Why is Episode 13 of Ulysses called Nausicaa?

Joyce maps Episode 13 onto Book 6 of the Odyssey, in which the shipwrecked Odysseus, naked and crusted with salt, is discovered on a beach by the young princess Nausicaa and her handmaidens. Joyce calls his chapter 'Nausicaa' because Leopold Bloom — exhausted, mourning, washed up after the day's near-shipwrecks — encounters a young Dublin girl, Gerty MacDowell, on the rocks of Sandymount Strand at evening, and a wordless exchange of looks (and a discreet act of voyeurism timed to a fireworks display) becomes the chapter's modern restaging of that mythic meeting.

What happens in Episode 13 of Ulysses?

Around 8 p.m. on 16 June 1904. Gerty MacDowell sits on the rocks at Sandymount Strand with her friends Cissy and Edy, who are minding small children. From a distance she becomes aware of a 'dark stranger' (Bloom) watching her. The chapter's first half is told in a pastiche of sentimental girls'-magazine prose from inside Gerty's head; she leans back to watch the Mirus bazaar fireworks, letting Bloom see her drawers, and a roman candle bursts at the precise climactic moment. The chapter then switches abruptly to Bloom's interior voice — tired, kindly, post-coital, sad — until he dozes on the rocks as a cuckoo-clock strikes the cuckold's hour.

Who is Gerty MacDowell?

Gerty MacDowell is a young Dublin woman who lives nearby, lame in one leg, raised on penny romances and sentimental magazines. Joyce gives her the chapter's first half in pitch-perfect parody of the prose she would have read — a style he called, in a letter, 'a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto là!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter's palette…' She is at once Joyce's most affectionate and most clinical portrait of a reader of cheap fiction.

What is the chapter's technique?

Tumescence and detumescence. The first half swells with Gerty's florid, magazine-fed reverie, climaxing — in step with the fireworks — in the most rhetorically elevated moment of the chapter. Then, mid-paragraph, the prose deflates into Bloom's spare, fatigued interior style. The chapter is built around a single rhetorical erection and collapse, mirrored by the bodily one off-page.

Why is the chapter important?

Nausicaa is the novel's most controversial chapter — its sexual frankness led to the 1921 obscenity prosecution that delayed publication. But it is also one of Joyce's gentlest. The mythic meeting of hero and princess becomes a moment of mutual, distant, unspoken kindness between two lonely people on a beach, framed by fireworks. Nothing is said. Nothing is taken. The Homeric rescue becomes, in modern dress, an act of consensual loneliness.

Sandymount Strand · Twilight · 8 p.m.

Mirus Bazaar — Programme of Fireworks

Catherine wheels · Roman candles · O! O! O!

Ep. XIII · 16 vi 1904

Episode XIII · Nausicaa · Looking & Loneliness

Nausicaa: A Princess on the Rocks.

Episode 13 of Ulysses moves Homer's princess on the beach to Sandymount Strand at twilight, where Gerty MacDowell and a stranger named Bloom meet across the rocks without a single word — and the fireworks of the Mirus bazaar count down the chapter's choreographed climax.

"Tight boots? No. She's lame! O! Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl!"
Ulysses, Episode 13

Leopold Bloom

Washed up at evening

Gerty MacDowell

On the rocks, watching

Odysseus

Naked and salt-white

Nausicaa

Princess on the shore

Plain-English mode

Scroll to begin

§1 · Why "Nausicaa"?

A young woman, a tired man, a sky full of fireworks.

In Book 6 of the Odyssey, the shipwrecked Odysseus is washed up on the island of Scheria, naked and crusted with salt, and discovered on the beach by the king's daughter Nausicaa, who has come to do the washing with her maids. She does not flee; she gives him clothes and food and directs him to her father's palace. It is the Odyssey's gentlest meeting.

Joyce relocates the meeting to Sandymount Strand at evening. Nausicaa becomes Gerty MacDowell, a young Dublin girl on the rocks. Odysseus becomes Bloom, washed up at the day's lowest tide. The two never speak. They look. The Mirus bazaar fireworks rise over the bay; a Roman candle bursts; and the mythic moment of rescue becomes a small, mutual, unspoken act of seeing and being seen.

