Deasy blames women for the evils of history, and his views are as specious as those of Haines, who, in "Telemachus," maintained timidly that history, not the English, was to blame for Ireland's troubles. Apart from Eve, who first introduced sin into the world, Deasy censures Helen of Troy; Dervorgilla (the wife of the twelfth-century O'Rourke, Prince of Breffni and East Meath); and Kitty O'Shea (the wife of Captain O'Shea and the mistress of Charles Stewart Parnell). Helen is humorously appropriate in the mock heroic Ulysses since Nestor, in the Odyssey, sent Telemachus to Menelaus and Helen when he was unable to tell Telemachus much about his father. The reference to Dervorgilla shows that Deasy is not a precise scholar of Irish history; MacMurrough was not her husband; he was the lover with whom she ran off, occasioning O'Rourke to call in the English to help and bring them to Ireland for the first time (they never left). And the allusion to Parnell, the "Uncrowned King of Ireland," recalls the great political trauma of James Joyce's youth: the betrayal of Parnell by his followers because of the scandal of Parnell's involvement with Mrs. O'Shea. Of greatest importance about the stories of these three faithless wives, however, is that all three are different versions of Molly Bloom, who, on June 16, 1904, with Blazes Boylan, will enjoy an act of adultery.
In much the same manner, Deasy's distorted view of Jews foreshadows the treatment that Leopold Bloom will receive in Ulysses at the hands of predominantly Catholic Dubliners. Deasy feels that England is decaying because Jews are controlling the finances and the press. He sees them as "sinners against the light" in their unwillingness to acknowledge Christ as their Savior, and the image blends well with Bloom, who wears a black suit all day after attending the funeral of Paddy Dignam in "Hades." Deasy's description of Jews as being wanderers over the earth anticipates the role of Bloom as the Wandering Jew. And the crude joke that Deasy tells about Ireland's being the only country never to have persecuted the Jews (the Irish never let them in) establishes the scornful atmosphere that Bloom must wander in throughout the day.
