Joyce, in "Nausicaa," however, is doing much more than satirizing cheap, sentimental romance fiction: In this episode, he reveals the hidden side of Irish womanhood, as he will also later do in "Penelope," in Molly's soliloquy. In fact, in two significant ways, Gerty foreshadows Molly: Gerty, as does Molly, pleads for more understanding from men, especially priests, who hear women's intimate confessions; and Gerty and Molly are compared many times by Joyce to the Blessed Virgin.
Gerty knows exactly what she is doing in "seducing" Bloom — the dark and mournful foreign stranger — as she leads him to a moment of communication, albeit an ultimately unproductive one. She is aware of the allure of her transparent stockings: "Her woman's instinct told her that she had raised the devil in him. . . ." She finds a coconspirator in her friend Cissy Caffrey, who goes to ask her "uncle Peter" what time it is. Gerty has been told in the past about men's passions by Bertha Supple; thus, Gerty is very much aware of why Bloom keeps his hands in his pockets as he watches her display her underclothing. In short, she is scarcely the "fair unsullied soul" that Stephen saw calling to him at a climactic moment towards the end of Book Four of A Portrait. Stephen interpreted his "Pagan Mary" as beckoning him to the freedom of Europe; but in Ulysses, Joyce effectively portrays here the limitations of human nature, as well as its exalted moments. It was, in fact, Joyce's revelation of the darker passions of repressed womanhood, as well as its "blasphemous" commingling of sex and religion, that led to the suppression of Ulysses (in its serial format) by the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice in 1921.
The second part of "Nausicaa," as noted, concerns Bloom's thoughts — lethargic ones, for the most part, after his sexual emission; therefore, it is of little wonder that his ruminations deal with physiological matters. He recalls his almost approaching Mrs. Clinch, whom he mistakenly took to be a prostitute, and then he recalls the occasion when he paid a girl in Meath Street to say dirty words aloud. He also recalls the romance between Molly and Mulvey, and he thinks again about the time when he made love to Molly on Howth Hill. He wonders if Boylan pays Molly for sex, and, in true businesslike fashion, he estimates how much Molly is worth. He recalls the song of Boylan's about "seaside girls," the girls having become Gerty and her two friends. As usual, though, Bloom is an old "stick in the mud," and his phallic "stick" being limp, he tosses his writing implement into the sand, where it sticks, literally. As the cuckoo bird at the end of "Nausicaa" indicates, Bloom, despite all his thoughts about sex, is the cuckolded one.
