the
constable off Eccles Street corner."
Gifford notes that the 1904 Thom's lists a Mr. R.
Woods as living at 8 Eccles Street, one door west of Bloom's
house, and that "He is listed again under 'Nobility, Gentry,
Merchants, and Traders' (p. 2043), but his vocation is not
identified." In giving a place in the narrative to someone who
actually lived in the neighborhood, Joyce continued the
verisimilitude maintained by placing the fictional Bloom in a
house that was unoccupied in
1904. But in fact Thom's was wrong about the
person living in the house next door in 1904. "R. Woods" was
Rosanna Woods, wife of Patrick, and although the couple had
lived together in the house at the time of the national census
in 1901, they separated in 1902 and after that Rosanna lived
at 8 Eccles Street either alone or with her daughter Mary
Kate. For more on the Woods, see the note on the James
Joyce Online Notes website.
