In Nausicaa Bloom thinks of "Mutoscope pictures in
Capel street: for men only. Peeping Tom." Mutoscopes were
coin-operated boxes that allowed customers to advance a reel
of film by turning a handle. Like
photographs before them, these early motion pictures
were quickly turned to prurient uses, making money by enticing
passers-by to watch a moving peep-show. In Circe, a
mutoscope motion picture from the early 1900s called What
the Butler Saw provides the basis for a fantasy in
which Bloom becomes a valet invited to "apply your eye to the
keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a
few times."
Mutoscopes were coin-operated flip-card viewers activated by
a hand crank; when a user turned the handle, 70 mm still
photos created a moving picture. The machines were patented in
the United States in 1894. They were sometimes called "What
the Butler Saw machines," because a short film of that name
commented meta-cinematically on the action of staring at
half-naked women through a slot. It showed a woman undressing
in her bedroom, seen as if the viewer were looking through a
keyhole.
Bloom seems acutely aware of the voyeuristic possibilities
that cameras and film-viewing devices were opening up in his
time. In Circe, in addition to asking "May I
bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot?,"
he thinks in photographic or cinematographic terms while he
contemplates the deed: "(His eyes wildly dilated,
clasps himself.) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her!
More! Shoot!" The "shoot" of Boylan's orgasm
becomes indistinguishable from a film shoot, and the showing
and hiding of Boylan's penis and Molly's vagina becomes the
occasion for thinking about what is hidden and what is shown
in peep shows.
In an essay titled "Joyce, Early Cinema and the Erotics of
Everyday Life," published in Roll Away the Reel
World: James Joyce and Cinema, ed. John McCourt (Cork
University Press, 2010), Katherine Mullin argues that
Bloom "longs for the camera's power to capture the spectacle
he craves" (48)—voyeuristic spectacles of beautiful women laid
bare to the eye. This scene in Circe, Mullin
concludes, "savagely fulfills Bloom's cinematic ambitions"
(55).
What the Butler Saw offered no more than female
nakedness, but the title implied something more. The phrase
had been current in British popular culture since the 1886
divorce trial of Lord Colin Campbell and his lady, the
Irish-born Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, who was accused of having
committed adultery with four different men. (For her part,
Lady Campbell had won a legal separation from her husband in
1884, on the grounds that he had knowingy infected her with a
venereal disease acquired before their marriage in 1881. Both
parties filed for divorce after the separation.) In the very
well publicized divorce trial, the Campbells' butler testified
that he had witnessed his lord's wife copulating with Captain
Eyre Massey Shaw of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, viewing the
busy couple through a keyhole. The members of the jury were
escorted to the Campbells' London home to verify the
plausibility of the butler's testimony.
It is reasonable to suppose that Bloom, like almost everyone
else in London and Dublin, is aware of the notorious divorce
trial and the scandalous testimony on which it turned. When he
applies his eye to a keyhole in Circe, what he sees
is not a woman undressing, but an undressed woman being
violated by a man other than her husband.
