By Grant Wei
Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores then gazes at the veiled mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.
The moth, symbolizing the positive aspects of Bloom’s feminine persona, could not be perceived by Bloom until his grandfather pointed it out. Through internalizing “his self-image as a ‘Jewish male’ — effeminate, weak, overly compassionate, and cuckolded,” Bloom “perpetuates [his] isolation” through create negative feedback loops for himself (Davison 203). Within the chapters before Bloom’s introduction, the existence of anti-Semitism is prevalent even without the presence of a Jew like Bloom. From the perspective of Stephen, “who desires to be both ahistorical and apolitical, [Stephen] cannot escape either of these realities; from the beginning of his day to its close, a persistent foil of anti-Semitism he encounters from one end of Dublin to the other” (Davison 189). Without the presence of Bloom, an actually Jew, the conception of Jews in ‘Telemachus’ is presented “through stereotype” (Davison 200). Even when Bloom is introduced, he struggles by “refigur[ing] his identity by juggling — and often internalizing — a host of learned representations of ‘the Jew’” (Davison 200). His inability to reconcile both his Jewish and Irish identity often lead him to be a “a shopping-list of alterity and self-hatred” (Davison 224). Without his Virag to help him understand his virility, Bloom would have never come understand the positive aspects of his feminine persona.
Through giving birth to “a host of historical figures, several of whom were Jewish by birth,” Bloom “proves his bisexual-Messianism” (Davison 224). After his definitively feminine action, his grandfather, Virag, appears to implore him to be more sexually potent, encouraging Bloom, “Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today,” when referring to the “promiscuous nakedness [that] is much in evidence hereabouts (Joyce 399). Through “the grandfather’s sex-crazed imperative” Bloom comes to the realization of the limitations from his own perceived sexuality he creates for himself and will “ultimately re-establish his masculine potency (Davison 227). Through “a kind of Joycean ‘romantic transcendence,’ Bloom now suddenly and insightfully realizes that there is nothing degenerative about him; his lack of aggressiveness as compared to other males is now seen in a transformed and acceptable light (Davison 227). Even when Bloom believed that Molly had not been attracted to him, Molly’s monologue reveals that she perceived him as “superior type of male” because his “‘Jewishness’ she believes resides at the heart of who he is (Davison 237).
Similar to Bloom’s realization of his sexual potency, the moth had always existed, but it was up to a hallucination with Bloom’s grandfather to point it out. Only after Virag asked the moth, “Who’s moth moth?” did Bloom come to understand that his effeminate nature should not be a source of shame (Joyce 402). Initially Bloom perceived the concept of “the Jew” with the lens of a a racialized element of cultural production, or even as a defense-mechanism projection of non-Jew” (Davison 200). However, after his confrontations with his grandfather, he able to to deviate from the nationalistic conceptions of Jews to be less Irish and less masculine, Bloom defines “a new kind of Jew to himself: admirably compassionate, masculinity nurturing, actie, and worthy of being a Jewish father” (Davison 228). The moth’s presence in Bloom’s life is noticed through Bloom’s licentious grandpa, and he is able to observe the positive features of his feminine persona similar to how he could notice the moth in “Circe.” Through his grandfather egging him to pursue more sex in his life, Bloom redefines his Jewish identity in terms of acceptance of his sexual perception of himself. Before, “He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew he was not” (Joyce 504). But now, Bloom knows.