Interesting condition

When Mulligan enters the hospital common room he launches into ribald joking about his sexual potency. Then he sees Bloom among the students and asks if he needs help with a medical question. Bloom replies that he has come to inquire about a patient "that was in an interesting condition, poor lady, from woman's woe (and here he fetched a deep sigh) to know if her happiness had yet taken place." The strange diction here is not meant to suggest that Mrs. Purefoy's unusually prolonged labor is somehow clinically "interesting." In Italian idiom in stato interessante ("in an interesting state") means simply "pregnant," and similar usages were current among English speakers in the 19th century. A clue to the origins of this expression can be found in the word's etymological sense, "between-being," which subtly communicates Bloom's concern for the woman's suffering.

In an article titled "'Sounds are impostures': From Patronymics to Dante's Trombetta," Joyce Studies Annual 4 (1993): 43-54, Corinna del Greco Lobner remarks that Bloom is "the only visitor to the House of Horne who approaches the topic of childbirth with appropriate reticence. It's only fitting, therefore, that he should inquire after Mrs. Mina Purefoy by adopting a conventional Italian euphemism for pregnancy, stato interessante" (46). Since Bloom's Italian is almost nonexistent it seems unlikely that he would be "adopting a conventional Italian euphemism," but it does seem right to say that his euphemistic language (assuming it is his, and not the narrator's) conveys a decorous tact that the others in the common room sorely lack. Mulligan has been joking about a "national fertilising farm," and after Bloom's statement the unprofessional atmosphere continues with more coarse joking about whether Mulligan's big belly means that he is pregnant. "Interesting" emphasizes by contrast the polite and respectful attitude that Bloom brings to the proceedings.

It is not necessary to speculate about whether Bloom could be familiar with the Italian expression, because Victorians resorted to similar tactful circumlocutions. Although advice manuals for women referred explicitly to pregnancy, that state implied having had sex, so popular discourse covered the shame with euphemisms. Many women went into "confinement" once they began to show and were said to be "expecting." When it became necessary to refer to their physical condition they were often said to be in "a delicate condition," "an interesting state," or "the family way." The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser referred to Queen Victoria's first pregnancy on 25 April 1840 as her "interesting situation." In Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) Dickens writes that Mrs. Lenville, "as has been hinted before, was in an interesting state," and in a 10 August 1848 letter he sardonically observed that "Mrs. Dickens being in an uninteresting condition, has besought me to bring her out of London for two months."

In a page on The Victorian Web (victorianweb.org), Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge note that this word carries precise etymological implications: "Derived from the Latin inter (between) and esse (be), interesting was commonly used to convey a suspended or incomplete state, as in a cricket game being 'in a very interesting condition' or a missionary commenting that 'there are several families in an interesting condition, and I trust they may soon be enabled fully to make a profession of Christ'. The word's suggestion of unknown outcomes implies that interesting was not merely a euphemism but a subtle reference to the various unknowns of pregnancy in an era of relatively high infant and maternal death in childbirth."

There can be little doubt that the man who went on to write Ithaca was fully aware of the word's etymological sense. Bloom has come to the National Maternity Hospital because this "poor lady" has been in a state of between-being for three excruciating days.