How Old Is Gertrude MacDowell?

There seems to be some uncertainty as to how old Gertrude “Gerty” MacDowell is in Ulysses. A straightforward reading of the “Nausicaa” episode should tell us that she is a teenager: “As for undies they were Gerty’s chief care and who that knows the fluttering hopes and fears of sweet seventeen (though Gerty would never see seventeen again) can find it in his heart to blame her?” (U 13.171-73). In Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman’s “Ulysses” Annotated, however, she is referred to as a woman of twenty-two.¹ They allude to her relationship with Reggy Wylie as “a twenty-two-year-old woman’s daydreams of romance with a sixteen-year-old boy” (6). Similar views regarding Gerty’s age can be found in other writings as well. For instance, on the Modernism Lab at Yale University website, she is introduced as “a single girl in her early twenties,”² and in an article in the Washington University Law Review, dealing with the obscenity case against the publication of “Episode XIII (Continued)” in The Little Review, she is twenty-one.³ On the other hand, early commentaries on Gerty indicate that she is a teenager. In James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Stuart Gilbert refers to Reggy Wylie as “a boy of [Gerty’s] own age,” and, according to Gifford and Seidman, he is sixteen years old (6).⁴ In James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses,” Frank Budgen also refers to Bloom as being a man “twenty years the senior of Gerty, the maid.”⁵ Since Bloom is thirty-eight (U 17.454), that would make her eighteen. Considering that both books were written with Joyce’s help, it is likely that the author himself thought of Gerty as a teenager.⁶ While it is true that Joyce generally remained silent about other people’s interpretations of Ulysses, he did speak if he thought obvious mistakes were being made (JJII 601n). So then, how old is Gerty exactly? Despite the seeming confusion, the question is actually not difficult.

But perhaps more pertinent is whether this is a matter worth thinking about at all. Since little space has been devoted to the issue in scholarship and since confusion has persisted for many years, many may consider the query trivial. Be that as it may, this note will attempt to show that Gerty’s age is, in fact, significant for the narrative of Ulysses and deserves more careful consideration.

When we examine Ulysses for information on Gerty, it is clear that the confusion about her age essentially stems from the following passage in “Nausicaa”:

And while Edy Boardman was with little Tommy behind the pushcar she was just thinking would the day ever come when she could call herself his little wife to be. Then they could talk about her till they went blue in the face, Bertha Supple too, and Edy, little spitfire, because she would be twentytwo in November. She would care for him with creature comforts too for Gerty was womanly wise and knew that a mere man liked that feeling of hominess.

(U 13.218-24)

The textual ambiguity here arises from who “she” is in the clause “because she would be twenty-two in November.” Does it refer to Edy Boardman or to Gerty herself? On the one hand, the feminine pronoun has generally referred to Gerty as the subject of the third-person interior monologue after the question “[b]ut who was Gerty?” is asked near the beginning of the episode (U 13.78). The first two occurrences of the pronoun in the passage above, “she was just thinking would the day ever come when she,” both refer to Gerty, and the fourth, “[s]he would care for him,” also describes her. This context is most likely the reason that Gifford and Seidman interpret the third occurrence as referring to Gerty as well. On the other hand, pronoun-antecedent rules favor linking the third occurrence to Edy because her name is the immediate antecedent. There is also the inconvenient problem of the earlier passage identifying Gerty as “sweet seventeen” (U...