Touch is an equally important sense for this sensual man, and Joyce in the chapter frequently depicts Bloom's response to and need for warm objects and people. Bloom quickly notices the bright, pleasant sun, reasoning that it will be a warm day and that he will be uncomfortable in the black suit that he must wear for the funeral. When distressed, he yearns for the warm flesh of Molly, and he imputes the same desire to the cat when, instead of going out of the door as Bloom had thought she might, the animal chooses to go "in soft bounds" up to sleep on Molly's bed, to "curl up in a ball," fetally — perhaps as Bloom might wish to do himself.
Bloom's encounter, from a distance as usual, with the Woods' serving girl in Dlugacz's shop describes a warmth of a different kind: Bloom's sexual awareness, though now lodged in his imagination and physically dormant, will be aroused through Gerty MacDowell in "Nausicaa." In Dlugacz's shop, "blood" becomes the metaphor for sexual life as Bloom's thoughts range from the pig's blood to the tired blood of the Woods couple to the new, vital blood of the maid (and, by extension, to the menstrual blood of Milly and Molly, an important motif in Ulysses). Bloom enjoys his slightly voyeuristic memory of the Woods' serving girl whacking a carpet on the clothesline. He apparently likes hefty women, such as his own wife and (possibly) his daughter, and he hopes (but fails) to follow the thick-wristed maid out of Dlugacz's, to walk behind her "moving hams" (another pun on food in this chapter).
In addition, Bloom's trip to the outhouse epitomizes his delight in the physical as he (and Joyce) raise defecation to an art. Although the outhouse episode is probably one of the sections of Ulysses that Virginia Woolf found vulgar and disgusting, one must realize that in describing Bloom's modulating his stool, Joyce is offering in reality a bit of praise to humanity and is saying, at the same time, that salvation comes about only through an acceptance of the total self. Much of Joyce's work is balanced between scatology (the study of excrement) and eschatology (the study of mankind striving upward towards salvation).
