Howth tram
Howth tram
In Brief
Dredging up still more silliness from his past, Stephen
remembers a younger self "On the top of the Howth tram
alone crying to the rain: naked women!" He
was doing this not in Dublin or its suburbs, but on a tram
that took travelers to the relatively remote and wild Howth
peninsula, which juts into the sea about ten miles northeast
of Dublin. Indulging in sexual passion out of doors is not
unique to Stephen. In fact it is a pervasive theme in Ulysses.
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The "Howth tram" ran from 1901 to 1959 on a route that
departed from Fingal, just outside Dublin, and circled scenic
Howth Head, which had few inhabitants outside the village of
Howth on the northern coast of the peninsula. The whole route
had a rural feel, and cars had upper decks screened with wire
mesh for passengers to take in the sights. Unless he was
taking the tram to Howth to make a connection at the railway
station with a train bound for some other part of Ireland
(unlikely, though the line was constructed with this use in
mind), Stephen must have been engaged in an act of tourism,
using the tram to access a site of natural splendor not far
from the city. As the video posted here makes evident, people
were still doing this in 1959.
§ Stephen's release of sexual longing in the fresh country air identifies him with the novel's other two protagonists. Bloom has gone on a school field trip to the Poulaphouca waterfall and masturbated in the woods, for which he is accused in Circe by a grove of yew trees ("Who profaned our silent shade?"). Penelope discloses that Molly allowed Lieutenant Mulvey to fondle her in Gibraltar as "we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence," and also that she enjoyed a rapturous sexual idyll with Bloom "lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head." Stephen's hopeless cry of desire on top of a train car, strangled by religious guilt and justified by misogyny ("What else were they invented for?"), looks pitiful by comparison. But all of these episodes cohere in expressing an association between wild Nature and human sexual nature. As Simon Dedalus says of a sexual encounter in Hades, "it's the most natural thing in the world."
