Why is Episode 15 of Ulysses called Circe?

Joyce maps Episode 15 onto Book 10 of the Odyssey, where the witch Circe turns Odysseus' men into swine in her hall. The Joycean equivalent is Bella Cohen, the madam of a brothel in Nighttown (Dublin's red-light district of Monto), whose 'magic' is the brothel itself — the place where men's repressed desires take on flesh as hallucinations and 'transform' them into pigs of their own buried selves.

What happens in Episode 15?

It is around midnight on 16–17 June 1904. Bloom follows the drunken Stephen and the medical students into the brothel quarter of Nighttown to keep an eye on him. Inside Mrs Cohen's brothel, the chapter erupts into a 180-page play-script: stage directions and dialogue allow the characters' guilts, fantasies and traumas to walk onstage as hallucinated figures — Bloom's dead father, his mother, his daughter Milly, Molly, his lost son Rudy, his sins put on trial, his fantasies of being a great mayor and then a woman. Stephen, drunk and grieving, hallucinates his dead mother. He smashes a chandelier, runs into the street, and is knocked down by a British soldier. Bloom protects him and, in the final image, sees the vision of his dead son Rudy as an eleven-year-old boy reading a Hebrew book.

Why is the chapter written as a play?

Joyce calls the technique 'hallucination'. The play-script form lets him put psychic material on the same physical plane as the cobblestones — a hat speaks, a soap sings, a dead mother rises from the floor, Bloom is briefly crowned mayor and immediately impeached, then turned into a woman. Reality and unconscious are given the same stage directions. No other novelistic form could do this without losing the doubleness.

Are the hallucinations 'really happening'?

No. Almost nothing visionary in the chapter is supposed to be literally present in the brothel; only what is in normal type (Bloom paying Bella, Stephen smashing the lamp) is consensual reality. Everything in italics — the trials, the metamorphoses, Rudy's appearance — is psychic theatre. Joyce's point is that hallucination is the most accurate language for what actually happens to people at midnight in a brothel after too much drink and too much grief.

Why is the chapter important?

Circe is the climax of Ulysses. It is the chapter in which everything buried in the previous fourteen surfaces and is enacted, and the chapter in which Bloom finally — physically — saves Stephen. The closing image of Bloom standing over the fallen Stephen and seeing Rudy is the emotional payoff of the entire book.

Nighttown · Mrs Cohen's · Midnight

Playbill — Hallucinations in One Act

A Trial · A Coronation · A Black Mass · A Resurrection

Ep. XV · 17 vi 1904

Episode XV · Circe · The Unconscious as Stage

Circe: Bloom Walks Through the Brothel of Himself.

Episode 15 is the climax of Ulysses — a 180-page play-script in which Homer's witch becomes a Dublin madam, men become hallucinated versions of themselves, a potato in a pocket becomes the magic herb moly, and a father, at the end, finally sees the son he lost.

"(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier.) Nothung!"
Ulysses, Episode 15

Leopold Bloom

Protective guest

Bella Cohen

Madam of the house

Odysseus

Sword drawn on Circe

Circe

Witch with the wand

Plain-English mode

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§1 · Why "Circe"?

A brothel, a potato, a play.

In Book 10 of the Odyssey, the witch Circe turns Odysseus' men into pigs in her hall. Hermes gives Odysseus the magical herb moly, which makes him immune; he draws his sword, forces Circe to restore his men, and stays a year with her.

Joyce moves the hall into a Dublin brothel and the magic into the unconscious. The men do not literally become pigs — they hallucinate themselves into a hundred buried forms, and the chapter is written as a 180-page play-script so that those hallucinations can walk onstage beside the cobblestones. Bloom is protected by a potato. At the very end, the chapter restores his lost son to him for a single visionary page.

Circe's wand becomes a kitchen tuber; her hall becomes the Dublin night.

c. 8th c. BCE
Homer's Odyssey
Circe turns Odysseus' men into swine; Hermes gives him moly
1904
Monto / Nighttown
Dublin's red-light district, one of the largest in Europe
17 June 1904, ~midnight
Bella Cohen's brothel
Bloom follows Stephen; the unconscious of both walks onstage
1920–21
Drafted in Paris
Joyce wrote the chapter nine times and called it the hardest
1922
Publication
Ulysses appears in Paris

§2 · Odyssey Primer

Circe in The Odyssey — in brief.

After the cannibal Laestrygonians have destroyed eleven of his twelve ships, Odysseus lands on Aeaea, the island of the witch Circe. He sends half his crew under Eurylochus to scout. Circe feeds them drugged food and turns them into pigs in a sty.

Odysseus sets out to save them. Hermes meets him on the path with the herb moly, which makes Circe's drugs powerless. Odysseus drinks, draws his sword, forces her to restore his men, and ends up sharing her bed for a year before sailing on.

Joyce takes this story — a magical hall in which men's hidden natures surface as another shape — and turns it into a single hallucinatory night in a Dublin brothel, with the unconscious as the magic.

§3 · How Homer becomes Dublin

Six transformations, from Aeaea to Nighttown.

Homer

Circe, the witch in her hall

Joyce

Bella Cohen, madam of the brothel

Homer's Circe is a goddess with a wand who literally turns men into pigs. Joyce's Bella is a fat, formidable Dublin madam whose 'magic' is the institution she runs — the brothel as the modern equivalent of a sorceress's hall. She never actually transforms anyone; the transformations happen inside the men who walk through her door, and Joyce stages them as hallucinations.

