Even when Bloom does contemplate "normal" sex, the result is unfulfilling. Just before picking up his letter, he thinks of the Woods' maid, whom he was not able to follow out of Dlugacz's. And his view of the silk-stockinged woman in front of the Grosvenor Hotel is blocked by an inopportunely passing tram, as Bloom is reminded of the episode of the preceding Monday when he was denied the sight of a girl adjusting her garter; her companion shielded her from Bloom's view.
Many of Bloom's sexual and other personal problems are illuminated in his preoccupation with the letter from Martha; and in describing Bloom's grossly exaggerated precautions to avoid detection and his desperate eagerness to shake off M'Coy so that he can enjoy the secret missive, Joyce vividly reveals his sense of comic genius.
Martha, for her part, seems to be almost as odd of a duck as Bloom. Her style in the letter is repetitious, trite, and trivial: she feels affronted that the prudent and parsimonious Bloom included stamps with his last letter; she wants a long letter from him; and she writes in the language of a Gerty MacDowell — or one of today's Modern Romance heroines. Martha is obviously a poor typist as well, leaving off the end of one sentence and committing a grammatical error in subject and verb agreement (one that Bloom remembers in "Hades"): "my patience are exhausted." And in her veiled sexual references, Martha seems to be somewhat of a sadist, as well as a very frustrated Dublin vestal. She twice threatens to punish Bloom, who here seems more like Ruby, the abused circus girl, than like her sadistic trainer; and Martha teases him by her not-so-subtle suggestion that, since his home life must be unpleasant, she would like to do "something for" him.
Martha's letter fits into the general scheme of Ulysses in other ways. She includes with it a yellow flower, suggestive of Bloom's ancestral Hungarian name, Virag (flower). Her allusion to her headache implies a menstrual period, "her roses," and thus relates her to Milly and Molly. Her demand that Bloom answer by return mail (with by return italicized) ultimately suggests the return of Ulysses-Bloom to his home, and her excuse for calling Bloom "naughty" — that is, the fact that she does not like "that other world" — is properly Joycean in its ambiguity: either Martha does not wish to curse Bloom, or she doesn't wish to risk being sent to that "other world" of Hell or Purgatory for indelicacy; "world" is a misspelling of "word" (as Bloom thinks), perhaps a reference to some profanity that Bloom included in his last letter to her. Finally, the sentence "Then I will tell you all" beautifully casts Bloom as T. S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, yet it is unfortunate that no direct influence can be actually proven; for Bloom, like Prufrock, is definitely a man who never forces the moment to its crisis.
