Reading the Disabled Woman: Gerty MacDowell and the Stigmaphilic Space of “Nausicaa”

As readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses, we first encounter Gerty MacDowell during “Wandering Rocks.” Joyce’s encyclopedic account of the activities of both major and minor characters on the afternoon of June 16, 1904 fleetingly presents a host of physical and cognitive differences. From the one-legged sailor patriotically singing on Eccles Street; to the blind stripling on his way to retrieve his tuning fork from the Ormond Bar; to the harried and eccentric figure of Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, who accidentally knocks the blind stripling down; to Gerty herself, carrying her father’s “lino letters” and walking too slowly to catch a glimpse of the vice regal cavalcade (U 10.1207), “Wandering Rocks” presents brief displays of difference matter-of-factly.

Three episodes later, in “Nausicaa,” the state of physical difference with which Ulysses is heretofore peripatetically concerned finally becomes the object of more sustained engagement. Through Gerty’s brief relationship with Leopold Bloom, we begin to see that physical difference occupies a crucial position within the novel, helping to illuminate a space in which models of identity and social relations that rely on normative bodies can begin to be challenged and revised. While I am not suggesting that Joyce himself intended a radical critique of ableism, I believe that an examination of Gerty’s character reveals her crucial role in shoring up the novel’s implicit questioning of compulsory normativity. Far from being a conventional, sentimental heroine, Gerty MacDowell embodies a powerful resistance to eugenic ideologies of standardization that pervade the twentieth century, positing in their place an ethics of bodily particularity.

Modernism and Eugenic Ideology

To examine Gerty’s relationship to ideologies of standardization, we must first understand the pervasiveness of eugenic ideology during the modernist period. Disability theorist Lennard J. Davis has written extensively about the development of the concept of the “normal” body, and its particular relationship to disability in the twentieth century. Davis traces the beginnings of corporeal norming to the rise of statistics—specifically, to the work of nineteenth-century French mathematician Adolphe Quetelet.¹ Observing that “[s]tatistics is bound up with eugenics,” Davis notes the ways in which statistics seek to identify and manage deviations from the norm, thereby creating the notion of a “standard” body (26). Indeed, Sir Francis Galton, the British statistician who infamously coined the term “eugenics,” took Quetelet’s notion of the “normal distribution” one step further by ranking various deviations, which led to “[a] new ideal of ranked order [that] is powered by the imperative of the norm, and then is supplemented by the notion of progress, human perfectibility and the elimination of deviance, to create a dominating, hegemonic vision of what the human body should be” (35, emphasis mine). In addition to being rooted in a fundamentally racist and classist fear of cultural “degeneracy,”² this hegemonic vision of the normal body excluded a range of people with disabilities: the deaf, the mentally ill, the cognitively disabled, alcoholics, and those with congenital anomalies, among many others (Davis 38).

This eugenic ideology of bodily perfectibility persisted well into the twentieth century in both America and Europe and, despite its later association with Nazi extremism, was a staple of mainstream culture during the 1920s. In 1927, the Supreme Court case Buck vs. Bell explicitly legalized forcible eugenic sterilization in the U.S., which, in some states, remained legal until the mid-1970s.³ Although less widely practiced in Britain, compulsory sterilization enjoyed a reasonable degree of approval within the scientific community (Davis 38). Many British health officials who were uncomfortable with compulsory sterilization vigorously campaigned for what they called “voluntary sterilization” during the 1920s and early 1930s.⁴ Scientists were by no means the only prominent cultural figures to support eugenic programs. The list of modernist writers on both sides of the Atlantic who subscribed to eugenic philosophy is a long one, including T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Rebecca West, and H. L. Mencken.⁵ Tellingly, Joyce was among a handful of authors to speak out against eugenics in his...