I will be using Distant Reading techniques to examine how the language James Joyce uses to describe Gerty MacDowell and her girlfriends in episode thirteen of Ulysses, “Nausicaa,” serves to infantilize the young women by analogizing them to their infant siblings. Gerty MacDowell and her girlfriends are significant characters in Joycean discourse; Gerty in particular is often examined in scholarship through the lens of her sexuality, and the ongoing discussion of whether she is powerful or powerless in the eyes of both Leopold Bloom and the reading public provides the bulk of the body of academic writing on “Nausicaa.” Bloom’s sexualization of Gerty is overt, and her sexual agency as a young woman in staunchly Catholic, turn-of-the-century Ireland has been debated by critics ad nauseam; however, the use of language in “Nausicaa” as a means of infantilization has not been as thoroughly examined, and I have yet to come across an article that uses distant reading to investigate quantitatively how often specific words such as “little” appear in this section as a means of comparing the young women to, and therefore placing them on the same intellectual level as, their toddler wards.
In my research, I provide quantitative data that links the characterization of Gerty MacDowell and her girlfriends to that of the toddler boys they are babysitting. By investigating how often infantilizing words such as “little” are applied to both Gerty and her girlfriends and the young boys in their care, I examine how Joyce uses these same descriptions to force the reader to draw comparisons between the nature of toddlers and the “childlike nature” of young women. Furthermore, I apply this data to the work of other critics who examine the depiction of Gerty’s naivety and perceived “innocence,” and discuss whether I believe Joyce is intentionally critiquing, through the character of Bloom, a society that asserts the superior desirability of the “barely legal” female - and the inherent power imbalance of this - or whether I believe he himself is perpetuating this harmful narrative.
My goal is for my research to provide new context to how Gerty and her girlfriends’ characterizations are systematically structured, and to add to the discussion about the role and responsibility of Joyce himself as narrator in swaying the audience’s view of Gerty’s character.