BELLO: (His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Adorer of the adulterous rump!
Ulysses, Episode 15

Bellametamorphosisbrothel

§4 · Who's Who

Homeric counterparts in Episode 15.

Circe stages the Dublin brothel as the modern hall of metamorphosis — every guilt and longing of the day puts on a costume.

Ulysses	Odyssey counterpart	Note
Leopold Bloom	Odysseus, immune via moly	Protected by his pocket potato; rescues Stephen at the end
Bella / Bello Cohen	Circe / a male-coded enchantress	Madam whose brothel is the chapter's transformation chamber
The pocket potato	Moly	Folk amulet from Bloom's mother — the chapter's literal magic
Stephen Dedalus	A sailor who half-transforms	Drinks, hallucinates his mother, smashes the lamp, runs out
May Dedalus (vision)	Anticleia in the underworld	Stephen's dead mother rising green-faced from the floor
Zoe, Florry, Kitty	Circe's handmaids	The brothel's three young women — minor enchantresses
Rudy (vision)	Hermes' restoration	Bloom's lost son appearing at the chapter's end as an 11-year-old

Linati Schema (1920)

Scene: The Brothel. Art: Magic. Symbol: Whore. Technique: Hallucination.

Gilbert Schema (1921)

Organ: locomotor apparatus. Colour: none. Hour: midnight.

Homeric correspondences

Circe → Bella. Moly → potato. Swine → hallucinated selves.

§5 · Key themes

Ten threads through the night of magic.

✜

Hallucination

The chapter's technique — psyche as stage direction.

✤

Moly

Bloom's pocket potato as folk-protection against magic.

❦

Father-son

Bloom physically rescues Stephen — the bond completes.

♪

Guilt

The day's small sins come back as theatrical accusers.

✺

Gender

Bello dominates a feminised Bloom — Joyce on identity.

❦

Rudy

The vision of the lost son is the novel's emotional pivot.

✜

Theatre

180 pages of stage directions; reality and unreality co-cast.

✤

Nighttown

Real Dublin Monto — Joyce's most documented setting.

♪

Non serviam

Stephen's refusal is the chapter's loudest single line.

✺

Mercy

Bloom protecting the unconscious Stephen is its quietest.

§6 · Quotations & close reading

Homer beside Joyce.

Homer

"She struck them with her wand and shut them in the sties. They had the heads and grunting voices of swine, and their bodies were bristled, but their minds were unchanged — even as they had been before."

Odyssey, Book X

Joyce

"BELLO: (...His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Adorer of the adulterous rump! On hands and knees! … Down!"

Ulysses, Episode 15 (Bloom's hallucination)

Why this matters

Homer's swine retain a human mind inside an animal body; Joyce's Bloom retains a human body inside an animal hallucinated self. Both are pictures of the gap between what we are and what we feel ourselves to be.

Homer

"Hermes gave me the herb, drawing it from the earth, and showed me its nature. The root was black, but its flower was white as milk. Moly the gods call it. It is hard for mortal men to dig."

Odyssey, Book X

Joyce

"BLOOM: I have it somewhere. … (He retrieves the potato.) Talisman. Heirloom."

Ulysses, Episode 15

Why this matters

Homer's moly is a divine gift; Joyce's is a kitchen tuber kept for sentimental reasons. The chapter's joke is also its theology: in a modern city the things that actually protect you are the small heirlooms you happen to be carrying.

Homer

"But Hermes touched them with his wand, and the bristles fell from their bodies … and they became men again, younger than they had been before, and taller, and fairer to look upon."

Odyssey, Book X

Joyce

"(Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit … He reads from right to left, kissing the page.) BLOOM: (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!"

Ulysses, Episode 15 (closing)

Why this matters

Hermes restores the swine to men; Joyce restores Bloom's dead son for a single page. The chapter's whole grotesque machinery has been quietly working toward this image — the modern equivalent of a Homeric resurrection is a private vision in a back alley.

§7 · Modernity vs Epic

A witch's hall, rewritten as a brothel.

Homer

A goddess, a drug, a sty

A literal witch literally transforms men into animals. Magic is external and divine; the protection is an external, divine herb. The hero stands up to the witch and shares her bed.

Joyce

A madam, a pocket potato, a play

A Dublin madam runs a brothel; the transformations are internal hallucinations rendered as stage directions. Protection is a kitchen tuber, the hero rescues a young man who is not his son, and the witch is paid in cash.

Joyce keeps the magic and locates it where modernity actually places it: in the unconscious, the city street, and the small objects we carry without knowing why.

§8 · Why this episode matters

The climax — and the moment Bloom finally has a son again.

Circe is the place toward which the whole novel has been moving. Every guilt, every fantasy, every small humiliation of the day surfaces here in costume — and is paid for by the chapter's grotesque theatre. Joyce wrote it nine times and considered it the hardest chapter in the book.

And under the noise it does something quietly decisive. Bloom finally — physically — protects Stephen, lifts him out of the gutter when a soldier knocks him down, and is granted, by the chapter, a vision of his lost son Rudy. The substitute paternity that has been building since Telemachus is, in Circe, simply accomplished.

The brothel of the unconscious turns into the place where a lost father finds, for a single page, a son.

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All Homeric Parallels →

§9 · FAQ

Quick answers.

Joyce maps Episode 15 onto Book 10 of the Odyssey, where the witch Circe turns Odysseus' men into swine in her hall. The Joycean equivalent is Bella Cohen, the madam of a brothel in Nighttown (Dublin's red-light district of Monto), whose 'magic' is the brothel itself — the place where men's repressed desires take on flesh as hallucinations and 'transform' them into pigs of their own buried selves.