94 (U382.1120) BLOOM: (Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands:

Cast 94. Page 382, line 1120.

　BLOOM: (Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien.) O cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once. (He offers the other cheek.)

　MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (Severely.) Don’t do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!

　THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently.) I’ll do no such thing. Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped! To dare address me! I’ll flog him black and blue in the public streets. I’ll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a wellknown cuckold. (She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air.) Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick! Ready?

　BLOOM: (Trembling, beginning to obey.) The weather has been so warm.

Episode 15. Fantasy and reality intermingle. As noted in Cast 87 in this blog, Bloom’s trial begins after he is questioned by the night watchman. This is one of the scenes that follows. Three society ladies—Mrs Yelverton Barry, Mrs Bellingham, and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys—accuse Leopold Bloom of having sent them obscene letters.

It is not that Bloom has actually done such things; rather, his subconscious seems to be surfacing in these hallucinatory episodes.

The Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys appears in the following attire:

　THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (In amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly.) …

(U381.1058)

An “Amazon” refers to the tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology, said to have lived around the Black Sea. By extension, an “amazon costume” denotes a woman’s riding habit for hunting: a top hat, spurred boots, long gloves, a trailing skirt, and a riding crop.

Searching for “amazon” in an online dictionary（https://www.finedictionary.com/） yields an illustration by the French artist George Barbier from Modes et Manières d’Aujourd’hui (1922). Remarkably, it matches exactly the outfit described for Mrs Mervyn Talboys.

There are many puzzling elements in this scene.

First, why is Bloom shivering with cold? It is June in the novel.

“Kismet” is a word of Ottoman Turkish origin meaning fate or destiny, and it appears several times in the novel. Why Bloom uses it here is not entirely clear.

His offering of the other cheek is based on the Gospel of Matthew (5:39):

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

“Pigdog” is slang meaning “a contemptible or worthless person.”

It is also unclear why Bloom, who has just been complaining of the cold, suddenly remarks that the weather has been very warm of late. Perhaps it is a feeble attempt to avoid having his trousers removed.

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