Episode XV
Circe
(The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown…)
12:00 AM, Nighttown (Monto, north Dublin). Style: Hallucinatory drama.
Summary
Bloom follows a drunk Stephen into the red-light district. A hallucinatory play unfolds: shame, transformation, ghosts, and finally a quiet rescue.
- 1
Written as a play
The longest chapter in the book is set out as a stage drama with characters' names in capitals and italicised stage directions. The 'real' and the hallucinated share the same page.
- 2
Bloom in Nighttown
Bloom chases the drunk Stephen into Mabbot Street and the red-light district known as Monto. He is robbed of a kidney sandwich, splashed by a sandstrewer, and harassed by soldiers and prostitutes.
- 3
Bloom on trial
In a series of hallucinated set-pieces Bloom is crowned Emperor of the New Bloomusalem, put on trial by Dublin's society women, transformed into a woman in Bella Cohen's brothel, and humiliated in detail.
- 4
Stephen at the brothel
At Bella Cohen's, Stephen plays Yeats-y songs at the pianola, sees his dead mother rise out of the floor in green decay, and refuses, with a single shouted Latin word, to give in to her.
- 5
On the street
Stephen, drunk and grieving, smashes the brothel chandelier with his ashplant and runs into the street, where a British soldier — Private Carr — punches him to the ground.
- 6
Rudy
Bloom stands over the unconscious Stephen, fends off the police with quiet decency, and sees, in a final hallucination, his dead son Rudy as he might have been at eleven, reading a book.
Gabler lines 15.1–4967
How Circe unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Circe is written as a play script and runs on hallucination: stage directions animate objects, the dead speak, and guilt takes visible form. The map tracks the three real events — Bloom following Stephen into the brothel quarter, Stephen smashing a lamp, and Bloom standing over him in the street.
Bloom follows Stephen and Lynch into the brothel district, is put on trial by his own conscience, and meets the dead and the accusing.
1. The entrance to Nighttown
lines 1–150Stage directions set a dreamlike Mabbot Street of idiots, tramlines and stunted figures as Stephen and Lynch go ahead.
Why it matters:The episode establishes that stage directions, not characters, now control reality.
2. Rudolph, Ellen, and Molly appear
lines 150–500Bloom's dead father, his mother and Molly materialise to scold, fuss and mock him in turn.
Why it matters:Every private shame of the day becomes a speaking character with a costume.
Notice:Nothing hallucinated is new information — it has all been in Bloom's head since morning.
3. The trial of Leopold Bloom
lines 700–1200Bloom is accused by Mary Driscoll and a parade of society women, defended by J. J. O'Molloy, and sentenced amid absurd testimony.
Why it matters:Guilt about letters, fantasies and small cruelties is staged as public prosecution.
4. Bloom as Lord Mayor and Messiah
5. Bello and the degradation
6. Bloom takes charge of the money
7. May Dedalus rises
8. “Nothung!”
9. Private Carr, and the vision of Rudy
The shape underneath
Circe runs descent → accusation → degradation → recovery → rescue. Almost nothing on the page actually happens: three men walk into a brothel, a lamp is broken, a soldier throws a punch. Everything else is the day's contents staged as theatre. The book's paternal plot completes itself here, wordlessly. See the Homeric parallel below for the enchantress and the herb.
In modern prose
Midnight, in Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district. Bloom has followed Stephen there and the chapter is written entirely as a hallucinatory stage play — characters, ghosts, objects and abstractions all speak, scenes morph into each other, the real and the imagined are given equal weight on the page. Real things happen: Bloom rescues some of Stephen's money from being fleeced, they end up in Bella Cohen's brothel, Stephen sees the ghost of his dead mother and smashes a chandelier with his walking stick in panic, runs out into the street, gets knocked down by a drunk British soldier in a fight over a misunderstood remark. But these real events are constantly interrupted by waking nightmares — Bloom put on trial for every secret shame of his life, crowned emperor of a new Jerusalem, transformed into a woman and humiliated, confronted by his dead father, visited by his dead infant son Rudy, who appears at the very end as the boy he would have been. Today we'd call it the unconscious made visible: every repressed wish, fear and shame of both men acted out on a public stage and then dispersed. After Stephen is knocked down, Bloom — without fuss, without anyone watching — stands over him in the road, refuses to let him be arrested, looks down at his face and sees, for an instant, the son he lost. That silent moment is the emotional centre of the book.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Brothel
- Hour
- 12:00 AM
- Organ
- Locomotor apparatus
- Art
- Magic
- Colour
- —
- Symbol
- Whore
- Technic
- Hallucination
- Correspondence
- Circe
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Circe.
- Beginner's guide to UlyssesWhere to start, and how to keep going.
- How to read UlyssesPractical ways through the book's hardest stretches.
- All 18 episode summariesSee where this episode sits in the whole day.
- Daily Companion, Day 121: Nighttown, after eleven — the streets outside Bella Cohen'sWe're suddenly in Dublin's red-light district, and the prose itself changes: everything is written as a play script, stage directions and all, and the scenery starts talking back.
- Daily Companion, Day 133: The fantasy breaks, Bloom is himself againAs suddenly as it began, the Bello fantasy ends, and Bloom is simply standing in the brothel parlour again, a little dazed.
- Daily Companion, Day 145: Circe ends; the street falls quietThe wild hallucinations subside completely.
- Who's who in UlyssesLeopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and the cast of Dublin.
- Themes in UlyssesThe ideas that run beneath every episode.
- Dublin locations in UlyssesWhere Nighttown (Monto, north Dublin) sits on Bloom's day.