The Homeric beach becomes a Dublin strand, and the rescue is performed in silence.

c. 8th c. BCE
Homer's Odyssey
Odysseus is found by Nausicaa on Scheria
1890s–1900s
Penny-romance fiction in Dublin
The magazines Gerty's narrative voice imitates
1904
Mirus bazaar, Ballsbridge
The real fundraising bazaar whose fireworks light the chapter
16 June 1904, ~8 p.m.
Sandymount Strand
Bloom and Gerty meet by looking and not by speech
1921
Little Review prosecution
Serialisation of this chapter brings the U.S. obscenity trial
1922
Publication
Ulysses appears in Paris

§2 · Odyssey Primer

Nausicaa in The Odyssey — in brief.

After his raft is smashed by Poseidon, Odysseus swims for two days and crawls naked onto the island of the Phaeacians. He sleeps under olive bushes. Meanwhile the goddess Athene visits the dreams of the king's daughter, Nausicaa, and prompts her to take the household linen down to the river-mouth to wash.

Nausicaa and her maids wash, eat, and play ball. Their shouts wake Odysseus. He emerges, covers himself with a branch, and speaks to her with such elaborate courtesy that she gives him clothes, food, and instructions for reaching her father's palace.

It is the Odyssey's quietest rescue — no monster, no violence — and one of its sweetest. Joyce keeps the register exactly: in Nausicaa, no one is hurt, and one very tired man is, briefly, treated kindly.

✦

Beach

❦

Ball

≈

Wave

✺

Spark

♛

Cuckoo

§3 · How Homer becomes Dublin

Six transformations, from the river-mouth to the strand.

Homer

The mouth of the river on Scheria

Joyce

Sandymount Strand at evening

Odysseus washes up at the river-mouth where Nausicaa has come to do the washing with her maids. Joyce places his own washed-out hero on the rocks of Sandymount Strand — the same Dublin beach where Stephen walked in Proteus that morning — at the cool blue hour of evening. Two characters who would never meet in any drawing room are placed by Joyce on a strip of sand, with a sea-wall between them and nothing to do but look.

The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.
Ulysses, Episode 13 (opening)

strandeveningDublin

§4 · Who's Who

Homeric counterparts in Episode 13.

Nausicaa stages Sandymount Strand as Homer's beach — a strip of sand where two strangers meet by looking and never by speech.

Ulysses	Odyssey counterpart	Note
Leopold Bloom	Odysseus shipwrecked	At the day's lowest tide; saved by being looked at kindly
Gerty MacDowell	Nausicaa	Young, romantic, lame; the chapter's first voice
Cissy Caffrey	Nausicaa's bolder handmaiden	Loud, hatless, runs barefoot on the sand
Edy Boardman	Nausicaa's quieter handmaiden	Minds the babies; cattily aware of Gerty
Tommy & Jacky, Baby Boardman	Children at the river-mouth	Domestic chaos around the mythic meeting
Father Conroy & Canon O'Hanlon	The priests at Alcinous' palace (loose)	Their benediction at Mary, Star of the Sea forms the chapter's antiphon
The Mirus bazaar fireworks	The ball thrown into the river	The signal that wakes both characters into the moment

Linati Schema (1920)

Scene: The Rocks. Art: Painting. Symbol: Virgin. Technique: tumescence / detumescence.

Gilbert Schema (1921)

Organ: eye, nose. Colour: grey, blue. Hour: 8 p.m.

Homeric correspondences

Nausicaa → Gerty. Handmaidens → Cissy & Edy. Athene → cheap magazines. Ball → roman candle.

§5 · Key themes

Ten threads through the twilight beach.

✦

The strand

Sandymount Strand: Stephen's morning beach revisited at evening.

❦

Tumescence

Schema-technique: rhetorical swelling and collapse.

✤

Magazine prose

Joyce's pitch-perfect parody of penny-romance style.

✜

Voyeurism

A wordless, mutual exchange of looks across the rocks.

