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It can hardly be an accident of Joyce's writing that the cat is female and that her vocalizations ("Mkgnao!," "Mrkgnao!," "Mrkrgnao!") resemble those of the half-conscious Mrs. Bloom ("Mn"). Bloom's reflection on his cat's cruelty, and his uncharacteristically unrealistic thought that her victims too may be deriving pleasure from her claws, suggest that he is constructing Molly in fantasy (though perhaps unconsciously) as a dominatrix and himself as a passive but willing sub. Many details of the novel support this impression, leading up to the extravagant hallucinatory events in Circe.

As Calypso continues, more of Bloom's thoughts and actions suggest that he does derive a certain pleasure from submission. As he waits in the butchershop, eyeing the servant girl in front of him, he remembers in strongly suggestive terms the way he has seen her beat a rug in the garden: "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." Two paragraphs later, the pleasure he takes in watching her vigorous beating is juxtaposed against his passive sense of subjection: "He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging, whack by whack by whack." Several paragraphs later still, his voyeuristic leering in the butchershop, and the girl's disinterest, give him further occasion to become aroused by abasement: "they never understand. . . . The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast."

Bloom's tendency to become a servant in his wife's presence—bustling about to anticipate her desires and execute her bossy orders, identifying with Mozart's Leporello—is another aspect of this submissiveness. So too is the helplessness that he feels with respect to her adultery. In the face of both Molly's infidelity and Milly's sexual maturation, he experiences physical sensations that sound sickly but also vaguely erotic: "A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now. Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman's lips."

The letter in Lotus Eaters shows that Martha Clifford is well aware of Bloom's submissive tendencies, and willing to play along: "I do wish I could punish you for that....Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So now you know what I will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not write." When Bloom writes back to Martha in Sirens, he thinks again about the servant girl beating the carpet: "How will you pun? You punish me? Crooked skirt swinging, whack by. Tell me I want to. Know."

Bloom's sexual passivity and self-abasement are laid out quite unmistakably in the novel, but it is possible that his thoughts about mice in Calypso result from observation as much as projection. Mice will sometimes play dead (or become paralyzed by fear?) when trapped by a cat, and sometimes they may be positively drawn toward felines. In a personal communication, Brad Harbaugh points out that in recent decades researchers at Stanford University and Imperial College London have been investigating how a common fungal parasite called Toxoplasma gondii hijacks the neural circuitry of rats. Toxoplasmosis infections activate a part of the rat’s brain responsible for sexual attraction, overcoming the animal's natural tendency to freeze in fear of a cat by making the smell of cat urine arousing. Joyce would have known nothing of this, but he liked cats and wrote about them repeatedly (Calypso, Lotus Eaters, Ithaca, The Cats of Copenhagen, Finnegans Wake). It is conceivable that he may have watched mice acting as if they were drawn to cats rather than fleeing them and connected that odd behavior to his protagonist's equally odd uxorious masochism.