As I was reading through Ulysses, I happened to come across yet another dramatic description of Stephen Deadalus' mother. However, I feel as if this is a more horrific image to take in, despite it having less words than the previous quote I used in blog 1.
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"Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.
THE CHOIR:
Liliata rutilantium te confessorum [May the troop of confessors, glowing like lilies, surround you]
Iubilantium te virginum [May the choir of virgins, jubilant, take you in]
From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.
BUCK MULLIGAN: She's beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother... The mockery of it! Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. (Tears of molten butter fall from his eyes on to the scone."
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Wow.
In this colourful scene, Stephen hallucinates his dead mother's re-emergence who, symbolically, recites a few lines from Prayers for the Dying in Missal, a book used for celebrating mass (what makes it more symbolic is that Mulligan devised that Stephen killed his mother because refused to pray by her bedside). Comparing her pale green face to gravemould helps to emphasize the realism of this hallucination in order to further mortify Stephen, and potentially the readers. The comparison of Mulligan's Tears to molten butter, and the surrealism of Mulligan appearing in such a fashion, emphasizes the horror of the event as well as the effect of Stephen's mother's passing.
[EDIT: IT'S 3/8/18, I AM A FOOL, I FORGOT TO PUBLISH THIS BLOG POST, I AM A BIG OLE FOOL]
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| A representation of Telemachius' mother's passing in Odyssey |
"Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.
THE CHOIR:
Liliata rutilantium te confessorum [May the troop of confessors, glowing like lilies, surround you]
Iubilantium te virginum [May the choir of virgins, jubilant, take you in]
From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.
BUCK MULLIGAN: She's beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother... The mockery of it! Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. (Tears of molten butter fall from his eyes on to the scone."
__________________________________________________
Wow.
In this colourful scene, Stephen hallucinates his dead mother's re-emergence who, symbolically, recites a few lines from Prayers for the Dying in Missal, a book used for celebrating mass (what makes it more symbolic is that Mulligan devised that Stephen killed his mother because refused to pray by her bedside). Comparing her pale green face to gravemould helps to emphasize the realism of this hallucination in order to further mortify Stephen, and potentially the readers. The comparison of Mulligan's Tears to molten butter, and the surrealism of Mulligan appearing in such a fashion, emphasizes the horror of the event as well as the effect of Stephen's mother's passing.
[EDIT: IT'S 3/8/18, I AM A FOOL, I FORGOT TO PUBLISH THIS BLOG POST, I AM A BIG OLE FOOL]
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