MEMORIES OF KISSING VENUS:

PICTURAL DESCRIPTIONS OF WOMEN IN ULYSSES, BY JAMES JOYCE

Abstract

This work proposes the reading of some excerts from the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce, in which there are pictural descriptions of women. The hypothesis of this work was that those scenes compose an important narrative thread in the novel, because it is from them that we find the cause of the marital crisis of the protagonists Leopold and Molly Bloom. In the novel, there is not any denomination of works of art. Because of this, it was part of this work identifying, in the pictural descriptions, the paintings the text was referring to. The conclusion was that Leopold formed subjectively an image of Molly in the beginning of the relationship that corresponds to the painting The birth of Venus, by Sandro Botticelli. After seeing his wife, in present, in contrast with the reproduction of a painting of Diana’s bath, Leopold Bloom compares his marriage to the myth of Diana and Acteon. In the end, in one of the last aparitions of the protagonist in the novel, he kisses his wife, seeing her as a mirrored version of the painting Venus in the mirror, by Diego Velásquez. The kiss sets the moment in which Leopold realizes an insoluble discrepancy among his real wife and the women reproduced in the works of art.