Leopold Bloomed in the Fountain of Salmacis

Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is a variation of Ovid’s Hermaphroditus from Metamorphoses. The parallels between the two are numerous and striking. Both are irresistibly drawn to the feminized element of water, both are part woman, and both are outcasts. But while they share these similarities, Bloom is, in other respects, an inversion of Hermaphroditus. Whereas Hermaphroditus resents his body and the womanly water that made it so, Bloom is a “womanly” “waterlover” (U 15.1799; 17.183). While Hermaphroditus’s womanliness rests on the outside of his body, Bloom’s is internalized. Through Bloom, Joyce alludes to, critiques, and reinvents Hermaphroditus, bringing us a man whose womanliness is one of his greatest strengths rather than weaknesses.

Ovid deeply influenced Joyce, as Joyce’s choice to title Ulysses in the Latin of Ovid rather than the Greek of Homer suggests. Like Ovid, Joyce is interested in the process of metamorphosis. In Ulysses, machines and doors possess human qualities (“Aeolus”), waterfalls speak (“Circe”), women become men (Bella/o in “Circe”), men become women (Bloom in “Circe”), the dead are resurrected (Bloom’s father and son in “Circe”), and Leopold Bloom transforms himself into a Flower (Henry Flower). Moreover, as Joyce and Ovid explore themes of change, flux, and “metempsychosis,” both Ulysses and Metamorphoses construct and imagine relationships between men and nymphs (U 4.339).

Ovid’s “The Fountain of Salmacis” tells the story of the son of Mercury (Hermes) and Venus of Cythera (Aphrodite) who, after rejecting the nymph Salmacis’s sexual advances, swims in the fountain of Salmacis and is consequently engulfed by the libidinous nymph, whose prayer that they become forever united into one body is answered. This gives rise to Hermaphroditus, a being who is physically both male and female. In stepping into the fountain, “whose enervating waters” now, according to legend, “effeminate the limbs of any man/who bathes in it,”¹ the boy unknowingly oversteps a sexual divide. For reasons not explained by Ovid’s narrator, the fountain is an extension of the nymph herself. As soon as the boy dives into it she declares, “I’ve won, the boy is mine,” before jumping in and binding her prey (Ovid 138). In entering the water, the boy enters the nymph’s domain without any hope of return, as she boasts after wrapping herself around him: “you can resist me, but you can’t escape” (138). Infuriated by his fate, Hermaphroditus cries to the heavens, “may any man who sets foot in this pool/depart from it without virility,/instantly softened by the water’s touch” (139). His cry is heard, and his parents “g[i]ve the fountain that defiling power” (139).

“The Fountain of Salmacis” firmly establishes the man-woman/landwater binary that has led to countless tales of sirens, mermaids, naiads, and other womanly watery creatures who enjoy seducing and drowning land-inhabiting men, a theme that was especially popular in fin-de-siècle painting.² This binary is evidenced early in Ulysses, as “hydrophobe” Stephen Dedalus simultaneously fears women, water, and drowning,³ and Buck Mulligan repeatedly calls the sea variations of “our great sweet mother” (U 17.237; 1.80). In tracing the idea of woman as watery other and water as womanly back through the canon, Ovid’s Metamorphoses proves to be one of its most ancient sources.

While Salmacis is not explicitly present in Ulysses, an image titled “The Bath of the Nymph” from Photo Bits hangs over the Blooms’ bed (U 4.369). The nymph in the photograph is in Bloom’s thoughts throughout the day, and partakes in a fantasy conversation with him in “Circe” while he fawns over her: “Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty, almost to pray” (U 15.3285–6). Like Salmacis, Joyce’s nymph is sexually aroused by her male counterpart, who she nevertheless aims to “impotentis[e].”⁴ In the midst of her interaction with Bloom “a large moist stain appears on her robe,” shortly after which “she draws a poniard and, clad in the...