Twice in quick succession at the beginning of Sirens—indeed, in the same block of Wellington Quay—Bloom passes by shop windows displaying "blessed virgins." Small statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary are enormously popular in Italy (both con bambino and senza bambino), and Italian merchants evidently are doing a brisk trade selling these devotional objects in Dublin. The ones Bloom sees are clothed in blue and white, iconographic colors traditionally assigned to Mary. Briefly pondering her appeal, he displays ignorance of Catholic theology and settles on a notion which the church would find outrageous: that Mary says "come to me" in a sexually inviting way. In the catalogue of Joyce's subversive innuendos, surely this one deserves a high ranking.

Countless works of religious art depict Jesus's mother in a blue robe—a motif which Joyce deploys repeatedly in Nausicaa. One other color is usually involved, typically in the dress worn under the robe. This second color is occasionally red, but more often white. "Bassi's blessed virgins" conform to the iconographic pattern: "Bluerobed, white under." About a page later in the text, and only a few feet farther up the street, "Ceppi's blessed virgins, bright of their oils" presumably do so as well. The white color seen "under" Mary's outer garment may appear to be only an empirical observation. It proves to be something much more disturbing.

Believers in Ireland, as in many other Catholic countries, keep Virgin icons in their domestic spaces as perpetual reminders that God's mercy to sinners, symbolized in a mother's selfless love, is inexhaustible. The cultus of the Blessed Virgin arose in the later Middle Ages as a popular antidote to harsher images depicting God as a righteous and vengeful judge of human frailty. Mother Mary acts as an intercessor between this angry heavenly father and his incorrigible offspring. Beckoning sinners with maternal love, she assures them that if they confess their crimes, show contrition, and resolve to sin no more, no transgression can exceed God's capacity for forgiveness.

Stephen Dedalus was raised in this culture of venerating the heavenly mother, but as an adult he scorns it. In Scylla and Charybdis, as elsewhere, he meditates on the Trinitarian theology of Father and Son as the true essence of Christian faith: "On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded." Mary is a saint in the Catholic religion—the most blessed of human beings, closest to God of all heaven's inhabitants—but she is not divine. Bloom gets this wrong: "God they believe she is: or goddess." But it is a distinction that nonbelievers may understandably fail to grasp, given the ardor with which Catholics embrace their holy icon. Protestants call the devotion mariolatry, "worship of Mary," and the freethinking Bloom jumps to the same conclusion.

As an atheist skeptical of all religious doctrines, he takes little interest in what the goddess statues might imply about sin, atonement, forgiveness, or reconciliation. Instead he sees simply a beautiful female figure, someone that a man might like to fuck. In Lestrygonians his distinctly anal eroticism led him to inspect one of the statues of Greek goddesses in the National Museum to determine whether the sculptor provided her with an anus, and now he recalls how his plan was thwarted when someone spoke to him: "Those today. I could not see. That fellow spoke. A student. After with Dedalus' son. He might be Mulligan."

If statues of Greek goddesses are capable of exciting erotic interest, then why not Christian ones? Never mind the puritanical piety of Christians as contrasted with Greek delight in the naked human form. And never mind the clothes. Bloom lives in a culture with strong taboos against the display of female flesh, resulting in fetishization of undergarments. He suffers from a bad case of underwear-lust, as Molly thinks in Penelope: "of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin standing right against the sun so he could see every atom she had on...drawers drawers the whole blessed time."

Seen through this particular lens, the statues in Bassi's and Ceppi's shop windows acquire a most unorthodox kind of significance: "All comely virgins. That brings those rakes of fellows in: her white." Comely virgins exist to be deflowered, and the body language of this one says "come to me." Is it any wonder, then, that licentious young men ("rakes") may be carnally attracted to a young woman whose white "under"-garments are all too visible? Even today, no commentators seem to notice this staggeringly blasphemous little detail in Sirens. If any of the censors in Joyce's day had been good enough readers to spot it, perhaps his novel would never have made it onto English, American, and (especially!) Irish shores.

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John Hunt 2025