✺

Mariolatry

The Virgin's service across the wall — sacred to the secular climax.

✦

Fireworks

Mirus bazaar rockets timing the chapter's bodily moment.

❦

Lameness

Gerty's leg revealed only at the parting; the chapter's pity-moment.

✤

Cuckoo

A clock-cry naming Bloom's private grief three times.

✜

Tenderness

One of Joyce's gentlest stretches of writing about Bloom.

✺

Loneliness

Two strangers meet by not meeting — and are briefly, kindly, less alone.

§6 · Quotations & close reading

Homer beside Joyce.

Homer

"There by the river's side were the lovely washing-places, with abundance of clear water gushing up through, enough to cleanse the foulest garments."

Odyssey, Book VI (Butcher & Lang)

Joyce

"The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand."

Ulysses, Episode 13 (opening)

Why this matters

Homer's clean precise description of a real river-mouth becomes Joyce's deliberately swollen sunset prose — pastiche of every late-Victorian sentimental opener. The chapter announces from its first sentence that its setting will arrive through Gerty's borrowed style before it arrives through the world.

Homer

"She alone abode and faced him; for Athene put courage into her heart and took fear from her limbs."

Odyssey, Book VI (Nausicaa)

Joyce

"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."

Ulysses, Episode 13

Why this matters

Nausicaa's mythic courage is a brief Homeric line; Gerty's poise is a full magazine paragraph. Joyce keeps the gesture (a young woman holds her ground in a charged moment) and gives it the prose she would recognise herself in.

Homer

"Then with a mighty cast she sent the ball at one of the maidens, and missed her, and cast it into the deep eddying current."

Odyssey, Book VI

Joyce

"And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O!"

Ulysses, Episode 13

Why this matters

The ball Nausicaa throws into the river is replaced by a Roman candle fired into the sky. Homer's accident becomes Joyce's choreography: the moment that wakes the hero is now exquisitely, almost embarrassingly, timed.

§7 · Modernity vs Epic

A gentle myth, rewritten in penny-romance prose.

Homer

River-mouth, clean linen, a ball

A princess and her maids do household work in the open air; a stranger appears; he speaks well; he is given clothes and sent on his way. The meeting is daylight, public, kind.

Joyce

Rocks, magazine prose, a roman candle

A girl sits with her friends and minds someone else's children; a stranger watches from a distance; nothing is said; a firework bursts; he sees she is lame. The meeting is dusk, private, gentle, and entirely unspoken.

Joyce keeps the kindness of the Homeric meeting and changes everything else — the clean linen becomes a magazine in the head, and the ball thrown into the river becomes a Roman candle in the sky.

§8 · Why this episode matters

The novel's most controversial chapter — and its most tender.

Nausicaa is the chapter that almost killed Ulysses: its serialisation in the Little Review in 1920 triggered the U.S. obscenity prosecution that banned the novel until Judge Woolsey's 1933 decision. Yet read on its own terms, it is one of Joyce's gentlest performances — a meeting in which no one is harmed, no one speaks, and two lonely people are, for a moment, less alone.

The Homeric meeting on the beach is the Odyssey's first moment of pure human kindness after the wandering. Joyce honours that exactly. The mythic rescue becomes a small act of being looked at without contempt, after a day that has offered Bloom funerals, sneers, and a thrown biscuit-tin. Even the cuckoo-clock that mocks him at the end is, in context, almost affectionate.

The hero washed up at the day's lowest tide is given, briefly, the kindest thing one stranger can give another: an unjudgmental look.

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§9 · FAQ

Quick answers.

Joyce maps Episode 13 onto Book 6 of the Odyssey, in which the shipwrecked Odysseus, naked and crusted with salt, is discovered on a beach by the young princess Nausicaa and her handmaidens. Joyce calls his chapter 'Nausicaa' because Leopold Bloom — exhausted, mourning, washed up after the day's near-shipwrecks — encounters a young Dublin girl, Gerty MacDowell, on the rocks of Sandymount Strand at evening, and a wordless exchange of looks (and a discreet act of voyeurism timed to a fireworks display) becomes the chapter's modern restaging of that mythic meeting.