Venus and Adonis

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In Lestrygonians Bloom leaves the bar to urinate: "Dribbling a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to do there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the lees and walked, to men too they gave themselves, manly conscious, lay with men lovers, a youth enjoyed her, to the yard." The referent of "they" is clear––Bloom has been thinking about Greek goddesses in the previous paragraph––but the particular goddess and the "youth" with whom she had sex are not specified. Thornton and Gifford suggest, however, that the sentence may allude to Shakespeare's Venus, Gifford noting that "manly conscious" evokes Shakespeare's relentless characterization of the goddess as masculine. There are countless examples of this, e.g., "Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust" (41). The mention of a "youth" would also distinguish Adonis from the many grown men to whom goddesses give themselves in Greek myth, though, as Gifford notes, Adonis does not "enjoy" Venus in the poem: "Venus is unable to overcome the resistance of Adonis's 'unripe years' (524)."

Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner appear skeptical of an allusion to Shakespeare, instead mentioning "Calypso and Circe, who both slept with Odysseus, and Thetis who slept with Achilles's father Peleus." This more general reading makes better sense of "enjoyed," but it completely ignores the word "youth." The Slote team supplies some interesting commentary on "yard," noting that it can mean "toilet" in Ulster dialect, or "penis" according to the OED. (One wonders whether Davy Byrne's might have had an actual back yard, with or without an outhouse, in 1904. Presumably they have looked into this possibility and ruled it out.)

If Thornton's hunch is correct, it would cohere with the theme of unmanning that Stephen advances in the next chapter. Shakespeare presents Venus as a kind of failed rapist, aggressively dominating Adonis but unable to command an erection from her partner. (Instead of a portrait of aggressive female sexuality the poem could be read as a veiled expression of the author's homosexuality, but Stephen does not respond to it in this way.) Venus's unsuccessful seduction might seem irrelevant to Bloom, since like the "youth" he has had sexual relations with his love, but the thought of emasculation is highly relevant at this moment in Lestrygonians. Bloom has just been remembering a rapturous sexual experience with Molly years ago on Howth Head, a memory that reproaches him now when he cannot summon the potency to satisfy his wife. ("Me. And me now.") The "Dribbling" flaccidity of his penis as he thinks of urinating puts him in mind of his halfway state between sexual engagement and impotence: "to go to do not to do there to do."

Shakespeare's characterizations of Venus as a woman who wants to penetrate as well as be penetrated, and of Adonis as a man who does not do but is done to, receive symbolic expression at the end of the poem when Adonis, abandoning Venus for the hunt, is gored by a boar. Running after him in distress, she finds "the wide wound that the boar had trench'd / In his soft flank, whose wonted lily white / With purple tears, that his wound wept, [was] drench'd" (1052-54). Lest anyone miss the way in which the boar has acted out her desire, Shakespeare has Venus say that the animal "by a kiss thought to persuade him there; / And [nuzzling] in his flank, the loving swine / Sheath'd unaware the tusk in his soft groin. // Had I been tooth'd like him, I must confess, With kissing him I should have killed him first" (1114-18). The combination of tender feeling and rapacious desire expressed so skillfully in these lines lies behind Stephen's picture of the effect that Anne Hathaway had on Shakespeare: "The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding." Like Bloom, Shakespeare had sex with a "boldfaced" female and was undone by her unfaithfulness: "Belief in himself has been untimely killed."

Many less consequential echoes of Venus and Adonis sound in Scylla and Charybdis. Stephen refers to "The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis," alluding both to the poem's description of Adonis as "the tender boy" (32) and to Venus's words, "Mine eyes are gray and bright and quick in turning" (140). His reference to Anne's "blue windows" recalls Shakespeare's account of Venus raising her eyelids: "Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth, / Like the fair sun" (481-83). (Gifford notes that in Elizabethan English "gray eyes" meant blue.) When he thinks of himself as a "Seabedabbled" Icarus he is recalling the poem's picture of a "dewbedabbled" hare chased by hounds. When he imagines Shakespeare writing Anne into his fictions he includes Venus: "Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess." And when he imagines Anne getting religion late in life he gives her a mythic name: "Venus has twisted her lips in prayer."