Reflecting on the young wife whom he encountered in his historical study of Irish aristocrats, Father Conmee thinks that "if she had not committed adultery fully, eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris, with her husband's brother," then she probably would not have confessed her sin to a priest. This church Latin phrase, rendered in an English translation in Ithaca ("ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ"), refers to completed acts of heterosexual intercourse. The contexts in which the phrase appears are very different—repressive control of a woman's sexuality in Wandering Rocks, satisfaction of a woman's sexual desires in Ithaca—but in both passages it introduces the Catholic view that the purpose of sexuality is to produce offspring.

Mary Rochford was accused of adultery and admitted it in a kind of plea deal to obtain a legal divorce, but her vengeful husband reneged on his promise and imprisoned her on his country estate until his death four decades later. Father Conmee thinks the legal confession may have been a sham, but he believes that even if the young woman committed adultery only in her heart she would still have been obliged to make a confession to a priest, since desiring to do such a deed is a sin no less mortal than actually performing it. He supposes, however, that the young woman might have declined to bare her soul for something as trivial as unacted desires: "She would half confess if she had not all sinned as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband's brother."

Joyce does not treat Father Conmee very kindly in Wandering Rocks, and he may well have intended for these condescending thoughts to satirize priests meddling vicariously in the sexual lives of their female parishioners. But the Latin phrase "eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris" encodes Catholic ideas about marriage and sexuality that held broader interest for the novelist. Similar phrases are used in the Casus de Matrimonio (1893), a Catholic work on marital law which Joyce owned while in Paris and extensively underlined. Written by Maurice Matharan, a Jesuit priest and professor of moral theology, the Casus describes hundreds of particular cases of marital trouble and pronounces the church's judgment on the issues they raise.

In James Joyce and Sexuality (1985) Richard Brown notes that "Matharan is concerned, above all, with questions of legitimacy.... Characteristically over 200 of the cases deal with various 'impediments' in the performance of the service or in the 'consanguinity' of the partners that may legitimize the otherwise unthinkable separation or divorce. Many of the cases deal with the sexual relations of the partners, but not within modern terms of reference where the biological or emotional well-being of the partners is the primary consideration. For Matharan the sexual act is understood as a rendering of the conjugal debt incurred in the marriage contract...." (45). Marriage is a contractual obligation and sexual activity is its currency. In this institution mutually arranged by the family and the church, patriarchal interest in seeing property passed down to legitimate heirs aligns fairly naturally with pastoral insistence on directing sexual energy solely to making children.

Hence the oddly precise focus on semen entering the proper organ. Catholicism makes firm distinctions between legal and illegal orgasms: sodomy and even onanism are sins no less grievous than adultery. Brown quotes a definition of the latter from Paul Garnier's Onanisme (1883), "effusio seminis extra vas per voluntarium et violentam copulae interruptionem ad generationem impediendam' ('the ejaculation of the semen outside the vagina by the voluntary and violent interruption of copulation to impede reproduction')," and a more general condemnation in Matharan's work, "Mortale est quidquid per se inducit ad effusionem seminis extra conjunctem naturalem" ('whatever of itself leads to the ejaculation of semen outside of natural coupling is a mortal sin')" (56). A sentence in the Casus which he does not quote, concerned with adultery and the annulment of marriages, comes even closer to Father Conmee's language in Wandering Rocks: "Adulterium non invalidat nuptias subsequentes nisi fuerit consummatum per effusionem virilis seminis in vas femineum" ("Adultery does not invalidate subsequent marriages unless it has been consummated by ejaculation of male semen into the female vessel") (272). 

In the case of Mary Rochford, this Jesuitical splitting of sexual hairs arises in the context of a husband's need to control his wife's errant sexual impulses and ensure that familial property passes down to legitimate offspring. But Ithaca resurrects the phrase in what Brown calls the "modern" context of emotional relations between spouses. The narrative asks, "What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves...?" First part of the answer: the "listener," Molly, perceives "a limitation of fertility," inasmuch as, after five years of more or less normal marriage, "complete carnal intercourse, with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ, having last taken place 5 weeks previous, viz. 27 November 1893, to the birth on 29 December 1893 of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1894, aged 11 days, there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ."

Clearly Molly chafes at having been sexually unsatisfied for the last ten and a half years. In Penelope she thinks of letting Bloom know "that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times." This seems a legitimate conjugal expectation in all eras, but the paragraph in Ithaca implies that something more than sexual dissatisfaction lies behind the crisis in the Blooms' marriage. Echoing the language of clerical legalists like Matharan, it identifies the "inhibitions of conjugal rights" as, for Molly, a "limitation of fertility." By precisely chronicling the two births in the Blooms' marriage and the two acts of coition that produced them, it implies that Bloom's refusal or inability to inject semen into his wife's vagina is something more than a refusal or inability to give her the kinds of orgasms she prefers. It is a denial of the very principle of procreation.

Of course that is exactly what Bloom feels. His aversion to "complete carnal intercourse" clearly stems from the fact that the child produced by his last such marital act failed to thrive. Hostile to the church's diktat of unlimited procreation, he nevertheless believes that in his limited way he has fulfilled it: earlier in Ithaca he thinks that "The parties concerned, uniting, had increased and multiplied... [with] offspring produced and educed to maturity." But Molly is more religious than her husband, and she evidently feels cheated of a second chance at motherhood. Joyce wisely does not take sides in this matrimonial conflict, but his use of Jesuitical language to characterize her dilemma suggests that the Catholic conflation of marriage, sexuality, and procreation never entirely lost its grip on his imagination.

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John Hunt 2025