The Iambic Muse: Gerty’s Metaformations in Ulysses 13

This article on Ulysses 13 argues that Gerty’s fetishized feet and lame leg function as verbal, visual, and aural symbols that guide the readers through an intertextextual labyrinth. It shows that the Nausicaa episode does not just re-enact the mythic Homeric encounter between a foreign man and an unguarded girl on the beach of Phaeacia, but alludes simultaneously and repeatedly to other versions — classical and modern of the original erotic-elegiac encounter. The author contends that Gerty MacDowell, like the scriptae puellae of Latin elegy and Ovid in particular, is a textual- object fabricated by the artist-lover. She is Bloom’s flawed erotic masterpiece.