Gerty MacDowell In Ulysses:A Feminist Reading Of Her Liminality

In the thirteenth chapter of Ulysses,Gerty MacDowell takes the place of Molly Bloom,the heroine of the novel,to become the leading female figure of the chapter.Wandering on the Sandymount Strand,Leopold Bloom,encounters with a completely strange maiden,Gerty.They develop a transitory and passionate romance,however their relationship merely lasts throughout this chapter with Gerty herself showing up at length only in this episode.Although she plays a significant role merely in the"Nausicaa" segment,James Joyce employs dozens of pages to portray her,a minor character who seems to fail to possess not much explicit and essential connection with the other episodes.Since the publication of Ulysses,generations of researchers have dedicated themselves to the exploration of who Gerty really is and why Joyce spends half of the thirteenth chapter on her,a seemingly marginal female character.Starting from the two repeatedly asked but unsolved questions in Joycean researches,the thesis tries to explore the liminality of Gerty with the help of feminist theories.The thesis argues that Gerty can not be oversimplified as a sentimental heroine in the genre of popular love stories nor one-sidedly interpreted as a sex object in the imagination of Bloom.Instead,the female figure to whom Joyce devotes half of the"Nausicaa" episode possesses essential and internal connections with both the hero and the heroine of the book and embodies great liminality with her ambiguous identity.Employing the feminist theory,the thesis analyzes Gerty’s connections with Bloom,Molly and the specific gender context in Ireland at the time to suggest that her liminality represents the intermediate state of Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century.Splitting into three chapters,the dissertation successively explores Gerty’s struggles between the traditional and the modern gender roles,between the angel and the monster selves and between the religious and literary stereotypes and the Irish new woman in order to reflect the underlying but essential significance of Gerty.