Who is Gerty MacDowell in Ulysses?
Gerty MacDowell is the young woman Bloom watches on Sandymount Strand at sunset in Episode 13. The first half of the episode is told in the gushing style of the romantic magazines she reads. She leans back to show her legs; Bloom masturbates; then she limps away.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Episode 13, Nausicaa. The narrator, introducing Gerty in the style of a sentimental novelette.
Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see.
What it means in plain English
The prose is full of beauty products, fashion and dreams of a husband. Joyce called the style “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy”.
Only when she walks away does Bloom notice she is lame.
Literary context
In the Odyssey, the princess Nausicaa finds the shipwrecked Odysseus on the shore and helps him.
References
- Ulysses, Episode 13, “Nausicaa”
- James Joyce, letter to Frank Budgen, January 1920
- Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (revised edition, 1988)
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Questions readers ask
Why was Nausicaa banned?
Its publication in The Little Review led to the 1921 obscenity conviction in New York.
Related terms
I AM A
Bloom writes “I. AM. A.” with his stick in the sand of Sandymount Strand at the end of Episode 13, then stops: there is no room. The unfinished message to Gerty MacDowell has never been completed, and readers have offered many endings for it.
Cuckoo
“Cuckoo” is the cry of the cuckoo clock that ends Bloom's part of Episode 13. The cuckoo lays eggs in other birds' nests, and the word gives us “cuckold”, a man whose wife is unfaithful. The clock calls it out to Bloom, whose wife has just been with Blazes Boylan.
Sandymount Strand
The beach where Stephen walks alone in 'Proteus' (Episode 3) and where 'Nausicaa' (Episode 13) is set.
Free indirect discourse
Free indirect discourse is narration in the third person (“he”, “she”) that takes on a character's own words and attitudes, without “he thought”. Ulysses uses it constantly. The first half of Nausicaa is the best example: the narrator speaks in Gerty MacDowell's romantic-magazine voice.