Suspired amorously

In Brief

Mulligan is fixated on homosexuality in Scylla and Charybdis, perhaps in response to the common speculation that Shakespeare had strong feelings of that kind. He introduces the subject by telling how poet and Shakespeare scholar Edward Dowden (Gogarty's former professor at Trinity College) responded to his question about "the charge of pederasty brought against the bard." Before launching into this anecdote, the narrative observes, he "suspired amorously." Although Shakespeare occasionally used both of these words, Joyce appears to have taken them instead from Mulligan's (and Gogarty's) favorite poet, Algernon Swinburne. Swinburne's sexual orientation (primarily homo-) would seem to support this association, but the poem in which the two words appear does not evoke same-sex desire.

In a JJON essay, Geert Lernout notes that in the earliest version of the passage Joyce wrote "said gaily" but that in the Rosenbach manuscript he changed it to "suspired amorously." These words can both be found in Shakespeare's works: "amorous" appears frequently, and "amorously" in A Lover's Complaint, while "suspire" (meaning simply "breathe") is used in King John and Henry IV, Part 2. In its Joycean context, though, "suspire" seems to carry the meaning cited from the OED by Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner: "utter with a sigh." And Lernout suggests that Joyce's likely source is not Shakespeare but Swinburne's poem "Hermaphroditus." He argues that, while "gay" had not yet acquired its current sexual meaning in 1922, the words that Joyce substituted for it "contribute to a considerable homosexual subplot in the chapter, which is appropriate, given the theories about Shakespeare's sonnets."

It would be fair to draw this inference from the sculpture that inspired Swinburne's four sonnets, but as a response to his poems it is more than a little baffling. The inscription at the end of the sequence, "Au Musée du Louvre, Mars 1863," alludes to an erotic work he saw there called Sleeping Hermaphroditus. According to an ancient myth, the water nymph Salmacis, finding her love for the boy Hermaphroditus unreciprocated, lustfully wrapped her fluid body around his and joined with him to produce an androgynous being. The sculpted figure that Swinburne saw has female breasts and long hair, a man's name that joins the properties of his parents Hermes and Aphrodite, and a face that could belong to either sex. On top of this gender indeterminacy, the Hellenistic sculptor slyly overlaid sexual ambiguity. His naked figure with its provocatively presented bottom invites intercourse of a quite uncertain kind. If Mulligan knows of this, it may well be prompting his queenily amorous suspiration.

The sonnet sequence takes a rather different tack, however. It presents the mingling of two kinds of love in a single body––a man's for a woman, and a woman's for a man––as a source of sexual frustration, "barren hours." The first poem, responding to the pose that the sculptor chose, urges the androgyne to "Lift up thy lips, turn round, look back for love." But the lips look weary, because "Two loves at either bosom of thy breast / Strive until one be under and one above. / Their breath is fire upon the amorous air, / Fire in thine eyes and where thy lips suspire." Seeing the sculpture engenders both "strong desire" and "great despair." The third poem of the sequence remarks that Love will never "make thee man and ease a woman’s sighs, / Or make thee woman for a man’s delight." The poem describes a grotesquely contorted introjection of heterosexual desire. It could well be that in meditating on the sculpture Swinburne was pondering aspects of his own bisexuality, but the poem is no anthem to gay love.

Whether Joyce had any awareness of these distinctions, or even knew any more of "Hermaphroditus" than Gogarty's enraptured quotation of two lines, must probably remain a matter for speculation.

John Hunt 2024