Cows and Bulls

Cows seem to be a reoccurring symbol throughout Ulysses. In Episode 4, Bloom ponders how cows are made to suffer as he looks at an ad for Israel: “Those mornings in the cattlemarket the beasts lowing in their pens…flop and fall of dung…there’s a prime one, unpeeled switches in [the breeder’s] hands”. and then associates the white heifer with Israel and the Jewish people (59). The Jewish people and the land they inhabit suffer like the stallfed heifers: “The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity”; the land “dead…the grey sunken cunt of the world. Desolation” (61). Likewise, a few chapters later, the funeral car passes “branded cattle…lowing, slouching by on padded hoofs…Tomorrow is killing day…Roast beef for England” (97). Here, the cows serve as a metaphor for Ireland and Irish culture, which is purged by and for the benefit of the English.

It follows that the cows in Episode 14 Oxen of the Sun do not represent the sanctity of life. Rather the cows symbolize the unheard people who are relegated to the periphery. Women, like Jews and the Irish, are oppressed peoples. Joyce statement, “In Horne’s house rest should reign”, is a cry for calm and peace for women.

And if women are the cows, then men are the bulls: “He’ll find himself on the horns of a dilemma if he meddles with a bull that’s Irish, says he. Irish by name and Irish by nature, says Mr. Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English chinashop” (399). Irish men are the ones who silence the birthing mother in the next room. Another bull in the novel is the Church. Lord Harry “bought a grammar of the bulls’ language to study…In short, he and the bull of Ireland were soon as fast friends as an arse and a shirt. They were… as the ungrate women were all of one mind, made a wherry raft, loaded themselves and their bundles of chattels on shipboard”.